I think the general resistance from older devs comes from the velocity of software in the past decade. I just connected with a former manager I worked with at IT services from my university and we talked about how crazy tech has moved since my time working there. I had the privilege of working on the data center before the university moved to AWS. The entire backend was written in pure C, running on BSD. We had monitoring scripts written in Perl before getting a contract with Splunk. My manager worked on the design of the distributed file system for the university, and is still an active contributor to the distro. It wasn't the greatest system, but it sure was cool. I'd be a little salty too if some MBA came in and said, "we're moving to AWS, Okta, Workday, and Splunk. And oh by the way, we have to rewrite the system in node.js, and these interns are going to do it. Have fun!"
Enterprise software is going nowhere but sideways for 2 decades already.
But yes, the velocity of new bullshit with dubious value that is consistently getting add on top of each other is just amazing.
By the way, I still haven't seen any single project get value out of SaaS auth (both auths) systems. Why the hell people use them?
Also, I had to check: "The key to driving your business forward? One powerful AI platform that keeps your most important assets on track, every decision on point, and your fleet of AI agents at peak performance. That’s Workday."
Well, people here still didn't manage to make LLMs do anything useful. That's despite a strong push from the top to use them, and many very smart people. They did manage to design a very promising tool that uses LLM in a way that uses its strengths and add a lot of value (that seems to be completely unparalleled - and we just invited the entire economic sector for a talk), but didn't manage to make it work well yet. So, our fleet of AI agents at peak performance...
I think audio really took a hit in the 90s and early 2000s when home theater became a lot cheaper and a lot more accessible and so too did the quality. Guys would spend their life savings on some crazy Polk or JBLs back in the day, and they were genuinely good quality and expensive.
I always thought "Blinded by the light" was a garbage song hearing it on the radio all the time, but after listening to the album on my dad's JBL L100's, I understand why he's such a vintage purist. It changed the sound of the song completely. The speakers picked up things I had literally never heard before.
I know nothing about audio engineering, but it does seem like the art has sort of died out or became "more productionized".
I have what essentially is a mastering suite (i just don't do mastering very often) at home and the difference in quality between the majority of modern music and the majority of older music say 25 years and older is large. There are many exceptions that sound amazing that are older, often done by very talented people in the best studios at the time. But one difference, hugely generalising, is dynamics, older music can have more dynamic range with modern music being basically a sausage of audio.
When people come over and want to listen, I usually have to tell them that it might actually be a disappointment to hear your favourite album is badly recorded next to something that is musically garbage but sounds fantastic. Or you wont be able to unhear the amount of distortion on Adele’s voice.
My gut reaction here is that the hallucination is caused by how you [rightfully] formed the prompt. GPT has no way of reliably determining what the fourth book is, so it infers the answer based on the data provided from Wikipedia. I'll bet if you changed the prompt to "list all books by Paul Edwin Zimmer", it would be incredibly accurate and produce consistent results every time.
I usually seed conversations with several fact-finding prompts before asking the real question I am after. It populates the chat history with the context and pre-established facts to build the real question from a much more refined position.
My Room and Board sofa from 2011 is still rock solid. I was a bit nervous buying it used a few years ago because of the age but it turned out to be a great purchase.
Yep, my only complaint was that an obese buddy of mine wore out a seam but R&B were good about it and sent someone out to fix it onsite. It's going on 10 yo and still looks new.
I believe there is research into rapid eye blinking followed by slow blinking causing the brain to "calm", so perhaps an external source has a similar effect?
I didn't look too much into it but I too have seen something long time past about patterns with light from a TV on some of those documentaries from the 80's, basically about people trying advertising with subjective flashes to induce a certain mood.
Single family homes are fine. The problem in the U.S. is that it's illegal to build anything _but_ single family homes in the majority of suburbs. Wouldn't it be better if people had access to a walkable grocery store, coffee shop or park? Or if kids could safely walk or bike to school? Many communities have absolutely zero options and are completely reliant on cars in order to go about daily life.
Most suburbs also have higher density zones where you can have apartments. The single family homes get the majority of the land space, but there are also apartments and townhouses which are more dense.
There are sometimes apartments spotted around in a suburby area, but due to the nature of US suburbs they don't really get many of the advantages density should bring - everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there, etc. Any time you leave your apartment you go straight to the parking lot and get in your car. It's pathetic really.
> everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there
Can you point at specific places like this? Google street view links?
Every suburb I've lived in the US I can walk to just about everything I need, kids walk to playground and parks, friends houses, etc.
I'm curious to see these suburbs where one can't walk anywhere.
To be honest this is one of those Internet comments where I feel like the commenter is in a different reality than me. None of the dozens of suburban US people I've known has ever found it feasible to walk to much of anything - yes, maybe a neighborhood playground if they're lucky. They definitely don't walk to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bar, to the gym, to work, etc.
In the latter it _may_ be theoretically feasible to walk to a couple restaurants, if you don't mind a fairly unpleasant trip. In practice I guarantee you almost no one does this.
But those are just a couple arbitrary choices; in my experience they're pretty much all like that.
On the other hand, by being selective about where I live (walkable neighborhoods are scarce in the US), I've been able to live in several places where a great grocery store, a gym, multiple great restaurants, a bar or two, and other interesting destinations were within a 5 minute walk - in some cases literally right next door. If most of the land around you is taken up by single family homes with pointlessly large lots, it's completely infeasible for anything more than a tiny percentage of people to live close to these things, short of building a grocery store for every 100 people or something absurd.
> To be honest this is one of those Internet comments where I feel like the commenter is in a different reality than me.
Same, but that's why I say the US is a big place. There isn't a standard US suburb.
> They definitely don't walk to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bar, to the gym, to work, etc.
That is alien to my experience. I can walk to all of those, with multiple instances of each one, from a suburban SFH.
On the first link near Charlotte, I have two comments: First one is that it stretches the definition of suburb. Switch to satellite view and zoom out until you see Charlotte. Those houses are in the midst of vast stretches of green, far away from the nearest urban area (Charlotte) a half hour away. That seems semi-rural to me. Are we calling that a suburb?
Even so, there is a supermarket, gym, tavern and a few other stores within 1 mile. A very easy bike ride.
The second link is definitely suburban, smack in the middle of built-up areas. Also more familiar to me since I have lived in various spots not far from there. You can easily walk to Saratoga Ave which is full of businesses.
So there's a pretty big push for urbanism the last few years. There's lots of YouTube channels and other social media stuff dedicated to the idea that the US needs more walkable neighborhoods, more bike infrastructure, less car dependence, etc.
In your view then... what in the world is this about? If suburbs are perfectly walkable, why does anyone care about urbanism? Why does this channel https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes have over a million subscribers?
Moreover, why is the suburb such a post-automobile phenomenon? If it's viable to get everywhere from a suburb without a car, why were people in 1000 BCE or 1000 CE or 1800 CE not living in suburbs?
I just find this perspective so weird... I've definitely met plenty of people who are very pro-suburb, but it's because they consider it natural and acceptable to need a car for any trip, not because they think they can get places without a car.
> In your view then... what in the world is this about?
I don't entirely know, that's why I ask questions and links to concrete places.
> If suburbs are perfectly walkable, why does anyone care about urbanism?
I think there are different reasons for wanting to live in a dense downtown.
20-something me wanted to live in Manhattan so I could walk to hundreds of bars and clubs. For young people looking for this scene, an ultra-dense downtown is the only way to go.
So that is one reason, and for this one I completely understand and agree that no suburb ever will be able to offer the same experience.
But I feel other reasons are based on misconceptions. I see it repeated in every housing thread on HN, that it is impossible to walk anywhere when living in a suburb. Just on this article discussion you can find multiple people making variants of that claim. Sometimes people here on HN go even more outlandish and claim that people in suburbs must drive 30 minutes to get to a supermarket.
Those are misconceptions, so I think it's worth pointing that out. I'm sure there are occasional suburbs (not rural) where you truly can't walk anywhere, but that seems like a rare exception.
In my very suburban neighborhood, we can easily walk to 3 supermarkets, many restaurants, two bars, misc services (haircuts, locksmiths, etc), assorted other stores, hardware store, movies, library, theater, post office, bike shops, car repair, multiple playgrounds, sports fields, friends houses (for adults and kids) and I can go on.
> I've definitely met plenty of people who are very pro-suburb, but it's because they consider it natural and acceptable to need a car for any trip, not because they think they can get places without a car.
I don't think I can go places without a car in my suburb, I can and I do. See list above. Unless it's freezing and raining (not so common here in NorCal), I mostly walk or bike to all of the above. I prefer to bike but the lack of secure bike parking makes me walk more often than bike. My pre-teen kid can bike or scooter or walk to these places as well, mostly friends houses. I'm not imagining this, this is how we live out here in the suburbs.
The only additional point I’ll make is that places like Stallings (the first link I posted) are absolutely considered suburbs. For instance the Wikipedia article on Stallings calls it a “suburban town” ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stallings,_North_Carolina ).
That’s another thing I found a bit odd - it would never have occurred to me that anyone would not have considered that area a suburb.
> That’s another thing I found a bit odd - it would never have occurred to me that anyone would not have considered that area a suburb.
It's true that there is no agreed definition to "suburb" which confuses these discussions.
Suburbs comes from sub (under, although here basically means around) urbs (city).
To me a suburb must be connected to its city. The city center has dense tall buildings and as you move away from the center the height and density decrease and then you are in the sub-urbs but it's all still built-up area. Once you move even further away and move into forested areas, you're out of the suburbs and into the rural surroundings.
If you have 30 minutes of highway driving through mostly forested areas (very green on google satellite view) between a house and the "urbs" (Charlotte, here) I think that's quite a stretch to call that a suburb.
Yeah, well that's just not the case at all here. The drive from Stallings to downtown Charlotte is almost entirely on Independence Boulevard, which is very much a stroad ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad ), very much developed with lots of pointless strip malls and office parks and little visible nature, and certainly not a foresty experience. The fact that you can see green nearby on satellite view has little to do with people's actual experience driving on these roads.
Suburbs are not perfectly walkable. As a.crow flies there are things in range ,but often there are fences in the way so you can't get there. Even if you can, the door face the road and so you spend most of acceptable walking distance just getting around the building. And there are no or poor sidewalks on the trip so you end up mixing with cars too much.
I bike to the.grocery store, it isn't too far, but the trip is not pleasant because everything is setup or driving.
Those high density zones suffer economically by being forced to subsidized the extensive infrastructure for single family homes - and in the US it's quite difficult to find an area to inhabit that actually prioritizes pedestrians over cars.
> The problem in the U.S. is that it's illegal to build anything _but_ single family homes in the majority of suburbs.
This is always repeated, but could you point to studies documenting in which cities it is illegal? All around I see townhouses, apartment buildings, 2/4/6-plexes and other variants being built, none of which are single family homes. Maybe it takes a bunch of paperwork (I don't know) but clearly it isn't illegal.
> Wouldn't it be better if people had access to a walkable grocery store, coffee shop or park? Or if kids could safely walk or bike to school?
This is a false dichotomy. One can also live in a SFH and walk/bike to all of these things and more. I do, and I do, so does my kid.
> This is always repeated, but could you point to studies documenting in which cities it is illegal?
You don’t need to look at a study, you can just look at zoning and land use maps for basically any city in America. Areas zoned single-family are not allowed to build anything else. There are multiple articles on Wikipedia[0][1][2] about this topic with literally hundreds of citations to primary and secondary sources. What a frustrating question.
Coming from farm country in Iowa, I'm glad to see Allan Savory's work getting more publicity. Regenerative grazing definitely works. The problem is restoring a distressed ecosystem (typically soils) back to its natural state after desertification has already occurred in an area that livestock continually grazes. There are a few agTech companies looking at doing just that via different GMO seeding products of native grasses and plants, but the cost is still far too high economically coming in at around $50/acre. I don't think any farmer or rancher would argue that we need more free-range livestock and less confinements/stockyards, but it's a slow process.
