zimzam

For some context the school shared walls with and used to be part of an active military base. [1]

That being said bombing children is always a tragedy and the US should be doing everything it can to learn from this and not make these kinds of mistakes.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

Workers on an H1B are more abusable though - if they lose the job they have something like 30 days to find another one or they have to leave the country entirely.

So you talk a good game about work life balance and then after you hire an H1B worker and bring them to the country you can spring 60 hour weeks doing tedius things and many won't be in a position to say no.

The salary might also seem higher to somebody who doesn't understand the cost of living in the US (and how many things are not paid for via taxes like healthcare).

The trifold looks cool, and also solves the redundant screen problem - I hope we see more explorations of this form factor!

I think I'd prefer it over having a phone with screens on two sides (and the cost of having two screens over one that's partially used sometimes and fully used at others).

How are they "making bank" by giving out 0% loans?

So is it moral of me to destroy a copy of "Windows 95 for Dummies"?

What if a person with small children and an elderly, incontinent pet with a penchant for peeing on books wants to buy it - can I sell this book to such a dangerous purchaser who might destroy it?

I love book as much as the next person but the hyperbole about "rare books" is absurd. Nobody is buying the Gutenburg Bible and destroying it for AI. The books in question are certainly not rare enough to be in museums - without titles there's no proof these are anything of real value.

I'm not convinced safety is solved: given how often LLM's hallucinate and automated cars get confused, what happens when something unusual happens and the robot thinks a person's arm needs to be "folded" and breaks it? Or a person's clothing looks like the wall and a robot tries to move their arm through a person's chest?

Sure, for each individual situation one can imagine a safeguard but being in close proximity to unpredictable humans means there are unlimited edge cases... if a humanoid robot is strong enough to do something useful it is also strong enough to be dangerous.

When I first moved to NYC I was enchanted and delighted by the various people singing or playing music on the subway but over time it became an annoyance - if I want to listen to music I’ll play it myself.

Please don’t force me to attend your concert by performing in the subway car. I don’t want to be your captive audience. Even more so for people who don’t use headphones.

This is only true if you assume users always scroll down while reading and the only reason they scroll up is to find the header... but many of us scroll up and down while reading and find the re-appearance of the header to interfere with our goal of reading the content. So there is a clear downside for us "up and down" readers.

I don't know what portion of users we are though, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one!

I think I missed something: how do galaxies getting further away (divergence) imply that intelligent species will converge anywhere? It isn’t like one galaxy getting out of range of another on the other side of the universe is going to affect things in a meaningful way…

A galaxy has enough resources to be self-reliant, there’s no need for a species to escape one that is getting too far away from another one.

Correct, the person you are responding to is using it as a benchmark for the all-in cost of driving a vehicle on a per-mile basis.

What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society.

Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor.

For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased to less than 1% of what it once was.

Of course the person spending 100+x the effort to grow corn will not be economically competitive - why would we want anything different?

https://www.lhf.org/learning-fields/crops/corn/

Yeah, the following has happened to me multiple times when I ask copoilot to fix something. It updates my code to version A, which is still broken. Then I share the error messages asking for a fix, resulting in version B, which is also broken. Then I share the error messages and copilot confidently changes things back to version A, which is still broken.

It will confidently explain version A is broken because it isn't version B, and version B is broken because it isn't version A. There's no "awareness" that this is cycle is happening and it could go on indefinitely.

I think this is a framing issue.

Is it fair to charge people with different sized families different prices (per unit) for toilet paper?

vs.

Is it fair to charge people different prices (per unit) for different sized packages of toilet paper?

The former makes it seem nefarious but the latter is commonly accepted as fair. Same for airline tickets - if there's a discount for buying in bulk that's just as fair as a discount for buying toilet paper in bulk.

Parental leave is definitionally not working.

Capital-A Agile is for companies that want the benefits of agile (higher velocity) but don’t want to trust their employees or make any meaningful changes in how the management team operates (micromanagement, committing to rigid feature scopes on rigid schedules).

Obviously this doesn’t increase work but companies get to say they are “agile” and the management team gets to keep doing all the counterproductive management they were doing before. No hard conversations about changing how management operates or unpredictable things like giving engineers autonomy.

I think that’s because glyphosate is used agriculturally not because people were mad about weed control for their lawns.

The expectation that engineers work overtime to hit arbitrary metrics can’t be fixed by a process like scrum or waterfall though. Process can’t replace competent management.

It isn't about the writing of G-d's name but rather about whether the written form will be treated respectfully or not.

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/486809/jewish...

Small correction: Hebrew for father is "ah-bah" (אַבָּא) not "bah-bah"

Most flights I've taken in the last 5+ years use group boarding, which roughly approximates filling outside in (not front to back).

It only roughly approximates though because the first few groups are usually not outside-in (eg. first class, premium/rewards customers, veterans, families with small children).

In web development there is often a single place you can put a feature flag though.

For example maybe the feature flag just shows/hides a new button on the UI. The rest of the code like the new backend endpoint and the new database column are "live" (not behind any flags) and just invisible to a regular user since they will never hit that code without the button.

As far as "remembering" to clean up the feature flag, teams I've been on have added a ticket for cleaning up the feature flag(s) as part of the project, so this work doesn't get lost in the shuffle. (And also to make visible to Product and other teams that there is some work there to clean up)

Air travel is usually cheaper than Amtrak though.

To travel from NYC to Chicago on Aug. 21st:

Flight: $124 nonstop (2hr 40 min) or $85 with layover (7 hours)

Greyhound (bus): $170 (23.5 hours)

Amtrak: $144 (19.5 hours)

If you value your time and/or your money the flights usually win

But this isn't necessarily proportional to the amount of wear-and-tear they cause on roads.

I know someone who's an actuary, and the reality is much simpler: people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits.

It gives the insurance company a way to identify a lower risk group of drivers so they can charge that group lower prices.

This is missing context: Microsoft made their browser free at a time when Netscape cost $49.

Apple giving away Safari for free at a time when all major web browsers are free is different. Sure, Apple might benefit from being the default but Spotify and Pandora, which compete with Apple Music, are both still in Apple's app store.

I’ve had non-technical users, who used the application daily, ask me to implement a large form where every input was a radio button.

When I suggested using a more appropriate mix of drop-downs, checkboxes and radio buttons they readily accepted.

It turns out they thought radio buttons would be easier for me to implement. They aren’t stupid people, they just don’t have any idea of how things work outside their domain.

It is a similar problem with retail space. When a dense, urban neighborhood like those in Manhattan has 30+% of their retail space unoccupied it has huge impacts on how it feels to live there.

A block or two with empty retail space means no lights on at night which affects not just the 'vibe' but how safe it feels to walk around.

Vision Pro wearers don't show up in FaceTime as wearing goggles though: they show a simulated face that responds to facial gestures (basically a high-res Memoji)

In my experience Humanities professors cared way more about the classes they taught. It was the Engineering / "Hard Science" professors cared way more about the research and treated teaching undergraduates as a chore and/or an afterthought. (Though there were a couple of exceptions)

FYI on your jobseeker's page the copy reads "Finding a new jpb" instead of "Finding a new job"