stdbrouw

Only Rube Goldberg can make a Rube Goldberg machine?

People really like coral reefs. "Civilization will collapse and this baby kitty will die."

If you are the enforcer, which the maintainers are, then surely any rule you come up with is enforceable in exactly the kind of way you'd like it to be enforced?

I guess I will be the sole person in this thread to admit that I really enjoy my hand being held while I play a video game.

I used to play a lot of games in high school but didn't find the time for them once I started working and now, after about a 15 year hiatus, got curious and have been playing God of War, Expedition 33, High on Life and enhanced editions of slightly older titles like GTA 5 and BioShock 2. The cinematic experience of God of War, the hints in the environmental lighting about what direction to go in Expedition 33, the popovers in GTA that remind you of what the left joystick does again, the repeated voiceovers that explain what each gun does in High on Life, exact directions to where you need to go in Cyberpunk 2077, never having to bother with save games because most games have copious checkpoints... it's great!

Maybe I'm a klutz, but I remember in the late 90s and early 00s there were plenty of titles where a typical night of gaming would go like this: you have to make sure the intergalactic terrorists don't blow up the power plant, but after half an hour it's clear that you will need to level up to have a chance, another half an hour later you resort to google and figure out that you really shouldn't have skipped that side quest because then you'd have that invisibility upgrade, you finally make your way past the baddies but after a toilet break get confused about what direction you were going in and suddenly find yourself back where you started, you retrace your steps, go on, press the Avoid Reactor Meltdown button but because you've clicked a couple of pixels too far to the left, then a couple of pixels too far to the right, it doesn't do anything, so now you're thinking, maybe I didn't complete all the prereqs so let's wander around some more, but you're getting annoyed so you repeatedly fall off of some walkway into lava... ultimately you make it to the end boss and after the 17th try you realize that their right eye is their weak point, but only for a window of five seconds after it has stopped glowing red. Too bad you didn't stock up on sniper bullets and entered the last room without full health, might have to load an earlier save game to fix that.

I'm sure a lot of people are nostalgic for that special feeling when you've beat a difficult game, but there are a lot of ways in which games used to be difficult that were incidental, through lack of affordances, instead of essential to the gameplay.

As a parent of young children it rarely makes sense to litigate anything that happened more than 10 minutes ago, so perhaps people extrapolate from there :-) I'd enjoy that deep dive, though.

Maybe not what's happening in your case, but stuff that is in swap will not be moved back to memory unless there's a need for it, so if you did have memory pressure at time 1, which resolved at time 2, then you might still see a lot of swap in use at time 3.

The parent seems very aware that he's lucky he happens to be into a kind of music that isn't very popular.

I used to think this too, but e.g. Bosch and IKEA have great replacement parts websites accessible to the consumer. IKEA’s parts are mostly free, too! With modern logistics (automated warehouses, cheap shipping, ordering online) it is actually a solvable problem, if the company gives a damn about it.

Rethinking is indeed written for people who have some or even a lot of existing proficiency in statistics, but for whom it never really clicked. If that’s not your background, I can understand that it might feel disjointed.

+ Krushke’s Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, and for the very basics there is Downey’s Think Bayes. I guess there might be a gap in the literature for a different approach, heck, I’d read it, but there is some very good material already out there.

That was a good read, thanks! I think one thing the blog post perhaps misses is that although humans are nice throughout the movie, we are supposed to view a lot of their best behavior near the end as part of their "awakening", the realization that there is more to life than just pleasure and that it'd be great to get to live on earth again. It's not as incoherent as it seems, though there is definitely still room to wonder whether the protagonists are actually the villains.

It would be ontology if you consider salad (properly defined) to be part of the fundamental fabric of the universe.

This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it, and it's extremely frustrating because often you can't!

Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.

A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.

When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun and still knew how to make the wooden supports.

Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner. Which they will do for free.

And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.

Same thing with beer and wine awards, some are good but most are just a paid promotion lottery.

One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but at their current cost, who cares. Even in the developed world, you get noticeably more bang for your buck if you buy a cheap, basic car than if you buy a cargo bike that could replace it, because of the fierce competition and huge economies of scale for cars. Touch screens are cheaper than seven segment displays. And so on. (Not a snub on the Open Source Low Tech community, their designs look great!)