jmopp · HackerTrans

But when you succeed in the game, then what? Yes, the real world is full of endless trials and never a payout. But the entire point is that there is no point. The fun is in the journey. The real treasure is the friends you make along the way, to quote the meme.

jmopp

2 年前議論

It's kind of like how the north star for a programmer is to automate themselves out of the job. A good manager will bring the best out of their reports, which leads to making good decisions and executing on them.

jmopp

2 年前議論

It's not the kidnappers trying to contact the family in this case. It's the clinic administrator who doesn't know why their doctor hasn't shown up for a week

jmopp

2 年前議論

On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West Africa due to being kidnapped/robbed etc and someone local tries to contact the family back home, but all the messages end up getting blocked.

jmopp

2 年前議論

The trick is not to do it at the embassy, but to take a two-week holiday and do it in South Africa.

jmopp

2 年前議論

I always thought fusion was easier than fission, since all* you really need is water and electricity — the problem being that it's currently impossible to get more energy than what you put in

* I am eliding over the fact that building a Farnsworth fusor is still a challenge, but less of a challenge than sourcing, purifying, and enriching uranium certainly.

jmopp

2 年前議論

Fun fact: the descendants of Moctezuma still live today as Spanish nobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo

jmopp

2 年前議論

The bicycles that were made from wood and iron gave an extremely stiff ride and were called boneshakers.

jmopp

2 年前議論

The Amish view of technology is a bit more nuanced than "modern technology bad". Generally, technology needs to have a legitimate purpose for the community in order to be adopted. So a grid connection would be bad as it's a connection to the outside world, and electricity on tap would encourage vices like television. But battery power, or solar power, where the purpose is simply to power your tools to make your work more efficient is acceptable. Were people to start hooking up smartphones to the solar panels and posting videos on TikTok, the opinion about the technology might change.

jmopp

2 年前議論

As someone who uses curl and postman regularly, both tools have their places: I've found curl most useful for quick ad-hoc requests, or if I need to figure out why my service is no longer working. Postman I've found most useful to create a library of requests that are available on-hand: If I need to call services but I don't want to have to remember what the exact URL is or what the exact payload is.

jmopp

2 年前議論

Since we're in the realm of fiction, Harold is a Helion employee and has first dibs on their container-sized fusion reactor.

jmopp

2 年前議論

Yep, any kid who obsesses about the periodic table of elements can figure out how to collect radioactive isotopes and attempt to build a simple nuclear reactor. Most don't, because they know better.

jmopp

2 年前議論

Presumably you would have built up a pension in your previous country, which you can draw from. That would satisfy the requirement for an independent source of income. When Britain was in the EU it was (and still is) common for pensioners to live in Spain.

jmopp

2 年前議論

I don't know, slumlords charging an exorbitant rent for a shack is a thing.

jmopp

2 年前議論

This. In poorer parts of the world, you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years, but once your child finishes school and finds work they're contributing to your well-being and to helping feed the younger children. You also need not worry too much about your retirement, because you know your family will support you, and you'll play a role raising your grandchildren and great grandchildren.

jmopp

2 年前議論

I did wonder why the podcasts I listened to on Spotify had ads in them which were clearly targeted to my region.

jmopp

2 年前議論

I do wonder if the window for observing it empirically has passed. Pretty much everywhere in the world has access to artificial light — even if it is in a cheap, low-tech form like a hand-cranked LED torch. And those people who remain uncontacted have made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted.

jmopp

2 年前議論

I don't know. Sports cars are notorious money sinks. The person who took the bus might be more financially prudent.

jmopp

3 年前議論

Peter Thiel might have been a libertarian in 2009, but he's not a libertarian anymore. He's jumped fully onto the nationalist conservative train. https://reason.com/2020/08/02/wait-wasnt-peter-thiel-a-liber...

jmopp

3 年前議論

That's the slippery slope people who want to take away rights exploit. Sure, you can believe women shouldn't vote. You can even go around telling people you believe women shouldn't vote. But just because you can say something, doesn't mean you should. If you say you don't believe freedom and democracy are incompatible, I am absolutely going to judge you for it because it's a stupid belief for which there is no evidence. There are several free democratic nations, a much larger number of unfree democratic nations, but there are no free undemocratic nations. And it doesn't take a degree in sociology to figure out why that is the case.

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