rtchau

For a brief, beautiful moment, one man came close to sucking more than any other person in human history.

I had a 2015 M5, it was easily one of the best Macs I've owned. Ultra-ultra-ultra portable, I had great battery life with mine, and it was as fast as my 2013 Macbook Pro. I used it as my daily driver for 3 years before I got a new job (and a new work-issued laptop). Paired with a monitor that provided USB-C power (there were a few at the time, I got one of the Philips displays) it got me through several sizeable web dev projects. It's only just been retired, as the battery finally made it unusable, and now its logic board (and 2 others: my wife's 2015 Macbook and a lucky score on eBay) are part of a 3-machine cluster with Ubuntu installed, because why not... each one just has a USB-c power/ethernet dongle plugged into it, and I've got a little compute cluster that punches way above its weight for the amount of space it takes up (and the power it consumes, which is very little, especially with the display removed).

If you could buy SBCs based on the m5, I'd eat them up.

Some say this brave adventurer met his end when the 5110 fought back against the insult to its sacred internals.

Others say bestowing the power of 4G on a device as formidable as the 5110 opened a portal to realms hitherto unknown, to which our hero travelled, and we'll meet him again someday.

But my guess? He's still out there, trying to make the dream of a 4G-enabled 5110 a reality. And I still have hope for a "Part 2".

I love Lightnote! I'm trying to get my kids into it as well.

Awesome work.

I survived with a 12" Macbook and a solitary USB-C port. The one difference is that I did have an audio jack as well.

I found a monitor that had a USB-C connection with charging, a USB hub, ethernet etc. (of which there were very few back in 2015). When I was somewhere other than my own desk, the Apple HDMI dongle was more than good enough.

The only "this sucks" scenario was when I had the opportunity to use multiple external models, but couldn't. Aside from that, I don't regret getting that laptop.

No, I don't believe that it would be. In terms of "calories expended over distance", it'd be pretty close, but we're made for endurance, not raw speed. From what I understand, the energy budget of the human body is tuned for 2 things: neurological activity (the energy consumption of which far exceeds any other animal on earth) and endurance.

It's what makes us such terrifying hunters... prey can outrun us but then when they invariably have to stop to recover, we eventually just turn up and they have to keep running again.

So, any activity where you're cranking the ol' powerhouse up to 120% and going for a run is going to incur a cost, both in terms of energy consumption (which, as the post demonstrates, is slightly more efficient than a fast-paced walk), but then also the resultant metabolic waste which needs to be eliminated, which is a process that takes place during recovery in the 24hrs or so after you've completed your "efficient" 7-minute mile, and I don't believe the article takes this into account.

I watched an interesting video recently (I think it was Kurzgesagt?) that talks about the illusion of high-intensity activity vs low-intensity but longer-duration activity.

I got into the game "kinda late" (first PC ran DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1), and I still cherish and adore the CLI, and can't imagine it ever going away (if it does, a little piece of me will die with it). The look on the faces of a fresh crop of 20-something developers when you pull out a one-liner and/or some regex never gets old, and I still consider myself very unskilled compared to the folks who have lived and breathed bash/csh/zsh/tcsh etc for the past 30-40 years.

That being said, how old is "Old"?

I have: 1. An old i3 running TrueNAS after I decided my QNAP TS-503 was too old and shonky to be able to run Plex; 2. An ex-govt i5-6500 with 32GB RAM for miscellaneous development activities; 3. An RPi 4 that runs prometheus/grafana for monitoring; 4. A Khadas Vim3 that currently runs some crypto-related analytics, but is mostly for fun/experimentation; 5. A 2015 Macbook (12") that's been gutted all the way down to the logic board, with a combination power/ethernet dongle hanging off it, running Linux as a headless machine for more mucking around/non-serious stuff; 6. A work-issued Macbook Pro (M1 Pro); 7. A Windows desktop with a Ryzen 5 2600, 32GB RAM, a 2Tb nvme and a 1660Ti for gaming; 8. Aforementioned QNAP TS-503 gathering dust.

If I'd change anything, I'd turn the Khadas into a media PC and plug it into my TV and retire my broken old AppleTV (some older generation that doesn't allow installing apps), I'll inherit my wife's 12" Macbook and add wire it up the same way as the other one, and then get rid of the i5 and bring the power consumption down a bit (the Core M-5 in the 12" Macbook is surprisingly powerful, and with the I/O on the Macbook, it'd beat the i5 hands-down, aside from the RAM limitations). At some point I'd love to build a small cluster of ARM boards when they step up in capability a bit (and when I can find some reasonably priced ones that can support 32GB RAM or more), and then any dev stuff I do can run in minikube or something similar. I'd like to play around with RISC-V at some point too.

For your purposes... I'd recommend a thin formfactor with a decent CPU, 64GB RAM and as much storage as you can stuff into it, then run TrueNAS.

Holy smokes, I'd hate to be on the receiving end of that power bill, though I'd love to have the kind of workload that justified that setup.

Oh god. It's too real. This was soul-crushing. Thank you for sharing.

The problem is that ADHD (and its related disorders) can't really be measured (on a scale from 1 to 10, for example).

In reality, it's like a color wheel or a spiderweb chart of different symptoms/characteristics/idiosyncrasies, only said wheel/chart also has a depth component. There are so many nuances of behavior/habit and crossover with other disorders (depression, anxiety, oppositional/defiant disorder) as well as going hand in hand with much nicer stuff (creativity, introspectivity, intelligence etc).

When I was diagnosed, someone I knew scoffed at me and said "no way, I know a girl with ADHD and she's bouncing off walls, you don't have ADHD" and have known other people to say outright that it's a load of crap and is made up etc.

It's just... Not. That. Simple.

What I do know for sure is that since being diagnosed (10 years ago, at 31), and commencing medication, things turned around in a colossal way. Medication doesn't fix ADHD, it just helps break down that motiviational wall that makes it hard to just start. For me at least. For you, or the next person, it might help in different/more ways.

Long story short, mild ADHD is a little hard to characterise, because at the "mild" end, there can be a bunch of other factors making you distractible/unmotivated (health, diet, relationships, job dissatisfaction etc).

If you're in any doubt, just go start a conversation with your doctor and go from there. If you're trying to spot specific behaviours, look at the number of unfinished or abandoned "pet projects", degree of procrastination, poor impulse control... those were the red flags for me. Your mileage may vary.

New position.

My workplace is different - we've been in an under-resourced, over-committed state for about 3 years and we KNOW we need more established standards, better testing, and a handle on our tech debt. We just don't have it yet, so instead of blank stares and "what are you talking about", it's exasperated sighs and "yep, we gotta work on that". But our whole team is on the same page and committed to the idea, so that's definitely a plus.

I came here to say this. I'll make do by seconding this motion.

I suppose tagging along with an exploded bomb-hunter is generally only applicable in the past tense.

In my experience (and the industry I'm in), requiring identity verification upon withdrawal is an anti-money laundering measure, and often one required by legislation rather than company policy.

Don’t think too hard… there’s a rate limit. Unlike accepting your lord and saviour, which is unmetered! \o/

Glad I could elicit a laugh :) And I hope I didn't cause any offence.

Tell me I'm not the only one who thinks the graphic in the middle of the logo resembles something other than anything space-related?

Yeah, you definitely called that one. It's like a smouldering cornucopia of antisemitism, "Buy GME", penises, "Death to America", more penises, more GME... if an alien race were using this as a tool to profile us and decide our fate, we'd be toast. Props to the author for creating something entertaining, but it just goes to show you can't control what people post.

I couldn't even begin to guess how many hours I spent playing this game as a kid (and how much I dreaded hearing "Warning - missile approaching" in the last level).

Looks like it's too late. Is there anywhere else to watch this online? It doesn't look like there are any screenings in Australia any time soon...

"Teledildonics"... what a time to be alive. Just when I thought we were running out of new frontiers!

Could you imagine the privacy implications? "Hey! It looks like you could use more fiber in your diet". Then suddenly, you're seeing Metamucil ads all over Facebook, and you start getting discount vouchers for prune juice in the mail.

"The long term solution is, then, not eradicating ADHD's existence, but building a society in which individuals with ADHD can prosper in their unique ways." - Spot on the mark. Not that ADHD can be "eradicated" but having a society that makes it easier for people with ADHD to thrive is important.

A lot of our institutions (education, employment etc) are a good fit for the "neurotypical" among us, which makes coping with ADHD difficult, even though it does go hand-in-hand with a lot of positive traits (empathy, creativity, "hyperfocus" etc).

We can use the associated strengths to our advantage as much as we like, but for me, that means working staggered hours (my focus/drive follows a cycle that means I could be a 5am-er for a few days, then back to being a night owl when it comes to work output), and that just isn't possible with a day job, unless I put up with being half as productive. When I was consulting and working mainly from home, it was great as I could "surf the wave" of this cycle, so to speak, but with a day job, and the expectation that I can work regular hours alongside other people, it's no longer an option.

That example is specific to me, but I'm sure there are loads of other ADHD traits that make life difficult simply because they don't fit the mold of "regular people" - my kids are a good example, especially my 11-year-old... he'll annihilate a book in a single sitting and he's an incredibly bright kid, but he's a straight-C student.

I can relate to this. I was diagnosed at 31, and my doctor at the time asked me "so, are you having issues at work? Is anyone pulling you up on your effort?"

The answer was "No". His response was "well, then what's the problem?"

The longer answer from me should have been "no, but keeping up appearances requires Herculian effort, and I pay a tremendous emotional and personal cost, I am distant from my wife and 2 kids, and at night time, the anxiety is enough to materialize a cold ball of steel in the pit of stomach".

I managed to get a diagnosis anyway, and my psychiatrist got me started on Ritalin, and then onto Concerta (I take Vyvanse now). The difference was like flipping a switch. My work output improved out of sight, I stopped being a zombie at night time because I didn't have to go through a cycle of wake up -> work -> burnout -> sleep -> recover every day, and I'm earning more than twice what I was at the time of my diagnosis, and I don't think any of that would have been possible if I'd remained in the same situation.

What I've learned over the years is that the problems associated with ADHD don't "go away" with medication, they just become more manageable, and knowing how my brain works both on and off medication has been TREMENDOUS tool for increasing self-awareness and understanding that the anxiety/procrastination/apathy etc is a function of neurochemistry, and not a harbinger of doom or destruction.

It's solid. The problem is scaling: if you're betting fixed odds, a lot of bookmakers will limit the amount you can bet, or ban you outright if you're winning too much. If you're into horses and bet into the totes, you run the risk of wildly affecting the pool (and therefore the final payout) if you're throwing huge amounts into it. The only way to really scale it is to bet into pools that are already huge (like Hong Kong - hence why it's such a popular target for the big syndicates).

I first got on the internet in 1996, so it was pretty much all IRC and personal sites built in Netscape. :-) And a (now conspicuous) lack of information landfill (the sheer amount of garbage on the internet today saddens me).

In all seriousness, even though 1996 is not "early" internet, I still look back on when it still seemed like a frontier. I hope there's another innovation that gives everyone the same sense of exploration and being on the bleeding edge - I've no doubt there will be, but I'll be damned if I know what it is.

I laughed so hard at that.

Yeah, I'm reading Black Swan now, and then have Antifragile and Skin in the Game... I get the impression it'll be a journey through the man's ever-inflating ego. Signal/Noise was great though (not that I didn't thoroughly enjoy NNT's Fooled by Randomness), I'd love to read more of Nate Silver's stuff. Also open to recommendations of similar material?

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

I find it truly horrifying that we got to a place where it's a real step forward that fewer people are using Facebook for news.

This is what happens when you use colloquialisms and are otherwise vague when providing a brief to copywriters who don't primarily speak English. In other words - be specific, avoid slang, and don't leave any room for strange interpretation.

I imagine the brief for this went something like this: "Here are a bunch of keywords to write about... tell us about how it works, what makes it tick etc" and the rest is history.