Empty advice like "you should want what I want, because here is how it works for me", benefits from pushback.
Another common one: responding to a commenter's device or OS problem by suggesting a platform switch. Despite the massive number of unrelated tradeoffs such a decision would involve.
And of course, the pedantic "well, it always works for me" or "really, that should work", chime-in non-advice to just not have the problem in the first place. It is tautologically effective, but ...
The advice was to question what is truly needed. I may be a bit on the extreme end, as I never stop asking this question and seeing what life is like without various things.
This doesn’t seem like horrible advice to someone who is running into UI breaking problems. This also isn’t a new notch issue. I remember this being a common topic of discussion going back to the 12” MBP 20+ years ago. People with a lot of menubar icons would have them collide with the dropdown menus. I ran into this issue on some apps, even with a 17” display at the time.
I started to treat these limitations as a positive thing. One could call that Stockholm syndrome or worse, but I found having some of these limits changed how I think about problems. I no longer default to solving problems through addition, and instead first look if a problem can be solved through subtraction. This has been one of the most positive mental shifts in my life and has paid dividends in both my personal and professional life.
Of course the obvious answer to solve the problem through addition are the apps that let you place the menubar overflow into an expandable area or dropdown (like HiddenBar); I think they can also be added to Control Center now. However, I figured someone with that many items up there would already know about those utilities and maybe doesn’t want them for some reason. Those utilities also mask the problem for those who haven’t taken the time or energy to look at their setup critically and push back on their own assumptions of what they really need.
One might say that type of user is less likely on HN than in the general public, but I have seen it at all skill levels and backgrounds. For the more technical user, they hear about something, it sounds cool, they install it thinking it might be useful someday. It never actually makes it into their workflow, but during their evaluation they remember that it sounded cool and keep it around to use “someday”. I used to be this person. I had all the popular menubar apps, geek tool displaying stuff on my desktop, PathFinder replaced Finder, I was all-in.
People can and will do what they want. I’m just pushing back on the idea of what they want, the same way you’re pushing back on what I think you mischaracterized as empty advice.
Apple should let users double the menu bar height. Put the app menus, user name, current time and search along the bottom. A text only bar would look coherent.
Then put menu bar items on the row above. Default from right, but let users move items to the left.
I use hiding menu bar and dock. Dynamic Wallpaper toggles desktop files/widgets visibility. So my Mac's resting face is, and would remain, completely uncluttered.
This writes itself. It shouldn't, but "should" as a concept needs a lot of work.
And even that isn't accurate. They are not bending the rules for a trillionaire, they are maintaining the consistency more systemic rules. This is how it has always been. We can all point to real or perceived ethical islands. They certainly exist, and are worth creating and preserving. But for now, the sea still sets the rules, and the sea is deep. For the deeper system, island visibility is a useful distraction. Sometimes something heavy moves near the surface and we misinterpret visibility as exception.
Did you get lost and start writing a poem? What’s all this about the “sea”? Fine. Let me turn down my anti-Elon-ness for a bit and caveat that the timing of these changes coinciding with this listing is suspicious, no? Grant me that at least. And then we can, with new found common ground, investigate the motives behind such a change.
Granted, indeed, and with the summarily bestowed honor of our royal favor.
Yes. The changes for Elon are exactly what they look like. Preferred treatment in exchange for the priveledge of being paid vast sums to serve him.
My sober point is that this is absolute par for the course. Every whale gets this treatment. Elon can take his business somewhere else, and expects something for not doing so.
The exception here is not a bent rule. But that the special treatment his spending power "merits" is so enormous, that the proportional conflict-of-interest sacrifice, is unusually visible.
Other names for Gödel encoding: Digital. Binary. Zorros and Unos.
Today Gödel encoding is so pervasive, it’s easy to miss that everything is trivially Gödel encladed. Because like most everything invisible, it’s right in front of us.
We Gödel our memes and gift cards, and (pick your poison) pr0ns. Colors and AI’s, lax ASMR’s and our (sneaky don’t read me) terms of service. Even this very small humble .
Gödel isn’t eating the world. Gödel already pööped it.
That period was encoded in a symbol string, i.e. it is a bit string.
Today we encode everything in bi-symbol strings.
This was not common when Gödel crafted his incompleteness theorem. And at the time it was a novel approach for setting up a context for testing the limits of computing.
Some people can still be struck by it as novel when reading the proof, because in context it was, and still feels that way. But today "symbol string" representation is ordinary and pervasive.
To be (an actual) hedge, something needs to be very solidly understood (by the purchaser), a very solid investment in its own right, and either reverse correlated or independently correlated specifically with a particular asset being hedged.
And not based on analysis of one "hedging" scenario, because both are going to be owned over a huge distribution of scenarios.
Probably the worst indicator of an investment being credible, is a promoter who has to stoop to the floor to ask "What's wrong with hedging?", as if that manipulative bon mot was ever in question, or was the relevant question.
If a motivated promoter can only make a very bad case, believe them.
And, if an "expert" attempts to get respect for their work from non-experts, instead of from other experts, there is something very wrong. Because the former makes no sense.
--
If you don't know how to get respect from experts, study more, and figure out how to trash what you have. Counterintuitive. But if you have anything original right, thats how to find it. Identify it. Purify it. And be in a better position to build again, with just a little more leverage, and repeat. Or communicate it clearly to someone qualified to judge it.
You won't have to persuade anyone.
If you have to persuade someone, either you don't have something, or you don't understand what you have well enough to properly identify and communicate it.
You have ambition. You have motivation. You have interest. You follow through and build. That is it. Don't stop. Ego derails ambition. Kill your darlings. Keep going.
Why would experts care about my product? There's no big money behind it. The big money has to come in first, then the experts come later to tell the big money whatever they want to hear. Maybe they want to hear the truth maybe not... Either way the paymaster always hears what they want.
Besides, I am an expert. I studied cryptography at university as part of my degree. I have 15 years of experience as a software engineer including 2 years leading a major part of a $300 million dollar cryptocurrency project which never got hacked... I know why the experts were not interested in my project and after careful analysis, I believe it has nothing to do with flaws in my work.
If anything, it might be because my project doesn't have enough flaws...
At this stage, I hope you're right. I hope I will find the flaws in my projects that I've been looking for after 5 years.
You are leaving something out then. Which you allude to.
Bravo on five years! I recently solved a problem that took me over 30. I originally thought, 3-5 months maybe, then 3-5 years, ... I am happy it didn't take 50. I have killed a lot of my own darlings.
Well apparently you know what you are doing, I am sure you have something.
I have found the best language models are great at attacking things. You may have already done that, but if not its worth a try. Free brutality.
> Harmful mutations can accumulate through inbreeding. Yet somehow Neanderthals managed to survive across most of Eurasia for nearly 400,000 years
It is also true that inbreeding for extended periods weeds out both dominant and recessive bad genes very effectively. As long as at least one good or not-so bad alternative is maintained.
So not as surprising that small groups can last a long time, once they reach a threshold, as implied by the article.
It’s a brutal way to improve the stock, as lots of individuals suffer until (and in service of) a debilitating gene going “extinct”. And every new maladaptive mutation restarts the process, but it works.
On the upside, any adaptive mutation can just as quickly become pervasive.
The biggest downside in the long term is a lack of genetic diversity as a shield against new diseases.
In captive breeding, it's a brutal way to "improve stock" but in wild populations this is pretty normal for large mammals. It also generally happens more slowly... so isn't that different from every other ambient process that selects some genes and culls others.
Fwiw... something similar also occurs with outbreeding/hybridization. Novel gene combinations can be maladaptive, just like double recessives.
These are all pretty normal population dynamics.
There are billions of us now... but that's not normal for a large animal, especially predators. How many leopards, or bears, or elephants are there at any given time?
I wouldn't single out the concern new diseases if the population is small. Most diseases co-evolve intra-population. The lethal ones are the ones that suffer a mutation and are suddenly able to be passed to a different 'species'. So, if they already survived on a 'knife's edge', immune variety is of comparatively low concern (but still existential) on the list of things that can end your species (climate change, competition, demographics - 2-3 infertile females in a group of 20, say bye bye to tribe).
Isolated populations are all going to be creating isolated variants of any disease doing well enough to stick around.
And the impact of events where any individuals die to a new variant, is amplified for a small population. The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.
Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.
But you are certainly right that the cross-overs are incomparably worse. And diversity becomes species extinction protection at that level.
> The risks of highly correlated vulnerabilities are on top of that.
For small groups, it doesn't matter too much if it's correlated or not. A 'small' hit doesn't exist, so 20% or 80% is a wipe-out either way. You don't have big population dynamics, you can't take even a 20% hit to your population as a small group. Even if you'd have the genetic diversity of modern humans, your population would still be damned (my 2-3 females gone example, it's an extinction vortex [0])
> Variants of the flu continue to quietly emerge and kill people today. Despite all our regular exposures to their constant churn and weather shielded environments.
Flu is specifically adapted to exactly what you point out. Check out virulence in doors vs out doors for influenza. Also, it's precisely regular exposures that allows influenza to persist, as it has a rapid mutation rate, and it benefits from as much exposure to humans as well. There is no evidence for Flu before the Neolithic, precisely because the flu is adapted to constant exposure to an inter-connected population, requiring a critical community size in the hundreds of thousands.
I think we are more or less agreeing, but emphasizing different valid sides.
After all, as much as cross over illnesses are orders of magnitude more dangerous, they are also orders of magnitude reduced in threat distribution, for any low population species.
The integrated surface x time surface area for transfer just isn't there. Lots of low population species last millions of years, or tens. And even then, die off for other reasons. despite their extreme and persistent low-diversity vulnerability to any successful cross over parasite/illness. Neanderthals are not exceptional on that count.
Hosts feel like they have everything to lose by not banning problematic accounts, everything to gain by performatively burning anything “sketchy”, and nothing to lose by the inevitable automated over banning.
I almost lost everything because I used a state ID that was not a drivers license (which i did not have at the time), in combination with another complication that was “caused” by a recent move between states.
It made zero sense if you are not an automated system, and would have been devastating if I hadn’t figured out a path through it. I spent three weeks under enormous stress, as my savings, among other things, were needed to pay off the majority of my house right then.
But despite the insanity, it was easy to see the pedantic digital “reasoning” that was happening.
The mass centralization and automation of commerce is pushing us into dystopia. Brazil.
We are not safe. I mean that. Until laws make corporations responsible for these kinds of harms, with fines on the order of historic fortunes, if they don’t, it is going to get worse.
The “mind boggling fine” part makes for a hard sell. But it is the only way to create balance against the mind boggling levels of centralization and profits that insulate these companies of any personal individual level ethics.
Another common one: responding to a commenter's device or OS problem by suggesting a platform switch. Despite the massive number of unrelated tradeoffs such a decision would involve.
And of course, the pedantic "well, it always works for me" or "really, that should work", chime-in non-advice to just not have the problem in the first place. It is tautologically effective, but ...
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