Take some existing code and bundle it into a zip or tar file. Upload it to Gemini and ask it for critique. It's surprisingly insightful and may give you some ideas for improvement. Use one of the Gemini in-depth models like Thinking or Pro; just looking at the thinking process is interesting. Best of all, they're free for limited use.
Wanted to try more of what I guess would be the opposite approach (it writes the code and I critique), partially to give it a fair shake and partially just out of curiosity. Also I can't lie, I always have a soft spot for a good TUI which no doubt helps
I don’t think the built environment is that determinative. I live in a car-dependent suburb. Walk Score 2.
My neighbor knows the whole street. She knows the garbage men. It’s because she wants to. When I run into her outside, she chats. She walks her dog and chats with dog owners and anyone else she sees.
Easy relationships are available at the grocery store, post office, etc. I’ve been seeing some of the same people working at Costco for years. I don’t know them. It’s not the built environment. I’d need to take effort to build a relationship with them. My neighbor would. I’m simply not so inclined.
This is an incredibly important point - you could remove the car entirely, even make you dependent on others (as you're dependent - or were before self checkout - on the Costco clerk) - and you still would have the disconnect.
Hardship can force it more often, perhaps, but that is accidental and secondary.
In all the times I've traveled on forms of "mass transit" (airplanes, subways, trains) the only time I've ever really talked to someone was at the seat-together dining on a long-distance train. Otherwise you can sit next to someone for 20+ hours and never say much more than "excuse me" if you need to use the restroom.
(Another counter to this is kids, if you have kids and there are kids anywhere within screaming distance, they will find each other and immediately be best friends. Parents get dragged along - https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-2/cafe/ )
It's absolutely the built environment. Your Costco example is a clear example. you drive to Costco, you walk in, grab generic packaged goods without needing to really talk to anyone, and then go to the checkout and use the automated kiosk to make your purchase.
There's no reason to have a human interaction, so why would you bother getting to know the cashier? You're never going to build a relationship with the cashier precisely because of the environmental structure.
Contrast that with walking down the street to a local store that one of your neighbors owns. I bet you would already have a relationship unless you chose not to. Why? Because you'd also see them at your kids birthday party, or you'd see them at the bark down the street, or out on a walk.
I made the choice at Costco to not build a relationship with anyone. There's a guy standing at the entrance checking memberships. I've seen him for years. I don't know him. I don't use the automated kiosk if I have several items. I see some of the cashiers for years. I'm cordial but I don't chat them up. One woman who has been there for years chats with me a bit; I'm cordial but don't reciprocate a ton.
There's a corporate supermarket owned by a Dutch multinational not far from me. I see some of the same employees there every week. One of them loves people and recognizes me. I could stand around and chat with him if I wanted. But I don't want to.
I made this choice. Someone who wants to build relationships chats with people. Folks like that chat with people at the grocery store, on the airplane, waiting in line, etc. Often it leads to nothing, occasionally it leads to something. But the point is, they practice it. I don't. The built environment is not stopping it. Not being in a "local store that one of your neighbors owns" has nothing to do with it either. Plenty of relationships are built in corporate chains.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect, and the way we live today and the problems we experience bear this out. It's not about individual choices you make to engage with a cashier at Costco, it's about the opportunities to engage and where they occur. You're still talking about a forced connection you have to decide to make at the checkout line, and ignoring that you never see that person again in a different context, like in your own neighborhood or at your local restaurant.
Socialization isn't a choice one makes, it's supposed to be organic. The fact that you have to choose and make decisions around interacting with other people proves my point.
> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder.
Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't remember whether this is visible by default. There is also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this information at the bottom of the window.
> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory
Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-Shift-H.
> Externalities lead to users downloading extra gigabytes of data (wasted time) and waiting for software, all of which is waste that the developer isn't responsible for and doesn't care about.
This is perfectly sensible behavior when the developers are working for free, or when the developers are working on a project that earns their employer no revenue. This is the case for several of the projects at issue here: Nix, Homebrew, Cargo. It makes perfect sense to waste the user's time, as the user pays with nothing else, or to waste Github's bandwidth, since it's willing to give bandwidth away for free.
Where users pay for software with money, they may be more picky and not purchase software that indiscriminately wastes their time.
If I'm traveling for work, I'm working all day. At the end of the day I often just want to rest in the hotel room, especially if I take my dinner in a restaurant.
Typically I don't watch the hotel TV though, as I don't want to figure out what channels are on it and I probably wouldn't want to watch them anyway. If I watch anything it will be on my iPad.
Physically it is very taxing. Snow is heavy, and the movements aren’t typical of daily activity. Even for a modestly sized property it can take awhile.
Years ago it was remarkable for software to have docs built-in as Emacs does.
Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.
Now in the Web and LLM age, much software doesn’t even try to have built-in help or even much documentation, and it’s again remarkable that Emacs is self-documenting, especially the part of Emacs that users can program.
> Then for many years it was standard for software to have help files, and it seemed anachronistic for Emacs to loudly proclaim it is self-documenting.
Emacs' notion of self documentation refers to something slightly different than the fact it has online help files. The help facilities can query the Lisp runtime for things like functions and keybindings. These update dynamically as the system is reconfigured. The result is something that isn't quite as cleanly presented as an online help document, but has the benefit of being deeply integrated into how the system is actually configured to behave at the moment. Very cool, and very much dependent on the open source nature of emacs.
Consolidation frees up real estate, allowing new businesses to open. Where I live, old supermarkets are now farmers’ markets, trampoline parks, and health clubs, and an old car dealership is a church.
I let my kid play Roblox for a couple of weeks and I was absolutely horrified by all the inducements to seek Robux. So I removed it from her iPad, which is locked down.
I play Roblox with my daughter from time to time and we have lots of fun. I’ve explained the dangers to her (strangers messaging, gambling style games, etc), and I see it as an opportunity to teach her while she still listens to me. When she’s older and I’m not privy to everything she does on a computer I don’t want her stumbling across these things uninformed.
A portion of her pocket money goes to Robux, which she saves up for special outfits (eg halloween) or creatures in her favorite game about birds. No different from the hobbies many adults have - except I use it as a teaching opportunity about saving, buyer’s remorse etc., again while she’s still young and listening.
I've had a similar approach. My kids computers are setup next to mine and I keep an eye on what they're playing.
I've instigated a purchase wait period of at least 3 days. Very often they themselves realize that the thing that they wanted to spend their pocket money on was a brief desire.
I was super proud when I heard my son say "meh, this is pay to win" as quitting a random roblox game he was trying out.
They don't have to have those. Depending on your definition of "kids", most people on HN I imagine are not giving their kids phones, laptops, or tablets at young ages (maybe less than ~13?). And if they do, I imagine the devices are somewhat locked down and monitored.
I think the more technologically literate a person is, the more wary they are of unfettered access to it for children. Hence, preferring a stationary desktop where use can be supervised.
I agree desktops are best, and they are what my kids started with, but there is a lot of pressure to give kids phones.
For example, where I live, the cheapest (monthly) bus tickets require an app, so kids need a smartphone to get to school (or their parents have to pay a lot more for daily tickets).
There is a lot of social pressure on the kids too. There are lots of activities that have either moved online or are organised online. Lots of ways to get left out.
This is such a good approach. You're sharing interests with your daughter and teaching her valuable skills to confront problems she will absolutely face as an adult. Having the good foundation will give her a leg up later in life for sure and I wish more parents followed this example.
To summarize a bit glibly, you're saying to be a good parent. Which of course is awesome, and it is important for people like yourself to explain how to do that using the available tools, etc.
I think the concern many people have is that not everyone, maybe even not most, are good parents. They are themselves addicted to their screens, sports betting, credit cards, etc etc.
How much of a "nanny state" we create is a fair question. Of course due to economic incentives the companies will generally tend to outsource the problem as "be better parents", and indeed the problems of digital society are not these games' fault or burden alone. But to me it seems we have to break the cycle somewhere, and regulating these apps more is a perfectly sensible starting point. We should have freedom, yes, but also need to make systems that match reality on the ground and don't fail under the lowest common denominator situation.
Edit: not to assume you were implying otherwise. Just that we should avoid the "well it's not a problem for me, just do <x>" error.
My son plays Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 on the Playstation sometimes, if all his homework is done and his room is tidyish.
No inducements to buy in-game currencies, no weird people chatting to my child online, no deeply profoundly unsettling user-generated content. About the only downside is that I occasionally have to remind him that his teacher probably doesn't really want to hear about Screaming Females or Rough Francis or Bad Religion, although it's perfectly okay for him to have opinions about them.
Plus I doubt I'm ever seeing my initials on the highscore table ever again. The Future Is Now, Old Man.
The PS4 remake is excellent. Sure, the maps have been restyled a bit, but the warehouse looks just as good as you remember, and you remember it as looking a hell of a lot better than it really did.
THPS1 is forever intertwined with having a few pints with my wee sister, pick up a curry and some beer on the way round to hers, then watch The West Wing, then beating her boyfriend at Tony Hawks', drinking beer, and eating curry until the small hours of Sunday morning.
In the early 2000s, we really did have it all, didn't we?
The problem is that just like boycotts/individual action doesn't work (besides a handful of lucky exceptions), this won't work either if all your kids' peers are on it. Being the "odd one out" brings its own share of problems, especially in a volatile environment where any pretext for bullying is a good one.
This is why we need regulation. Both for child-focused platforms, but also for adults (regarding social media).
I agree mostly. But I would push back on the idea that you need to let your child do whatever (play on Roblox, get fancy clothes or toys, etc) because of bullying. You're trading one set of potential problems for another set of known problems, and letting your own fears dictate how you raise your kids. How do you expect your kids to stand up to peer pressure as teenagers if you give into their peers when they are younger?
I get it. We all look back at the pain from our childhoods and try to shield our kids from that pain. But unless you want your kid to be average in every way there's going to be a chance of bullying. Focus on building a strong relationship with them so that you can guide them through it if it happens.
I would be surprised if that were true. Roblox was one of the earliest games to have their digital currency for sale in corner stores where kids can buy it with cash.
There are a lot of free-to-play mobile games (say Arknights) that you can play for free and have a pretty good time. I got lucky and got two “game breaking” characters playing for a reasonable time but if you have the idea that you absolutely have to have a specific character or collect all of them boy you can spend a crazy amount of money and those people pay for all the rest of us.
I still let my kid play a couple of hours a week, but told him no robux at all, it just wasn't something we were even going to consider. Let's see how it lasts, hopefully I can get him interested in something else but somehow his entire local social circle collapsed when we made him cut back on his play time. Its not even strangers at this point, but kids at school that have caused conflicts.
Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable, speedy network connectivity. It’s up to my network provider to determine the best means to do that. I don’t care if it’s tin can and string if it provides the service I need.
> Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable, speedy network connectivity.
The second sentence answers the question.
> It’s up to my network provider to determine the best means to do that. I don’t care if it’s tin can and string if it provides the service I need.
You assume that your network provider wants to provide "reliable, speedy network connectivity" and not "maximize profits with the smallest possible outlay".
Given they already have a bunch 'legacy' infrastructure, they're going to try to milk that existing plant as much as possible before shelling out another dime on anything new. That is not a recipe for "reliable, speedy network connectivity".
So municipal networks are a classic example of a natural monopoly, where it's more efficient to just have a single utility network vs redundant infrastructure.
Fiber is good for this because it's both cheap and effectively future proof vs consumer needs. Also, thanks to how IP works, a municipality can build out the physical network, then offer competitive options among ISPs delivering service on it if they like.
This generally results in much better service for consumers at lower cost, which is why Comcast, Century Link, etc, have been doing all the political maneuvering they can to pre-empt voters from choosing that path.
Fiber is cheaper, faster, and far more reliable. You've already constrained the problem such that fiber is the only possible solution, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Mostly because we're pushing the limits of long-range copper to offer currently-standard bandwidth levels, where as fiber is just getting started (you can go to 100Gbit on the same fiber by just swapping the optics at either end).
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