Well, I didn't say I look forward to living in a tiny capsule in space, just that it would be fun to live in a time where that's possible. I'd imagine most people would not venture into space until they can make it comfortable enough.
Seriously. It would be like living on a submarine. But I guess if you don't like sky, mountains, beaches, nature, weather, animals, etc... Like, if you hate the outdoors and spend all your time in windowless rooms with poor air quality? Then OK, maybe space is for you? Also the food is probably going to be extremely monotonous, so that also needs to not matter.
Unless people are envisioning living in magical holodecks all the time, with magical food replicators? But those don't come along automatically with "space", no matter how much Star Trek you've seen...
It does. For a lot of motorcycle enthusiasts the modest power output and questionable reliability of a Harley don’t make sense if you want a high performance bike.
Then again, in a highly surveilled and monitored society, a Hayabusa or something similar more revered makes zero sense since you can’t use the performance legally.
The Harley guys are having a lot of fun at modest speeds and the ‘busa riders are either frustrated or getting arrested. So which of these makes more sense?
I lurved my Miata, so much fun from so little hp, the best shifter in anything I've driven.
My one pedal drive Model 3 is also a blast, it handles like nothing I've ever driven. Not having to wait beat to get the engine in the powerband is amazing.
I sometimes miss the extra puzzle of shifting gears to keep the engine on the cam, but most days you're just rowing through gears on the commute home (which is now fairly stress-free thanks to FSD).
(I rode motorcycles exclusively for years before I got my first car, from an R69S to Yamaha 180 scooter and lots in between.)
I’m a big muscle car fan, drive a Chrysler 300c SRT8.
You simply can’t use the performance legally and it’s a lot slower than the Charger R/T.
The main reason the ICE V8 is preferred is nothing to do with the performance. It’s like a Harley Davidson. The fun is in the noise, the drama and the authenticity.
There is a presence that you get with some of these engines.
Go try a V8 with a proper supercharger on it. I bet at least 1 EV genius would convert after the first ride. Nothing compares. The EV is faster, but it will never feel that fast.
For me, it's about being in control of a complex thermodynamic engine. When you add an additional element that the brain can use as feedback (the whine of the blower) it makes the experience much more engaging.
No better time in history to learn guitar. Amazing online resources, the world is flooded with cheap guitars as well if you’re happy with 2nd hand. There is a technical side to it (tuning, restringing) and plenty of toys, pedals and computer integration to any nerd hearts content. Even if you get stuck at 3 chords it’s amazing the number of pop songs you can suddenly play. Plus if you get past there you still have classical, jazz or whatever super hard path you want to travel to explore.
I sometimes wonder if I'm broken in some way. I bought my first guitar in 1996 (a Mexican Fender Stratocaster) and my last guitar in 2018 (a Gibson SG). I've taken lessons with three different teachers. I've worked through a Hal Leonard book series. I've subscribed to Guitar Tricks for a while then switched to Justin Guitar. I have YouTube playlists a mile long where I try to learn songs. I keep a guitar in my office to help me stop thinking about a problem when I get stuck.
After all this, I don't know any (real) songs from start to finish. The closest I come is playing Nirvana's About a Girl.
I might have some kind of rhythm disability. If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
It's so frustrating, especially when I see how fast my kids learned to play an instrument. They make it look so easy.
If you're not looking for random person's advice feel free to ignore :-)
> If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.
Are you able to play any strumming patterns (however simple) with just the metronome? Ideally you'd practice this enough that you are able to do it consistently with almost zero thinking, and then check if it has improved your ability to play along with the record.
Another thing that has helped me when learning new strumming patterns (and just rhythm in general) was practicing just the strumming, muting the strings with my left hand instead of playing chords. First with the metronome, then along the record (all without any chords, just muted strings). Give that a try if you feel like it.
You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course. I bought that course and worked my way through it and enjoyed doing it, but it didn't have a big impact.
To answer your metronome question - I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync. I start to focus on how my arm feels strumming and I can feel the pick vibrating in my fingers and feel the air I'm moving with my arm and I notice the vibration in the guitar body and as my attention moves around, I lose track of the click.
> You are describing some of the exercises from the Justin Guitar Strumming SOS course.
Not surprised that these are in there!
> I can do it for a few minutes but soon something like semantic satiation sets in and I get out of sync
Huh, I never actually did that for more than a few minutes at the time (when just using the metronome), I can imagine it gets boring and attention wanders. I did try to do it frequently (couple of times a day, spread throughout the day), but only for two minutes or so.
Anyway, I thought you might have tried all of that already, considering you took lessons and bought courses, but still wanted to throw it out there. Good luck!
Start in a very slow fashion, like you're teaching kindergardeners songs, and key here is to use both feet to tap, every other beat on each foot, and do it slow as molases, count it 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 while alternating the feet. You can also move the body to that slow rhythm. After some time of doing this you'll realize you don't need to go that slow. Good luck!
Do you have any recommendations for online resources? A few years ago my wife and I started with Justin guitar, but then we switched to piano to tempt our daughter. Is that a good choice, or are there better options?
I (op) restarted guitar recently, and Justin Guitar definitely seemed to be the internet's recommendation. I found it to be OK! The content is good but the app was a bit janky. I switched to online Zoom classes. Two people I know have used Simply Piano (and there's a guitar version of the same app) and swear by it, so probably also worth a look.
I dabble a bit in this but only because one of my hobbies is vintage hi fi (1970s level aluminium faced classic Japanese hi fi really)
I think it helps if you have a specific niche you want to play in. I stick with the era before integrated circuits became dominant because troubleshooting those is next level from replacing blown caps or whatever. Motivation is generally that I want to hear the thing I’m fiddling with and that there is usually some mechanical part of that gear that makes them interesting.
Get a desolder gun when you get a soldering iron.
Also the TechMoan guy on YouTube is fun as he shows his failures repairing things along with the successes
When I switched to Linux full time, I had to ditch Heidi as they didn’t have a Linux version. I actually prefer dbeaver now, Heidi had some odd defaults (default collation especially) which need attention but you don’t realise it until too late. It also was a bit crashy here and there.
DBeaver has the worst name in history but it can do everything Heidi does and doesn’t fall over every 20 minutes. The buttons are all over the place and it’s harder to navigate than Heidi but it’s also standard on a few distros.
I’m glad it has some competition though. If you’re working with sql server Microsoft have really dropped the ball with SSMS and don’t talk to me about azure data studio it is a undergraduate project that got a C.
I was switching a lot between SQLite, pawl, Marian and sql server and dbeaver is excellent on all of them
I feel like dbeaver works with all of them. It never feels like a pleasure to use, unlike Heidi, which actively feels like it makes working with databases nicer.
I've found Dbeaver struggles with large tables or databases with a lot of tables, often going out of memory unless I click the GC button every 10 seconds.
An amazing idea: Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory and let them loose. In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Hard to know whether to be seriously impressed or seriously concerned - if Europe decided that enough was enough and started helping Ukraine with troops if they decided the Russian nuclear threat was a paper tiger we're in for some very interesting times.
Russia has a nuclear triad. Unless all of their submarines were in port and taken out during the attack, there’d be no way to prevent them from losing all three delivery mechanisms simultaneously.
Russia hasn't spent enough in their military to afford nuclear maintenance in decades. They don't have nuclear weapons any more, they're just faking it at this stage.
And there worst part of the triad, ICBMs, can't really be taken out easily by any method I can imagine. And they are nearly impossible to intercept, even by the US.
Even if you know the location of every single one, you can't easily destroy them. They all have very heavy armored covers. They are probably all guarded by the military.
Putin has very carefully put himself in the position that his death would cause a very chaotic power vacuum in Russia (to the detriment or at least risk of almost everyone), to dissuade any would-be assassins.
Do they? Your sources are what, Russians saying they have 6 thousands warheads? Well, yeah, the last time they tested something to scare everyone, their scary missile did not work. I expect most of their warheads in the state of being dysfunctional. It’s a paper tiger, it’s not China, it’s a fake state, a failed one. A mafia covered as a state.
>because his next successor could be smarter and more brutal
Why would they? Putin's actions, imo, seemed to be able rebuilding the greatness of the ussr, he's former KGB.
Maybe the next person would just be happy with power over one of the largest countries in the world. Plus the end of the war would make him quite popular with the general public
Actually, both.
Perimeter dead hand system algorithm:
1. If perimeter have been activated
2. AND there is nuclear explosion at russian territory
3. AND there is no connection to commander-in-chief
THAN release launch codes to every local military commander.
In this case, the CIA Director flew to Kyiv to warn of the assassination attempt along with the invasion itself and we know how accurate the latter turned out to be.
But sure, it could have been bad intelligence or it could be accurate. Given the brazen assassinations Russia has committed/attempted under Putin though, I see little reason to dismiss it simply because sometimes other intelligence has been faulty.
It's Putin who dreams of terrorist attacks. He attacks civilian targets, schools, hospitals, and residential areas almost constantly. To terrorize Ukrainians. Ukraine targets only military targets. Even after years of suffering Russia's terrorism.
And Putin has ordered multiple attempts to assassinate various presidents of Ukraine, including Zelensky. Putin as commander of this brutal war is absolutely a valid target.
It’s so funny all those Russia ‘supporters’ are unable to at least cover themselves with the proper correct spelling of Kyiv, they must write it as Russia does, wrongly. It’s so easily visible now, since the rest of the world respects Ukrainian choice to have their name written properly.
Bonus: now it’s so noticeable, the time zones in Linux. When I’m interacting with some old distros, it was Europe/Kiev, now it’s Europe/Kyiv. Mostly only Russians and their ‘supporters’ (usually just bots from the suburbs of St Petersburg) continue to write Kiev. Plus some people who are not interested in the topic, like at all. Or those who happen to read what Russians distribute. Next time you see Kiev anywhere, pay your attention at what narrative that person is pushing.
Imagine an assassination that is done with a drone mailed internationally to a PO Box. Send a gig driver to pick up a small box and drop it off at an abandoned lot.
The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.
Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.
While you define a legal act of war, that can stil be terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic that works by insipiring fear and causing a response. The attack itself usually doesn't do enough damage to change the outcome of the war.
By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
> Terrorism is a tactic that works by insipiring fear and causing a response. The attack itself usually doesn't do enough damage to change the outcome of the war.
But this wasn't that. This was taking out bombers. If anything, it reduces the amount of terror.
> By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia.
By that definition, every war is terrorism. And maybe it is, but this war was started by Russia. Russia is still the only terrorist state in this war, no matter how you spin this.
But that can be said for most actions in a war. Multiple actions taken together is what changes the course of a war
Giving one example, you could imagine that for internal reasons, the Russians must keep a facade of a war that is far away, changing that equation may produce enough pressure for them to eventually stop the war
> But that can be said for most actions in a war. Multiple actions taken together is what changes the course of a war
Yes, great point.
> you could imagine that for internal reasons, the Russians must keep a facade of a war that is far away, changing that equation may produce enough pressure for them to eventually stop the war
I wrote above,
By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
And as you say, it brings the war home somewhat. Imagine the response of Americans if a military base on US territory was attacked successfully.
We can debate the definition of 'terrorism', but a fearful pscyhological effect was, I suspect, the primary aim of the attack.
And that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do (if you attack legimmate targets, which Ukraine did). I think people on this thread think 'terrorism' is an insult.
I think generally terrorism has some other connotations which is why this is raising antagonism among Ukraine supporters
I don't think this is causing fear as the citizens do not feel threatened, as these are military targets. I think the feeling is more of the sort of "humiliation", which can indeed have valid political implications that may affect the war.
Putting aside that, denying the enemy its strategic bombing methods has various advantages in a war, such as less damage to infrastructure and in this case increasing domestic morale due to military success, and reducing Russian ability to demoralize by bombing cities
> Terrorism is a tactic that works by insipiring fear and causing a response. The attack itself usually doesn't do enough damage to change the outcome of the war.
Yeah, like the Blitz Terror bombing in WW2. But this isn't that. They attacked strategic enemy assets, so it's not terror bombing.
We agree, other than a matter of definition. I don't think the definition of terrorism excludes legiimate military targets, though it certainly includes illegitimate civilian targets.
> The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
Are. You. For. Real?
The planes terrorised Ukraine each and every night. Now obviously they’re gonna do it less. Since they mostly target civilians, it might not do much to the frontlines situations, and technically you can be correct here …
But my dude, are you aware you mostly push a Russian side in this thread? Eliminating so many war targets is a huge benefit for Ukraine. They eliminated one third of their strategic aviation, literally overnight.
I don't understand that. Nobody would debate that the countries are Russia and Ukraine, that they clearly are at war, and that the target was a military facility.
The mode is new, but you must agree that choosing cluster munitions for a church on Sunday is an actual nightmare compared to a slight background hum of latent independent drone missions.
When it comes to abuse of trust, I'm worried about goods coming from China. Israel's compromise of the pager supply chain shows that innocuous seeming devices can be weaponized via trust.
Imagine if every IoT appliance decided to burn down/self destruct and every phone with satellite connectivity decided to weaponize its battery pack. If every car with cell service connectivity decided to accelerate with brakes disabled at once. If every access point/router decided to make itself inoperable/turned into a bot net removing home internet all at once and likely shifting traffic to cell towers which could overload them resulting in zero communication. Imagine that as many devices as possible were programmed or constructed in a way to create failure on a specific date or period.
Sounds insane, but I would have said the pager thing sounds insane too. All those things definitely sounds possible to me.
i recently heard a podcast where a16z claimed this was one of the main reasons why you need a US electric vehicle and robotic industry - what if Chinese device could be weaponized at will in the event of a conflict?
A less far-fetched reason is that modern EV and robotics technology (lithium ion and LFP batteries, motors, power electronics, embedded electronics, RF electronics etc) is dual-use and absolutely crucial for building all modern weapons
It's not far fetched, not only is it perfectly feasible, there's now been precedence. If nation-state wants any hope of security, they need to have control of the entire stack. That's why countries are banning Huawei 5G networking equipment.
Ding, ding, ding. Welcome to the "Circus of Globalist's Externalities come home to Roost!"
At a certain point, you as a country can only be said to be capable of what you can do without external aid. The possibility that your Allies will always remain as such, either at their behest, or your own, is simply never zero.
Queue the Globalist's in the crowd going "The entire point was to maximize the amount of time before peace broke down through economic interdependence. Wrong. They optimized for that metric while maximizing the vulnerability to supply chain based attacks. They made individual countries less resilient and accepted the risk that if a much greater worldwide action potential was actually reached, everyone would be potentially fucked.
its much easier to buy them in the USA, like guns, bullets, grenades. to damage an airplane you dont need much: just a mix of molotov cocktail, and aluminum and metal shavings a-la Walter White in order to penetrate and ignite the fuel tank of a strategic nuclear bomber.
No need to buy compound and trigger authorities. Thermite is just metal oxide powder and aluminum powder that can be made at home, just add magnesium from matches to ignite and thats it.
I can now understand Palmer Luckey's point of intelligent weapons. It truly brings to life the quote from Game of Thrones, "Why is it more noble to kill 10,000 in battlefield than dozen at a battle." Intelligent weapons enable the second scenario. Civilian lives are mostly unharmed.
How about an automated weapon you shoot from a howitzer 15 miles away that autonomously surveils the area under it's impact zone for a couple armored vehicles and reliably eliminates them?
I can imagine this could have been the motivation 18 months ago.
"In the early morning hours of 29 December 2023, Russia launched what was seen to be the largest wave of missiles and drones yet seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War, with hundreds of missiles and drones hitting the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other cities across the country."
You have to wonder how much of that time was inventing/creating the actual capability on top of planning/rehearsing. Would be an interesting story in the mold of the "Dam Busters".
> Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory
The trucks used for the delivery were acquired (along with the mobile homes the drones were launched from that were on their beds) in Russia, as I understand it, not driven from Ukraine (of course, the drones still needed to be delivered from Ukraine for the attack packages to be assembled.)
> An amazing idea: Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory and let them loose.
Is it such an amazing idea? Imagine the shoe is on the other foot - would you normally be able to drive a truck full of drones into a country at war, say Israel? This puts a target on civilian vehicles.
> In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Again, is it such an amazing idea? Do you want to make people in charge of nuclear weapons more jumpy and likely to make a rash decision?
Put a target on civilian vehicles? This changes nothing. I don't know if you read or watched "generation kill" but even US troops shot at everything which came too close for comfort in Iraq. And I understand that, any unidentified vehicle could be hostile. You are not going to sit and wait to find out as a soldier.
Also they didn't drive a truck into Russia. The trucks were acquired and modified in Russia. And according to Russia they are not in a war. They are in a "special military operation"...
I would support this idealistic approach and disregard for consequences if we didn’t have an “ally” that’s doing exactly the same thing, and potentially vulnerable if a major power decides to intervene
Not just headlines being shared, but culture is still being shared.
Sure the shared cultural experience of being limited to a handful of TV channels is gone, but it's been replaced by a handful of streaming services. The world has shared the Marvel Cinematic Universe and 800lb sisters and Taylor Swift.
Seeing Taylor swift mentioned is weird to me cuz nobody I know listens to her. We had like, 10 international popstars thru my youth with the Disney ones too(not that anyone listened to those that I knew).
When I was young you couldn't NOT know the song "semi-charmed life" by third eye blind, or 50 other songs. Nowadays idk if that's the case. Then again, I'm not sure how much would be lost if my whole middle school didn't know the song "shake that Laffy taffy".
> I don't think the author's troubles have anything to do with AI, other than making it harder to get an interview.
The industry is ageist, but not "900 applications and 3 interviews" ageist. The big problem here is the concentration on remote work. I'm quite a bit older than this guy, quit a job earlier this year and went looking for work again only to find that "ooh, dream job, remote, nice little pay bump" were the jobs that got swamped with 1000 applicants.
He's simply going to have to move closer to where office based jobs are, suck up the commute for a while and when they have more confidence they'll let him work remote after a while.
Most of the jobs are likely getting swamped by AI generated applications, by overseas candidates and by every chancer who hates their current job.
In the current job market, there is absolutely no substitute for leaning on your personal network. It's the only real way to compete against AI and foreign workers. So that means, to give yourself options in a job you don't like, maintaining that personal network is absolutely essential. Instead of wasting the effort on 900 job applications after you quit or get fired, concentrate on reinforcing those connections whether you need them or not.
edit: I had my choice of jobs after a small wait, purely through people I know personally.
I wonder if he should consider taking his mother with him and moving somewhere with a better local job market. Similarly, parents move and take their kids with them when the job market demands it.
There is a separate conversation to be had about whether this is a good thing -- should we allow the job market to force people to move away from their homes/families/friends/connections? -- but it's already a fact of life for a lot of people.
just to offer a minor correction, the ratio was more like 800 applications for multi round interviews with ~10 companies (so maybe about 25 interviews). probably 25% of applications received a "no" response, while the rest ghosted
