Yeah, around here we worship Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, Elon Musk and Richard Stallman for being insufferable, arrogant pricks but Heaven forbid Simone Biles be even a little bit proud of herself.
Again, they are moving the world in some direction (a good or bad - I won't comment on that). How is she moving it by a jot?! How is this an achievement on the grand scheme of things? Have you seen what animals can do with their bodies? Have you seen an Alpine ibex, for example? An squirrel? A cat? Will this impress an alien civilization?
You have a reductionist view of both people and society that I find uninteresting.
Your fixation on "great man" view of history, in which only those who affect society on a grand scale matter, belongs in the last century, as does your reductionist view that societies "progress" along some linear axis of "good" or "bad." Everyone affects society, everyone matters, and society moves in countless directions at once.
Nevertheless.
However unimportant you may consider Simone Biles, the fact still remains that she's accomplished far more than you likely ever have or will. So apply your own rubric and find a bit of humility. She has achieved master status in her art. She has doubtless inspired generations of gymnasts with a lifetime of practice, effort and skill, and made an indelible mark on her field. She's the best in the world at what she does. What have you done, Nikolay?
...that's a rhetorical question, I don't actually care.
Well, maybe I won't be more accomplished in your eyes as obviously your value system differs from mine. But I've tried hard in many way to change things for better - not for me, but for others and for the future generations to come. And I have some successes. What is she going to accomplish? Make money and make others follow her lead? And that would be great, right? Well, not for the planet - that's for sure!
> What is she going to accomplish? Make money and make others follow her lead? And that would be great, right?
She inspired me and other in her boldness
> Maybe she is. I see no grace in her performance though. Maybe I'm too used watching Soviet Bloc gymnastics. Isn't this artistic gymnastics? I see no artisticism in her performance, just routine - it's like a robot doing it, but failing to land properly
Your lack of interest in pushing the boundaries or rejecting pre established rules (Who said gymnastics should only be about art? Why do you think soviet block country must forever be the model?) strikes me as dull and classicist.
You would be very happy in China mainland, where you have one model to obey and follow, coming from the top down, with no room for inspiration or breaking the mold.
I don't follow you as gymnastics in China is way more popular than gymnastics in the US. America has always been based on following role models and all was good until the Kardashians and gangster rap singers become those. Given she competes in the artistic gymnastics field, being artistic is a key component of the sport - it's sport, but it is an art, too. Rhythmic gymnastics is way more artistic, I agree, but it also is much more complicated than simple athletic routines and it's dominated by Eastern Europeans mostly due to the focus of beauty, grace, and clockwork coordination. Again, not sure what boundaries she's pushing in this breakneck act - there's no human, who can push the boundaries beyond those set by animals.
> However unimportant you may consider Simone Biles, the fact still remains that she's accomplished far more than you likely ever have or will. So apply your own rubric and find a bit of humility
I love your take. It makes me happy to find the rare soul on HN who gets it.
Accomplishment is more than accomplishing something. Go to PubMed and you will find a lot more role models to follow and heroes to admire than all the circus clowns cheered in the MSM. A scientist may not get all the fame and cheering a clown gets, but they do accomplish a lot more in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe she is. I see no grace in her performance though. Maybe I'm too used watching Soviet Bloc gymnastics. Isn't this artistic gymnastics? I see no artisticism in her performance, just routine - it's like a robot doing it, but failing to land properly.
Rare to see such high quality content here. I share your analysis. But I believe Xi came at a time the mainland needed to be strengthened, to avoid being trumped over again (opium war like)
He is still needed? Maybe, because you said:
> The last 4 years saw rising nationalism in the US, and it has also been rising in Europe and in China. This is not good.
It is not good. Eventually the future for the mainland is bright, with good material condition and freedom. The situation is not ready yet. You can not "impose" democracy, the population must be ready.
But I believe all is done right and set for the generation being born now ("3 children per family") to be the happiest in the world.
Look, I understand the sentiment and context. China saw what happened in the USSR, and what's happening in India, and they are rightly fearful that a mob of 1 billion people who have not risen to the level of the 300-400 million middle class Chinese, pose an existential threat to the stability of the country if a power vacuum were left. They need to bring up the rest of the country to, ironically, prevent a communist revolution to the current "state capitalist" system they have.
The US came frighteningly close to instability during the Great Depression until FDR launched massive infrastructure projects, created social security, built 40,000 schools, created the GI Bill, etc.
But there is a such thing as overdoing it. I don't believe the current censorship is actually creating stability. Most educated Chinese know what's going on, can use VPNs, and the creativity of using anti-censorship terms on Weibo, shows people still want to criticize the government. (for example, mentioning Chloe Zhao was banned, so Chinese netizens started using her pinyin initials or English initials like CZ to refer to her, and the algorithms didn't pick it up)
Scarily enough, Xi has created such an atmosphere of nationalism, that "cancel culture" on behalf of "patriots" these days is enough to ruin someone, you don't even need the government to censor. If you criticize the government or China online these days, netizens will crush you.
M2 port would have been awesome!
I believe the comment stating Jetsons were expensive was made in comparison with the RPI4, which also lacks an m2 slot. I really do find Jetons much more affordable when performance is taken into account, again, Tensor aside.
They can also boot from USB3 as of recently, which boosts storage access speed tremendously.
> The industrial/commercial cookware he lists is definitely durable
No, it is plain wrong. He recommends borosilicate beakers for beer. I think he never worked in a lab: borosilicate beakers break. Their thermal expansion tolerance is a non feature for cold beer: when did one of your beer mug broke because you served yourself boiling beer?
> Does your glassware meet ASTM Specification E960, Type II requirements? Is it manufactured from 33 expansion, low extractable borosilicate glass conforming to USP Type I and ASTM E438, Type I, Class A requirements? I didn't think so.
I call that hacker syndrome, when the typical hacker thinks a long line of impressive specs and numbers matter, because he has no idea of the customer requirements.
> Used to contain a life raft. Now, my groceries.
How easy it is to clean when there is a spill? How easy it is to replace? I have carried BRICKS inside the nylon woven bags some supermarket sell for $1.99. Rinced with water, ready in 5 minutes.
> For less than $100, I can buy a short USMC Short KA-BAR or a real M9 from Ontario for $150. This is the real thing, used by the US military.
Show off!!
If you want something to bring in a fight, get a Mark 1 trench knife: has brass knuckles for punching (and limit the risk of dropping your knife), a long thin blade for more lethality (easier puncture wound regardless of angle than with a wider blade). And in the kitchen it is ideal to break walnuts :)
Of course it does not look "nice" - like carrying bricks in a nylon supermarket bag. It is about knowing the needs you optimize for.
The beaker example is the worst one, because the shape of the beaker is meant for controlled pouring out one point and no spills anywhere else around the perimeter. A drinking glass is designed for sipping which is completely different. If you tried drinking out of a beaker the flanged opening would tend to make the beverage pour down either side of your mouth.
It's also sort of a bad idea to normalize drinking out of laboratory glassware. Granted your home is different from a real lab, but lab workers have died drinking something they thought was water.
In my dad's lab in the 1970s, they used to make coffee in a large Erlenmeyer flask and filter it under vaccuum with a Buchner funnel. The safety director eventually banned it and made them buy a Mr. Coffee.
I wonder how many undergrads will disassemble their bongs made from spare bits of chemistry glassware after reading your warning about drinking from lab equipment.
I think you're missing the point. Nobody cares what ASTM Specification E960 is, it just sounds cool. Some people like industrial/military stuff for its own sake.
Instead, get a Yogabook C930 with a dual display eInk + color, and touch + pen support on both screens. Great for notetaking in portrait mode: looks like a book, you write with the pen on the eink side while reading PDF or websites on the other side. Smaller than a macbook air or an ipad. Feels lighter too when held like a book in portrait mode.
Better: Fold over to use eink as the main display in mirror mode after updating the drivers. This suspend the color display to save battery. Ideal with a bluetooth or mechanical USBC keyboard: 2 USB-C ports for charging and connecting a peripheral at the same time.
> A touch keyboard is a no-go for me, sadly. Especially for this kind of usecase
Get a USBC mechanical keyboard if that's your thing ; an amd64 tablet with a eink display and enough ports to connect a mechanical keyboard is quite unique.
If you plan to use it as a "laptop", you are missing 95% of the usecase: it's for taking notes with the wacom pen (55% of my use) and using the eink screen as the main screen with a physical keyboard (40% of my use).
The remaining 5% is using the touch keyboard to type a login when I can't be bothered to grab my laptop in the next room
Oh I see they also made one with a real keyboard as recently as last year (thinkbook plus), wonder if the eink can be drawn via software directly (instead of using it as a regular display and let the driver guess how to optimize draw calls).
Windows 10 is going to become a better option for Linux development than MacOSX : before, it was already good with WSL1 and 2, and the lighter options like msys2.
With that, all I need is a better filesystem to move disks with unix permissions.
I predict BRTFS or another "modern" filesystem like XFS will soon be supported out-of-the-box.
Very sad to see an alternative view point downvoted. I've used professionally Linux, Windows and macOS, and I agree with your assessment.
Issues I have with macOS dev I don't have with WSL 2 or native Linux:
- crappy Docker performance. Need hacks such as NFS mounts.
- case insensitive filesystem. I had to create a special volume for MySQL on a case-sensitive version of HFS or some client projects would fail with random errors
- I'm not a fan of Homebrew.
- BSD coreutils are not as good as GNU's (YMMV)
- it might be a certified UNIX™, but the OS fights you if you try to work outside /Users or /usr/local. Changing a conf file in /etc means losing any modification on the next OS update.
- very definite feeling the machine isn't my own (SIP, Gatekeeper)
--
These days my OS of choice is Windows, and my second choice is Linux. macOS is great for any other task which isn't gaming or working as a full stack engineer.
Homebrew is very bad, probably one of the worst package managers I've used, and light years worse than Arch Linux pacman or apt, which I'm not a fan of, but better than Brew.
It's certainly one of the better macOS package managers, just because it's the most used — so it has more packages than the competition.
It can be hard to say what's best altogether, since paradigm (rather than individually differentiating virtues) might dominate a user's preference or need.
There's a set of common problems that all package management systems eventually have an opportunity to address, and each tradition is committed to a few fundamental tradeoffs in its solution to those common problems. Additionally, there are problems specific to each paradigm, and solutions within a given tradition address those with varying degrees of success. Package managers generally inherit the virtues and defects of their traditions when it comes to how they solve the common problems, but they can excel individually in terms of how well they resolve the problems specific to their paradigm.
Incidentally, Homebrew is a ‘traditional’ source-based package manager, but it's also been developed more or less naively (i.e., without serious examination of any other package managers in any tradition). So it has most of the annoyances that are common to traditional source-based package managers, and it additionally bungles a lot of the fundamentals compared to competitors in its class.
As for what's good: how detailed of an answer do you want?
Not the one you're asking but I use snap, flatpak, apt, nix, and guix all on one laptop and nix and guix are far and away the finest, minus the invisible autoupdates of snap, a feature which tons of people hate but I love.
Any package manager that manages mutable and non-deterministic packages should be doused in gasoline and set aflame.
I've only spent a lot of time with homebrew, apt, yum, dnf, pacman, and the latter is miles ahead in speed, efficiency, with the only drawback behind non-sensical option mnemonics: so instead of `pacman update all`, you get used to doing `pacman -Syu`
Then add Arch Linux's AUR, and you get the best ecosystem in the Linux world bar none.
It takes very little effort to setup them up, you can install via Windows Store, and start the VMs like any Windows program. What's not approachable?
> the terminal (the new and old) are pretty limiting
Windows Terminal is a big leap forward, but it still feels clunky compared to terminals in OSX/Gnome/KDE. It's little things, like copy/paste or even highlighting text - the lack of a right-click context menu is frustrating. But it's still a welcome effort, and native ssh support means I can rely on putty a little less.
> ...anything competes with Mac OSX terminal out of the box...
Would you like to explain how? Maybe not iTerm2, but the Windows Terminal is a pretty capable terminal compared to Terminal.app and it's development progress has been phenomenal.
> WSL1 and 2 aren't super approachable even now...
How so? WSL2 ships with a full Linux kernel, the GUI/Audio support has already hit Insiders and installing Ubuntu is literally two clicks on the MS Store.
You're kidding, right? It's less than 5 minutes of setup. We spend more time on Google/StackOverflow trying to find the right setting for Docker or other random things.
Not for casual use. There's no reason to use BRTFS or XFS on single-drive computers, unless you have a specific need for something like snapshots or checksums. BRTFS does let you do crazy things like split a single drive into 2 partitions, and run them RAID1.
It's all fun and games until you try to expose a networked application from within WSL2. Throw Docker into the mix and you've wasted half a day configuring this nonsense.
I love that spirit :)