beloch (u/beloch) - Readit News

beloch commented on What medieval people got right about learning (2019) scotthyoung.com/blog/2019... · Posted by u/ripe

beloch · 10 days ago

Medieval craftsmen often ran what we would consider to be sweatshops, with many young (i.e. child) apprentices banging out work and not receiving much instruction in exchange. We're romanticizing and idealizing a past that was, in realty, often quite exploitative.

There are reasons why we started sending children to schools rather than businesses for basic education. There is also little need to reach back to medieval times when comparatively less exploitative (but still imperfect) apprenticeship systems are alive and well in the trades today.

One-on-one practical instruction related specifically to what you want to do is awesome, but there are a lot of difficulties in incentivizing people to supply such instruction.

beloch commented on How Kentucky bourbon went from boom to bust bbc.com/news/articles/ckg... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

Terr_ · 12 days ago

> "That's worse than a tariff, because it's literally taking your sales away, completely removing our products from the shelves ... that's a very disproportionate response," Lawson Whiting, the CEO of Brown-Forman

Nonsense, it is a perfectly reasonable response to the disproportionate, capricious, and possibly-illegal Republican import taxes on Americans (tariffs) that were thrown onto Canadian everything while "joking" about violently annexing Canada.

If Mr. Whiting cared about reasonable and proportional trade, he should be aiming those complaints at his own politicians. He's been maxing out in his donations to the company PAC for the last several years, but I can't tell you for sure what candidates that money went to. [0]

------

P.S.: Fair disclosure, I live in a US state where Canada is--was?--the #1 international trade partner... You'd be surprised how little that narrows it down. [1]

[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...

[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/07/usa-us-trade-canada-...

beloch · 12 days ago

I was gob-smacked when the American ambassador went on CBC and called Canadians "Nasty" for boycotting American goods. Then he kept doing it! It doesn't matter whether it was because the Americans selected a inept ambassador or if they gave their ambassador inept instructions. This is precisely the opposite of what an ambassador is supposed to do. The U.S. is a very poorly governed country right now.

Bourbon is back on the shelves in my province (because our premier is spineless), but I still won't touch the corn swill. Even before this nonsense broke out, I'd have taken Canadian rye over bourbon any day!

beloch commented on Tesla Diner tesla.com/tesla-diner... · Posted by u/poly2it

beloch · 19 days ago

They might as well start a restaurant chain called "Gastroenteritis, Botulism, and E.Coli" at this point.

beloch commented on What's happening to reading? newyorker.com/culture/ope... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy

nemomarx · a month ago

Why are you reading these articles at all, even enough to summarize them?

beloch · a month ago

Click-bait. I'm not immune. I see something tantalizing and then I have to know. I've been burned by Hacker News more than once.

beloch commented on What's happening to reading? newyorker.com/culture/ope... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy

asimpletune · a month ago

Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward. Even the idea that knowledge is something that is capable of being transferred is something that has to be assumed at one’s peril.

On the other it's those of us who’ve read in the old school style, for fun, in private that are more convinced of the opposite than anyone. If anything getting summaries might be the worse of both worlds because one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.

Anyways, as was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, even English majors and other serious literary people often have no idea what they’re talking about, which just goes to show that people who were going to read will do it regardless of what else is happening in their life, and people who weren’t going to read will not read even if it’s their major. In this sense, LLMs don’t really change anything. The same person operating the tool will continue to be the same person in either case.

beloch · a month ago

Click-bait longform is where things went wrong.

I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.

Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.

When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.

beloch commented on Let me pay for Firefox discourse.mozilla.org/t/l... · Posted by u/csmantle

beloch · a month ago

It's become a meme, but consider WinRAR. Odds are, it's installed on your machine and you haven't paid for it. It just works. It brings up a polite nag box but it doesn't sell your data. It doesn't invade your privacy. It just works and makes enough money to keep getting updated.

It sounds hokey but, perhaps, Firefox should be trialware. Don't cut off the people who can't pay. Make a browser that just works and see how many people will pay for it even if they can use it without paying.

beloch commented on A Typology of Canadianisms dchp.arts.ubc.ca/how-to-u... · Posted by u/gnabgib

superconduct123 · a month ago

Is that in all of canada or just west coast

beloch · a month ago

It's mostly West coast. Origin is Pacific West Coast pidgin (Chinook). Some people in Yukon and the prairies use it, but it becomes rarer the further you are from B.C.. It has become more widely used in recent years though.

beloch commented on EverQuest filfre.net/2025/07/everqu... · Posted by u/dmazin

thegrim33 · 2 months ago

It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game.

In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.

I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.

beloch · 2 months ago

I too formed memories by playing EQ in a way that was, in retrospect, dumb, and learning from the experience.

e.g. I created an Erudite wizard (who could not see in the dark) and insisted on leveling up in Toxxulia forest, the default "newbie" zone for Erudites. It was dark there, even during the day, and pitch black at night. I kept my monitor at the calibrated brightness level because I didn't want to "cheat". Monsters of an appropriate level were spread out and often hard to find. A troll NPC roamed the forest and randomly killed players. I spent many hours getting lost (and killed) there before leaving the island, only to discover the comparatively easy newbie zone that stood outside Qeynos, a short, safe, free, ship voyage away.

The game was full of stuff like this. If you wanted to do something, there was usually a very bad way to go about it and other ways that were much better. Finding those gave you a sense of accomplishment that was far sweeter than mere levels.

Modern games tend to be more balanced so you can be assured that, however you're doing something, there probably isn't another way to do it that is vastly easier unless you're doing something really weird. This "wastes" less of your time, but somehow feels less realistic. In real life, different strategies for doing things are seldom equal.

beloch commented on Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/A_D_E_P_T

dilawar · 2 months ago

> Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere". They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.

Same here in India.

These ideas about civilization and racial purity/superiority are a scientific nonsense but very useful for getting people to hate each other.

beloch · 2 months ago

Human populations almost never sat still in one place and avoided mixing with others. Go back far enough, and Europeans and Indians are related. Go back further, and they're both related to Native North Americans. Go back far enough and we're all related. Anyone making claims that their ethnic group is somehow "pure" is ignoring linguistics, genetics, archaeology, and basic human nature.

We move around. We meet people. We make new people.

beloch commented on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers reuters.com/business/they... · Posted by u/petethomas

thaack · 2 months ago

My family runs a small plastic (injection molding) business in the USA. Second, soon to be third generation.

The only reason it still exists is because the products made are too expensive to ship from a country with cheaper labor as they are pretty large and heavy. And it's quite a niche product/vertical.

The biggest problem that the business faces on a day-to-day basis is employees. It's a very low skill manufacturing job. You pull parts out of the mold. The pay is good for a large midwestern MCOL city, plus full health benefits (employees don't pay a cent). It is downright impossible to find and retain reliable employees. The job sucks. I worked there when I was younger helping out and you do the same thing every minute for 8 hours a day in a hot and loud factory. It's not a career - just a job. I'm not sure how you fix that. The American appetite for a low skill manufacturing job is dead - I'm not sure it's a bad thing either.

Even the high skill stuff has already been taken over by China, their process is far more efficient. When the business needs design/tool & die for a new plastic injection mold costs and speed associated with getting that mold designed and made in America are astronomical compared to the Chinese. The Chinese will get back to you with a design proof in 24 hours at a 1/4 of the cost.

beloch · 2 months ago

Sounds like the employer has created its own problems.

If an employee is doing an unpleasant, dead-end job with no prospect of advancement, they have to make a value judgment. If there's no prospect of advancement or any kind of wage growth (they're "low skill", so they'll be replaced if someone cheaper comes along), let alone security, then why stick around?

If the working conditions (e.g. heat and noise) are unpleasant, they could be improved. A ramp into other positions could be built to make the "job" an entry point to a "career" (e.g. Costco moves people between many different low skill jobs and then recruits from that pool for management).