Knowing facts matters quite a lot imo, even if it doesnt 'seem' like it.
To use another metaphor, you can't REALLY see the forest amongst the trees, if you don't consider the trees themselves.
One of the reasons I like history so much is because, with enough facts accumulated, you can see how one piece of information flows into another - e.g. dates matter, because knowing the precise order in which important events occur helps you determine how those events may or may not have affected each other in the course of their unfolding.
Sure memorizing dates is boring on its own, but putting them in contexts is exciting - you still need to comb the beaches to find the right stones!
I accept the ordering of dates is important, yes. History can be in the details, but as you say you need to comb the beach for the right stones.
I guess an interesting counterpoint to what I said is something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory (and similar) where a grandiose framework tries to fit inconvenient facts into a shape that is entirely invented.
I think this might not be true though. This is like saying a marathon runner can walk like an amputee using a prosthetic.
Just like anyone else with a disadvantage, people who aren't that smart develop diverse compensatory strategies to work around their intellectual limitations, and these can look very different from popular caricatures of "dumb guy". A stupid person is not as simple as a smart person might imagine.
But by talking to them you can tell. It doesn’t matter if they made a ton of money selling real estate or whatever or have lovely personality traits or… let me know if I’m missing something. You can still tell by talking to them, because the structure and detail of a smarter person’s thought process is impossible to fake*. If you are similarly smart you can mirror their structure in your head, but if you are not you will just think they are saying something weird or confusing. Whereas there is nothing stopping a smarter person from simplifying their thought process when communicating, or filtering out thoughts they don’t think will be understood by the listener. Extremely smart people can get very good at this if they are well socialized.
It's funny to imagine that's the reason why "aliens invading us" or "AI taking over" are finally defeated at the end of a movie with a really stupid trick.
> the available emulators may just not be good enough, such as for example the CDi and 3DO.
funnily enough, the first public version of 3DO is now available on the MiSTer (se: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyew7oHGyNE) - its doesn't seem perfect, but its not nothing!
Emulating the 3DO is a complete pain in the ass, several reasons:
1. There’s not that much interest in general, most anything interesting got ports to other systems.
2. There’s no such thing as a 3DO. There were several, and all of them function slightly differently, usually an irrelevant difference in functionality, but if you’re making an accurate emulator it means you need to make a dozen emulators, actually.
3. Apparently the hardware is just weird in general. See also the N64 for an example of a system that suffers from this.
that's funny, i know where this story is set (i grew up there) - or at least, the place Claude was basing things off of
some inconsistencies that stuck out/i found interesting:
- HWY 29 doesnt run through marshfield, its about 15 miles north.
- not a lot of people grow cabbage in central wisconsin ;)
- no corrugated sheet metal buildings like in the first image around there
- i dont think theres a county road K near Marshfield - not in Marathon county at least
fwiw i think this story is neat, but wrong about farmers and their outlooks - agriculture is probably one of the most data-driven industries out there, there are not many family farmers left (the kinds of farmers depicted in this story), it is largely industrial scale at this point.
All that said, as a fictional experiment its pretty cool!
I think it serves even better as a metaphor for software engineering's future than as a forecast for the future of farming. As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about. Software people, though, are still twentieth-century programmers at heart, who are just starting to feel their way through the Kubler-Ross process.
Really a great story, and to the extent it was AI-written, well... even greater.
> As you suggest, farmers already had to make the "transition" over the course of the 20th century. A farmer from 1926 wouldn't recognize his counterpart today. They would have nothing to talk about.
Automation and technology in general have made it possible to do more farming with fewer people: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso... . In the US job market, agriculture accounted for 51% of workers in 1880 and less than 3% in 1980. It now appears to be closer to 1% depending on which source you reference.
Hard to imagine many occupations that have undergone more radical change in the recent past than farming. The profession is now utterly technology-dependent, and a few companies like John Deere have hastened to take unfair advantage of that. Hence the growing advocacy of right-to-repair laws.
Mass Transit isn't the solution on its own. It needs to be Mass Transit PLUS people living around mass transit stops.
Mass Transit will never, ever, ever work in rural areas where houses are 2-5 miles apart from each other. It would barely work in suburbs, and only certain kinds like bus transit. You're never going to get a subway to work in the suburbs. Mass Transit is great for cities though, we should be building more of it.
Trolleys and Regional Rail work great in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the state actually gives SEPTA funding so they can keep their vehicles up to date and pay their workers fairly
> $116k — Senior software developer yearly salary. Interns makes more than that in US. Not that anybody's hiring interns anymore, but that's not the point.
Some interns make more than that.
I highly doubt the median intern does, even a SWE intern. Please think beyond SF/NYC.
Yeah this is a crazy comment to me. I know multiple people who had entry level Wall Street and NYC/SF SWE offers back in 2022-2023 and I feel like $120k was really good for even an entry level position, let alone an intern. I guess maybe inflation in the past few years might have changed this.
I don't find Notepad++ to be a good replacement for (the old) notepad, personally. It's too feature-filled. The big win of notepad was that it was genuinely minimalist.
True, I can ignore them, but they're still a distraction and impact performance. For the use cases that I want the old Notepad for, Notepad++ isn't a great alternative for me.
I live on the north side of Chicago and, to be honest, one of my favorite modes of public transit is the express buses that go from Edgewater/Uptown to downtown.
It's MUCH faster than the train, because once it hits the highway, it doesn't stop till it gets downtown.
Dont get me wrong I love the train, but the red line suffers from the same too-many-stops problem.
Express buses thread the needle imo precisely because they hook into existing infrastructure (highways) and still move masses of people
Good point but the solution you are describing is having a tiny minority of busses that move quickly between centers of activity faster rather than decreasing the stops on the vast majority of the line.
my backpack hasn't shown any major signs of wear or tear in the.. idk, 5 years since purchase?
I left the shoulder sling in an airplane a couple years ago - it was in virtually perfect condition as well, I'm still pretty bummed at its loss.
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