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veen  ·  15 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 13, 2024

We're slowly starting to work on a plan to get our garden from 90% brickwork to 'as little pavement as we need'. We had a garden designer help us think through and make a first design, which we promptly iterated over until it looked almost nothing like what he drew for us. But it's still useful to have done - gotta start somewhere.

Now I just hope there's a few warm/sunny spring weekenddays to get the project going. So far this winter has been oscillating between "cold as fuck" 20% of the time and "mild, but raining" 80% of the time. Last week saw the first sunny mild days which was a nice change of pace, albeit another climate record shattered.

veen  ·  28 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 28, 2024

Started swimming again this week. I have lost the motivation to go to the gym a while ago but it's painfully obvious that I really need some form of cardio if I want to have the stamina for a busy/fun life. Cancelling my membership there when I can.

There was a period of my life where I was a gym rat, and last year it's been great for recovery workouts, but it doesn't work for me anymore. I just don't have any strength goals, am not the insecure twentysomething that needs strength to compensate for confidence, and don't enjoy going to the gym enough to get motivation from there.

Swimming is something that I do enjoy a lot. It combines the runners-high that I get (only after weeks) from the repetitive movement, it sends my heart racing but forces me to stay calm and keep down my breath, and I always feel good afterwards.

veen  ·  34 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 21, 2024

We’re house-and-dogsitting for two weeks for a friend. I was worried the dog might be anxious or something for a few days, but he’s been nothing but a happy-go-lucky doggo from the get-go. He listens really well to commands, is easily motivated by food and after two days he now lies down beside me while I’m working from this home. It’s clear he has come to like me (more than my SO for some reason) and it is very fun to walk anywhere near him and be met with the thump thump thump of his wagging tail.

Ohhhhh I’ve had that indecipherable infrequent egg burn for so long! I’ll try that from now on. I just compensated with more butter but that just results in very greasy eggs.

Maybe 4) would be to let the pan and oil/butter warm up entirely and thoroughly before adding anything else. I’m always so impatient to start and it often hurts in the long run.

veen  ·  47 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of Dollars to Reshape Business of Chips and AI

veen  ·  51 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: For when the nerd helmet isn’t nerdy enough

Personally I'm convinced the walkie-visionie applications like Joanna Stern's cooking are the eyecatchy red herrings of this device. Like the fuckin' gamified vacuum cleaning video - it looks new and cool and we can go ooh and aah, but it'll get old veeerry quickly.

If I'd have to bet my money, I think the best possible future version of this is that it'll be a device for the times when you go 'I want to do something on an iPad, but bigger, but I don't have a big screen'. Really, how often is that?

I still think I want to try it out. And who knows - maybe lying on the couch with a 200" fake screen on my ceiling is the best way to watch Interstellar. But I doubt it's thousands-of-dollars better.

veen  ·  52 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 563rd Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately"

Same! Quickly becoming my most listened new album this year.

veen  ·  54 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Happy 50th, D&D

I've been playing D&D on 'n off for the past...six years? I'm very glad I found it, but I've also just finished prepping my first one-shot using an alpha version of what I hope grows into the D&D killer. At the very least it is a much more fun game already, finally stripping out the weird war game legacy shit that never really made sense in D&D but would anger the grognards too much if it were removed from D&D. Personally, I just love the combination of narratively tense tactical battles and collaborative storytelling that keep me coming back to TTRPGs. It's just such a different medium to tell stories in than games, tv or film.

Matt Colville (of the aforementioned D&D killer) pointed out that there have been a bunch of cycles of interest, hype, excitement over new versions of D&D, only for it to grow stale again (or get superseded by WoW). The last years were definitely a new upswing for D&D that I rode along with, but I am also quite certain the inflection point is in the past and we're on a downward trajectory again. In no small part because Hasbro wants their properties to go bajillion-or-bust and D&D has never, will never be a cash cow the way Magic is, even if they manage to Netflix it up by making 6th Edition some kind of online tethered game. Kinda remarkable how varied and interesting the TTRPG space seems to be these days while simultaneously having D&D as the undeniable centerpiece.

veen  ·  55 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

Americans hate transit because it’s usually not a viable alternative to driving. Not always though - 65% is no joke.

The first law of transit is that people will always drive unless transit / cycling is fast enough. If the travel time of transit is below 144% of that of driving, more than half of people will choose transit. Your 45 minute bus trip is a 26 minute drive (Maps tells me) so it’s just on that threshold. You’re totally right in assessing that for a lot of people and a lot of trips it’s garbage, because it just takes too fucking long and the bus doesn’t even go where you need it to go.

The second law is that transit needs to do everything right to succeed, whereas cars need to suck real bad for people not to use them. That 144% assumes the transit system is working, people know how to use it, and it’s not just perceived as a plebeian can of sardines. I don’t buy that the geography of US cities prevents good transit, I just believe it’s transit on hard mode. Canada’s superb suburban bus networks prove that you can make a successful transit network even in car-dependent suburban hellscapes. That does require buses to be fast, to get priority and to have an agency and city that really get that. A friend and transit professional of mine objected to a pedestrian crossing that the city wanted to place, because that street saw 26 buses an hour each way and if you calculated the extra cost just in terms of paying bus drivers that €2000 of paint would cost the transit agency over €120K a year, let alone the time it asked for everyone riding it. So they didn’t.

veen  ·  55 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

Good ol' trifecta of incompetency, power grabs and grift. That makes...more sense. Fuckn' stellar journalism, Vice.

Over time I've come to appreciate slash realize that on a fundamental level, the general public simply does not care for public transportation. It's why the US gets so many trams that should have been metros. Even here - the railways cut service in half to a rural-ish city, and people grumbled and some politicians sputtered, but transit is only 13% of all trips so they'll grumble and sputter and the train just won't come more than once an hour and the people will adapt and the people will forget it wasn't always that way and they will wonder why the roads are so busy these days and they will never link the bad choices in the past to the bad outcomes in the present.

veen  ·  59 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Knowledge Economy Is Over. Welcome to the Allocation Economy

Dan desperately wants to be an auteur. He's not.

What I like about the metaphor is that it reminded me a lot of how I feel like managing interns at my job. You're gonna need to instruct (prompt) them in a particular way, they're gonna run in whatever direction that seems good to them regardless of if it actually makes sense/is true, and it's up to you to coordinate various people and make sure the right task befalls the right person (model). It's a metaphor on how to use the increasing array of different tools and models and interfaces and whatnot. I feel there's a difference between how I use a normal tool versus how I use AI tools, precisely because they're both unreliable and a way to boost creativity or to outsource easily-controllable tasks. (Lke interns.)

I fully agree that managing people and, you know, their feelings & morale & motivation is what a manager's actual job is, but I find the argument that Dan makes where "we are all gonna be a bit more managerial due to AI tools cropping up in our job in weird ways" at least somewhat compelling.

veen  ·  63 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: January 24, 2024

Editing my fiancée's choir concert together that I recorded last month. Davinci is a surprisingly easy program to learn, when you're like me and refuse to read anything and prefer to stumble/google your way forward. The video is pretty okay considering the awful lighting conditions. It was...a bit too stressful to record (I had like 2 minutes left of disk space at the end and had to hotswap 2 batteries during recording three times) but my new Fujifilm delivered on its video chops.

The audio is splendid - as per KB's recommendation I got a Zoom H1n and put it in the exact spot it needed to be. HOWEVER, I noticed during setup that the piano chair creaks. A lot. Considering I put the Zoom something like a foot from the chair, it would be very noticable. There was an attempt to fix another chair, but it failed, so now I have a perfect recording except for that chair. Even KB with all his might & prowess could not find a good way to get rid of it in post, which is saying something. Thankfully the creaking gets less earpiercing over time, so I'm just gonna run with it and call it a learning exercise for everyone involved.

The concert did inspire me to think about learning to play cello. My fiancée not only sings well but also plays the flute phenomenally, and my MIL picked up the alt violin again. It would be amazing to play some music together but right now I have only the most basic of piano skills (it's not my instrument, I've learned) and a bunch of rusty high school guitar skills (which is also not my instrument anymore). So there is room for something else.

veen  ·  75 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: FT Alphaville's spreadsheet of BTC ETFs

…why? What’s the significance of it beyond the minor step towards governmental legitimacy and retail acceptance of crypto?

veen  ·  76 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What We Learned in 2023 About Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis

My assertion would be that there is a direct line from

    i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear

to

    if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth

that doesn't seem to happen often enough. You'd do it, because you know full well where the internet is unsafe, but for the vast majority of parents it seems like an insurmountable task so they just don't. I'd argue the point is not to scare parents, the point is that parents should be helped in managing this shit because the techbros sure as fuck won't help. Tech always moves much faster than society can catch up to it, but in this particular case we seem to be lagging behind in a very painful way and the consensus seems to be to maybe do the absolute minimum.

Is the Internet a net positive? Well, yeah, but in moderation. So is alcohol as kb points out. I, too, was a socially isolated preteen on the web and have seen my fair share of awfulness due to the complete lack of any parental guidance. But it exposed me to ideas and information and people I'd otherwise never meet. Because it was hard for anything to engage me irl. I fled to niche hobby phpBB forums and mowed down pedestrians in GTA: Vice City when I was nine.

    i don't see how the solution is continued coddling

I agree, so I think the solution is better parenting. I don't think I ended up worse from my exploratory years on the Internet but that was way before algorithmic feeds, with my own cautiousness a determining factor in what I did and did not do. Kids and teenagers benefit from parents giving them some borders. I didn't get any, but I came of age just before social media really shaped teenagers. Gen Z also didn't get any restraints, but got rekt by social media. Thank fuck it's dying, but that doesn't mean we're out of the woods I think.

    make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax.

This strikes me as a very absurd juxtaposition. What percentage of parents do you think are even aware of these dangers? because I'm afraid it's very, very low. My parents knew literally zero about the dangers, this generation of parents know...some things but it frustrates me how far we still have to go.

veen  ·  91 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 27, 2023

Hey look, it’s three Christmases in a row ruined by illness/covid! The fiancée has been ill for over a day with the covs, I have not…yet.

veen  ·  99 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you Reading?

I've been enjoying slogging through Grueber's The Dawn of Everything. As for a bit of lighter reading, I just started Titanium Noir from Nick Harkaway and have what if? 2 for when I'm in the mood for silly physics. It's not his best work but it's passable and scratches an itch.

Quick vent, I have not been reading much the past two years and it's frustrating me to no end. I've been religiously time-tracking my reading since February of 2017 and it looks like this:

2017: 167 hrs

2018: 249 hrs

2019: 152 hrs

2020: 143 hrs

2021: 123 hrs

2022: 65 hrs

2023: 52 hrs

...yeah, I just looked, I have 5 unspent Audible credits and 3 books I have already loaded up (The Goneaway World by Nick Harkaway, The Song of the Cell by Mukherjee and Hidden Potential by Adam Grant). I have a pretty good (as in, long) commute now but haven't been motivated enough to jump from light podcasts to a book.

veen  ·  99 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

I thought I'd read this before... turns out my memory wasn't failing, but it has been a looong time:

    It's a fundamental, speechless recognition of a vast difference that has no supporting evidence for its existence beyond cultural choices. It's a horrified, irreversible recognition of a great wrong that you have no way to right.

That's a good way of looking at it. I might've talked about this before, but when I was working with Americans for a project I did in 2020 it was an...interesting look into the hypercapitalist abyss. Someone on the team having a breakdown over their health because of its ties to job security was quite the a Bass Pro Shop moment, so to speak.

I distinctly remember the Americans being annoyed at me and my colleague being fuck'n gone AGAIN every 8 weeks or so because we have reasonable PTO (in my case a slightly above average of 30 days/yr) that we reasonably use, during which we reasonably disappear off the face of the earth. Their annoyance was frequent but also brief in a - I now realize - "I don't want to think about this for too long, let's go discuss something else" kinda way. It might've just hurt too much in exactly the way you descibe.

    This is not because Europe is a bunch of laggards, it's because Europe had less room for improvement.

Did you know we invented a term for that?. I'm glad you're catching up on worker's rights and you're right, I probably underestimate the leaps and bounds that have been made since I last visited the other side of the pond. I think we, as far as labour go, only got two things out of the pandemic: immense pressure on blue collar work (with very strong calls for a minimum wage raise) and a seemingly irreversible increase in the number of WFH days to two or three for most white collar work. Nothing earth-shattering - for me it seems energy insecurity and inflation has had a bigger impact on society than labour reforms.

I do now wonder what impact Brexit had on all of this, and thus also on the Economist's lukewarm take. It seems to me they basically slid further back the past years. They're not just geographically in between the EU and US, economically too, with classism thrown in for extra spice.

veen  ·  111 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 6, 2023

I just realized I hadn’t updated y’all on the fact that I’ve been effectively free of any long covid symptoms for at least a month now. Yesterday I rode a bike for 5 miles and my heart rate stayed under 120 for the first time in what felt like forever.

    What blows.my.mind. is that this is clearly and obviously a conscious policy choice.

The interesting part to me is a) seeing the massive decrease in inequality realised in the past years, and b) ruminating on the exact causes. I'll give you the Economist is not very good at the latter, but I'd be surprised if the largest determinant in this blue collar revival is policy, and not "covid / russia and its implications". By which I mean: covid caused large disruptions in global manufacturing and massive shifts in (the willingness to do) blue collar work. The Russian invasion caused energy insecurity which pushed inflation even further than the labor troubles could.

I get that the U.S., with the benefit of hindsight, has made the right choices to navigate these unprecedented times, but isn't that secondary to the larger economic forces at play here?

veen  ·  117 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 556th Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately"

Such a heartwarming song:

I've been fascinated/mesmerized/amazed by Caroline Polachek's voice this week

veen  ·  133 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 15, 2023

Is it just me or does it feel like Substack is the only place left where there's any original, consistently good writing? Blogs feel dead, social media (especially Twitter) fails to deliver...

Spent a few rainy days in Antwerp with friends. On Saturday we went "huh why are all the stores closed?" only to realize its Armistice Day, which is Not A Thing in the Netherlands because we remained neutral, so I had no idea.

Next Wednesday is Election Day. A few months ago I was hopeful for a leftist renaissance, but that ship seems to have sailed as we are somehow gonna slide even more to the right after 4 cabinets of right-wing neoliberals. I haaattee itttt.

I feel like everyone has some kind of covid/flu thing, there's something going 'round and I was almost sure I got it yesterday but it seems to already fade away today.

veen  ·  140 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 8, 2023

Celebrated my third decade ‘round the sun this week! We are also taking a week off. Yesterday we found a fantastic new spa nearby, today we’re off to Antwerp to visit friends for two days.

veen  ·  141 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rethinking “driverless cars”

"No idea how we'd do that" is a good way to condense it. But it just seems like every promising foray into improvisation done by computers ultimately turns out to be a fata morgana or a false positive. What hopes I had before this week have been put to bed now.

Put differently, how long must we search (and how many billions do we/Google/rich people spend) before we ask ourselves the hard question whether this is doable at all. That may very well turn out to be a failure of imagination on my part, but personally I feel like the position of "this is, for the forseeable future, iron law" is preferential to "it might work some day (we just don't know how, and have no practically attainable idea of how)".

veen  ·  141 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rethinking “driverless cars”

As if an intervention is gonna last only seconds, lol.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one gobsmacked and outraged by that fact. Never thought that the definition of succes for a company like Cruise isn't "is this safe enough for rollout", but instead "are the downsides linearly scalable" like every other fucking startup.

veen  ·  141 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rethinking “driverless cars”

Personally I do think there is an argument to be made that self-driving cars might be in the realm of "this can't work because physics", if we define "physics" in a particular way: this can't work because the physics of compute tech and AI cannot reach the levels of safety that we might demand from an actual, fully self-driving vehicle.

Because, let's be honest, it depends on a) Moore's law continuing, b) an unattainable amount of data or some unforeseen leap in ML that allows it to reason outside of its training data. I came across this which argues that GPT-2 can't reason beyond its training data. Much like GPT, the dominant idea of AVs is that they would be either able to preload everything they could ever possibly encounter, or that they could reason outside of that dataset through some kind of magi- I mean AGI. We know through Waymo/Google that the former is pretty much impossible in the near future, and we know through Tesla and GPT that the latter is also impossible in the near future, especially if what that paper argues is a fundamental part of all ML models and AGI turns out to be just a rabbit pulled out of the hat.

veen  ·  151 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why driverless cars might—or might not—be at the end of the road

I didn't know about the whole 'Waymo requires manual rules per road' thing, that is wild. Really puts a nail in the coffin that Google's "we simply scan the entire world and the car will have enough information to drive" is a formula that after a decade plus they just can't make work.

At least it's good to see one obviously risk-taking company put in its place with Cruise's pullback. Hopefully it's only a matter of time before Tesla goes the same way with their even-riskier approach to non-highway automation because that stuff is not, will never be safe enough because of their tech.

veen  ·  154 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 25, 2023
veen  ·  154 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 25, 2023

Aquarium update: after waiting probably too long for the new tank to settle, I decided to add livestock (some neon tetra's and panda corydoras). It's been going great.

I also had totally forgotten that Cities:Skylines 2 launched this week. Supposedly it's optimized more poorly than Cyberpunk was at launch, making 4090's sweat if you have the wrong settings. But I was due for a GPU upgrade anyway - my ancient 1060 couldn't manage a playable framerate in CP2077 even if it were in optimal condition.

veen  ·  161 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 18, 2023

Got myself another Pfizer. Was the only one under 60 there.

Caught myself wanting to work last weekend. That’s a good sign I suppose. There does seem to exist a Law of Continual Work Suck in our household, as whenever I have it easy or good at work my SO has a hard time and vice versa. Right now she’s considering jumping ship.