Have these people never heard of ReCaptcha v3?
Readit Newsantisceptic commented on Websites are tracking you via browser fingerprinting engineering.tamu.edu/news... · Posted by u/gnabgib
I dunno, I never sat down to learn vim, just used it every day for a couple years. I’m not one of those wizards who is, like, answering stack overflow questions or writing wiki articles, but I get the job done. Is it necessary to learn Vim? Seems like a chore.
Is the text editor really a bottleneck for anyone? I find that no matter how slow I type, I need to spend more time thinking of what to type anyway, if I’m doing anything interesting.
I don't understand this attitude. It's clearly more conducive to solving problems to be able to move around our environment more quickly. It's extremely useful (compared to a beginner who only knows insert and write quit) to understand the different vim modalities as well as a few commands to jump around a file or to perform regex or to call an external command.
When you're not proficient with the necessary tools, you're interrupting your flow with what you consider mundane. That you consider text editors mundane is more reason to move as much of that process into muscle memory as possible, not less!
Why are we pretending like mastery of our tools is unimportant? I hear this sort of opinion most eagerly expressed by engineers who in fact are quite handy with vim! Is this some new kind of flex where we're all pretending to take a purely academic approach to programming instead of becoming proficient with the tools of our trade?
antisceptic commented on Screw motivation, what you need is discipline wisdomination.com/screw-m... · Posted by u/thunderbong
IMO this makes the most important point at the very end. “Being disciplined” itself is a consequence of motivation, or is effectively that. Building habits however, requires very little discipline or motivation so long as you build them strategically - I.e. start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are.
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
For all intents and purposes you should just assume both discipline and motivation are completely mythical and you should construct a system of high-leverage habits to obviate the need for them. You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.
He mentions building habits in part 2 of the article, using the boiling the frog analogy (imploring the reader to use it for good instead).
My question, though, is how does a good habit expand into a great habit, without motivation? For your tooth example, once you start flossing you might as well floss all your teeth. The upfront cost of getting started with the floss is the worst part of it, but once you're there it's easy. This isn't true for all habits though. For many it's easy to just bail out fast. If I started doing 5 push-ups a day will I eventually do 100 and then 1000? Or would I settle somewhere on a mediocre range because it's easy to stop? Is there some sort of recursion or positive feedback loop that kicks in that rescues me from mediocrity if all I have is discipline and not motivation?
antisceptic commented on Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company · Posted by u/qzx_pierri
One problem with DEI is that many ethnicities get thrown under the white or white-adjacent umbrella and aren't given the same opportunities simply because the popular view of history doesn't seem them as historically oppressed when in fact they were. For instance, Armenians are a historically oppressed group, even genocided, yet they are not afforded any DEI perks in their career paths. Palestinians are also not included in DEI because it isn't politically expedient to side with them, even though they have lost their homeland and are generally treated like dogs. Many, many such groups exist but because they don't come up during AP US History, they have no mindshare.
Another is that DEI seems to simultaneously accept that race is a social construct while also using race as a key criterion for purposes of inclusion, which is absurd. For example, a Black Swede, growing up in Sweden her whole life, would be considered a candidate that improves diversity in the workplace. However, I'm not aware of Swedes being an oppressed people. In fact, growing up in Sweden your life is probably better than in America. The judgment is made purely on skin color and lineage.
Lastly, I also want to say that I know this is an ugly situation, because high paying jobs are often about connections, which have a strong correlation with ethnic background in the United States. In that view, it makes sense to have something like DEI shine a light on power structures within the workplace and make them more fair. So despite the above, I support DEI if it helps underprivileged people. After all racism still exists, and it's virulent. Many people harbor racist views and will lie through their teeth in order not to be canceled.
I just hope eventually racism is extinguished so we could move forward to a purely merit-based system.
antisceptic commented on Dell to layoff 6,650 employees as demand for PCs plummets theverge.com/2023/2/6/235... · Posted by u/jiwidi
Dell's Precision Mobile Workstations are beasts. I have a 7750, whacked 128GB RAM into it aftermarket, and never looked back.
The thinness and lack of ports on the Precision doesn't bother you?
antisceptic commented on How much can you get out of a $4 VPS? alicegg.tech//2023/02/06/... · Posted by u/zer0tonin
I know it's not in fashion, but I will suggest that renting physical servers is a very good and under-appreciated compromise. As an example, 45€/month gets you a 6-core AMD with 64GB of RAM and NVMe SSDs at Hetzner. That's a lot of computing power!
Virtualized offerings perform significantly worse (see my 2019 experiments: https://jan.rychter.com/enblog/cloud-server-cpu-performance-...) and cost more. The difference is that you can "scale on demand", which I found not to be necessary, at least in my case. And if I do need to scale, I can still do that, it's just that getting new servers takes hours instead of seconds. Well, I don't need to scale in seconds.
In my case, my entire monthly bill for the full production environment and a duplicate staging/standby environment is constant, simple, predictable, very low compared to what I'd need to pay AWS, and I still have a lot of performance headroom to grow.
One thing worth noting is that I treat physical servers just like virtual ones: everything is managed through ansible and I can recreate everything from scratch. In fact, I do use another "devcloud" environment at Digital Ocean, and that one is spun up using terraform, before being passed on to ansible that does the rest of the setup.
How many nodes (droplets) do you spin up that you need Terraform? I do something similar but I use a single script to spin up the Digital Ocean side and then I complete the setup in Ansible (with an all-in-one master script, since the DO droplets are fetched with a handmade inventory plugin).
antisceptic commented on Dell to layoff 6,650 employees as demand for PCs plummets theverge.com/2023/2/6/235... · Posted by u/jiwidi
Dell lost my confidence when their XPS 15 display couldn't display a pane of gray without flickering. I switched to a Macbook Pro and haven't looked back.
For me (personally) to consider Dell again, they would have to replicate everything that Framework does and ship Linux with support.
Edit: can I also add that they suck for business too? The slim form factor has NO place in business, slimming down the chassis and removing ports is an anti-pattern. I couldn't give a shit how thin my work laptop looks, my job doesn't involve taking pictures of unrealistically minimalistic office desks. With Dell you either get a dainty oversized netbook or a rugged behemoth (which is a little too rugged unless you're in telecom and roll in a van). Where's the middle ground? Nothing needed to change from the old thinkpad.
Yes but what would a mecha of tech expertise look like? Jude Law? Voltron?
A Gundam
antisceptic commented on AMD Killed the Itanium (2005) utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
It's hard not to root for AMD when Intel has a track record of sitting on their hands whenever they become the market leader.
I don't really feel the need for a curl replacement. In the past I've used httpie which is pretty slick but I end up falling back to writing tests in python using requests library.
Maybe I'm not the target audience here, but I should still say something nice I guess. It's nice that it's written in Rust, and open source tooling is in need of fresh projects ever since everyone started bunkering up against the AI monolith scraping all their work. We should celebrate this kind of project, I just wish I had a use for it.