msluyter

I haven't really been in the java space for a while now, but I recall there being a fair bit of criticism[1][2] of checked exceptions over the years.

[1] https://www.javacodegeeks.com/2026/01/javas-checked-exceptio...

[2] https://reflectoring.io/do-not-use-checked-exceptions/

WRT magic, I've generally thought that was a result of frameworks - Spring, for example. In the past, my feeling was that these impose a sort of meta/configuration language that itself is not checkable at compile time, so you'd get weird runtime errors that are somewhat inexplicable. This was like... 2018 though, so perhaps things have improved.

Somewhat related. I've also been generating lots of markdown files, which I've occasionally wanted to print out (so I can rest my eyes, or just read them somewhere other than my desk.) First class (free) printing support for rendered markdown seems like a lacuna in the overall ecosystem. I'm currently using the "print" plugin for VS Code, which opens rendered markdown in a browser window, which I print from there. Curious if anyone knows of better options?

Really cool deck! Anyone out there play Mu? It's an _excellent_ trick taking card game. One of the few (complex, trick-taking... I'm not counting stuff like Uno in this genre) card games that I know of that works really well with 5 or 6 players. This deck _almost_ would work for Mu, but it'd need different point values. (I keep having to rebuy new Mu games when the deck wears out so I've been contemplating other possibilities.)

A third problem is that, depending on the project, one's recollection might be pretty fuzzy. A fourth is that, while you might be a great programmer, perhaps you've never had the opportunity to do the work of the design or greenfield development, meaning, you may not have a ton of insight into the design work that went into the project. E.g., perhaps you mostly do maintenance work on a large number of projects, so your overall knowledge of each is fairly shallow.

Perhaps the joke is that the valence of going backward or forward isn't equivalent. IIRC, some studies show that people will generally accept smaller gains to avoid the possibility of loss. Eg, loss has a greater (negative) emotional impact than equivalent (positive) gains.

Random family seating anecdote. A couple of years ago, we were on vacation and my wife had to go home early to tend for a sick pet. My daughter and I also re-arranged our flight to get home early, and ended up in like the D boarding group (on Southwest). So we're getting on the plane and we're almost dead last, and there are very few seats left together anywhere. My 6 yr old daughter was not really emotionally equipped to sit alone at that point.

We get about 2/3 of the down and there's now nothing, so I say -- with some desperation -- "If someone would be willing to switch seats so my daughter and I can sit together I'll give you $20." A guy says "I don't want the money but I'll switch."

Which sort of shows that if you're not a jerk, and you ask nicely, often people will go out of their way to help you.

Families who seem to expect other passengers to move, especially when there's assigned seating, are another story, and deserve the condemnation they get, IMHO.

Is anyone arguing "all fringe ideas must be false" or, conversely, "widely accepted ideas are true?" That's basically just argumentum ad populum, and I don't think that's the argument of the paper. Rather, it's that those with fringe ideas tend to be over-confident in their beliefs.

IME, a scientific/empirical mindset tends to lead one to a state of epistemological modesty, in which few things are unassailably true, and beliefs are provisional until disproven. One crucial feature of that mindset is the notion of falsifiability. Knowing if/how ideas may be falsified helps one avoid leaping down conspiracy rabbit holes. <- (A likely unfalsifiable statement!)

"Step out" is how to get out of the lower level frameworks, and or "step over" to avoid diving into them in the first place. I can't speak for other IDEs, but all of the JetBrains products have these.

This was my question. There's a weird sort of self-cannibalism that this hints at. The LLM is only as good as it is because it's been able to train on existing SO answers. But if over time, SO content production declines, then the LLM results will be less reliable. It seems that a new equilibrium could be one in which -- for newer questions/concerns -- both SO and LLMs will be worse than they are now.

Saying this as a rather old person myself...

I have a theory that, wrt knowledge, the relative advantage of age has been at least partially eroded by rapid technological advancement. In traditional/tribal societies, prior to the 20th century, wisdom actually accumulated with age, because the pace of change was slower. Wisdom & knowledge could be passed on from generation to generation.

Now, wisdom and knowledge become obsolete quickly. Many things you knew 20 years ago are outdated. The ICE engine you learned how to fix as a kid is now computer controlled, or has been replaced by batteries. Your optimistic/open/friendly mindset now makes you easy pickings for online scammers. Hell, even your family's secret cherished muffin recipe is spurned by your grandchildren because it has gluten or they're vegan or keto or whatever.

All this is just a take, but when I look at voting patterns in particular, I find myself pessimistic that the elderly are wiser than average.

| Private schools are outrageously expensive.

Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone.

And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)

You're not alone. Type "best ev that's" into Google and the first autocomplete will be "best ev that's not a Tesla."

Majesty! That was it, thanks!

I've often speculated about a radical interpretation of this idea, inspired by a old video game (whose name I forget). In the game, you rule a kingdom, but unlike, say, Civilization, you don't directly manage things. You set goals and create quests, like "slay this monster and get some reward." And the quests would inspire heroes to join your kingdom, and things would grow from there. Iirc, you create incentives around your economy as well.

Imagine if there were product goals ("implement feature X") with some reward [1] attached and you could leave it up to teams or individuals to claim that goal if they desired. You could choose the goals you wanted to claim, recruit coworkers to help you, (eg, self form teams). PMs/Management would basically be in charge of allocating rewards for the goals.

I imagine it'd be a terrible system in practice for a number of reasons, but I enjoy thinking about ways you could attempt to make it workable. For example,

[1] rewards -- I don't think you could tie rewards directly to people's paychecks. Do that too much and I think you'd create perverse incentives. But perhaps things like swag, gifts, time off, or just bragging rights, honor, and glory might work.

[2] coordination -- a danger would people redundantly working on the same goal. You'd need a way to prevent that.

[3] other perverse incentives -- you might get an overabundance of folks choosing the "fun" goals, for example. (After all, engineers may be more motivated by that than other things.) Here I imagine the rewards for unsexy things would need to rise over time if nobody opted for them. Or, you make first dibs on some other "fun" goal the prize for achieving a less fun goal.

At some point Threads started to suppress (or at least, not boost?) political content or news. Which sort of crippled it as a "current events + hot takes" Twitter/X competitor. Bluesky doesn't appear to have this limitation (though perhaps for some this is a feature).

Orlando resident here. Disagree with "great climate" and "affordable living."

I honestly don't understand those who say Florida has great weather. We have basically two seasons:

Wet season: Hot and humid. Being outside after ~10am feels like being in a sauna. It rains nearly every afternoon. Usable daylight hours for outdoor activities, when you subtract the hottest part of the day and the rain time is like 3-4 hours.

Dry season: Mild & less humid. Less rain.

The problem is that wet season is like 6-8 months out of the year! I wouldn't call any place that's this miserable for this much of the year a place with "great climate."

Yesterday, I took off work and went to Bok Tower Gardens with my family (neat place, btw). It was insanely hot and humid, and I was pretty miserable.

Prior to living in Orlando I lived in Austin, TX, which is also hot but felt more comfortable because it's so much drier. And perhaps I'm bitter and making an unfair comparison, but Orlando, at least, is a cultural wasteland compared to Austin. And although real estate was luckily much less expensive when we moved here in 2021, prices have risen rapidly over the last few years and aren't quite the bargain they previously were. You can find cheap housing if you want to live in one of Orlando's many soulless exurbias, but if you want to live close to downtown or in Winter Park, prices are on par with Austin.

It definitely appears much worse for girls, but afaict, depression has risen in boys as well, just by not as much. See graphs here: [1]

So if social medial is harmful in general, I don't view prohibiting it a "punishment" for boys; perhaps like less of a benefit? Regarding your second point, I imagine the data would provide some clues. If the kids that are now teens were always more depressed, I'd imagine that we'd see more pre-teen depression ~3-8 years ago. I haven't looked into it closely.

And I grant that social science statistics are often problematic -- I imagine it'll take a while to really know what's going on.

[1] https://www.afterbabel.com/p/international-mental-illness-pa...

I think the empirical evidence is fairly clear, actually.[1][2]

Having struggled with various forms of screen addiction myself, I find it sort of odd that a lot of people are so laissez faire about giving children the most addictive device ever created.[3] Whether or not this law is a good idea, I think it's incumbent on parents to monitor and limit screen time and access to social media. Which is difficult! When my wife and I are tired, setting my daughter down in front of an ipad is the easiest way to get a break.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23522...

[2] https://jeanmtwenge.substack.com/p/yes-its-the-phones-and-so...

[3] Sure, it's not technically "the device," itself, but rather what it makes possible.

I remember being astounded by Johnny Mnemonic when in came out in Omni Magazine, of all places.

(Incidentally, for those old enough to have encountered that magazine, you can see it online at: https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/). I have a ton of nostalgia for Omni. It reflected the techno-optimism of the era and along with G.E.B., was a profound influence on in my life, ultimately leading me into CS.)

I worked on a fairly complex invoicing system and couple of things not (directly) mentioned:

  * Forward billing vs billing in arrears. We had to treat different customers differently. 
  * Tiered billing -- e.g., if a customer used > X amount of services, they got a discount.
  * Special rules around when billing starts for new customers (e.g., no bill for the first month). 

There are probably more I've forgotten. We billed by data usage, mostly, and I used to say that their bill was the integral of the customer's usage graph over a month -- which was true -- but that explanation didn't gain much traction with the accounting folks.

It allows you to separate certain essentials (getting possibly important notifications, calls) from temptations that you want to avoid (twitter/X, instagram, tic tok, etc...)

A lot of articles on reducing phone use coming out at the moment. For example (older, but recently updated: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/break-up-with-you...) I think a lot about the fact that we carry on our persons the most addictive device ever created.

I've recently adopted the grey scale trick -- set your phone to grey scale display mode. It works pretty well! Of course, I can always disable it if severely tempted, but it creates another hoop to jump through. I also have one of the phone safes, which I use sporadically. Ironically, having an Apple watch makes the phone safe more effective, because I can lock up the phone but still answer critical calls if necessary.

Weird that in the 23rd century, a lot of us are replaying Oddyseus, collectively tying ourselves to the mast.

Indeed. I kept wondering if the circle was actually getting lighter as it got smaller or if that was just how I was perceiving it due to the afterimage and whatnot.

Not sure if this is a complete explanation, but people tend to ascribe more value to physical objects and perhaps, because the general price of books is bounded within a known range that is fairly stable, don’t question the price as hard as they might. That is, if a book is roughly the same price of other books in the category you’ll tend to view the price as “fair.”

The value of a podcast seems more nebulous to me, and perhaps this raises more questions. Unless you already subscribe to a lot of podcasts you may not have the equivalent comparison point, so more questions arise.

On top of that, subscriptions create another barrier to entry and raise even more questions.

Yeah I was wondering about this as well. To what extent were the greek myths known in that part of the world at that time? A brief googling suggests that from the 6th century onward there were various transcriptions of greek texts (Boethius, for example), but it's not 100% clear to me what was known / available in Britain in the 10th century, specifically.

Apparently Irish monks preserved some ancient Greek texts after the collapse of Rome. Interesting stuff!

> Twitter faltered but recovered and competitors don't have an opening any more.

Really? I dropped Twitter and have been on Threads since it opened, and afaict, it's gaining momentum, while Twitter becomes the new Truth Social.

Threads does have a different set of problems (instagram influencers showing up in your feed, for example), but mostly I just read people I'm directly following so it's not much of an issue. Perhaps eternal September hasn't arrived for it yet, but thus far I greatly prefer it.

Takeaway: when faking data, make sure your numbers are randomly distributed. ;)

Seriously, this was fascinating and disturbing that it took so long.

I majored in flute performance in college, and have listened / played a lot of avante garde music. My roommate, a bass player, and I were really into it at the time. We once played Shoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire on a tape loop over and over for an entire week -- and emerged with our sanity mostly intact. (An interesting side fact is that now I can barely recall it.) I played Luciano Berio's Sequenza on my Sr. recital. In retrospect, I think I was mostly relishing playing the role of enfant terrible, playing weird music just to get a rise out of people.

These days I don't willingly listen to atonal music of the Shoenberg/Carter/Boulez variety. I have a variety of theories about why modern classical music tends to be rejected, but in the end, all I can really say is that I have a subjective response to, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, that's entirely different from his Movements for Piano & Orchestra.

Obligatory reference to "gron" ("make JSON greppable"), which I find to be quite useful for many common tasks:

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

I can see something like this filling a niche with the elderly population as like an external memory. (Or even just for forgetful adhd folks like myself, having something I can ask "wait, what did my wife just say to me 5 minutes ago?" ;) )