do you know what they died of? car accidents are probably less heritable, unless they're caused by heritable rash behaviour...
Unfortunately all of my male relatives suffered from hit by a bus itis.
Readit Newsel_benhameen commented on Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50% science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
Who is behind this over digitization of primary school? My understanding is that in the Us pretty much all homework and tests are done on computers or iPads.
This obv isn’t a push by parents because I can’t imagine parents I know want their kids in front of a screen all day. At best they’re indifferent. My only guess is the teachers unions that don’t want teachers grading and creating lesson plans and all the other work they used to do.
And since this trend kid scores or performance has not gotten better, so what gives?
Can anyone comment if it’s as bad as this and what’s behind it.
My kids are in elementary school in the SF area (although pretty far in the ‘burbs) and this is not my experience.
The older one has a chromebook and uses it for research and production of larger written projects and presents—the kind of things you’d expect. The younger one doesn’t have any school-supplied device yet.
Both kids have math exercises, language worksheets, short writing exercises, etc., all done on paper. This is the majority of homework.
I’m fine with this system. I wish they’d spend a little more time teaching computer basics (I did a lot of touch typing exercises in the 90’s; my older one doesn’t seem to have those kind of lessons). But in general, there’s not too much homework, there’s good emphasis on reading, and I appreciate that the older one is learning how to plan, research, and create projects using the tool he’ll use to do so in future schooling.
el_benhameen commented on Booting from a vinyl record (2020) boginjr.com/it/sw/dev/vin... · Posted by u/yesturi
Today, storage is so advanced that to the ordinary user it simply presents as some kind of non-leaky abstraction: small rectangular shape, no moving parts, stores blocks, retrieves blocks, low latency, high reliability.
Back then, the storage is was much more 'real': it was slow, made noises, degraded noticeably because of stray magnetic fields etc, complicated mechanical parts. By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.
I’ve been working on archiving a bunch of old hard drives and floppies that my parents found and gave to me when they were cleaning out their garage.
Aside from the fun of seeing all of the old contents of the drives, it’s also been fun to walk through the progression of storage devices through the years. Lots of cool sounds and form factors, including an early Conner hard drive (that I have unfortunately been unable to archive), which is built like a tank and makes some great noises as it spins up and seeks.
Also cool to learn a little more about how the various storage media worked. It all feels very simple when you abstract it all away into bytes and blocks, but there was some wild engineering in those things. If you stop to look back, it’s impressive that we’ve made it this far.
el_benhameen commented on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape blog.jgc.org/2026/01/ther... · Posted by u/abnercoimbre
Can it run doom?
el_benhameen commented on Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/7777777phil
It's not directly comparable. The first time writing the code is always the hardest because you might have to figure out the requirements along the way. When you have the initial system running for a while, doing a second one is easier because all the requirements kinks are figured out.
By the way, why does your co-founder have to do the rewrite at all?
I find the opposite to be true. Once you know the problem you’re trying to solve (which admittedly can be the biggest lift), writing the fist cut of the code is fun, and you can design the system and set precedent however you want. Once it’s in the wild, you have to work within the consequences of your initial decisions, including bad ones.
el_benhameen commented on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes reuters.com/world/us/us-w... · Posted by u/kpw94
> Very surprisingly progressive opinions from Trump.
Trump does not possess many "locked-in" opinions. He can be persuaded to support anything if you are charismatic enough.
Oh come on. There are plenty of uncharismatic rich people who have still managed to persuade him.
el_benhameen commented on Toll roads are spreading in America economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/smurda
That was my suspicion, but I'm not sure. Obviously, they have other valid options. Raise taxes. Have the state borrow, build, and operate the road as a toll road at cost, etc.
Sure. I think the point is that in Texas, those are valid but not viable due to politics.
el_benhameen commented on Toll roads are spreading in America economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/smurda
I'm not sure what your point is, can you explain?
I think the point is that in this case, the choice is between the infrastructure being pay-to-use or just not existing, not between the infrastructure being free and being pay-to-use
el_benhameen commented on I know you didn't write this ammil.industries/i-know-y... · Posted by u/cjlm
> Suspicions aroused, I clicked on the “Document History” button in the top right and saw a clean history of empty document – and then wham – fully-formed plan, as if it had just spilled out of someone’s brain, straight onto the screen, ready to share.
This isn't always a great indicator.
I can't stand Google Docs as an interface to write with, so use VIM and the copy/paste the completed document into it.
Oh, another fun one: I once got an offer letter via Docs. The edit history included the original paste from another candidate’s offer letter, including their name and salary. Useful for benchmarking!
The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.
It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.
Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.
And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.
Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.