rwallace

50 ms·

511.
by rwallace 10y ago
> I don't see how this surpasses the (very expensive) services like Brink's and ADT who will contact law enforcement for you. By not being very expensive? I mean, you don't necessarily expect a cheap solution with electron
512.
by rwallace 10y ago
This is a trinary variable, not a binary one. Sure, between the two options of giving people freedom to make their own mistakes versus applying coercion for their own good, I'm in favor of the first option. But there is a third: soft p
513.
by rwallace 10y ago
I don't think that's exactly what's going on here. As it happens, I agree that the mainstream media tend to be uncritically accepting of anything that seems to fit a neoliberal narrative, and that this is a big problem. Howev
514.
by rwallace 10y ago
I know of one guy who got burned out on corporate IT and opened a game store. Several years later, each year being just as close to bankruptcy as the previous, he realized it was the corporate BS he was burned out on, not programming per se
515.
by rwallace 10y ago
> And that means more pretty than functional. Not really. I mean if you think about it, the original Macintosh looked like shit even compared to its predecessors; what was it, something like a nine inch screen in black and white, even gr
516.
by rwallace 10y ago
Almost every free soloist dies? Literally? That would make it the most dangerous hobby in the world? Are there any references or discussions on that handy?
517.
by rwallace 10y ago
Hey, I bought zero bitcoin because by the time I looked at it - when the price was still in two digits - I thought the bubble had come and gone and there were rumors of an impending government crackdown. So you did 15k better than I did!
518.
by rwallace 10y ago
I think that's a great goal to aim for, but remember we were supposed to have full-blown Drexler-style molecular manufacturing years ago and like most things in this universe it has turned out to be harder than we expected, so let&#x27
519.
by rwallace 10y ago
Okay, here's a warning if you haven't read this article yet. Up near the beginning, there's a really, really unfortunate line about pot legalization being the cause of this and that. I'm sure it's tongue in cheek, b
520.
by rwallace 10y ago
And in the meantime, make damn sure we keep samples of every existing genotype of crop species, including the varieties that aren't in themselves commercially useful because of low yields or whatever. We don't know in advance whic
521.
by rwallace 10y ago
Neurotypical people often err in the direction of overvaluing social status (presumably because in the ancestral environment, it made a large contribution to evolutionary fitness in a way that it does not today). If you find yourself smilin
522.
by rwallace 10y ago
At the level of security where you need to be paranoid about the operating system developers, how do you know the source code Microsoft shows you, corresponds to the Windows binaries running on your machines? (Let alone to the sum and total
523.
by rwallace 10y ago
Well, I only advocate legislating a maximum 40-hour (or better yet, 30-hour) week for employees. If you're self-employed and you think you're an outlier? You're probably mistaken. Chronic fatigue is like being drunk; it imp
524.
by rwallace 10y ago
A good guideline for writing user-facing software: When you get asked a question once, it might be just a question. When you get asked the same question by two different users, treat it as a bug report and see if you can fix the interface t
525.
by rwallace 10y ago
If you think a yes answer is unreasonable, bear in mind that you actually get less done in a 60-hour week than a 40-hour one (maybe not in the first week, but in the second and subsequent ones), so discouraging it in the three cases you men
526.
by rwallace 10y ago
That was last year when the crisis could still be attributed to incompetence, mismanagement. The situation has changed considerably since then. I'm going to call it now: the Venezuela crisis is not incompetence after all. It's the
527.
by rwallace 10y ago
It's past time this was said: we need to start shaming people who voluntarily work long hours. Not those for whom the alternative is unemployment, of course; they are victims to be pitied. But those who work long hours when they could
528.
by rwallace 10y ago
There are two things we are recommending against. 1. Sinking too far into a rut, getting to the point where you have a narrow specialty (fine) but identify with it and are uncomfortable with even thinking about anything outside it. 2. Tryin
529.
by rwallace 10y ago
If you follow that meta-advice, you'll probably end up learning some things the hard way that you could have learned the easy way.
530.
by rwallace 10y ago
This incident didn't really have anything to do with Facebook. The cause was buried in an offhand remark in the middle of the article: apparently the woman's behavior was a result of brain damage from lead paint. The headline shou
531.
by rwallace 10y ago
While I haven't personally read the work in question, I remember enough about school book selections to observe that you should not rule out the possibility that the real source of the problem is that the book is genuinely boring.
532.
by rwallace 10y ago
"it's not steel-framed and instead uses a concrete design" I thought concrete buildings without steel frames came down instantly in earthquakes. What am I missing?
533.
by rwallace 10y ago
Get the co-worker out of your mind. That's got nothing to do with you. You're not the boss. It's not your problem. If you're overworked, that's the problem. Decide how much work you can do, and let the boss know. If
534.
by rwallace 10y ago
I agree that it's better when we can do without legislation and rely on individual action instead. For example, individuals should be able to take a copy of Windows 10, reverse engineer it, disable the spyware and offer the result for
535.
by rwallace 10y ago
One thing to bear in mind: whenever you see someone arbitraging your product, take it as a reminder that we always instinctively underprice our products; it seems to be hardwired into our brains to do that. But when you see customers willin
536.
by rwallace 10y ago
More practically, or instead of and will suffice. That is, if you lack the expertise to set up your own server, it's okay to use someone else's provided you also keep local backups of all your work. For most people, keeping lo
537.
by rwallace 10y ago
It's sometimes okay to use inexact or uninformative terminology, but it becomes a problem when words are used to mean their exact opposite. So if you are going to talk about serverful programs - those which depend on servers and can&#x
538.
by rwallace 10y ago
The correct systematic solution would be to outlaw a transportation system that fills our streets with lethal machinery. It's crazy that cars were ever legalized in the first place; it's one of the biggest mistakes our species eve
539.
by rwallace 10y ago
There's an important difference between 'if the grid goes down, we will have some inefficiency because of excess production here and insufficient production there' and 'if the grid goes down, everything goes down'.
540.
by rwallace 10y ago
So an obvious long-term solution is to reduce the need for the grid. Many commercial and industrial facilities could run at least partly on local wind or solar, and the more decentralised capability there is, the less the vulnerability. (

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