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5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Try to set up https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq impulse responses for headphones, and you _will_ inevitably hang your X. Daemon isn't terribly useful on its own if you can't set it up to do what you need. So anyone considering Pipewire as a "better" alternative to anything should also know, at a minimum, that it's difficult/impossible to uninstall and buggy AF.

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Pipewire for some reason insists on using GTK4 for its UI though, which hangs X cold if you use any of the popovers in it. I didn't even know it was possible to hang X like that.

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And that is why I won't be buying one until at least 2025, and unless they also remove all on-device spyware and let me power it off for real without it broadcasting its own location when shut down.

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> If Autopilot poses a significant risk to other road users

It does not, if you use it as Tesla tells you to use it - paying attention to the road at all times and with your hands on the wheel. If you don't do that, Autopilot is probably still better than distracted driving - over the years I sometimes would catch myself drifting off in my thoughts as I was driving to the point where I wasn't even sure how I drove my car for the past few seconds. I bet this happens to others, too, and often. Between that and even semi-autonomous Autopilot, Autopilot seems like a safer choice, and it'll only get better from here on out, though I don't think we're anywhere near real "FSD" where you'd be able to read a newspaper as the car drives itself.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

> Go over on data?

Or you could be a T-Mobile subscriber and never "go over" on data, even when abroad. It just gets slower, but that's fine most of the time, at least for me. It's amazing to be able to use even slow internet in the butt crack of the world somewhere without paying an extra dime - that's the way it ought to be on all carriers.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

It is still useful for you to know. That "overhead" often does very little to advance your career or even just advance _you_ professionally. And until you measure how much overhead you're incurring, you wouldn't even know.

Much like how people didn't know they're spending 4+ hours on Instagram and YouTube every day until Apple started cataloging and surfacing phone usage. When I saw my own usage I was horrified, and I have cut it down significantly since then, and closed FB and Instagram accounts entirely.

To translate that into the professional domain, there may be some optional bullshit activities you participate in solely because you don't see their cost. You'd be able to identify them and cut down on your participation, possibly either improving your career situation, or improving work/life balance, or both.

There was a time when I worked at a BigCo where there was so much bullshit during the day, I only could do work from home in the evenings. So I worked ~14 hours a day for years - 8 hours spent on bullshit, then another 6 at home on actual work. That wasn't fun at all.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Try actually tracking the time using a free service like Harvest. You'll be surprised just how much longer some things take objectively than subjectively. I'm not saying do retrospectives every week or whatever, but do at least a few, then take note of time sinks and weigh their utility against the time they take. I don't think one can build awareness of this without measurement, something the essay also alludes to.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

As someone who also tracks time in some amount of detail (to bill clients for it), communication, and _written_ communication in particular takes a surprising amount of time. All those Slack threads you might not even think twice of engaging in can easily destroy half your working day, even if you ignore the cost of context switching. Emails take longer than you think. Design docs take _much_ longer than you think. Code reviews take longer than you think also.

For me at least coding seems to take less time objectively than subjectively, but it's also quite obvious that most of my time is not spent on coding, sadly. A good chunk of it is completely unproductive bullshit that simply has to happen because that's how the company chooses to operate. I tell them it's not the only way to do things, but they insist on wasting ~1.5 person days a week on "standups" and "scrum" (the team is 12 people, excluding me). They could _easily_ move 50% faster if they shed that bullshit and just gave people sizable tasks and some degree of autonomy and personal responsibility. Instead it's down to who can _appear_ the busiest during standup.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Not anymore. Go to Redfin and see for yourself. I wasn't even looking in the "city proper", I was looking within half an hour drive to Austin downtown. I consider it dumb to buy property without any land to go with it, so I wanted a decent house with an acre or two of land at least. The only decent options I was able to find were all over a million dollars. And then there's flood insurance to contend with in Austin area - you really have to look where it does and does not flood or you could also be on the hook for $1K/mo in flood insurance, without which the bank won't issue a loan.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

In this case terrible traffic is the result of buding a ton of crooked relatively narrow roads without any rhyme or reason. Family with children _cannot exist_ in most of the US without a car. Even in Austin itself if you don't have a car everything is just too far apart, and you could spend an hour or more fetching groceries quite easily. I actually forgot my driver's license at home and while it was being fedexed to me I got to experience the car-less Austin lifestyle. Let me tell you authoritatively, you wouldn't want to live like that. But at the same time if you live in Austin itself you don't want to bother with a car either, there's relatively little parking, so you'll really be struggling to find a spot once COVID subsides. I've seen the same deliberate shrinkage of parking happen in other "progressive" cities. Nobody gives a shit if you got kids and need a car. Another thing that Austin shares with other progressive cities is its massive and growing homeless population, though I must also say that even the homeless people are nicer there than, say, in SF or Seattle. At least I haven't seen anyone shoot up heroin in public or shit on the sidewalk.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

The traffic situation is already pretty bad in that area, seemingly deliberately so. That is the case even during the pandemic, I can only imagine how bad it is when _nobody_ is remote. It seems that progressive Austin wants everyone to move to the city and give up their cars, which is not a realistic thing to do for most people in TX because it's not built for such lifestyle. I have no other plausible explanation.

Since I'm apparently "posting too fast", I'll just post my reply to the post below here.

US cities (including Austin) are not built to make this viable. I grew up in Russia which mirrors the European way of building things. Everything you need for your family is within walking distance, for what I hope are obvious reasons. The US is not built for this. If one's goal is to get rid of cars, you have to build cities with that in mind. This takes decades, which is why nobody seems interested in actually doing this. Instead we get this passive-aggressive "let's build less parking and roads" thing that you see in US urban centers. No attention whatsoever is paid to how the folks actually live, how they raise their kids, and so on. I'd also argue that, as we switch to electric (and eventually to nuclear power, since that seems inevitable if we actually want to solve the climate crisis rather than just make Al Gore filthy rich), cars will become less and less of a problem, and population will spread out rather than move into the cities. Cities are a bad deal as it is. Expensive real estate, congested roads, high crime.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Don't know yet. One thing I realized is I can't really decide whether a place is worth moving to without living there for a few months. So that's what I intend to do before I uproot my family and move. I like TX in general, but a week or two does not give an even remotely complete picture, beyond just the basic "affordability" and quality of available housing stock.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

I've looked at properties in Austin area a few months back. It's more affordable than CA, but it's still way out of reach of most non-HQ staff that Tesla employs. I've read the stat that property values have gone up 43% due to exodus from locked down blue states over the course of just the past year. Couple this with Texas' higher than average property tax rate (_especially_ in Austin area) and you've got some pretty un-affordable housing. FWIW, I'm looking at FL now instead.

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100% predictable. They'll eventually move factories there as well, at least the ones where there are a lot of employees. CA is downright abusive to businesses. Only the highest margin Silicon Valley style businesses (which Tesla isn't) can survive in such a hostile regime, and only out of necessity - because that's where talent happens to live. As talent distributes more and more and companies move out, CA will run out of other people's money. Happens every time. That's why they're planning a wealth tax which you'll continue to pay for 10 years after you move out.

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Mainstream news is just naked propaganda, so I'd also like an option to pay them nothing, in the unlikely event such a subscription is actually available. They aren't doing it for money anyway, and whoever is paying for what they do will just continue paying, because they need manufactured consent.

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That's what I already do, but the fact that publishers get zero from this is not lost on me.

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Apple, do please kneecap Google's advertising as well. In fact, eradicate unwanted advertising entirely and do what you did with Music - sell a subscription so I could browse the web without this bullshit, yet site owners would also get paid. Brave is trying to do this, but they lack the critical mass. Apple has the critical mass of basically everyone who has the money to spend, worldwide, as well as their credit card info.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

It's tough being an AWS fan for that matter too. Aside from the simplest things, every time you need to do something there are huge reams of "documentation" in various stages of decay, and each doc is comprised of dozens of (unnecessarily) manual steps. Error messages are shit, too, and the whole thing has this stench of massive engineering debt and duct tape to it. I was told this stuff was supposed to be built by people who know what they're doing, but apparently not. It's duct tape all the way down it seems like.

5 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

Same thing in a lot fewer words, for "visual thinkers" among us: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just mathematics. Celebrate those dimples on the surface of human knowledge, if you can, in fact, even make them. Very few people can, and our future depends on them.

6 वर्ष पहलेdiscuss

And just like that, within a year pretty much all of Apple's lineup will become the best available platform for AI inference, since each and every one of the new machines will have a TPU.