In central Europe our biggest tarpit are sustainability / climate topics. Even founders that are smart enough to realize the difficulties still pursue these topics because of an unfoly feedback loop where government agencies almost exclusively fund those "societally important" areas. There's no other risk capital available so most founders align their goals, just to fold 1-2 years later.
I'm not sure I agree with this - though I'm not in central Europe.
Sustainability and climate are not products or businesses in themselves.
If you're trying to sell sustainabiity, what is your business? What are you selling?
If it's advice on how people can be sustainable, or carbon credits or something, sure, those are things that may be tarpits.
But electric vehicles were probably a tarpit idea until they went from being advanced golf carts to being real cars.
Environmentally friendly packaging is doing very well. Etc etc.
I mean that's better then funding a bunch of startups that try and use psychological traps to capture the attention of your kids and ruining their ability to focus. Most of them also fold 1-2 years later.
> I sincerely doubt that anything great in the history of humanity has been built in the post-lunch afternoon
Interestingly, late afternoon is the time that I am most productive when coding. At 6pm when work ends I often feel that I could easily go on for another few hours
I'm in the same boat where 6pm comes and I actually have a hard time shifting gears from writing code or thinking intensely about my project. I've been working on my focus and starting earlier in the day. The difference is when I get on track earlier I still chug along until the end of the day. Then by night I'm exhausted and go to bed early.
Work/life balance is important so I should probably listen to my body and focus when it wants to.
This is breathtaking. I watched a few videos, and am reminded of the alien evolution simulator that I am working on right now. But where my console-based program is crawling, this project is soaring through the sky!
Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles because of their extremely low thermal mass. Basically, they heat up quickly and cool down quickly. In most of Europe and North America you want the opposite: a structure that evens out high temperature throughout the day, and radiates warmth at night. Brick, stone, or clay do that very successfully. Think of an old stone church at a warm summer day: it's comfortably cool inside, completely without AC
That is good for temperate climates in the right season when there is a big difference between day and night. It's a terrible design for consistently hot or cold places. i.e. Norway in the winter you're running some kind of heating (coupled with insulation) around the clock. A large thermal mass would just be constantly sapping that energy away. In Spanish summers a large thermal mass just means you don't get to take advantage of the slight cooling you get at night.
If your daily high or low temperature is still twenty Kelvin below or above a comfortable temperature, insulation is far more important than thermal mass.
>Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles
I can't find any research backing this claim. The exact opposite appears to be true. Stone remains cold all winter and hot all summer. And it's expensive to heat and cool.
In addition, wood can be renewable and has a much smaller carbon footprint than mining and quarrying.
I'm still stuck on dirt-crete (concrete made from dirt and/or saw dust) walls after seeing the vibrant aircrete community on YouTube. It looks like an excellent solution for walls. Thermal mass, air entrained, cheap materials, easy to shape.
Not waking up earlier to the fact that the meat section in the supermarket is a product of systemic, gruesome torture of intelligent beings.
Like probably many of you who read this, I usually felt a bit guilty when I was confronted with the ugly facts we are all vaguely familiar with. I justified my meat consumption with specieist arguments (humans are so much better than pigs, cows, etc).
My wife challenged me to watch at least a little bit of a documentary, and if I still wanted to eat salami, so be it. Afterwards I didn't want to eat salami anymore. I now think that the extreme abuse of animals by the food industry on behalf of ignorant consumers is probably the worst evil of the 21st century.
If you disagree, I challenge you - watch 15min and then post your reply:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
I think the "aha" moment was when I was thinking silently about how great this veggie wrap was, and someone expressed disgust. They said nothing compares to a meatball sub, and I realized that my palate had changed because I used to feel the same way. Like if you don't hork down a big chunk of meat, your meal is incomplete. But deliberate effort to be healthy and moral had changed my taste buds and gut. The sacrifice is not as big as you think. As for me, I will still eat a steak if I really crave it, but I typically feel heavy/slow afterward and it's just not as good as they say.
A few minutes of skipping around Dominion for me too.
> I now think that the extreme abuse of animals by the food industry on behalf of ignorant consumers is probably the worst evil of the 21st century.
I agree, there's no comparison, billions of land animals a year, trillions including sea life. I can't count that high.
The pain has gotten worse year after year. You watch otherwise smart people give bad arguments, or complete ignorance. To maintain any kind of social life you have to deal with being uncomfortable with those around you.
Hopefully we can have small impactful moments upon other's lives.
My stock response to assertions that eating meat is cruel: plants feel too. Many species are self-aware every bit as much as animals are. It’s only because wheat and corn don’t have big googly eyes that we feel no sympathy for them. Implicit in the act of consumption is the notion that our lives are worth more than the lives of whatever we eat.
Even if it's true that plants feel and suffer, the pipeline of plants -> livestock -> food still kills many (an order of magnitude at least) more plants than the direct pipeline of plants -> food, so eating animals still causes more overall suffering.
In that sense, it seems to me that a plant-based diet is still the preferable choice if one wants to reduce unnecessary suffering.
It's an admittedly fun argument, but it has flaws that I think make it unsuitable as a strategy for destroying vegetarians with facts and logic. It relies on abstract, black-box constructions of notions like sensation, awareness or intelligence based on analogy and observation, whereas in animals we can also rely on arguments based on equivalent biological structures. The breadth of that construction also has some intriguing but pretty challenging implications: you might also need to accept sentient traffic jams and Kubernetes clusters that feel pain.
Beyond all that, though, I think the major flaw in your reasoning is it treats concepts like awareness or moral worth as binaries, with language like "every bit as much" and "only because". Of course, one reason we don't treat wheat with empathy or offer it moral equivalence is because wheat doesn't look like us, but that's far from the only reason. Wheat is simply a less complex form of life than a fly, and certainly less complex than Google Chrome, neither of which I feel much compunction about killing when they are consuming my resources.
If you're going to accept an incredibly broad definition of awareness, then that definition also needs to be nuanced and gradated or else you end up saying nothing only with more words. You can absolutely define feeling such that grass can feel, but if that's also "every bit as much" as what humans feel then you've arrived at a notion of feeling that's almost tautological and struggles to support any meaningful consequences. We and the grass are also carbon, I suppose... or energy? I'm not sure why it matters. I care about the version of feeling that made me cry at the end of Homeward Bound, and plants don't have that, no matter what you call it.
All these contradictions disappear if you're willing to say that different forms of life have different levels of awareness, and different degrees of moral worth. Intuitively, I care less about the death of an animal than the death of a person, and I care less about the death of a plant than an animal. That exact mapping from being to moral worth is going to be pretty tricky to define, but I think it's pretty hard to argue that animals should have none at all.
If animals have non-zero moral worth, then there is some area between the curves of your enjoyment and their suffering within which it is okay to eat them, and outside of which it isn't. I don't have any desire to tell you what your curves should be, but as a matter of my own observation, I haven't found vegetarian food in general less enjoyable than food with meat in it. There are exceptions, of course, and I still eat meat sometimes, but as a practical matter I found the exchange rate from dining enjoyment to animal wellbeing very favourable. You might too.
I can think of worse evils than the animal consumption industry: child sex slave trade, starvation and death of millions, genocide.
I get your point and don't disagree that animal suffering is terrible, but I wish people were more moderate in their language and not so quick to jump to hyperbole. No one can care about everything, and everyone's thing is 'the worst thing'.
Have you watched at least 15min of the linked documentary? I am asking because I actually chose my language deliberately. I might be ignorant about extremely atrocious evils that happened on a large scale over the last 22 years, but at least to my knowledge and my subjective feeling, the systemic animal torture that is inflicted unto many millions of intelligent beings every day as shown in the documentary Dominion is the worst.
But I don't need people to share my opinion, you are right in that this is an important topic for me. What I just would like to happen is that people realize that eating animal products is evil enough to change their diet.
I watched the entire pig section at the beginning (so more than 15 mins.) Thanks for linking it — I’ll watch the rest later. I would still eat pork and don’t feel it’s the worst thing that exists in the world. (I eat a lot of vegetarian and vegan food though too.) It’s very bad, so I don’t mean to say that what I saw was no big deal. But I wouldn’t call it the worst. This documentary shows the absolute worst bits together so it’s a bit slanted. We have different value systems and opinions. I hope you don’t mind me sharing mine.
Tofu, Tempeh, beans, peas, Fu [1] (found in Japan but you might see local variants of this). If you are living a sedentary lifestyle you are bound to overeat if you want to reach anywhere near recommended protein levels. So it's just inevitable you will want to supplement your food with Protein powders. Soy Protein is a complete protein and much cheaper than Whey or Casein.
You would be surprised how much protein is in certain vegetables, though most are not "complete" proteins so need to be combined with each other. So just eating a balanced mix of vegetables helps a bit (along with the obvious stuff like beans, nuts, pulses, tofu etc).
No I'm completely vegan by now (though I was vegetarian for a long time because cheese had a strong hold on me).
Regarding small butchers / organic farms: a long time ago, I spent two days at a tiny organic farm that was run by a local politician of a European Greens party. By meat industry standards, this farm was an absolute animal paradise. I helped around the farm, including with slaughtering a pig. My job as the guy from the city was to just herd it into the kill room. The pig seemed intelligent to me, it was confused and didn't want to die. A crew of men dressed in wifebeaters stunned the pig with an electroshocker, lifted it up with a chain, sliced its arteries to let it bleed out, all while cheerfully drinking beer. They made crude remarks while blood and guts was spilling everywhere. Needless to say, there was way more chopping to be done after that. The scene had a surreal quality to me - what had just been alive a moment ago was now dangling in halves in front of me like in a horror movie. The pig probably didn't suffer, but the experience still felt deeply wrong to me. But here's the kicker: even after this close-up slaughter experience I still continued to eat meat for years, because I just was so used to it. Back in the city, in the gleaming supermarket, meat again stopped being something that lived, and was again a yummy product to buy.
Long story short: even the best farm and the best butcher (which are getting exceedingly rare) are still using, abusing, and ultimately killing intelligent beings. This also does something to the people that do the killing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50986683
I grew up around a farm for a while, and my stance today is that I only eat animals I'd be willing to kill myself. Which pretty much just knocked pork out of my diet, since as you pointed out they are very intelligent animals. The overlap between "smart pig" and "dumb dog" is substantial.
More like dumb pigs are on the level of smart dogs. "Pigs are widely considered to be more intelligent than dogs and equally as intelligent as chimpanzees. "
This is actually something we're not super sure about ourselves yet. I think AI art is quite interesting and has a lot of potential for use cases like this course (where we can affordably create hundreds of highly specific illustrations). Of course, the tradeoff is that you end up with illustrations that give off an uncanny vibe, for example the face of the monkey in our hero.
My greatest fear is to make the course too generic when using stock art images. Do you know a (low-budget) way of getting many interesting illustrations?
I'm Fabian, the CTO of Frobocode, and I'm pretty frustrated with the state of affairs of coding courses. 10 years ago, MOOCS promised to give us really good educational content that everybody can use to learn programming. They never delivered.
It's 2022 and we still don't have anything resembling A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. What we need is to get out of our lecture-focused educational mindset, which evolved in the middle ages because of the scarcity of books. Why can't education instead be based on gamified, personalized storytelling?
Some great examples are vim.so, Everyday Data Science on Tigyog, Code Wars, and SQL Murder Mystery. Me and my co-founder are also throwing our hats in the ring, and are currently working on the first chapter of a pilot text adventure course. In "The Grand Web Adventure", we want to take students seriously, and show that a gamified course can be both fun and deliver results.
Right now, we only have a signup page publicly accessible, but we’re hoping to finish a small preview lesson for trying out the course soon. We’d love to hear your feedback about the idea, as well as your experiences of learning to code.
I like that format, but the problem in my opinion with such courses is how linear they'll be.
When actually what a person needs when learning a subject is exposure through different methods and ways, and of course, time!
Otherwise they'll be a one trick poney. I know so many people that did different bootcamps and my experience with them is similar, they need a lot of extra training because everything they've learned was in a very linear way. Sometimes it would be better if they would start from scratch and forget what they've learned in the bootcamp.
Every entrepreneur is trying to find the next method that will teach coding to beginners in no time, but nobody is focused on actually building people from beginners to experts.
Some platforms like pluralsight tries that, but they are mostly boring courses.
In the end we have a lot of competitors in the same space, when exactly zero are worth to subscribe long-term(like pluralsight, but it's fucking boring).
Good point, I think nothing can replace the actual experience of learning coding out in the wild. I personally think that the single most important step for a student learning to code is the transition from the "happy path" of an online course / classroom to a private project where they actually get exposed to all kinds of realistic real-world problems.
This step is actually something that we want to focus on in the later course chapters - e.g. all the things that are required to actually host a website (buying a domain, deploying code, caching, etc)
As a typophile, the body/H3 text (P/H3 tag) where "letter-spacing" set to "-1px" and "-2px" respectively, makes the website content difficult to read since each letter doesn't have enough room to breath.
"No offense but do make a shareware version. Demo if you're younger. No way I'm paying for something like this based only on marketing copy."
I'd add to this: give me why reason anyone would buy something like this based only on marketing copy. Personally I'd consider such a person extremely gullible.
Tailwind is a thin wrapper for the people scared of CSS. I use Tailwind at work, and it opened my mind to the benefits of an "ugly" html layout with inline styling. However, being there now, I think that inline CSS offers the better "Tailwind experience" - CSS requires no setup, and learning it properly is a good investment for the future when Tailwind, like so many other frameworks, will inevitably end up on the frontend dumpster fire.
Inline CSS has a few HUGE drawbacks compared to Tailwind, but I think the biggest by far is that your devs are totally unconstrained in what they can do for styling. You're forced to rely solely on convention to not, for example, violate your color palette, or use the wrong border radius, or the wrong padding value. For a small app with a small team and no concrete design system that's not a big deal. At scale that is absolutely massive.
A few of the other advantages of Tailwind:
- reduced noise in the markup compared to raw inline styles, with the underlying styles getting cached by the browser
- utility classes can contain multiple properties that should always go together
- media queries!
You should learn what CSS is actually doing as well, but realistically Tailwind is, like you said, a pretty thin wrapper on CSS. Learning Tailwind usually just means learning CSS, with some different property names.
I was about to say, if anything it shows there is demand for the style tag to handle pseudo selectors. Setting up some CSS variables on the root and accessing them through the style tags would provide most of the benefit of Tailwind.
Good point, I don't know of any way of doing that inline. So that's definitely a good convenience function in Tailwind!
My lived approach to inline vs. not-inline is: why not both? Inline is great for prototyping, and for edge cases, like specific margins for wrapper divs. Where CSS classes really shine is when it comes to mature / often used components.
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