throwaway_75369 (u/throwaway_75369)

throwaway_75369 commented on Career Advice (2013) moxie.org/2013/01/07/care... · Posted by u/hypertexthero

Should be labelled (2013).

Would be nice if I didn't have to say that; in so many ways the bloom is off the rose of my (admittedly high paying) corporate job. I even recently reunited with some old friends who chose a more independent career path, and was jealous and nostalgic- they're definitely working far closer to their passions with more freedom than I've felt in a decade. But man, what a decade since 2013.

I would be foolish to dismiss that I had stable employment through Covid, and I still have a paycheck through the current economic turmoil. I also have my corporate health insurance, which covers my stupidly expensive regular medication which I had no idea I would need in those nostalgic days when these friends chose their alternative careers (I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2015, now in remission thanks to the meds)

So I agree with the sentiment that it's dangerous (especially to your soul) to just blindly conform and follow the money, but it's not always unjustified. In my case it was at least a little bit justified, since my parents were more or less broke and I didn't have a safety net.

I do wish I had hedged my bets better and been less of a workaholic, of course. Would be nice to be married now.

throwaway_75369 commented on Airlines make more money from mileage programs than from flying planes theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/chapulin

nradov · 2 years ago

The amount of data is irrelevant. Data by itself isn't actionable. We don't have a proven theoretical framework that could be used to turn data into good decisions in a command economy. Plus it is nearly impossible to command innovation; command economies have occasionally produced innovations by throwing enormous resources at particular problems, but for the most part they are stuck with copying innovations from free market economies.

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

I mostly agree with this sentiment, but I think it goes too far.

> command economies have occasionally produced innovations by throwing enormous resources at particular problems, but for the most part they are stuck with copying innovations from free market economies.

Hmm. This seems unfair to the military during wartime? WW1 feels like a huge example.of advancement driven from very command-ey institutions; from the idea of the tank to deal with machine guns and barbed wire to nitrogen-ating fertilizer in Germany to withstand the British blockade. (Never mind DARPA and the internet or the moon missions during the Cold War, or the Manhattan Project)

(Yeesh, not that I'm suggesting it would be preferable to pursue this as a full-time model - it's literally fascism, but it's important to understand why these systems were pursued in the first place - the point is that there do at least appear to be high profile success stories)

throwaway_75369 commented on Airlines make more money from mileage programs than from flying planes theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/chapulin

bluGill · 2 years ago

Most of the money belongs to the middle class, not the rich. So that is what markets mostly work for.

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

For what it's worth, I (mostly) disagree with your detractors in the other comments and agree with your sentiment (I think).

Markets care about "aggregate demand". Rich people can be lucrative individual customers because they have more to spend and often less price sensitivity. But they have limited capacity for consumption in many areas; they only eat three meals a day and only fill so many airline seats at once. The middle class and even lower classes have much higher capacity for consumption and are worth targeting - think McDonald's or even Google (advertisers want all the eyeballs they can get, even if they prefer wealthy ones)

throwaway_75369 commented on Microsoft is killing WordPad in Windows bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/turtlegrids

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

One interesting thing about WordPad (at least from the Windows XP / 7 era) was that it supported the complete OLE2 / ActiveX stack.

This let you do all kinds of things like embed other types of controls (like canvases or images from Paint, or Excel tables) inside your document, and WordPad's UI would jump through all the hoops to update and transform into the embedded application's UI when that control gained focus. This made it a pretty useful testing app when I was interning at MS and working on embeddable Inking surfaces for Tablet PC. (Yes, I'm a dinosaur)

throwaway_75369 commented on Why homes often feel warmer than the thermostat suggests – what to do about it theconversation.com/why-h... · Posted by u/PaulHoule

sph · 2 years ago

What is the best way to measure electronically the "feels like" temperature then, if air temperature is not a good metric?

I'd like to hack my thermostat and heating system to maintain the same temperature inside year round, but as the article explains, the air temperature sensors are pretty much useless to determine how hot or cold it feels.

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

The article mentions that you can track the Temperature of surfaces with an "inexpensive infrared thermometer". Then you could calculate the "operative temperature" as the average of Mean radiant and the air temperature.

But yeah, if you want to fully automate it you'll need to figure out a way to gather those readings from the various surfaces.

throwaway_75369 commented on The Never Married, a New Normal psychologytoday.com/us/bl... · Posted by u/AlexandrP

jitl · 2 years ago

My partner and I have been together for 7 years, we bought a house together, haven’t found a compelling reason to get married.

Marriage is a complex and binding contract that for two high earners is a tax disadvantage. The most prominent benefits I’ve learned are some situations around visitation rights, and avoiding being compelled to testify against your spouse. It comes from a very dubious history of the husband essentially owning the wife. The “commitment” of the legal marriage obviously doesn’t prevent people from falling out of love or breaking up, not that it should – if one partner stops loving another they will still leave the relationship one way or another. So, why marry — besides “tradition” and “society wants you to for whatever reason”?

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

Hmm - TIL that Power of Attorney is not automatic for spouses (although I imagine it is set up practically by default for most people who get married, and the laws differ by state). (https://www.google.com/amp/s/estatelawatlanta.com/do-spouses...)

Seems like something folks would care about? It's adjacent to the "When I die, who gets my stuff?" part of the marriage contract which I remain convinced is the real reason governments need to be involved with marriage contracts. I also know a lot of folks who would rather their S.O. make medical decisions for them if they're debilitated than, say a sibling (especially if they're estranged).

But yeah, this doesn't explicitly prevent you from assigning power of attorney to an unmarried partner, of course.

throwaway_75369 commented on Legend of Zelda game sells 10M copies in three days finance.yahoo.com/news/le... · Posted by u/he0001

ericzawo · 2 years ago

Nintendo has been the gimped hardware in the marketplace for, what, 30+ years now? This is not surprising.

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

Hmm, this is a bit of an exaggeration. The Gamecube was considerably more powerful than the PS2, (and Microsoft took a huge dive on the original XBOX hardware in order to compete - although it was indeed more capable than the GC).

The Wii was the first time Nintendo explicitly entered the market with hardware knowingly less powerful than their competition, and that was... 2006? So like 17 years, not 30.

You could make a case that their handheld hardware was always "underpowered" compared to the competition, like the Game Gear and PSP, but the justification at those times was better battery life and pocket-ability. The market results seem to speak for themselves, though

A lot of western pundits (and major studio executives) have been expecting Nintendo to "go third party" like Sega ever since the Gamecube, and yet they're still around. They seem to know what they're doing.

Edit: bad at math

throwaway_75369 commented on Pinball is booming in America economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/pseudolus

pupppet · 2 years ago

See this is what confuses me, are Arcades not still fairly big in Japan? What do they play there? Old machines?

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

Depends on the location, many of the best arcades in Japan are multiple floors, and each floor usually has a theme, so like the ground floor is crane games, and then a floor for shooters/shmups, then a floor or two for fighting games, and then a floor or two for music games. Maybe a floor with card games or those giant horse racing games...

I was fortunate enough to go like 5 years ago, but I really fondly remember Taito Hey had a whole row of like 8 Super Sweet Fighter 2 Turbo machines which were basically continuously occupied, and then a floor down I watched somebody basically one credit perfect one of those Capcom Dungeons and Dragons side scrolling brawlers, and then on another floor was a widescreen Darius machine (which I'd never seen in the US).

In other locations there were floors of like card-based army formation strategy games, music games with circular screens, etc.

Pachinko is like its own thing, almost always in different buildings, usually like 3 times as loud as the arcades, and full of smoking. Strangely I don't recall seeing any western style pinball machines anywhere, though.

Basically, it was arcade nirvana for someone like me (born in the early 80's) I heard things got pretty bad during Covid, though, so I don't know how much it's regressed. I do have a friend who just got back from visiting the first time though, and he mentioned he could still find tons of competition in old fighting games and stuff. (Man I wanna go back, especially since the exchange rate is so good now)

Edit: typos

throwaway_75369 commented on Pinball is booming in America economist.com/united-stat... · Posted by u/pseudolus

pupppet · 2 years ago

Does anyone actually make new arcade machines/games anymore? Like real 80's/90's style arcade games, not the ticket dispensers.

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

Some indies still make arcade games - Killer Queens comes to mind, and I'm pretty sure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge got a full on coinop release. Of course, Japan still puts out all manner of new machines with all kinds of creative gimmicks (especially music-based, or arena fighters), but they're rarely available stateside and they might not always be the vibe you're looking for, if you're trying to scratch a 90's nostalgia itch.

https://sternpinball.com/ continues to make modern (awesome) pinball machines - I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that stocks a couple in breakrooms. They also usually have a big presence in the floor of California Extreme (https://caextreme.org/) which is totally worth checking out if you're in the Bay Area in August.

Edit: For a little bit more to search on in terms of Japanese stuff - https://arcadeheroes.com/2023/02/10/new-arcade-games-for-jap...

throwaway_75369 commented on The decline and fall of the hit instrumental song tedgioia.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/nickwritesit

throwaway_75369 · 2 years ago

Huh. I'm a huge fan of instrumental music. I encountered Plini and Nick Johnston and through them discovered my favorite guitarist, Guthrie Govan. Then through him discovered his band The Aristocrats, with Bryan Beller (who's awesome, but I don't know too much about bassists) and the drummer Marco Minneman, who's now my favorite drummer after Neal Peart passed away.

I also really like all the Dream Theater adjacent stuff, like Liquid Tension Experiment...

Ok, guess I'm rambling. I dunno, for some reason I find it easier than ever to find all kinds of fantastic purely instrumental stuff, and now with YouTube you often get to more easily observe the musicians themselves, as opposed to listening to CD's back in the day.