tezzer

Pensions pay (paid?) regardless of how the stock market is doing, and they pay for life. They grow with inflation, and you don't need to know anything about stocks, markets, funds, rebalancing or anything else to benefit. It was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. If it wasn't mismanaged and raided. Incidentally, today only 1/3 of working Americans have 401ks.

Mentos sugar free gum (since I have some handy) has xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, aspartame, acesulfame, sucralose and "sucrose fatty acid esthers"

I seem to recall most xylitol gums also have aspartame, but Mentos is the only one I had handy to check.

I was working with a decoder for the LD-CELP voice compression algorithm. The machine it was running on was compute-bound and the playback stuttered a lot. I dug into the code, then went to the papers describing the algorithm, then went back into the code and modified a piece of it to be better tuned to the data I was processing. In the average case I probably made the code worse, but in my specific case I sped up the thing by 30x. That gave me confidence in a few things:

1) I can figure out issues in other people's implementations.

2) The best solution may not be the best solution for you, and my hunches on optimization might be correct

3) It's fun to look like a wizard to your peers

The centrifuge itself- you get a little nausea as it spins up, and then it feels like forward Gs; an elephant sitting on you or the bottom of a dip in a roller coaster that never stops. Even at higher Gs it's just a continuous crushing that makes it arduous to breathe, but they never spun us civilians up to the point that anything seemed life threatening.

But then on some of the vibration runs (they did a bunch of different frequencies), there was this overwhelming all-focusing urgent need to make it stop. It just felt wrong, and dangerous, and there wasn't room in the head for anything but this worry that something dreadfully wrong was happening. It pushed out any other thoughts.

The target runs (and this was a decade ago so I'm dragging through memory) were mostly just visual effects, though. Everything was bouncing around and you couldn't focus on anything well enough to read; and there was a bit of the worry in my thoughts but not the panic from other frequencies.

Yes, in the experiment we had to touch highlighted groups of numbers on the screen during some phases, do simple math on groups of numbers, or read out numbers. One of the harder parts is repeatedly reaching out to touch the screen under G forces, your arms get really tired really fast.

I was a guinea pig for this experiment- they spun us up in the centrifuge, vibrated the chair in a simulation of launch forces, and had us doing reading and manual tasks. There are parts of your brain that nope out at certain frequencies, it's a remarkable feeling.

Nobody talks about ozone because global cooperation led by science and public policy fixed the hole. Come to think of it, maybe we should talk about it more.

I play Walkabout Mini Golf weekly with a group of far-flung friends. The courses are interesting, the physics feel right, and the audio is good enough it feels like we're standing around a course having drinks and goofing off. It saved my pandemic, and has been a great way to keep in touch with folks on a regular basis.

[1] https://www.mightycoconut.com/minigolf

I think it was a fine retelling of "Fern Gully"

I'm with you, 100%

The optics of paying people in a culture not your own to not reproduce are problematic, yes? Besides, we know how to get people to have fewer children. Raise their standard of living.

For what it's worth, I agree with you. We've developed entirely new capabilities that grew out of tangential conversation after in-person meetings. A few of our technical folks prefer remote work, largely because it saves them from stupid commutes. I've noticed the folks most against it are the ones who have historically built new things (myself included), and if I stick around I'm going to miss collaborating with them in person.

Harper's and the Atlantic have been doing long-form journalism since the 1850s. I think the form clashes with modern attention spans and ability to focus, but I still enjoy it. Since it persists, I don't think I'm alone.

Recipe web sites, however... padding, padding and more. Though Dickens was paid by the word, too, and it shows.

I think that's an expense a company should be enthusiastic about paying- along with upgraded internet, sharing of power bills... maybe the occasional lunch delivery.

So instead I should personally shoulder the real estate and infrastructure costs of working from home? No thanks.

No, I'm not confusing anything. I'm stating my team made a great deal of progress when we got together in the office over a sticky problem; and attributing the progress to the random directions the conversation and problem solving effort took when we were in one room bouncing ideas off each other and poking hardware together.

I don't think I want to pay for a bigger house; I already pay to be close to work. I've never had more than a 15 minute commute, and that has occasionally been an expensive policy!

I don't like co-opting my living space for work. It clutters things physically and mentally.

Several do, the few times I've gone into the office and done a little problem solving with the folks who were there, we accomplished like a week of work in an hour. There's something about putting heads together that's hard to replace. Some of our folks have always been ~90% remote and that's fine, but I think they're missing out on one of the joys of engineering.

I'm a software engineer. I can do my job 100% remotely. I can't wait to get back to the office. I like in-person collaboration, and I really like having separation between my work life and my home life. This year has been torture.

Maybe I'm not suited for the modern world, but I paid for Office and Adobe Creative Suite and BBEdit and I expect to be able to use them indefinitely, unless I want a feature upgrade. I don't want a toothbrush subscription or a laundry soap subscription and I don't want a Photoshop subscription.

I worry about what happens to the things I've created should my subscription lapse. I'd rather budget for a one-time purchase than have a yoke around my neck forever. A tiny yoke, sure, but add that to all the other ones and they are taxing to carry around.

There's a Dunkin just built in Sunnyvale on El Camino, not open yet but they're moving in the furniture. First one I've seen outside of an airport here.

I got rid of mine when they started paying people to ask questions, and the quality of questions plummeted. Also, the clearly fake "so-and-so would like you to answer a question" email notifications annoyed me.

Great idea! You should specify a time zone in your selections, or identify which one you use, since the internet is available in a few different places these days.

The individual who lead the effort to mandate backup cameras (after backing over and killing his son) cited ~200 deaths and 15,000 injuries, annually, mostly small children and elderly [1]. I don't know if I'd call it overreach, but I also don't know what the equation is for cost versus tragedy when looking at an issue like this.

[1] https://www.kidsandcars.org/2018/05/14/after-his-sons-tragic...

Oh good, I thought there was something wrong with my browser that was hiding a close button. That's a very strange design decision.

Call this anecdata, but here's part of a weekly update from a friend, ~45yo male, and his post-covid struggle:

“I am trying to keep my weekly covid journal going. We are still in about month 4 post infection.

Some good news is my breathing is slightly better. When everything is bad all small improvements are noticed. Could be from OTC blood thinners or that my lungs are getting better. Still have a super hard time breathing, but it is just a bit less difficult. I am also in a near constant state of fatigue, but am unable to easily sleep because of the other symptoms. My MRI revealed no vessel or tissue damage to my brain from the stroke, so maybe not a stroke or just not sever enough to cause damage. It did reveal a small cyst on the brain, but that seems to be common in covid recovery patients and no one knows why yet. The stroke like symptoms maybe related more to the hypoxia and not a stroke. I see a nuerologist this week and they will decide the next steps. The symptoms are still there though - dizzy, off balance, difficulty with sentence formation, difficulty getting facts from brain to mouth or hands to type, memory issues. Super frustrating.

My cardiologist has sent me for a new test that takes highly detailed xrays of the heart. After deciding what/how much damage is in my heart valve they will decide the next course of treatment. Other than the damage, he says my heart is healthy.

Passed my breathing test, so capacity is OK and volume/flow is good. The worry and science now is saying the breathing troubles I am experiencing may be related to tons of micro-clots in the lungs. They have been discovering these during autopsy of covid deceased (hopefully deceased) patients. My next steps of healthcare relate to all these specialist working together. I can not start blood thinners for my stroke prevention until I am sure I will not need heart surgery. I can not go down the path of heart surgery until there were sure I can both breath effectively and not have a stroke. I am fortunate for good doctors that are at the front edge of treatment for covid patients. Some of the care is "we just have to wait", that is OK but frustrating because in the mean time I am at the mercy of me neighbors to do the right things and not re-infect me and I have to stay socially isolated. The latest science is showing that antibodies are not retained in over 85-90% of cases of infection, meaning there is no natural immunity. This includes me, I showed no antibody after 10 weeks. This is worrisome since I am sure I would NOT be able to survive another round, since I barely survived the first one. "

Crypto is its own category in the ITAR, one whose impact decreased over time as events made the restrictions less relevant. Most crypto is now EAR not ITAR, but treated as a special category. I'm not sure the software classification lessons are going to apply.

22% of workers, 13% of private sector workers, and falling.

Ah, now I miss Meebo again, which was like adium but browser-based.

Unless the job is in a pharmacy, grocery store or hospital, your start date may have just moved right by at least a month Or at least you won't be going into the office.