stinkytaco

I didn't accept any deal by clicking a link that took me to a webpage. I don't think anyone using Python, which is GPL-compatible, expects it to come with a "and you'll see our popup advertising for donations if you visit our site".

On the other hand, they didn't make any deal not to show you pop-ups. And they have no obligation to you as a user, nor does it seem they have incentive to change their approach.

In the physical world, common spaces can be regulated. Signs, billboards, radio waves, public right of way and similar goods are public property and often the government will lease common space in exchange for some benefit to the commons. This might be revenue (collecting some fee for the license to put billboards on the highway) or a more abstract benefits (the public benefit of information dissemination when leasing radio spectrum). This at least allows citizens to participate in the process and benefit from the outcomes, even indirectly. In exchange, private companies use various methods (including ads) to recoup their costs.

On the internet, though, it feels like the balance has been disturbed. The benefits the public get from the maintenance of the infrastructure that provides these services (cables running through public and private lands, radio spectrum for wireless services, maintenance of domain services, etc.) isn't really commensurate with the massive profit organizations get from using them. I'm not sure how we got to the point where Google can cash in so much on the commons and we get popup ads as a thank you. I don't know what regulatory framework will work, but I hope we find one.

This could also be an investment in future happiness. Part of the point of journaling and documenting is to later revisit and unlocking memories one might have not accessed in some time. This is part of the reason Spotify Wrapped and similar "recaps" are enjoyable. People enjoy seeing what they were like. In many ways we are the product of things we do (whether that be consuming or creating) and exploring those things at a future date is to be in conversation with ourselves.

Things like this are also a way of expressing and sharing gratitude, which is a cathartic exercise to engage in periodically. Putting into words "these are things I enjoyed" is worthwhile, in my experience, and sharing it is a small extra step. Additionally, sharing it can be a gift to the future. I can't tell you how much I appreciate effort my parents took to document parts of my childhood (vacations, accomplishments, daily life, etc.) and I know other children feel the same. It's the kind of window to the past that is only open through efforts like this.

Having served in the military once upon a time, it always makes me chuckle. Now, I didn't do much related to information technology or security, but "unbreakable" is not a term I ever associated with military equipment.

I remember listening both to the few PDQ Bach albums my parents owned and then his excellent radio show on music theory and concepts. I found some old episodes online and have been enjoying them again the last few days.

And the majority of us will be outliers are on any bell curve

This cannot be possible, by definition. The majority of us will be within one standard deviation of the midpoint on a bell curve because that's how bell curves work. And that means basic evidence based health and fitness advice applies to the majority of us. Not bullshit like "oxidative stress".

No, seriously, I had an uncle that smoked 3 cigarettes a day and lived into his 90s. I've started smoking a pack a day and I'll live well past 100, right?

I wish we, as humans, understood odds better. All health advice is about stacking the deck in your favor, but outliers always exist. I'd be more critical, except I'm sure there's some area where I apply a similar ignorance of the basics.

I'm perhaps idealistic by saying that at least some of this time, these things can coexist. It's ok to make money doing a thing. I'm reminded of this video that makes an excellent point:

https://youtu.be/x1kv3oKoZkQ?si=iehzC8H815vEtA1M

Part of the problem is that most of this works. If you pick up heavy things, you will get stronger. If you're trying to differentiate yourself you'll focus on specific techniques or sports, but really, the basics are not hard: do something that's difficult and your body will adapt to improve its ability to do that thing.

However, some specifics that I've found useful:

Barbell Medicine - focuses on strength training, not just barbells.

The Bioneer - a little lifestyle heavy, but the basic advice is sound.

Alan Thrall- also barbell focused, but lots of good advice to be gleaned there, including on bodyweight.

Ross Enamait - boxing focus, but bodyweight stuff. His book "Never Gymless" is good.

Underground Strength Gym - an oldie, but a goodie.

The above advice is good, since the most important thing is getting all major muscle groups regularly.

But you might also look into calisthenics, which is enjoying a surge in popularity, it seems. Lots of good stuff out there on bodyweight training with a variety of adapted equipment.

One thing I've found in fitness is that people need to do what will keep them active and for many, that requires specific guidance or goals. General prescriptions like "use your muscles by being active" is fine, but what does active mean? Some people like bodybuilding, or powerlifting, or powerbuilding, or crossfit, or hiking, or basketball or whatever and if those things get them active, then that's good.

The current physical activity guidelines call for 150 minutes of moderate intensity cardiovascular training per week and at resistance training on at least 2 days per week. There's lots of ways to get there, and maybe strength training is the way to do it for some people. Even if that's not the focus, however, people should set aside some time to focus on resistance training because it provides a number of long term benefits.

Yeah, I get it. I was mostly joking, but a few things:

I strongly suspect most people buy either the official case from the manufacturer or maybe they go to Amazon or buy one from their local store (Best Buy, Verizon, etc.). They are high markup items and thus readily available in places people shop already.

I find secondary markets that are essentially universal interesting. Imagine selling a TV, but not including a remote control, that seems absurd. What I strongly suspect is happening here is that the market does not favor phones that don't need cases because people want to buy cases. When you're talking about toting around a generic black rectangle everyone else has, there is a desire to make it unique and expressive through the case. I think even with plastic phones, cases would still sell.

Exactly. Why make more durable phones when you can make an extra $30 by selling a case, too?

Half of them provide discord access and 75% a custom rss feed for a subscriber only podcast in my list. And frankly, I only take advantage of a couple of those. Mostly I just do it to throw a few dollars to stuff I like and don't use the perks. I can't be the only one.

I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not.

It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful. Now that I'm older and in a position with a different perspective, I'm far less likely to find systemic fault. Perhaps I'm just lucky in my career atc? I don't have a blog to go back to, but this author seems insightful and I'd like to see what they think in 5 or 10 years.

I think this is a problem specific to your library. A very quick check shows the average age of our collection to be about 6 years (at my small to midsized urban library). That's extremely rough because new editions of classics will show a much more recent copyright date than an average person would consider them, so a collection can still be seen to skew much older than the data suggests. However, it's still dominated by recent titles, especially of popular literature. Technical books are harder for me to comment on because at a public library, that's generally out of our domain. We try to keep up on the popular series for tech stuff like "Learn Visually" or "Dummies", but the circulation or those dwindles as either fewer people need them or are more likely to use the internet for solving their problems. Depending on your needs, you might see if your library has a subscription to O'Reilly books or similar platform for your area of interest.

What you are suggesting does exist, at least partially. SimplyE is the largest open platform I can think of, but it does work by leveraging partnerships with traditional vendors like Overdrive. There's also Ebooks Minnesota and likely similar platforms in other states, though those are often run using proprietary platforms even if they contain open access material. There's also Internet Archive and Open Library, but both have been in some trouble. One I'm unfamiliar with was also mentioned in the original article.

I'll say that given my experience in identifying and spending funds for nebulous projects like software or service improvements, I'm not optimistic. It's easy to buy a bulldozer and shop and get the best price and then show you have a bulldozer. That's much harder to do for software and it's why so many government platforms seem to suck and why I think Overdrive will be comfortable at the top for a while. I'd like a world where libraries had control over the electronic content they purchase, but people will migrate to easy and we have to follow them there.

Do you expect authors or publishers to operate without a profit motive? I think I understand what you're getting at, but in any library model someone is getting paid. We buy books from the same wholesalers that serve book stores and subscribe to magazines that review them and catalog them with software we license (or if you're using open source you often have a support contract). It seems somewhat arbitrary to single out Overdrive as the ones who should go non-profit here. Overdrive provides a service that they charge for; that, in and of itself seems pretty standard, which is why I'm curious what else is going on.

Does a library have no duty of preservation or archival? Surely "what the public wants" cannot be the only driving factor, right?

Yes, it is the only driving factor for a public library.

It turns out people do want to preserve stuff, so we keep an archive of local interest items that the public wants (microfilm, city directories, notable local authors and artists), but we don't view ourselves as an archive. That's not our mission nor are we equipped to do that work beyond the limited capacity we already have.

The same goes for materials in the collection. If they do not check out, we remove them and replace them with things that hopefully will. Years of experience has taught me that people do not want an old collection, no matter what its value. They want current items that are clean and relevant to them and that's what we're here for. We're a government institution and are ultimately answerable to what the public wants.

But here's the thing, like with our local archive, the desires of the public and preservation do often align. That's why libraries look the way they do. People do check out great works of literary art and we often replace those as they wear out. People do want some archival materials and ask for them when doing research. The situation you describe doesn't happen because it turns out most people don't want all gardening books or adult magazines. But we don't keep anything that doesn't get used just for the sake of it, all of it serves the mission.

This is interesting to hear. I've always found that Overdrive does live up to its reputation of being a library focused company. The books aren't cheaper on Cloudlibrary or Axis360 and Overdrive offers the best user experience by a mile, even with all the warts on Libby. They are generally responsive to issues and supportive of concerns (they provided us a ton of data related to the McMillan boycott, for example). That may be in their self interest, but that's how this is supposed to work, right? They make money, we serve our customers. None of that seems sinister so I'm curious what else is going on behind the scenes.

I'm a librarian and while I sympathize with some of the arguments here, they are not arguments I can explain to the public. No one cares, and they shouldn't have to. They should be able to read everything from James Patterson to Thomas Piketty and not have to think about it and Libby is pretty good at enabling that. Alternative platform exist, but none of them are as good. Libby works on a lot of devices and Overdrive works with Amazon for people who own a Kindle. More people check out e-books and fewer check out physical books every year; the pubic wants what it wants and right or not Overdrive is the best way to get them that.

So yeah, this could come crashing down. But more likely it will be like the transition of any format. Audiobooks have moved from tapes to CDs to digital in the span of about 15 years (in 2007 we still had lots of tape audiobooks) so we tossed the tapes and bought CDs because people got rid of their tape players and then did the same with CDs. We didn't dig in our heels and tell people tape players were good enough because it's not a luxury we have.

If you jump up a level, you'll find a rhyme to it. He's a relatively well known artist and has a moderate internet following.

Stress is a factor of excellence.

So is having a rich family. The article provides a long list of examples of great artists who's success is largely enabled by already being wealthy, not necessarily being the best. Even just being lucky enough to already be established puts you far ahead of people trying to break in. I can walk out the door and likely find a job in my industry because I have lots of experience to point to and references who will vouch for me. I think I'm good at my job, but I was also in the right place at the right time to get it and now I'm a safe bet for someone who needs my skills, even if I'm not the best bet. Someone who's trying to break in that's ten times more talented than me might never catch that break. I know for a fact that I've hired lesser candidates because I needed someone who was a known quantity more than I needed someone who was possibly great.

Meritocracy is pretty far down the list as a factor of success in my experience.

I like both. I think Lego sets are in many ways my first experience of technical documentation and I still use those skills. It also helped me learn about how sets went together so I could design my own. Finally, I wanted to play with what was on the box.

Fairly similar to roam. It has:

Atomic nodes.

Citations.

A map of linked nodes.

Tiddlywiki and org-mode can also offer similar experiences I'd you take the time to set them up.

They have, especially big names that count on high follower numbers and analytics. I run across lots of accounts that have 2 or 3 posts, then stopped.

True, though I'd say that email is a cautionary tale due to how centralized it's gotten. I guess I was referring to "second wave" federation, for lack of a better term. Federated replacements for social networks: Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, etc. I can't say if those will be as successful as email, just that an obsession with itself is a pretty normal part of the growth process. Part of what made reddit successful, especially early on, was people identifying themselves as reddit users.

I'd argue that social networks are a little bit different because discussing is what they do. Reddit is obsessed with itself, when I'd say most of the wide world doesn't care about the API or 3rd party app business (though they eventually may if moderation gets bad). Even 15 years ago a good amount of posting on reddit was about itself: secret Santas, seeing reddit bumper stickers, self referential memes, killing digg, how it was going mainstream, etc. It's a pretty natural progression of any project. That isn't to say federation will be successful, just that its self obsession is pretty normal.

An instance can block another instance from federating with it. So if I'm on instance "b" and it defederates instance "a", I can no longer see any of instance "a"'s communities or comments.

This is one of my favorite HN adjacent projects and I use it with some frequency. Glad to see you are committed to it for the long term. Good luck.

Easier to find, but probably harder to talk to. I think it's not a coincidence that several of the subcultures you list above involve dressing in costumes. I'm sure part of that is immersing oneself in the culture, but there's also an element of anonymity that people value. At least some of this is a result of Thompson's influence on the culture.

A corporation's obligation is to generate shareholder value. Not user value, but value for the owners. This can be done a variety of ways but the two big ones are: generating profits and distributing those as dividends or raising the stock value. Technically the former doesn't require growth, but the later definitly does. VC funded companies are basically founded with the promise that the value of the stock will rise and that the VC can cash out its ownership eventually, either through a sale or an IPO.

Also, growth doesn't necessarily mean size, but it does imply long term increase in value for owners. If I buy stock in a company, I want to get richer for owning that stock and that means either the dividends need to be high enough to recoup my investment or the stock needs to rise in value, making me richer when I sell it (starting the cycle again). Both of those outcomes sort of imply some sort of growth over time. If I expect that time to be short, as one might with an internet company, I'd like that timeline accelerated so I get as much value as I can in as short a time as possible. That's what leads to moves like this.