mrwh

40 ms·

181.
by mrwh 6y ago
Just another plug for A Place of Greater Safety: it's a wonderful book, rather overshadowed by Wolf Hall.
182.
by mrwh 6y ago
Makes me think of Civilization, the game, somehow (which I used to spend far too much time playing and now have officially Given Up). You start money constrained, but by the endgame there's typically so much cash floating around that i
183.
by mrwh 6y ago
This is the thing, doesn't even need to be battery powered, houses usually have external accessible power points (at least in the US and certainly in Oakland).
184.
by mrwh 6y ago
Yes, this. The people most harmed by these leaf blowers are the people using them. Arguments that "electric ones don't work as well" rather miss this point.
185.
by mrwh 6y ago
Yes, this. If 1% of airline passengers died we would ground all planes immediately. 30% is awful.
186.
by mrwh 6y ago
My only direct experience of opioids is a one week prescription for percocet after surgery. It got me through, and probably was safer short-term than taking massive amounts of Tylenol. But I was glad to stop taking it. It felt insidious: it
187.
by mrwh 6y ago
I think that's probably a big part of it - and certainly in Silicon Valley. Part of the whole idea of the place. It might not require that much extra power on the side of labor (which this is) to create a large effect.
188.
by mrwh 6y ago
Just to follow up on this: the problem is not Why is there so much money sloshing around in tech (that's obvious!), it's, Why are tech workers somehow getting a decent slice of it?
189.
by mrwh 6y ago
Is it normal in other industries to work on one product for a few years, then switch and work on something totally different, and then switch again a couple of years later? That's a normal pattern at a FAANG - Google explicitly tries t
190.
by mrwh 6y ago
Well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy absolutely is satire (or rather, satire used to serious effect). But it's true that this was very quickly forgotten.
191.
by mrwh 6y ago
Interesting article! War novels often involve the privileged finally meeting the poor for the first time in their lives, as commissioned officers. And finally respecting them. It's a trope I'm sure there was a lot of truth to. A l
192.
by mrwh 6y ago
The zone diagram at the top of the article makes London's importance pretty clear. All roads (in England and Wales) lead to London.
193.
by mrwh 6y ago
Yes, this. I could talk about the things I've worked on at [big company], but really, no one outside of [big company] would find it interesting anyway (and not all that many inside [big company] to be honest).
194.
by mrwh 6y ago
I spent a happy summer writing a point-and-click graphic adventure in Amiga E (with my brother doing sound and graphics). You could drag the game screen down and reveal Workbench behind it. It was the first large program I ever wrote.
195.
by mrwh 6y ago
Naive question: mice don't live very long, humans live a long time. Does this imply that it _should_ be easy to extend a mouse's life, and for the same reason, very difficult to extend a human's?
196.
by mrwh 6y ago
"A righteous person would say that making money off the back of a global pandemic is at best opportunistic and at worst downright immoral—that the ghoulish deus ex machina that made short-sellers rich included hundreds of thousands of
197.
by mrwh 6y ago
AMOS! I swapped my copy of Easy AMOS with a school friend's copy of AMOS Professional. It set me on a path to becoming a professional software engineer. (Later, I swapped AMOS for Amiga E. Anyone remember that?)
198.
by mrwh 6y ago
For some more UK context, Gregg's (a cheap baker on most British high streets) started offering a vegan version of their sausage roll and it was a GIANT success: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200202-h
199.
by mrwh 6y ago
"Because the text was so light it was difficult to read" Snark aside, it's quite a good list.
200.
by mrwh 7y ago
Is the idea that technological improvements are tied to _increasing_ population somehow? What's the mechanism there? Being only slightly facetious, but if everyone had no more than one child, that leaves a lot more time in which to inv