kibibyte

I empathize with this. I went to one of those “top tier” universities and had a handful of classes where I regretted being one of the few (fewer than 10) goody good students who attended lecture, and subsequently fell asleep anyway. Over time, I realized that universities like these primarily prioritize faculty who can attract grant dollars over those who are excellent teachers.

But that said, I don’t believe this author is complaining that students generally don’t attend lecture. They’re complaining that absenteeism has increased, implying that it has increased substantially recently. And that this sudden increase in the delta is a cause for concern.

I only recently switched off the catch-all email configuration. Until then, I did what you did. But over the years, I got an increasingly annoying amount of misdirected email (possibly legitimate business, marketing, and spam) sent to all sorts of usernames, and only landing in my inbox because of the catch-all.

I now just generate masked email addresses with Fastmail. Much less noise now.

I’m visiting Vietnam for Tet, and one cultural quirk of theirs that I’ve learned is that $2 bills are considered lucky money. So much so that kids there will hold onto those $2 bills as keepsakes (though they could spend them). And thus I made my first ever trip to the bank to special order a bunch of $2s.

Something I wonder is if an uncut sheet of $2 bills would be considered extraordinarily lucky, because it’s a bunch of $2s in nearly mint condition. Or if it would be considered incredibly unlucky because those kids would have no easy way of cutting them perfectly.

1Password can show the whole URI with the seed, and I have used it in the past to tediously restore seeds to my other 2FA apps.

My solution to this attack is to generate random words (what 1Password calls a "memorable password") instead of something totally inscrutable. Most security question fields are long enough to accept 4 words (occasionally 5). I think it should be much harder to convince a customer support agent with "it's just 4 random words from the dictionary" vs "it's 32 random characters, do you really want me to go through it all?".

(I'm sure a determined enough attacker will eventually find an agent willing to accept the former excuse, but if it reaches that point, I think I've already lost this battle.)

I think you missed the Excel spreadsheet in the parent's link. Chase (under JPMORGAN CHASE BANK) and Wells Fargo are on that list.

Interestingly, the other 2 big banks—Citigroup and Bank of America—are missing. They both do support RTP though (which apparently is a different network operated by the same entity that backs ACH). Unsure if RTP is meant to compete with FedNow.

This is something that I still consider to be black magic to me, so this is my best attempt at describing a number of the variables.

Temperature is controlled in two ways: direct heat input (e.g. gas flame heating the outside of the rotating drum) and air flow (moving air through the roasting drum to the exhaust). It's not 1 measurement though: there is bean temperature (measured by a probe stuck into the pile of beans) and air temperature.

As far as time goes, when keeping the end temperature equal, spending more time in the roasting process means that the difference between interior and exterior of the bean are closer in temperature. When you plot air and bean temperature against time, you can derive additional information: how much energy is in your roasting drum and the rate at which the bean temperature is changing.

I'm going to preface this by saying that this is an ongoing field of research. We're still learning about what is happening in a coffee bean at various stages of the roasting process. For example, we're not quite certain exactly what is happening at "first crack" (the first time you can start to hear the beans popping), or why some coffee beans simply don't have as audible of a first crack.

We can attribute the first "rules" established for consistent coffee roasting to Scott Rao, who published some of his observations in a book in the early 2010s. Some of those rules were: (1) ensure that the rate of change of the bean temperature ("rate of rise") is constantly decreasing, and (2) prepare to adjust your roast as you begin first crack to prevent the "crash and flick" (a sharp decrease followed by a sharp increase in the rate of rise). The current thinking is that the release of moisture during first crack causes the temperature to crash, and the removal of that moisture causes the temperature to uncontrollably rise back up again. Not handling this properly often results in undesirable hollow and bready flavors; this is frequently referred to as "baked coffee".

As far as vegetal goes, that is often because of roasters cutting their roasts too short (and perhaps roasting too quickly). In this case, the bean does not get hot enough for sufficient flavor development, so it more or less retains a lot of the undesirable flavors of essentially "raw" coffee.

Note that these are "rules" instead of rules because there are a plethora of edge cases out there.

This is why roasting is really really difficult. And why even some of the best roasters out there end up leaning a lot on blends and their milk drink business.

And sorry, I gotta call out everyone who suggests this: most of your home-roasted coffee is gonna taste like ass lol. I tried home roasting a bit with a fancy setup and with a Fresh Roast. I sure saved a lot of money per pound of coffee, but I always got a fraction of the quality and the flavors were never consistent. But what I gained was insanity and the realization that home-roasting isn't for me.

You poke fun at it, but great irony is that a lot of knowledgeable coffee people started poking at all the techniques recently and we've learned that almost everything towards the showy complicated side of it are completely not worth thinking about or will have worse results. Osmotic pouring looks neat but will underextract anything that isn't dark. 4:6 is still questionable over most simpler 1-2 pour techniques. That showy thing of raising the kettle up and down a lot also will underextract.

Light roasts are great! But there are just a lot of straight-up bad renditions of them, as a result of lack of adequate training on either roasting or brewing, to the consternation of many of those coffee snobs. Unfortunately, this just happens when shops follow trends.

Roasting well in general is already quite challenging and is a lot more than just arriving at a certain bean color or temperature. Vegetal flavors are very much a roasting mistake that's being passed off as an inherent characteristic of a light roast. Combine that with techniques better suited to brewing (or pulling shots of) darker roasted, and you have a recipe for a dull, astringent, sour cup.

That being said, a sour espresso shot is always possible regardless of dark the coffee is, so I'd argue it has a lot to do with a cafe owner's willingness to train themselves and their staff to work with lighter roasted coffee.

I completely forgot that Vanguard also runs a brokerage operation in addition to their funds.

Ah, you're right! I'm now remembering that Vanguard mentions something like this for their default voting methodology, among the few choices they now allow investors to choose from.

Robinhood is a brokerage, and should be passing proxy ballots through to you for companies you hold shares in.

It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd matter at the end. Vanguard is for retail investors who want to invest their money as cheaply as possible without thinking hard about it. Delivering proxy ballots, even electronically, does have a cost, and would likely make such funds slightly but noticeably more expensive. And to what benefit? After all, most retail investors don't care to vote. If you strongly care about your shareholder voice, the better solution is to buy shares in the company directly.

That said, Vanguard now lets you select from some broader voting methodologies (e.g. Vanguard's default, ESG, or "good corporate governance"). But nothing specific like "good corporate governance, except screw Musk over/always favor Musk".

This is a bit tangential to the topic, but shareholder voting is interesting enough anyway.

* Musk will vote, for obvious reasons.

* Big institutional funds almost always vote with the board of directors recommendations. They very rarely rock the boat for a lot of mostly good reasons.

* Private shareholders with a sizable stake likely will vote.

* Retail shareholders (i.e. you and I) are notorious for not voting. Case in point: AMC is mostly held by retail investors at this point and had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to be able to increase the maximum number of shares they could issue, because that typically requires a shareholder vote that simply wouldn't ever get enough total votes to pass.