jrsdav

"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone."

- Sara Teasdale, 1918

Didn't see the inspiration for Bradbury mentioned here. I love this poem. There's also a great song-rendition of it by The Three D's, a folk group popular in the 50's.

> also what – chief design officer and futurist for DOMO??

Utah has a bit of a thing for "received knowledge", as the predominate culture tends to prime egos for prophetic wisdom. Add elitist competition with your local peers to the mix and you won't have to look far to find some...creative titles.

Kind of fun to think that the crystalline structure of minerals is an "echo" of their arrangement of atoms. A repeating pattern on a scale we can actually observe.

I'm fairly certain that Nest cameras do not allow streaming over your local network.

You can still use the cameras even without a subscription, i.e. watch the live stream or get notifications. This means that yes, they are absolutely uploading data to the cloud and storing it for some undetermined window. Paying for a subscription seems to just give you access to that history.

The late potter and educator John Neely would often say to his students and others:

> “I don’t put too much stock in creativity. Creativity itself won’t get you very far, you can’t always rely on it. But you can rely on hard work”

Knowing John and the chaotic world of clay perhaps deepens the profundity here, but even on its own it’s advice I freely share with anyone.

I hate to be the one to say it, but...this is why we can't have nice things.

At a certain scale, social media tilts humanity in one direction. We can't seem to escape the trajectory of our very nature; it will outcompete any complex system we devise to outwit it.

I’ve been wanting to implement a more “overzealous” approach to cleanup orphaned pods from analytical workflows (Prefect) that hang on to expensive compute resources, sometimes it feels frustratingly out of control. It’s really difficult to get good signal from the noise on if it’s actually orphaned (due to the things you’ve mentioned); killing a workload that isn’t actually orphaned can be very costly due to re-runs. Commenting out of solidarity here, but also curious to see others chime in their approach.

I’ve recently developed a serious allergy to this phrasing:

> “This was not just X; it’s really Y”

Here are some real examples taken from various sources:

> "Regenerative businesses don't just minimise harm; they actively create positive change for the environment and people."

> "This milestone isn’t just about our growth. It’s about deepening our commitment to you…"

> "This wasn’t just a market rally. It was a real-time lesson in how quickly sentiment can fracture and recover when fundamentals remain intact."

Hard to say for certain that this is AI slop, but just like em dashes, I see it routinely pop up in LLM prose. And I feel like it’s infected nearly everything I’ve read that was written within the last year.

I have only given negative feedback once when leaving a job, and it resulted in pretty sweeping changes in leadership across the department. I've since found out that the whole ordeal garnered me "legendary" status amongst the remaining employees.

On the flip side, the author is right -- it's a small world out there. While I don't regret doing the "right thing" and speaking up about serious issues, I am nervous that I burned some bridges with the two leaders who were let go after my departure. So far it hasn't come back to bite me (~8 years and 3 jobs later), but as they say time will tell.

Not to mention how difficult it can be to transition to sleeping with a bed partner, let alone one who is an insomniac.

Not just economic (although it definitely ties into it) -- finding an eligible patient population also another complicating dimension.

The teary-eyed CEO, of course.

> Many/most people hired by US government agencies in the last two years seem to be being let-go.

Could read into this a few ways. People joined who were eager to be part of tackling how the US prepares for and manages the next pandemic (which was uh, how do you say...an unpopular event with this administration), or people who may have been hired while DEI initiatives were having their moment. Both cases feel like vengeful targeting.

Regardless of which camp you're in, you can't ignore the collateral damage from this. What a very troubling time for the US.

I have been trying to imagine something similar, but without all the middleware/distribution layer. You need to do a thing? The LLM just does it and presents the user with the desired experience. Kind of upending the notion that we need "apps" in the first place. It's all materialized, just-in-time style.

Seen another way, perhaps Sam would be much worse in this regard without his meditation practice (but Vipassana can definitely make you more anxious).

I'm in agreement though, his podcast pre-2016 was pretty foundational for giving me things to think deeply about. But Trump broke him -- all the hours of airtime on that same soapbox, ad nauseam...

That being said, I still think he's pretty respectable. I started listening to his podcast again more recently, and realized my main dislike is his incessant nature to never let a poorly argued point go un-argued, until he wins. He's so tiring and brutal about that. But hyperbolic antics aside, there are very few times I've found myself fundamentally disagreeing with his assessment or argument (just his approach). And there are very few out there who are a match for his eloquence, when he can channel it and avoid stepping on a Trump rake.

Ironically, I think he could benefit from practicing more acceptance.

Not all third party Kubernetes controllers are created equal, unfortunately.

And it is also the reality that not every infra team gets final say on what operators we have to deploy to our clusters (yet we're stuck cleaning up the messes they leave behind).

The unfortunate trend I’ve witnessed in newer schools in my neck of the US (west) is to essentially make them fortresses, a place where entrances and exits are tightly controlled and each classroom can quickly be locked down. They honestly feel like prisons.

We all remarked on the classroom during back to school week this year for my third grader with “wow, you get an actual window this year!”. Other classrooms in the school have no windows or natural lighting at all.

One guess as to why this is becoming the norm.

So life as a system benefits from the randomness — but inevitableness — of death, is how I interpret that. Benefits as in, key to its continual perpetuation.

“I'm really not that fussy — I think it's more important to make the best use of what you have. I don't like to walk into a studio, lay down the law, and say, 'I must have this, otherwise I cannot continue with the session.' I'm not like that. I prefer to be more, 'What have you got? Let's see what we can do with that.' I hate spending inordinate amounts of time just playing with a sound, trying different pieces of equipment, and different mics and that stuff. Let's get the job done. Let's make a record. The whole process of recording is one big experiment in itself." - Alan Parsons

I am in the camp that sees themselves getting rid of a smart phone in the future. Right now I've been on the "defanged iPhone" warpath, whittling down my apps to just the necessities. It's been working well, perhaps made easier by giving up social media and news years ago (feeds are harder...I've managed a 1+yr HN fasts a few times, but get sucked back in because of how intellectually stimulating it can be here).

I really want to like this phone, and applaud what they are doing. But...it's still a "phone". Aside from the obvious, how is this fundamentally different (or better) than a defanged iPhone/smartphone? When are we going to rethink this problem of how we integrate networked technology into our daily lives in a way that's healthier for us?

As a hobby ceramicist, I must acknowledge a certain amount of grumpiness borne from what the talc allegations have done to our niche community.

Talc is used extensively in low-mid fire clay bodies as well as an additive to increase plasticity (makes clay easier to work with), and is an excellent source of MgO for fluxing glazes. In short, it's a great material to have in our cabinet [1]. But now there are essentially no more talc sources in the US and the ripple effect seen in our suppliers and manufactures has been a big shock (we are ever at the mercy of big industry!).

But I honestly just don't get the link to ovarian cancer. Chronic exposure to asbestos causing lung cancer, sure, if it were present in talc in high amounts (which is somewhat dubious in the case of talcum powder). Ultimately I have to conclude that J&J, with all of its billions of dollars and army of lawyers, couldn't find a way out of this. So either the research is dated and needs to be reviewed because there is something going on with talc that we don't understand (unlikely, imho), or I'm left speculating that there is something else motivating them to avoid closer scrutiny of their products.

- [1]: https://digitalfire.com/material/talc

This is essentially true. Pharma is incredibly expensive (for lots of different reasons), with R&D taking up a huge portion of those costs.

So yes, it's safe to assume that part of the accounting around those published costs in the billions are all of the failed candidates that never even made it to trials (the failure rate varies depending on the area of biology and the type of drug, but it's generally around 9 out of every 10 candidates [1]. By the time you get to trials, that ratio gets even more abysmal).

Disclaimer -- I work for Recursion, a company built around this very problem.

- [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221138352...

- [2]: https://www.recursion.com

> Under this theory, moms took the brunt of the blame, supposedly for being "cold and distant and detached from their child."

Before the heredity nature of autism was accepted, this was the school of thought (“refrigerator mothers”). But in truth, it’s neurodivergent parents having neurodivergent children, and society punishing the parents (namely mothers) for their inability at providing the “expected” nurturing conditions.

This perspective is well received; made a bit serendipitous by the unexpectedness of it (for me).

It came as an insightful thing to think about when linking it to the idea that we, humans, are a just a Darwinian biological system, and the rate at which we accelerated away from the eons in which basic tribalism ruled our pretty static social environment and cognitive real estate, was a giant shock to it.

I kinda love with silly endearment all the neat things we discovered to help our feeble little homunculi try to engage and wrangle it all; feudalism, monarchies, democracy, socialism, communism, cults, religion —- c’mon, you’ve got to give us animals a little credit for being quirky.

But oh!!! When you manage to glimpse at the mass representing the futility!

The two don’t always have to be mutually exclusive, no?

> Art is nothing more than branding and social connections. Absolutely nothing more.

Do you mean, in the context of pursuing art as a profession? Or just generally? Curious to learn more.

One aspect of Japanese culture that deeply resonates with me is its unique connection to the geographical landscape. It seems intricately woven with the very essence of Japan, a nation shaped by the terrifying reality of earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, and volcanoes.

These influences appear to have profound influence on the collective mindset of the people. The constant reminder of impermanence has sculpted a distinctive perspective on life, rendering the cultural tapestry of Japan something that feels intrinsically tied to its specific time and place.

I often reflect on this thought -- Japan could have only ever happened in Japan.

> Plates are often made of some glass-like or ceramic-like material and not that easily damaged by chemicals.

A ceramic is a glass (or the other way around), just of a different material composition. And yes, a dishwasher can easily damage both glassware and ceramic dishes depending on how the glass (or glaze, in the case of a ceramic dish) was formulated.

A common durability test for ceramic engineers is indeed — placing it in the dishwasher.

I haven't looked to see what licenses are involved, but Pulumi makes liberal use of Terraform providers[1]. And I would definitely consider them to be a Hashicorp competitor.

[1]: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/vs/terraform/#:~:text=U....

> Pulumi is able to adapt any Terraform Provider for use with Pulumi, enabling management of any infrastructure supported by the Terraform Providers ecosystem using Pulumi programs.