bstpierre

I’m basically the opposite — really struggle to memorize music, and will almost always read while playing.

Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid?

The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically learned it all from youtube and forced myself to memorize songs. But when I could play piano I only ever remembered a few bars from a couple of songs, everything else had to be written down. Even just playing chords on a uke!

> Some varieties of European and Asian pines have this innate resistance because they evolved alongside the fungus. However, American trees met this threat too late to develop a workable defense.

This is a cool project. I'm learning French and am always on the lookout for sources of books -- and especially audio -- at the right level.

To others questioning the need for rewriting: language changes over the course of a century! It's no problem for me, as a native English speaker, to read English from around the turn of the 20th Century. However, it increases the degree of difficulty for me to try to read French or Spanish from the same time period. Also, to get through an old book I have to learn a bunch of useless words that have fallen into disuse; it's much more effective for me to learn the version of the language that is relevant in today's world.

It looks like the French TTS isn't working properly yet? At least on the couple of titles I tried. The selection of titles you have listed looks great.

Two main things I use it for:

1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading list with (way too many) different series and it has my next book in each one.

2. Remembering which books I've read. (Kind of related to #1.) More than once I've gotten more than a few pages into a book and realized, "hey I'm pretty sure I read this before".

Either of these would work in a notebook or spreadsheet but that would require changing my workflow (and "importing" a long list of books).

I accidentally built a kind-of compiler last year.

It started as a few sed commands to merge TeX+code -> TeX for a book project. I ran these sed commands from a makefile. Life was easy.

But then there were complications, and I needed to make slightly more sophisticated substitutions. So the sed commands moved into an awk script, run by the makefile. This was better than maintaining a handful of little commands that were growing on a weekly basis. Life was good.

The transformations I needed kept growing a bunch of little variations, and the awk script became hard to maintain, so I rewrote it in go, with proper parsing and output. (And even unit tests, after the 2nd time I broke some output.) Designing it as almost-a-proper-compiler was 10x better than maintaining an ad hoc script. Life was great, even with the overhead of maintaining a separate processing tool.

Not sure about the person you replied to, but here in northeast US if you don’t mow to keep trees down you can quickly end up with a very thick growth of trees. It’s also easy to end up with a lot of undesirable (invasive) species crowding out the native/desirable plants.

It may be the case that a small amount of trees is beneficial overall for pollinators but if you’re managing an area as described then it takes a bit more work to plan for trees and mow around them.

Maybe it happens a lot and nobody has mentioned it here yet, but I find live, out-of-band reviews are often very effective. By this I mean looking at a patch and asking questions or raising issues with the author. I do this fairly regularly for PRs at work where the “live” aspect is just slack (I work remotely).

A dozen or so years ago I worked at a startup using svn and all reviews were like this: generate a diff, post a link to the diff on jabber, someone will comment/question. There’s room for immediate back and forth as needed. Revise, approve, done. Very lightweight, yet effective. However we were all colocated and all of the team members were high functioning so I’m not sure if it generalizes. (Also, being colocated meant that occasionally the jabber conversation could move to f2f with whiteboards if things got complicated.)

TIL there's a "north is up" setting! I always found this frustrating because my mental model is also "north is up", and when zoomed in I can get confused by "your direction is up".

In 1993 my freshman CS class was taught in scheme. All of our assignments had to be developed and tested on some shared Digital machine running Ultrix. The scheme interpreter was kind of slow to start, especially when there were 20+ users logged in. Helpfully, our TA taught us how to ctrl-z to suspend the interpreter, then edit our program in vi, and then "fg" to get back into the interpreter.

Unfortunately the fg part of the equation was lost on about 2/3 of our class... after editing they would start another scheme instance! I recall being in the terminal lab the night one of our first assignments was due, and the machine slowed to an absolute crawl. Can't remember exactly how it was resolved but I do recall being taught how to look for classmates running two or more instances of scheme to remind them about fg. (Also not helpful to machine load: "solutions" to the 8 queens problem with infinite recursion. The real lesson here was, in later years, to not be logged in on nights when CS 401 had assignments due.)

Yes, a private company can pay dividends. Or you could loan it the money to buy out your shares and collect interest as it pays back the loan. Or a mixture of the two, with a thousand little variations on terms. I believe I ran into an employee-owned company once that had gone through some version of the loan scenario.

Right, that’s the “menial” in the previous sentence to your quote. Washing dishes, cleaning floors, routine stuff where the mind can wander. For me when I was younger this was driving a mower around and around and around — not really intense physical labor, just a rote mechanical job that doesn’t consume much mental capacity.

I’m not a door pro, but my experience with diying doors puts it definitely NOT in the category of mindless!

If the ticket is a direct conduit to the customer, I think you could argue that ticket management in the form of asking clarifying questions so that you build the right thing (or fix the right bug) is creating value?

I worked at a shop with P0, and then there were too many P0 tickets, and then you just worked on whatever the CTO told you was the _actual_ highest priority ticket when he stopped by your cubicle for a chat.

I once got USPS mail addressed to:

My name My town (slightly misspelled), My State

no zip code, no mail box number. The beauty of being in a small town where the postmaster knows who you are.