cutchin

I wish they'd have given more examples for traditional bikes than bottom brackets. Yeah, bike shops have to deal with lots of different BBs, but that's because they deal with bikes that might be 30 or 40 years old, from all over the planet. Some threaded, some press-fit, etc. Some high-end, some very cheap.

On the most part, bike manufacturers use standardized parts that can be replaced by and end-user with sufficient know-how and the tools to do it. There aren't that many companies making drivetrain parts, so you tend to see Shimano and SRAM just about everywhere, and maybe the odd Campagnolo-equipped bike every now and then. At least here in the US. (Unrelated, Shimano's product range is crazy - somehow their components come stock on bikes ranging from $250 up to $12k or more.)

Outside of < $200 Wal-Mart bikes, I've never had any trouble repairing or finding someone to do "normal" repairs or maintenance on a bicycle. I'd like to know what prompted the article, unless the real point was to complain about E-Bike batteries, which is not something I can really comment on.

Personally, I love my smart home stuff. Homeassistant has been utterly reliable, automating things in node-red is easy and fun. I can use IKEA's stuff or buy from any of dozens of other Zigbee manufacturers. My plant lights go on and off at sunrise/sunset, my phone notifies me when there's movement on my porch or driveway, living room lights offer a nice ambience when I come home at night, etc.

It's mostly inessential stuff but it's nice. I tinker with the system maybe an hour or two every year and it all just works without any real drama or troubleshooting.

Zwift is great. I've been on it about three months and it really feels like the most productive training I've ever done. It's hard to get a decent ride in where I live but zwift is always available. They've managed to gamify real-world performance and it's surprisingly fun. There's a lot of different things to do in the game.

But be warned - it's a bit pricey to get up and running. All in, I'm sure I've spent at least $2k (USD) on various equipment and accessories and it's also $20/month for the service. To me it's worth it for sure, but running (for example) is very nearly free. Just make sure you think indoor cycling is something you'd be willing to stick with.

I have a hard time agreeing with the central premise here.

The article states that the Taliban had a protection scheme (possibly legitimate, possibly a racket) going on to effectively tax all trade through their regions and that made them a lot of money. I can believe that.

But calling that the "real economic prize" seems to miss the point. There was so much trade happening because of the tens of billions of US dollars flooding into the nation. If you take away all that money, you are left with a lot less economic activity to tax, and are probably dealing with customers and suppliers who can't afford nearly as much protection money.

If there was a true economic prize, it's the foreign aid coming in which will likely dry up soon. There are no major international shipping routes through Afghanistan (I think! see my note below), so without the foreign money they're left skimming off the top of trade through a poor developing nation, which doesn't seem like much of a prize at all.

However... the article states this : "Even before their blitz into the capital over the weekend, the Taliban had claimed the country’s real economic prize: the trade routes — comprising highways, bridges and footpaths — that serve as strategic choke points for trade across South Asia." I wish they'd elaborated more on this - are there some desirable routes going through Afghanistan that nations in the region might like to use for trade?

The "OS as a service" era was also when they really ramped up the advertising and telemetry in windows. It would be nice if they decide whatever revenue that brings is not worth the loss of good will people had for Microsoft before all that began and give it up.

I don't want to over-romanticize WSB, but this all seems fairly wholesome and even old-fashioned.

A hoard of like-minded investors put a lot of money into AMC because they felt it was under-valued and with a little push could ride out the pandemic. Now that it's on the rebound, they're not immediately cashing out with their short-term gains, instead they're encouraging the company to avoid wall street games like stock issuance and instead focus on organic growth as the economy recovers.

We were warned they were going to take down whole markets, but at this point they seem like agents of stability.

(Yes, I understand I may be giving the lads way too much credit here, but one can hope.)

I've been primarily a linux user for some time, so I've gotten pretty desensitized to various applications looking vastly different on the same system. But in the last several years that's mostly gone away - Gnome knows how to change the theme for QT apps and KDE can configure GTK themes so things are actually remarkably uniform.

But then when I fire up Windows, it is just this bizarre mix of all these different UI frameworks. I guess Windows isn't the big cash cow it once was for Microsoft and maybe it's not the highest development priority anymore, but still it's remarkably off-putting and I have no idea why they would let it stay in this state.

I read they were introducing a new UI framework to unify everything (Project Reunion), but I can't help but think that will mean it's just another different-looking toolkit thrown into the mix.

With all that said, Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility is fairly legendary so there could be an actual technical reason some things can't be redesigned with a newer toolkit.

I don't understand how this would work. You would tax corporations based on actual income? So money-losing businesses would have to pay taxes on their income even though they operated at a net loss? And low-volume/high-revenue businesses would pay less in taxes than high-volume/low-revenue would?

Since I mentioned Gradle aggravations, I'll share a couple:

1. Bizarre and inscrutable syntax. They say things like "build scripts are just Groovy code", but some things, like how you define sourcesets or configurations, don't look like anything that should parse, much less compile, in any C-like language. They're doing some fancy meta-programming stuff behind the scenes to keep things light and simple, but it really isolates (and possibly alienates) developers from exactly what's happening under the covers. The Kotlin DSL seems to help make it more clear what's going on, but I haven't used it much yet.

Having used Gradle for years, it is strangely off-putting how unsure I often am about whether to put a colon in a particular place or a comma, or if something should be in parenthesis.

2. If you want to do anything beyond what's documented you can get into a bit of trouble, and if you find answers more than a couple of years old there's a good chance they often won't work. Making sense of the DSL documentation is sometimes a little tricky.

Beyond that, I would dare say it's the least awful option for building for the JVM. Their documentation is very comprehensive, it's fast, they are very fair about providing deprecation warnings before features are removed. It's rare I find a case where I'd like to use some external library that has a Maven plugin but no Gradle support.

This is an oddly unconvincing little write-up.

Firstly, learning gradle doesn't mean you are learning Maven simply because most dependencies use pom files for their metadata. I just means there's a little XML document embedded in your dependencies that 99% of developers never pay attention to, whether they're using Maven or ant or any other build tool. It's entirely irrelevant.

Secondly, Gradle does not require you to learn Groovy. Use Kotlin if that's your thing - I get the impression that's the preferred DSL nowadays anyways.

Sadly I think those are the only two reasons really presented. Neither is especially convincing. IDE support seems just fine for both platforms.

I actually _like_ Gradle and I think I could come up with a longer list of things about it that aggravate me. But either way, use whatever build system you want, and if, as stated, their projects have fairly humble requirements build-wise, I'm sure either system will get the job done.

Yeah, I came here to say exactly this. I would guess that most people's schedules are based on wall clock times and DST doesn't matter, but I'm not really sure.

The author doesn't owe me anything, obviously, but I wish he had included a graph or two showing the normal variance (if any) over the same timeframe in a non-epidemic year. Then I'd have a bit more faith in his conclusions.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

Most of Docker's products are being superseded by other tools in the linux/enterprise world (buildah, podman, kubernets, etc), but the one area I think Docker still provides actual value to the industry is their Windows Docker distribution. I'm a developer running linux on a team filled with Windows users, and the fact that we can all share dockerfiles is a big benefit. Without docker there's a good chance I'd have to switch to windows or just find a new job.

Strange as it seems, I think the industry is moving such that soon enough most actual Docker users will be on Windows anyways. So why not just embrace that?

I'm not sure I agree much with this. When I first started learning Java I had six or seven years of programming experience and I still found dealing with matters of classpath and javac remarkably complicated. I had things down well enough with the tools I used before, but it all seemed so foreign in the Java world.

And to this day I find junior devs struggle with the same things unless they have a maven/gradle project all set up for them.

I'm all for folks learning these skills eventually, but in a first-year CS class I'd really rather students worry about the language and general concepts of writing software.

Lots of javascript tutorials start off with opening and browser's javascript console and typing out some simple stuff and I don't think people would tell them they need to jump straight into node.js and webpack.

All the other intricacies of writing systems will come to them but I find something uniquely wonderful about sitting and writing code, and if we're lucky we'll find students who can have that same experience. I'd rather meet them where they are and talk purely of the language and core concepts, and introduce them to the ugly details as their progress dictates.