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syncopatience

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Well put. I wonder if a lot of this comes from classical piano players (which there seem to be a lot of, proportionally?) assuming that everyone who learns piano is necessarily aspiring to play those super difficult classical pieces one day. I've started picking up the piano with jazz in mind and it's hard to tell if a lot of the advice out there is spot on and I'm worse off for ignoring it, or if it's really just not relevant to me because I don't intend to play Bach or Mozart. A lot of it _feels_ irrelevant, but I hesitate to dismiss it when it's coming from people who are clearly a lot more experienced than I am.

This brings to mind something Ira Glass said about "the gap":

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-gap

Couldn't this same reasoning be used to argue that we don't need for loops or functions because we have GOTOs? Boilerplate is tedious and error-prone to write and to read/understand in my experience.

If the concern is Uglify slowing down the dev cycle, you could turn it off for development builds.

I wonder why text editor preferences are so personal. I use the same editor and probably 90% of the same config as this guy and was nodding along until I saw he remapped B and E. Horrifying! Those are fundamental motions.

Could anyone weigh in on his assessment of Martin Fowler's Refactoring book? I'm considering picking it up - some seem to be of the opinion that its ideas are old news in 2016 and there's not much to learn from it, others say there's still lots of useful information.

The Web We Want 10 years ago

I had a similar problem working over a metered cellular data connection recently. One thing that helped a lot was the uBlock Origin extension for Chrome & Firefox, which has a feature that prevents automatically loading media elements over a certain size (say, 50kb). If you want to load a large image or video you can click to load it or turn the feature off on a per-site basis. Can use it in Firefox on an Android phone, too, since it has extensions.

  “It’s wonderful to have so many hours in my day – I
  feel like I can live two lives,” she says.

  ...

  “There’s this social view that short sleeping is a good 
  thing and should be encouraged – we’re always hauling 
  out the example of Margaret Thatcher and top CEOs who 
  don’t need much sleep. In fact, the amount of sleep you 
  need is genetically determined as much as your height 
  or shoe size. Some people need very little sleep, 
  others need 11 or 12 hours to feel their best.”
I don't think sleeping less is only better from a social view - like this lady says, she sleeps 4 hours and she feels like she can live two lives. If I need to sleep 12 hours to feel rested, doesn't it stand to reason that I can only live half a life? Maybe sleeping less than you need to feel your best is a worthwhile trade if you can spend more time living...

Is meth a completely different phenomenon? It's prescribed by doctors under the brand name "Desoxyn" for ADHD and narcolepsy - evidently they find more value than harm in it for some patients. The negative effects of meth are probably mixed up, to an extent, with the effects of taking a "street drug" filled with toxic byproducts.

Fortunately some research indicates that stoned driving is less cause for concern than drunk driving.

One study[1] has found that "THC's effects after doses up to 300 mcg / kg never exceed alcohol's at BAC's of 0.08 g %" and that "alcohol impaired performance relative to placebo but subjects did not perceive it", whereas "THC did not impair driving performance yet the subjects thought it had."

Another study[2] finds that "marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively for their impairment by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies such as driving more slowly, passing less, and leaving more space between themselves and cars in front of them", although it notes that the combination of marijuana and alcohol can impair even at doses that would be harmless for either drug alone.

[1] http://casr.adelaide.edu.au/t95/paper/s1p2.html

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722956/

Auto-antonym 14 years ago

Thanks for this. I've always been a little perplexed as to why an enumerator in Ruby uses 'yield' when it seemed like it was really the caller that was "yielding" to the enumerator. I ought to have been thinking of an enumerator yielding (as in giving) a value to the block provided by the caller.

I bought bulk-size toilet paper at a Target in St. Louis and the cashier taped a plastic handle to it as she rang it up. Fear not - the US is still advancing the state of the art in toilet paper delivery.

There are lots of great bikes to be had on Craigslist. It's not tough to find a modern road bike for around $300 in my city, and if you don't mind something frumpier you could get by with spending $150 for something that'll get you to work reliably.