snowfarthing

8 ms·

31.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
As someone who doesn't like to see history lost via "rebase" and "squashing" branches, I have had to think through some of these things, since my personal preferences are often trampled on by company policy. I have
32.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
XKCD has a fun comic about a guy who recalculates the world records of pole vaulters based on the gravity of the locations of various events. Earth's surface gravity is by no means constant -- it varies, presumably due to the density
33.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
With the lack of precision for clocks the way they are, and worries about variance in travel time due to traffic, distractions, potty emergencies, and so forth, the more natural way to handle precision is to give yourself a 5-to-15-minute-t
34.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
There have been times when my wife and I resorted to including send times, because the latency between our phones was ridiculously high. I really wish SMS and email would include both sent and received times, so that latency issues can be
35.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I remember a discussion of why it was acceptable and even expected to be late at parties, but for work events, you had to be on time or better yet early, and the general consensus was "when you're doing work, you need to be precis
36.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
What I don't get is how he says "we think of year and month as intervals, but it doesn't make sense to think of minutes as intervals" -- and I can't help but wonder "why not?" When we say something happen
37.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
This comment reminds me of a video I saw recently (not sure if I could find it) where someone broke down failure points for projects based on different aspects of engineering, using "designing a drone" as the example project. For
38.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
Nowadays, as someone who has heavily used LaTeX, I think WYSIWYG is rightly dismissed as WYSIAYG (ie "What You See Is ALL You Get"). There's a certain power that comes when you can designate that something is a section header
39.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
But those of us who think the entire idea of "patentability" is a joke in and of itself. All these fuzzy lines behind this "who invented what" is a major reason I consider patents to be evil -- the entire system sets up
40.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
On the other hand, Xena might also have a brain broken for written communication, and this is the best way to deal with it! I have only recently learned that I have ADHD, and have been trying to iron out all the implications of that (well,
41.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
It doesn't matter if it's literally stealing -- it's the mentality that is important here. Sure, you could always quit -- but the thing is, if you're pushing for these kinds of policies, you may very well push your best
42.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I think the ambiguity of the first two amendments -- heck, the Fourth has been gutted almost to non-existence by all the exceptions the Supreme Court has made over the years -- is the desire of certain people, particularly ones who are in f
43.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I consider this a feature rather than a bug. If you don't advocate for yourself and those you care about, who will? There's a certain level of ethics where you may be hurting someone else, but dealing with that is ... complicate
44.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
This reminds me of an article I read several years ago (I wish I had the link!) that explained that because the Law has contradictions, you can literally prove anything! The article then went on to say this isn't necessarily a bad thin
45.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
What should be done for the high-school freshman dropout who goes on to get a commercial driver's license, and then goes on to get an endorsement for transporting hazardous materials?
46.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I'd take out the reference to "job" -- because the only State violence where it's legal to commit violence against another person without provocation is in the Military (and even then, it's subject to Rules of Engag
47.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
And in reading your comment, I just realized there's a difference between casual conversation and writing something down. I can easily say "Hey, let's meet next Wednesday!" and you may reply with "Oh, great, I'
48.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I like to use the word "superstition" to describe my attempts to prevent migraines by wearing sunglasses, eating chocolate, and avoiding orange juice. I only have vague corollaries to believe these are helpful (particularly since
49.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I like to use words like "thus", "hence", and "therefore" a lot -- but this is because, as a mathematician, I picked up a style of writing that has been deeply influenced by the mathematics I learned. For that
50.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I decided in 11th grade to be a mathematician because I read Jurassic Park, went down a rabbit hole about chaos theory, and ran smack-dab into a conversation where someone asked Mandelbrot if the mathematicians knew he was using their work
51.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
In this day and age, I would think "politician" would be worse than "grifter". (Well, maybe not just this day and age ... this is a rather timeless observation.)
52.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
In my experience, it's been just as difficult to convince conservatives to let go of the notion that only government can solve problems, as it has been for liberals. For this kind of "lunacy", you generally have to go full
53.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
> I've never seen this evidence, but to speculate: probably since the colonist were, well, colonists, and literally building every industry from the ground up, they had to be. I would strongly recommend looking into John Taylor Gatt
54.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
Then again, it may be because FOIL is stupid. I've always had a difficult time wrapping my head around this acronym. What counts as "outer"? What counts as "inner"? And yes, when there are more than two items (no
55.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
Your wife teaches in a one-room schoolhouse? If not, then your wife's experience doesn't say anything about how well the Little House/Christmas Story model works. Indeed, I would go so far as to suspect that this is likely a
56.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
Did it really improve, though? There's evidence that Colonial/Revolutionary-Era American populace was highly educated, and that education had been gradually going downhill as the United States gradually adopted the Prussian mod
57.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
This is a problem that has been around for years, perhaps decades. One memorable example comes from "To Kill a Mockingbird", where the teacher complained about the main character Scout having learned to read before her 1st grade
58.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
I have seen the cynical observation, made more than once over the years, that an uneducated population is easier to manipulate, and thus it's only natural for government-run schools to get worse over time.
59.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
There is value in asking the question "when should an individual start studying anyway?" I don't have a link at hand for a discussion of studies comparing no pre-school to "play" pre-school" to "rigorous&
60.
by snowfarthing 2y ago
This is the very question that crossed my mind when I saw this headline (albeit at a different site): was this a failure of EdTech, or was it a failure of our highly structured and inflexible school system? This is an issue that started to

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