robotastronaut

Man, this helps me understand so much of what I’m experiencing. I had to switch to cheap stuff about two months ago and I’ve been all over the place. Absolutely terrible sleep, too.

Yeah, this is pretty standard behavior for Ford, I think. Similarly blurred lines with Autonomic. Honestly it was hard to keep track of who actually worked for Ford when I was at FSM.

This is one of the more challenging parts of turning 3D scenes into pixel art in real time — making them pixel perfect. There are definitely ways of doing it, but it honestly rarely gets closer to looking like pixel art that’s created pixel perfect to begin with.

I think that’s a bit reductive. The health tech industry as a whole fits this bill — do you question if startups in that sector have a real purpose? There are loads of green engineering teams that have to figure out how to comply with really tricky data handling regulations.

It’s not the same at all. You don’t bring sheet music home and tell it to write a brand new symphony in the style of Beethoven.

My college girlfriend was hit by a car right next to me going those speeds during a turn. It seems slow, but meat on steel is pretty brutal at any travel speed. It was a four or five month recovery. Remember that the velocity of the vehicle is only a part of the picture — mass is the damage dealer here.

Right, I know. You’re not wrong. I was meaning you wouldn’t want to do it in Go because it’s not idiomatic (and likely impossible as discussed). I use it all the time in other languages and don’t mind exception patterns, but method chaining feels very out of place when reading Go code.

Method chaining, while possible, isn’t something I’d say is really encouraged in Go. Returned values should be handled explicitly. There are plenty of cases where it could be fine, but if a function can error, you wouldn’t want to chain anyways.

Shower. I work from home, so the ten or fifteen minutes of shower time lets me relax my focus enough to settle into family time. Sometimes I bring a cocktail in there with me.

The issue is not parking. The issue is that these cars remain on the road all day, creating congestion. Commuters are only clogging the roads during commutes. Thus “rush hour.”

I think in your scenario we’re augmenting humans, not horses.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping that global competition increases tech pay for non-US companies and I can land a remote gig that has some actual benefits like paternal leave.

Actually, there were many clues listed, but they didn't directly connect them to "slaves" as such. The rough timber used in the bedding, the amphorae under the bed, a chamber pot, and lots of evidence suggesting the room was used for storage in addition to sleeping. These all point towards someone of much lower class (slaves of some kind) than the owner of the villa.

I think there's another side to this coin: very small software teams moving quickly in markets where truly senior devs are scarce. It makes far more engineering and business sense to invest in cloud infrastructure than it is to build and control all of those systems in-house. I can hire a middle-of-the-road developer and trust they've (at the very least) heard of the AWS or GCP tools/services we're using, but if I wrote my own systems in clojure/elixir/whatever (even though that's what I'd prefer to do), then there's nowhere near the likelihood that the new engineer will know what to do, and it'll take months to train them up to even a basic level of competency. You can make all sorts of "it's better in the long run" kind of arguments, but those don't help when the C suite says "yeah sure, maybe that's the best approach, but we need to get this done right now." That's where clicking a few buttons to spin up a load balancer in front of a handful of serverless handlers becomes rather nice.

I personally don’t think many people are banking on colonizing another planet, but rather the technologies created as byproducts of that effort. Between energy creation, energy storage, thermal regulation, extraction and refinement of products necessary for life (oxygen, water, etc), and transformation of atmospheric gases, there’s plenty that can help keep our current planet healthy and suitable for human life.

There is a growing number of academics who might argue that the spectacle can be part of the substance. For quite a long time, spectacle (or even advocacy) has been regarded as problematic in academia, particularly in the sciences. I see a lot of what West does as making “good trouble” that gets really important philosophical issues added to the general discourse

One of the things I learned pretty quickly is that it gave me the ability to focus better on anything, but my lack of prioritization skills became more noticeable. So yeah, it helps you focus, but you still have to practice picking what you should be focusing on.

For what it's worth, I started by trying ritalin and didn't like it. Like you, small doses of methylphenidate did the trick, but affected my mood too much. Once I learned some other coping strategies, I tried adderall again and find it to be extremely effective now. After you level up those other skills, talk to your neuro again if you feel the medication isn't actually helping.

It's interesting to me that your daughter phrased it that way. There's actually a ton of research (some old, some new) about perception of time among ADHD sufferers and how that affects modern life. In a nutshell, the idea seems to be that there's a shorter time horizon (ADHD folks can only see or imagine themselves so far into the future) which is what makes long-term planning, budgeting, etc so difficult and why many are also seen as procrastinators or bad with money. Hop on any research database or google scholar and give it a look. You'll also find in that research an overwhelming bias towards studying younger folks. We're only recently starting to understand how missing diagnoses affect adult livelihoods.

Anecdote: I'm one of those who tried behavioral approaches for years before agreeing to try medication. I bounced back and forth between different types and doses and ended up on small, regular doses of adderall because I could have some control over when it tapers off. I'm disheartened by the smugness of commentary here from people who see nothing but stimulant abuse.

To give a solid example of why it can sometimes be seen as giving you superpowers, consider my experience: I have three degrees. I was in graduate school for...far too long. Anthropology isn't a quick in and out. I could wrap my head around anything, but sitting and writing multiple drafts of 50-100 page papers regularly was unimaginably difficult. I loved writing, and I wasn't sure why it was so challenging for me. Several years ago, I had the "opportunity" to write an NSF grant with (read: for) a pretty famous researcher. The downside is that when I was asked to write it, I was told the deadline was in four days. I spent some time setting up a perfect writing environment with no distractions, comfortable lighting, and everything I could think of, but when I was working, I could almost physically feel my brain constantly switching to some other track. It was deeply upsetting. The following year, I finally gave in to my doctor's medication recommendation. When I first sat down to read an article in a journal while medicated, the only thing I could hear in my head while reading was my own voice reading the words on the page. It actually brought me to tears because I realized that was probably what everyone else was able to experience normally. The glasses analogy everyone is using? Yeah, it's a bit like that, but imagine being in your 30s not even knowing that you can't see properly until someone put glasses on you. It changes your entire perception of the world and your place in it. It makes small things seem like superpowers. Like you finally have the ability to do all the things you're expected to do as a productive member of society. It's liberating. At the same time, all I can think about is how much more I might have been able to achieve if people had considered putting me in some sort of treatment as a kid rather than telling me that I wasn't working hard enough and making fun of other kids with ADHD.

Nitpicky, but useful for anyone interested in spatial data: WGS-84 is not a "GPS standard" but rather a geographic coordinate system and is usually paired for consumption with a projection like wgs 84 web mercator to view those 3d coordinates on a 2d plane. Super interesting stuff and reconciling these standards across the globe is a really fun problem, and one you'll likely run into if you ever find yourself dabbling in remote sensing pipelines.

That market — the one that would be happy with a mediocre lens and great image processing - likely overlaps with people using top tier mobile devices for their work. After all, acceptable lenses with amazing image processing is basically what the flagship iPhones and android devices bring to the table, and their use case tends to overlap with that of a 50mm prime.

I’ve noticed a much heavier use of minor keys in trip hop than lofi or chill. Tempo might match, some of the techniques might match, but that minor key changes the feel entirely. Takes you right into that dark trippy place that I love so much.

When it became easy and affordable to actually consume content when we wanted to. Speaking for myself, obviously, but when it became easier to subscribe to one or two services and actually have all the stuff I wanted whenever I wanted it rather than invest my time and money in custom storage and streaming solutions and (not to mention finding what I want to download), then it was suddenly not worth it. Now, if I have to spend an equal amount of time figuring out which of the now dozens of streaming platforms a single movie might be on, only to find out that studio A is currently arguing with vendor B, all while I’m paying for each service, then yeah piracy suddenly sounds appealing again.

Except not really because I’m far too lazy to put in that effort again.

Holy cow this is the first time I've thought of this since I was a kid! My favorite was the toilet seat being headwear and "sanitized for your protection" as a chant.

Probably why I became an archaeologist.

You’re absolutely right, and if we can skip over the gender roles real quick, I think it’s another indication of a broader dysfunction that a family can’t support itself on a single income, requiring paid childcare of some form.

But yes, you’re right that the weight of that family care role would typically fall on the woman. I’m hoping that continues to change. I’ve seen real movement in that direction through quarantine as families have been forced to face financial realities.

While I agree that there are many parts of our society that are broken, I don’t think that living with parents (or grandparents) is part of that. If anything, I think the constant pressure to be fully independent by the time you’re in your early 20s is the indicator. In much of the world, it’s very common and even encouraged to live with previous generations, sometimes after marriage. There are a ton of benefits from this arrangement, including built-in care for younger and older folks, better ability to save, etc. I’ve seen more and more successful tech folks building multi-generation homes here in America to try to move towards this model for the future. I think the brokenness of the system is the degree to which we shame people that are diverging from the older American model.

They also don’t tell you quite how bad it is on your knees. I did most of my fieldwork in the Midwest with a some additional work on North American migration following the younger dryas in Alaska. My knees are safe now, thanks to a career in software. I miss fieldwork every summer, though.

It's also a common situation in the rest of population and community ecology. For instance, removing wolves as a predator here in Michigan has caused an explosion in the deer population. That, in turn, changed the makeup in undergrowth as they eat more now, which has all kinds of extended effects. Not to mention the propagation of diseases in a more sense population.

I was in a similar situation once. In the time between my offer letter and the day I started, the company fired every team lead and wanted to position me as a person that would help get the <location redacted> office in line with SF expectations. It was a culture nightmare. Beyond that, there was no engineering leadership at my location and the code was a mess. I could deal with the code, but not while dealing with the anxiety that the culture produced. I quit at three months. To his credit, the CTO was cool with it, noting that three months or less is basically the trial period, and if you back out of the job, no problem.

I'd quit if you can. Pay attention to the red flags.

Tools like these, while perhaps only answering very specific and limited questions, can be really useful when explaining phenomena to decision makers. More often than not (at least in America), the financial impact carries the most weight, particularly to those who might otherwise not care at all about climate change.

A subscription is a bit different as you pay in advance. If the charge fails, you generally lose access to the subscribed service. That's not the same as using an AWS resource, being invoiced for that use, then not paying it.