Alex_MJ

Seconded.

I'm a relatively experienced lifter - heavy squats 3x per week is brutal for the first week or so and then your body adapts to it.

I've found that I'll actually stick with a ~hourlong workout, 3-5x a week that I believe in and have goals for over anything quick with no discernible aim. And it's amazing how time magically appears to actually show up at the gym when you prioritize it.

A "scientific" 7 minute workout with no discernible goals is an admirable thing but honestly it's a cheap novelty at best - I've never heard of anybody actually sticking to one, "doing the bare minimum" is just not motivating at all. Scientific according to whom? To what end? Why am I doing this?

Exercise science is inherently a little bit voodoo. Motivation and consistency are much more important than the time requirement.

If somebody's had any success with vague goalless 7-minute workouts, or has even stuck with them consistently, I'd love to hear differing opinions.

Sikuli is freaking great, though not sure how this is news, it's been around.

Super useful for automating things that are easy to handle by looking for patterns/things on screen and hard to handle with APIs (or lack thereof)

Both of these posts have been educational and I now understand the debate in far more detail than before. Thank you!

Also, will books that aren't on Amazon cease to "exist"?

There are a number of books I enjoyed in the paper era that I flat out can't find on Amazon now, and I tend to think of Amazon as "ALL THE BOOKS".

WRT Executives interests not necessarily aligning with their parent - absolutely true. And yeah, I probably should have been less abrasive.

Can you double-check your link? I tried following it but it just links to this thread.

TIL Comcast isn't in it for the public interest.

I'm not missing that at all. The fact that we expect corporations to further their own interests over those of the public (and that people who are cunning enough to get into powerful government positions often come from industry) is exactly why the law is lettered that way in the first place.

If you think you get to a position anywhere close to where these guys are by being a jeopardizing valuable relationships in the name of doing-things-in-the-spirit-of-selfless-public-service, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'm looking to sell. Good price, too, shoot me a PM.

As much as I hate Comcast and occasionally say prayers that a cement truck accidentally crashes into Tom Wheeler's house, and I'd love to see a massive scandal here - these emails don't seem incriminating at all.

A high level official got invited to a party, and declined because "the rules folks over here tell me I can't". They know each other (makes sense, they're both working at a high level in the same industry) and they have people watching their backs to make sure they don't do anything that can legally be considered corrupt (again, makes sense, shit's a minefield and an ill-defined one at that. If I were in that position I would have people keeping an eye on that whether I was corrupt or pious as a lamb)

Am I missing something? I clicked on that link salivating for the political blood of Comcast executives and all I got was a polite grownup email version of "sry bro can't come, rules n shyt, sounds bumpin tho"

I'm still baffled at how everyone considers these startups to be "underachieving". In terms of becoming the next facebook or twitter? Well, no shit. That's a borderline impossible standard.

Compared to 95% of their peers (which are, at least statistically, true underachievers in that they never made it into the mainstream or at least the tech-mainstream, or didn't survive long enough that we would recognize them today), they're waaaay on the right side of the bell curve.

Indeed. What a bunch of slackers!

(1) I love this.

(2) Having limited legal knowledge, I'm curious what he means with "a lottery ticket to a lawsuit". Is he indicating that patenting something would make a company more likely to get sued? My basic understanding is the opposite, that patents yield protection from lawsuits rather than create exposure to them. Is this flawed?

That's decently accurate. We're all doing what's in our best interest, in the role that we play in that time.

In general - I want to give people who don't know me personally (and especially people trying to sell me anything) less power to catch my attention and pull at my impulses, not more.

Yeah, but Watterson clearly doesn't like working with technology. He's very much a pen-paper-human kind of guy, and I don't see him all of a sudden deciding to step into the internet.

I'll be darned if he couldn't find someone to work with who could handle getting his work online though. It's mere wishful thinking, but he could draw and communicate (or not) in whichever way he wants, and some trusted friend and gatekeeper handles all of the scanning and online stuff, which could be kept very simple and noncommercial. No ads, twitter, comments section or any of the usual "social media branding" stuff, literally just a page with a comic on it.

Sigh. Man, I still miss Calvin and Hobbes.

Am I the only one who thinks that this could hugely backfire from a PR perspective?

The message is "The Verizon Network is Crowded Right Now." not "Verizon is Deliberately Slowing This Right Now." (or some less loaded version of that)

It's bad PR for the ISPs, but combined with the fact that most people can hardly spell ISP, and that Comcast and their FCC homies keep describing the new toll booth as a fast lane, if I were a nontechnical consumer my first response would be, "What the hell are they waiting for? Put in the fast lane! I wanna watch my damn movies!"

This is awesome!

As a non-neuroscientist, the WashU course on Coursera about Computational Neuroscience was also really good. Not sure if there's an upcoming offering, but I'd highly recommend taking it. Keep in mind it's heavy on computation on a "simulate neurons and small networks of neurons" level and light on top-down neuroscience

I kind of suspect Amazon knew this when they were making it.

Remember their free-publicity drones segment on 60 minutes that made Amazon Prime go apeshit right before Black Friday? They've got a very clever marketing department.

Furthermore, this is exactly the kind of thing that would

(a) Drive traffic that otherwise wouldn't care to a promo for a video about another goddamn smartphone

(b) Convince whoever watches it, even if purely for entertainment value, that this is a totally different phone and worth paying attention to (like the opposite of when I keep ignoring Samsung or whoever's "THE NEXT BIG THING" every two months...yeah, whatever, the screen is a different size or something)

If they just announced "we're making a smartphone guys - here's a video!" it wouldn't be nearly as huge. I wouldn't be surprised if this gets on the front page of reddit purely because it's hilarious when you misinterpret it.

Hell, worked on me.

Given the way that one hand tends to quietly grabass the other in prestigious U.S. financial organizations and large corporations, we should probably narrow the title to "unsolicited by Tesla".