HN user
This is exactly the distinction that needs to be drawn:
Relative time is only useful within the next or past few hours. For pretty much everything else, the absolute time is more informative and clear.
Utter futility! — said Koheleth —
Utter futility! All is futile!This is basically the premise of Robert Sheckley's short story "The Robot Who Looked Like Me".
I'm with you on this.
I had the temerity to suggest there are benefits to face-to-face collaboration, and that meeting with colleagues was a valid reason for asking them to be on site in the office -- and I got raked over the coals as a butts-in-seats management lackey.
https://ez.substack.com/p/the-work-from-home-future-is-destr...
Speaking as a senior dev who has interviewed dozens (if not hundreds) of candidates, I assure you that the bulk of the burden is firmly on the interviewers, not the candidates.
This. "Accept it" or "ignore it" are perfectly valid options, and perhaps the healthiest for one's mental and emotional state.
Israel here -- full-time employees generally don't file taxes on their own. Your employer will ask to fill out a single form for any changes in tax status (such as single parent or disability).
On the other hand, self-employed individuals do need to file, which is not simple.
Completely agree:
My eldest was born when I was 24, and my youngest when I was 30. Now at 49, we're approaching empty-nest-hood -- other than the copious time we spent with our 2-year-old grandson. But at least we get to sleep....
HN has a religion all its own, with its virtues and deadly sins.
Shabbat observance is a massive world unto itself. It originates in Biblical sources (i.e. "the word of God"), but has developed throughout the entire rabbinic tradition, from the time of the prophets through the Talumdic era, and subsequently to the modern day.
Today, it is universally accepted in Orthodox Judaism that direct active interaction with electrical appliances is forbidden on Shabbat. However, one may benefit from and "use" devices and automated systems set in place before Shabbat, including light timers, fridges, and heating plates.
To be clear: nobody is "tricking" God by using a Shabbat elevator. Rather, this maintains the special nature of the day within the parameters established by centuries of tradition and scholarship ultimately based on God's commandments, while facilitating navigating our modern world.
I've found that my remote work meetings neatly break down into 3 categories:
- direct engagement -- 2-4 participants
- broad forum -- 5-12 participants
- fly-on-the-wall -- any number, but my contribution will be 0-4 sentences
I can frequently take fly-on-the-wall meetings (and sometimes even broad forum) while out walking, which is a nice plus.
Speaking as a long-time Perl monger (Perl5 has been 80%+ of my day job for most of the last 25 years):
Perl6 was definitely a fiasco that contributed to Perl5's demise. The active support in the ecosystem was divided between the "two Perls" and sapped the driving forces in the community.
Perl5, like any other language, needs constant maintenance and growth in order to interact with modern tools and frameworks. For example, Protobuf and gRPC only work with a particular module (Google::ProtocolBuffers::Dynamic) which requires an arcane series of dependencies.
Remember that a language is much more than just the semantics and the batteries-included libraries with the core. On the module and community side, Perl has been in free fall for the last decade.
If it's relevant enough for Github/Gitlab to render Markdown for the browser, clearly there's a visibility and aesthetic value to rendering.
I typically compose all messages in Markdown and then convert that into rendered HTML. So if you believe in the expressiveness of Markdown (which I hope you do), then HTML rendering is absolutely necessary.
Unfortunately, desktop Outlook is miserable with HTML support [1]. In particular, code blocks and quotes become an unreadable mess. The only way that I've found to include readable code blocks is to copy from VS Code, which somehow has the magic HTML combination that Outlook understands.
Apologies to the general audience -- this is going to get very low-level in terms of Jewish technical practice:
I agree that all historical attempts to associate electricity with particular melachot were not based on a full scientific understanding. Pinning the "fire" label on incandescent bulbs didn't really address the fundamental issue for all other appliances. As you mentioned, Rav SZ Auerbach would likely not have associated smartphone or laptop usage with uvdin d'chol.
However, I'm eminently thankful that the standard Orthdox practice has evolved to prohibit electrical appliance usage. I can see what Shabbat would have become otherwise, based on what Tisha B'Av is like. On Tisha B'Av, I make an effort to get into the spirit of the day, which means that I use my laptop for listening to (or watching) kinot and reading appropriate material. In the afternoon, when I'm worn out, I'll just "peek over" bat email -- and by then, the Tisha B'Av effect is shot.
If laptop usage were not forbidden, Shabbat would sadly become almost like every other day (at least for me).
On the flip side, I have enormous sympathy for the youth who keep "half Shabbat", i.e. they don't perform any major melachot, but they will use their smartphones. For many of them, social networks are an essential element of their daily life.
The grounds for probihiting electricity usage on Shabbat have gone through something of a metamorphosis, as rabbinic scholarship on the nature of electricity has expanded and the mechanisms used by electrical devices have evolved.
Given my digital-oriented profession and lifestyle, if it were not for the fact that all electronic devices are forbidden, I would find myself drifting back to work-related tasks ("oh, let's just see if this gets it to compile") to the point of losing Shabbat entirely. The blanket ban has saved my Shabbat and is part of the day's special distinctiveness.
This is an excellent question, and one dealt with in Israel. Today, electricity is required for the normal functioning of modern civilization, including for hospitals and security. Once power generation is required for society, all are permitted to benefit from it.
Wikipedia source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat#Use_of_...
Try to think of the Torah -- God's literal word, to Orthodox Jews -- as the Constitution, and rabbinical scholars throughout the generations as the Supreme Court.
The Torah prohibits work on Shabbat, but only points out a few instances in the broadest terms. One of those is to not carry items "between domains", directly referenced in Exodus and Jerimiah, but again only a single passage in each instance. This was expanded upon in Talmudic works, which include an explanation of what exactly constitutes a public domain.
The eruv is not a loophole to "fool God". The eruv is a means to adjust the technical (or legal) definition of a public domain.
When one ensures that a community has a functioning eruv, that itself is part of Shabbat observance.
I would phrase the Shabbat prohibitions as "creative work", modeled after the days of creation and the creative labor of building the Tabernacle. The 39 general categories of labor have been documented for millennia, and are applied as the archetypes for technical usage in the modern world.
Many aspects of Orthodox Judaism observance focus on halacha, often translated as "ritual law", but probably better described as technical religious practice. This may confuse those who expect religion to be primarily concerned with belief or faith.
As to the curious case of the eruv: The fundamental laws of Sabbath observance are mandated by the Bible, but the specifics of forbidden activities have been refined by rabbinic discussion over hundreds of years. These are documented in the Mishna, the Talmud, and many other sources continuing to the current era. It would be more accurate to view the eruv as a technical way to enclose a shared communal area. This has always been built into the technical determination of domains as set by rabbanic authorities, and functions more as a constant reminder of Sabbath than as a "loophole".
Anyone who observes Shabbat would never confuse it for a regular weekday, even with an eruv and light timers.
Yes, I already run Emacs (Spacemacs, to be specific) under WSL2 with X410 as the X Server. Presumably, I'll be able to ditch X410 when this layer gets to my corporate-mandated Windows build.
Born-bred NY-expat Israeli here, working for a West Coast Big Tech company.
New York (probably all US East) and Israeli cultures are fairly analogous. In just 3 extra timezones, West Coast workplace culture is light years away.
Many of my Israeli colleagues have no patience for the soft-pedaled corporate standard double talk (which they would call "PC"), and think that all US workplaces are like this. They have a hard time believing that my NY experience was just like our local Tel Aviv office.
I've also used Skype for Business (aka Lync) using the Pidgin plugin on Linux, which worked fine for chat and files.
I have often said that there are practically no C programming jobs. Rather, there are many job writing in the macros for a specific project (with the minimal associated C code).
Suggesting iMessage -- available only on Apple products -- as a alternative to avoid WhatsApp lock-in has to be the most ironic thing I've seen today.
To most people, email is something that you use for work, or if you're over 50.
That's an unbelievably poorly colored map -- 3 subtly different shades of green, 3 subtly different shades of blue. It's almost as though a colorblind designer set out to make everyone else suffer.
I've tried to convince my colleagues to use MS Teams channels instead of chat groups, to increase searchability and spontaneous joining (rather than needing to be invited). They've mostly resisted because they prefer the interface for group chats.
MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:
- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)
- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)
MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.