alexambarch

It’s been hard for me to overcome the feeling that anything I can do, the machine can do better and faster.

I know people have been saying “If you’re worried about it replacing you, you weren’t a good engineer to start with,” but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. I had a lot of fun solving problems and thinking deeply, but now my time is much better spent reviewing the plans and code of a machine that’s done that part for me.

Yes it’s still a hobby I can do on the side, but at my day job it’s just sucked all the energy out of me.

As an Ableton user myself, I’m pretty surprised that this musician could just… switch from Ableton to Bitwig. Goes to show how dire the situation was I guess.

I still have yet to hear any non-technical person I know encounter issues on Windows and seriously consider switching away. The learned helplessness instilled by Microsoft is very difficult to get people to shake off.

I’d argue Terraform/HCL is quite popular as a Level 4 configuration language. My biggest issue with it is that once things get sufficiently complex, you wish you were using a Level 5 language.

In fact, it’s hard to see where a Level 4 language perfectly fits. After you’ve surpassed the abilities of JSON or YAML (and you don’t opt for slapping on a templating engine like Helm does), it feels like jumping straight to Level 5 is worth the effort for the tooling and larger community.

I really like lazygit when I need something quicker and more ergonomic than the VSCode git extension.

I’m still partial to magit over everything else but lazygit has replaced a lot of my CLI usage of git. Thanks Jesse.

As someone who’s too young to have been around for HyperCard, what was the main draw? Was it the accessibility of the tech or was it just really well executed?

If these vehicles tackle the roads of Boston, there will be no stopping this company. That place has one of the most confusing road networks I’ve ever seen in addition to some of the most confused drivers.

NYC is another obvious challenge but Boston seems like a challenging middle ground.

From what I got out of the article and my own limited understanding of double entry bookkeeping, the "double" seems to be referring to the part where we split a transaction into credits and debits as opposed to a transaction with positive or negative balance. The doubling is happening with the labels we use to describe what's happening with the money.

From an individual account perspective, there's a doubling of the number of columns you could enter a transaction's amount into.

The most interesting takeaway from this article for me was that there's an inverse correlation between the number of syllables spoken per second and the bits of information conveyed in that time.

> Japanese, for example, has an extremely high number of syllables spoken per second. But Japanese also has an extremely low degree of complexity in its syllables, and much less information encoded per syllable.

It seems like our brains might only be capable of processing ~39 bits of spoken information per second. Now I want to see a comparison of the information throughput of other forms of communication!

Oh boy I sure hope I receive my grandmother's Monero cold wallet in her will!

As someone who has managed keycloak in production for work, it's a solid solution but boy is it easy to make mistakes that cause difficult to debug issues. It's a headache that does what it says on the tin.

I stopped being interested in poker when I realized that by far the best strategy is simply to play with the worst players you can find. Everything else pales in comparison to simply playing with new players.

I understand that these are people who are willingly coming to play the game and putting up their money but I just don’t feel comfortable intentionally seeking them out to take it from them.

Pretty sure that means I’m simply not cut out to play the game but the theory is definitely interesting.

Brokers fees for the apartment in Cambridge I rent were $4k. This was in addition to first and last months’ rent. Extremely annoying but when every other apartment is doing it too, you don’t have much of a choice if you want to live in the area.

> Also, oh, man, Jazelle. I'd forgotten about that. Hardware support for Java bytecode... that did not pan out well.

As someone who was too young to be paying any attention during this time, what were some of the reasons this didn’t pan out? Java seems so dominant looking back that I’m surprised something like this wouldn’t have been a success.

Honest question: what do we even do? I'm not European but it seems like you can't talk about the "housing crisis" without having to specify whether you're talking about Europe, Canada, the US, etc.

I see suggestions to build more housing through taller buildings, but without any incentive to do that from people who care, what policies will realistically get passed to change anything?