pritovido

Ohh, the hard work theater... Humans love human sacrifices, all the ancient cultures did it.

Human's effort is not linear.

Try this: Go outside, measure some distance by counting steps, like 500 meters, or measure it with google earth.

Experiment A: Then take your clock and start running your distance multiple times, do for example 5 Kms, apply more and more effort until it is reasonable but not that exhausting and can sustain it. Run for 20 minutes. Write down your time and how do you feel.

Experiment B: Now do the same thing another day but applying all the effort you can. Then you will be forced to stop in order to rest and not die. Then try again, stop when you can't do more and so on until you make the distance. Write down your time and how do you feel.

Compare both times. Compare your feelings in both situations. You will be surprised at the results.

You can do bigger distances if you are trained, like 20 kms, because it represents better work load.

In places like Singapur, or China and now the US(it used to be different in the past because of religion) they are living their lives like in experiment B.

In places like Germany or Israel they live their lives like in experiment A. In Germany people is not less productive than in America, or Singapur. Quite the contrary.

In China people work all the time, they sleep on work, but the intensity of work is very low. Working all the time means you can't be excited for work. All work, no fun,your mind sabotages you.

Jews invented the system that forced everyone to stop working at least one day a week. Christians inherited that and dominated the world.

Now the US goes backwards, glorifying hard work until you die in your 30s because of cancer.

I have known several guys die very young of cancer in the startup scene and it is not a coincidence. The immune system and organs are depressed by constant stress. Stress is good if you can rest. Tissues are not repaired. They eat badly and don't sleep.

Do not do that. Do the above exercise with your work. Measure the real output of your work. Force yourself to rest and be with your family, go hiking or to the beach like in experiment A. Work as hard as you can,and do not take breaks, like in experiment B.

Do that for a week and compare your output results. You will be surprised.

A very important thing with software is that the most painful work can be done by the computer itself.

Tools like Lisp are essential in your toolbox for whatever language you use for coding. If you can script and automate and test everything life is much better.

Most of the pain in software development is self inflicted. The most boring something is for a human, the easiest is for the computer to make it.

Lots of people coming from the "code must be efficient" front, like assembly, c and c++ programmers simply ignored the interpreted, functional and painfully slow "you don't know how things are implemented" world and viceversa.

But both worlds are complimentary.

When I was a kid I discovered Numega SoftIce. That was an incredible debugger and you could automate everything.

Turns out you can do the same with gdm and lldb today and bugs just pop up from automatic tests.

"Tricks" makes great difference in life. I can jump over a meter high with my bicycle because someone who knew did teach me the "bunnyhop trick". That and other "tricks" give you the ability to do things save on a bicycle that most people consider impossible or too risky.

Knowing the tricks of a trade, like software development, means the difference between starving or success.

In the same way there are "tricks" that you know about relationships and money and work that can change your life radically.

Trick in English have different meanings. It can be something intended for deception or illusion, but it could also be a habit or mannerism.

In Apple case, those tricks are not really tricks, but strategic informed decisions.

Apple has lots of knowledge about what the market needs and is willing to pay for, they have access to the purchase data of tens of millions of people.

If you have no access to real information, some decisions of the companies that do will look comical or nonsensical.

I use Zotero. The native UI search is horrible and is very slow as it needs to load gigabytes of info but it uses SQLite internally and I use my own software for doing serious things.

The author of the article is overcomplicating things. He wants the moon and as a result, gets nothing. He is paralyzed in the quest to perfection.

If instead of this, you start using your own tools today, you improve it over time. For example I use structured text files for hierarchical info storage and my tools are quite sophisticated compared with how I started. At first it was a simple S-expression lisp file done in an afternoon.

I also use databases.

I log the time I spend in HN and it is quite small. I just read as fast as I can(5 minutes) whatever interest me and organize it, every day. I write but don't read replies or anything that goes over my allocated distributed time.

Then after a while I spend time for getting deep on something and then I read all the books, all the articles,ask my friends, watch all the videos of a given subject in parallel.

Take for example Clojure. I spend a week doing nothing but immersing myself on it, real work, and use Anki to learn it.

If I were to read just one book isolated, I would not understand anything. Multiple perspectives is much better and funnier.

I got so frustrated with CAPTCHAs that started using my computer's visual and natural language recognition software to solve them.

It works much better than me at solving those stupid puzzles. It is great because if the software fails, it does not get frustrated like I did.

There are CAPTCHAs that my software solves that I know are wrong, but google says it is ok. Like "pic the pictures with a signal on it" and there is a picture with a signal visible from behind. My software does not detect that, neither google.

>Back in the day I got my weekly homeopathic dose of assembly language from a local home computer magazine.

I had the same experience, until I (we)found that the knowledge of those magazines were taken from books, so I(we) went to the source, the library of the University.

I was a kid at the time and had friends that shared the same interests as me. The library was magical.

Even today, when there is lots of amazing materials on the web, the real deep stuff is in books.

One of the great things of Internet, specially videos is that they introduce you to a topic so you can understand the book.

> There’s no question that Apple has struggled to craft a cohesive, compelling narrative for the iPad... We know what it’s good for, and we can easily imagine what it could be good for, if only Apple would set it free.

Of course there is question... The Ipad was a tremendous success for Apple. In fact, the M1 is possible because tablets in general and phones sell so much compared to normal computers that have made the price of those ARM semiconductors way lower than Intel's or AMD.

It has not struggled in anything. When I wanted to know if making an Ipad app made sense economically for me I stayed an entire day on a big Apple store and they sold like 50 on a normal day. They sold like 3 or 4 macbooks.

It looks geeks believe that companies are out there to satisfy them. But companies are there to sell products to as much people as possible.

The great thing about Autobahns is freedom.

If I travel in Spain, the speed limit is 120km/h. Now they have removed the 20 kms/h extra you could do for overtaking other cars. It is ludicrous.

Everybody goes over the limit, and hence everybody goes against the law, and everybody could be fined with 300 euros, like my father 1 month ago.

In cities, they are putting limits under 30km/h.

Politicians love the fines because it is an extra tax of an extra billion euros nobody controls.

I agree with you.

I was in Spain, and Maradona played there while he was not yet the shadow of himself that became later.

Lots of people admired this man but when he started doing stupid things like being totally drunk and stoned on public, most people stopped admiring him in all places but in Argentina.

I traveled to places like Bariloche and specially Buenos Aires for a very sort time,a month or so, and I could not understand almost the deity that such a bad example represented there.

But then an Argentinian friend explained it to me: You do not understand. It was because of the Malvinas, the English, Maradona represented something like a general that won over the same that defeated and humiliated us and so on...

And then it made sense. I had not made the connection before that.

And yes I agree with you that South America in general follows terrible role models. Places like Colombia or Venezuela look like paradise and are extremely wealthy but then the environment is Hell.

It is very interesting that Argentina and Chile are somewhat like the US and Europe but in reverse, the more to the South you go, the more serious people are, only that there is less and less people and land there to become significant.

It is a simple process, everything that you do in a language needs to be mapped into lower level instructions.

If the lower level hardware instruction does not exist, you use multiple of other instructions to emulate that.

If you add a low level instruction that maps a very common high level operation in hardware, you don't need to call 5 to 10 software functions(extremely expensive),each calling lots of opcodes but just can execute a single opcode and works by hardware beings extremely faster.

It is not hard to be better than Microsoft here. From my personal experience and having disassembled lots of their code they always were lazy bastards. They cared 0 about efficiency. Why should they? They had monopolies like Office or Windows giving them over 95% margins. They could just use the money they printed to buy everything instead of competing.

Lisp machines did that (adding opcodes that map the high level language) with the most common Lisp operators. Those machines were extremely expensive, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars because few could afford that. Apple sells in massive scale, in the hundreds of millions of CPUs per year, making this cheap for them.

Most of the time, it is not plastics themselves, but the hundreds of chemical additives that each plastic has, like plastifiers, ph and surface tension modifiers.

The most important is hormone-like compounds like Bisphenol A (BPA) because hormones are chemical compounds that are used as signals and its effect cascade multiplied by billions in the body, so super small amounts can affect you enormously.

They are being replaced, but new compounds also have hormone like response.

Because biology works by "shape is function" lots of chemical compounds can affect your body because they resemble the one we need for our body's normal function, and the body receptors are confused.

This has extensively been proven that happens, what we don't know is what dose could be ok. For example, you can use(without problems) fleece outside clothing if there is not a big part of your skin in contact with the fleece, like what happened with kid's pajamas, that was very problematic.

Probing that on humans is something similar to covid vaccine testing. It is extremely expensive and bureaucratic process and only gives us statistical results. Knowing exactly what happened is extremely difficult or impossible in practice because there are hundreds of chemical compounds, and they interfere with each other creating factorial combinations. But we know it breaks havoc in your body for sure.

You also should avoid heat because it makes chemical diffusion exponentially higher. When you eat your soda can, the PET layer,is at ambient temperature. When you eat coffee or tea, it is hot.

I think this is not sad, they are free to demand whatever they want, like you are free to accept that.

In fact, it is not a very good idea to accept that. You will be labeled instantly as "provider", not as a "lover".

Most women that have "providers" also have "lovers" and usually it is not the same person.

That is a lesson that I learned long time ago, when I met a very successful with women man, that actually treated them very badly. He had the mentality that it were women the ones that should prove their value to him.

Over the years I met other people with the same mindset, and even started applying it somewhat myself. I am physically attractive and educated, but I also was for some time too much polite with women, putting them on a pedestal for being successful with them.

The most attractive thing for women is character strength. Also things like being a world traveler helps a lot. You can be penniless, if you have those two things, attracting all the women you want is no problem.

For me the testing process feels painful and slow. I believe the best way to know the illness is through controlled infection of volunteers. I would have volunteered myself.

I have been around people risking their lives in B.A.S.E jumps, scuba diving or aircraft acrobatics.

If people can risk their own lives for the adrenaline rush, I don't know why they can't risk their lives for the improvement of all humanity.

I talked with a Spanish scientist that has developed a vaccine for covid and other vaccines for other illnesses before that.

He said something like that most of the work in testing is for the "carrier" or something like that(in Spanish). Once your vaccine works with that you could modify the vaccine very fast with little consequences.

Hew also told me that you can share "carriers" for different illnesses and he had tried to convince politicians for decades trying to create "generic carriers" in order to be prepared for something like this.

You need a hardware USB logger. The expensive ones makes things much easier.

Cutter is a program for the disassembly of programs. In order to use it you need knowledge of assembly, and that usually takes at least a year of training.

Reversing the USB protocol by software is very hard for someone without experience. USB protocol is very complex and has lots of layers.

I recommend that you start watching videos on internet like "reversing usb devices" and looking at real projects that do it.

Also, last time I used wireshark it gave me a very low level representation of things. It is a very good idea also knowledge of programming like python or lisp that can transform the low level representation into high level information automatically.