maire

I don't know if bittorrent has improved - but 20 years ago I had a personal issue with it.

At that time our son was using it for games. He goes away to college and came home for the first school break. I get a phone call from our internet provider asking if our son was home. I was so shocked and handed the phone to our son.

Apparently at that time bittorrent was optimizing for the most efficient path to a host. Since we had relatively good connection, the mighty weight of the internet was funnelling through our tiny internet provider to our son's computer. The provider (without our knowing it) had made a deal with our son that he would only turn on bittorrent between midnight and 6 AM. I doubt other providers would be so generous.

I have been sceptical of bittorrent since that day.

Kodak was well aware of what was going to happen. Company culture killed digital photography.

I was at Apple when we worked with engineers from Kodak who were working to change various format standards to allow digital photos. This was in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

I feel like these articles are written for and describe younger people.

I think the opposite is true. I first read Jane Austin as a teenager. I had no concept of the economic environment of the book. I thought meh.

Now that I am retired and re-reading Austin, I view them more in terms of the economic environment. I didn't have this context when I was young, and the books are awesome. In several passages she give a critique of the economic system so sublimely that it passed over my head when I was young.

FMLA only covers companies with 50 or more employees.

A friend was fired in the US when she told her boss she was pregnant and discovered this limitation. Her previous work experience was in France so she did not realize this could happen.

That looks like a compelling argument.

Although Babel was removed during the final vote count, here is what the interim vote count looked like. It looks like it would not even be on the short list.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25245686/h...

I just looked at the votes - and Babel would not have won in any case. It was ranked #7 when it was disqualified.

Netflix's Sandman was also disqualified. On Bluesky Neil Gaiman said he was never told why it was disqualified. He also said he was one of four disqualified authors.

The lesson learned is do not have a world-wide vote in a country with censorship.

This article answers one of the questions I had about this year's Hugo awards.

R. F. Kuang's Babel was on many other lists of top book of the year. I was surprised that it did not even on the nomination list. Now I find out that it was pre-emptively removed from the nomination list before the vote!

I am not a big fan of Babel (and posted my issues on Goodreads) but I do want the vote to be fair.

California provides awesome homeschool support. A lot depends on where you live.

In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.

My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.

She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.

Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.

The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.

The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.

I love the change of subject. ;-)

You have to put Tocqueville in the context of his era.

Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.

Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.

I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”

Here is a 2003 documentary on the same subject.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/rosalind-franklin-lega...

My take away was that Rosalind Franklin did support the Watson Crick paper but that there was some conflict leading up to the paper. She did not seem to think her ideas were stolen.

It did not help that after Franklin died - Watson wrote a hit piece on Franklin. I think that is what caused people to question if Watson was above board while Franklin was alive.

The EN email note is somewhat kludgy. It was better before the last major upgrade. Before the last upgrade it was seamless to other EN notes. I suspect but don't know what broke.

BTW - they kept around the EN classic app because so many things broke. For a while I was going back and forth between the two.

The EN competitors want you to convert email to a PDF. One of the competitors said they would have to have an email server to convert email to a note. They said this is hard.

I am OK that it is hard for everyone except Apple. Apple does already have an email server. Why are they forcing me to convert the email to a PDF?

By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll off.

I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.

EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.

Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.

What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.

I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.

Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.

My experience gave me tenacity and resilience.

My experience was not as bad as some others on this list. I believe that is because girls are psychological bullies, and boys are physical bullies. My husband was chased and beaten up until he the beat up the lead bully.

I met my lead bully as an adult. I was surprised to find out that she did not realize she was a bully. She acted as if we were childhood friends. One of her friends apologized to me, so others certainly realized.

Her life did not go as well as my life. I suspect it was because the traits that made her a bully as a child did not work for her as an adult.

In tech - today's leaders will not be tomorrow's leaders. The tech graveyard is full of former high fliers.

How about the early days of Covid when Zoom came out of nowhere to dominate Video Communications? They were nowhere near the market leader.

Facebook (as you recall) was also not the market leader on social media when the VCs decided they were going to be the winner.

I am taking a wait and see approach to Twitter. I wish them the best, but history is not on their side.

I agree with your father that batch processing (cards) is a drag.

I was in school and working in the computer lab when we switched from batch processing (cards) to a time shared system with terminal labs. I was part of the team that wired up the campus and connected the campus to the ARPANET (precursor to the internet).

As we rolled out the terminal labs, each CS class was either assigned to batch processing or time sharing. Since I was part of the lab, I could schedule my classes to be time share only. I was only stuck with 4 classes not in the time share lab. 2 were batch processing. For some reason my LISP and AI classes used a teletype interface. It was not as bad as the cards, but still weird. Some classes allowed me to use my personal computer (TRS80) and work at home.

At the time my uncle was a programmer. He said that there was no future in CS and I should switch majors. I could already see the wave coming and ignored the advice.

I also would not go exactly where the author goes, or do what the author does, but I appreciate the stimulation of being taken out of the pre-packaged presentation and into reality.

You are a backpacker so you already embrace the spirit of the article. You already have a purpose to your trip that takes you outside of tourist traps. Tourism packages destinations so they all start to look the same.

You are not a contrarian. You have an alternate path to the same goal.

You can even do this locally (no need to travel). My husband and I started biking and often this takes us to unseen parts of our own community.

If new things to be expert in proliferate faster than you can become an expert then life-span extension will not work. You would need to duplicate yourself each time there is a new thing you want to pursue. One you would be a concert violinist and the other you could cure the common cold.

Engineers continually discount the importance of usability.

The easy applications to convert to open source are those that the developer of the application is the user of the application. The easiest example is Bitkeeper to GIT conversion. The person who wrote GIT is the same person who used Bitkeeper. Therefore he knew what would be usable for a developer.

GIMP vs Blender is the counter example. Both GIMP and Blender are targeted at artists and not developers. The author assumes the awesomeness of Blender is inevitable. But GIMP is pretty bad and shows no evidence that it is getting better. Yet - when major animation studios decided to adopt Blender they dedicated UX resources to Blender to make it more usable for artists.

When the developer is not the user, you need that extra step.

I don't think the relation between slavery and industrialization is as simple as you think.

Industrial cotton mills and the invention of the cotton gin produced more slavery in the US. I am not sure about elsewhere.

If you like this, then you will love this 1913 Boy Mechanic series.

The Boy Mechanic Volume I: 700 Things For Boys To Do https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12655

The Boy Mechanic, Book 2: 1000 Things for Boys to Do https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44585

One of the transcriber said: Another class of projects illustrate the caviler attitude toward environment and health in 1913. These projects involve items such as asbestos, gunpowder, acetylene, hydrogen, lead, mercury, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, cadmium, potassium sulfate, potassium cyanide, potassium ferrocyanide, copper sulfate, and hydrochloric acid. Many references to these have been highlighted in red.

Projects requiring extra skill and care that involve high voltage, melting metals, or other hazards, have the title highlighted.

I found this list of companies affiliated with the Moonies (many defunct).

https://culteducation.com/unif121.html

Here is an interesting quote by someone who ran two of these businesses in the SF bay area.

"'With no labor costs and people willing to work 14 to 15 hours a day, you can undercut anybody' he said. Scales said that when he ran the Aladdin restaurants, employees signed over their pay-checks to the personal slush fund of West Coast church leader"

The article was from 1977 - and the Moonies tried to reform themselves later, but at that time they were slave labor businesses. Moon was able to shield his practices using his tax exempt status as a religious organisation.

Moonies used to be a big deal at college campuses in California. When my husband and I went to Berkeley in the 1970s, the Moonies were everywhere. They did many questionable things before fading away.

My husband is 4 years older than me - so he was not as aware of their recruitment practices. He said he was invited to dinner by a very attractive young woman who kept flirting with him all through dinner. She then invited him to a weekend retreat. He said he became suspicious and did not go. It was a good thing he did not go. By the time I went to Berkeley - we all knew about the retreats.

correction: VSphere 2.0 not Businessware 2.0 (wrong company).

For some reason I could not edit my post so I had to reply to my post.

Workstation and fusion were never big money makers. They were more of a labor of love.

I joined VMware just after the release of Businessware 2.0 - which I agree was 14 years ago.

The big money maker was vmotion because it allowed datacenters to decouple the server from the underlying hardware. Ever after, the money was in the datacenter products.

Documentation and user interface face the same issues.

The biggest mistake engineers make is to expose the internal workings of the software in ways irrelevant to the user.

The biggest mistake marketing makes is to focus on upselling. I believe this is the reason why Google beat out Yahoo in the search space.

If you are using google sheets you can use ycharts to pull in the dividend data. Here is my calculation to get 1 year of dividends.

=query(importhtml(concatenate("https://ycharts.com/companies/",$A4,"/dividend"),"table",0),...)

where $J$2 is ="select Col6 where Col1 > date '"&TEXT(I2,"yyyy-mm-dd")&"' LIMIT 12"

I used ETFs (and not stocks) to simplify the test. I was mostly looking for correlations of different investments across different scenarios. I then looked at severe market downturns to see how the correlations changed.

As you can imagine - when there is a severe market drop, most investments are highly correlated to the S&P. The most negative correlation I could get was medium term bond ETFs. Short term bonds were still highly correlated and I am not sure why.

The dot com bust was particularly interesting because each segment dropped at different times. Telecom dropped first, then tech. It took about a year for the drop to hit mid cap. In comparison - the 2008 crash hit everything quickly.

Also - lately I have been using the backtesting tools in TOS. As I said earlier, this only works for stocks and not ETFs.

People (and tool developers) forget that the purpose of a stock is to ultimately produce dividends. It is like buying a house for rental income and forgetting to include the rent.

When I retired I had to switch from a growth-stock mindset to an income-stock mindset. I have made the switch but none of the free tools makes that easy. The closest I came was TOS will do this calculation for stocks but not ETFs. Oh well. I now have all the calculations in google sheets.

I also now have a backtest that goes the the beginning of the Clinton administration to the end of the Trump administration. I added dividends to the backtest. I only went to the Clinton administration so that I could use ETFs to simplify the calculations. The backtest includes dividends - which I had to add manually.