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Could you perhaps imagine a reason why a person asking you to come with them to a funeral might feel it is valuable to them that you come?

Maybe they want to remember the deceased with you in a setting that is about remembering the deceased?

Is that less valuable than wanting to go to a party together?


Oh, no if someone asks me to come I undertsand that it's important for them. So, I'd go to support my friend, but I'd keep feeling like I'm wasting my time. Just as if a friend asked my be go to their Mormon baptism.

Why would you feel like you’re wasting your time if you care about the person and it’s important to them?

I think that's all we want. To know the cost upfront so we can compare choices efficiently. We don't expect businesses to lower total cost, just be more cooperative and less exploitative in communicating it.

Do people really think this way? In good faith? They have such a high sense of risk from school shootings that they have to organize their daily activities around that possibility, regardless of whether it may be ruining the learning environment, the entire nominal purpose of school?

When you do active shooter drills during school three or four times a year, then yes that sort of creates and reinforces a skewed perspective on the real risk.

Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way.


> Like, what difference does it make anyway if the kid can or cannot text the parent? Not like the parent can alter the situation in any way.

Yea this is what I don’t get. How is a cell phone actually going to help when there’s a school shooter? I guess you can throw the phone at his head. There’s pretty much no reason a kid needs a phone in school. If the parent needs to get in touch with him they can call the office like in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.


they have phones in closets where kids are hiding parents can call to make sure their child is still breathing?!

I am 10000% anti-phones in schools but this is silly argument to make. every parent of a child in America worries every day something may happen and when it does time it takes to reach your kid will be the longest time no parent should have to live through


I'm a parent and the last thing I'd want, if heaven forbid there was a school shooter, would be my kid (or any kid) talking on their cell phones or having the phones ringing and making noise that might cause the shooter to go investigate. A parent can literally do nothing about the situation over the phone.

spoken like a true parent, albeit irresponsible one…

this situation is also rehearsed - phone on silent, text only, safe words … hope you never need to be prepared for it


This is a terrifying way to raise children.

I.e. it sounds like you've terrified your children.

Why would you do that?


there are active shooter drills in schools across the United States since like PK so you know, terrifying part is already done by government which encourages slaughter of children in schools (e.g. sandy hook) which then schools have to prepare for… then as a parent you have to try to explain this to your kid and best way to do that is to prepare some more on a personal level

Active shooter drills are a tragic case of adults failing to deal with adult problems.

We scare children because we're scared, and somehow imagine that sharing that fear with them is helpful to anything but our own selfish fear of fear.


and yet if you live in Madison today… https://apple.news/AY6KuotdlTFW4aCRQYKH1Jw

School shootings are real, and are legitimately frightening.

But I suggest that active shooter drills do more harm than good.

And I suggest that it's a mistake for parents to legitimize active shooter drills by giving their kids special silent-phone-text-me-safe-words instructions.


I agree that they are real and frightening and given that the preparation for this unlikely event can be a difference between life and death.

like the stories of companies at world trade center who took time to practice the extremely unlikely event of “airplane hit the building how do we get out” and then safely got out cause they knew what they needed to do, kids also need to be prepared as well. it is horrible thing kids have to go through in the US but pretending this is not happening I believe is not the way to approach it


No one said anything about pretending it's not happening.

The correct method of training humans to conduct themselves in an orderly fashion under dramatic circumstances does not involve frightening them.

Prepare for all sorts of emergency scenarios. Tornadoes, earthquakes, power outages, fires, police activity, bomb threats. Prepare for them appropriately. In some cases: assemble at a distance outside. In some cases: go to safe assigned locations. In some cases: shelter in place. Category X scenario: take action Y.

Don't tell kids that superbad monsters are coming to get you and it's your responsibility to hide and not die (but make sure to text mommy and daddy! phone on silent!!1!!1! safeword "cacao"!!) when these evil creatures with big magic weapons come to hunt you down and watch you twist and scream in pain and eat your liver and we're soo worried about you and just want you to be safe so please don't die gruesomely, we love you so sorry we can't protect you make sure to study hard and do your homework.

The foregoing is an only slightly editorialized version of the way some schools and some parents communicate ASD importance to their children. I've seen worse. It involved parents sobbing. I've seen better too, but not much better.


I have a very particular set of skills...

Yes, New York State is considering some form of cell phone restrictions in schools from the State level and there's substantial push back from parents who object that they need their kids to have a cell phone for safety reasons like a school shooting.

Yes it is really part of the thought processes of people I have met too. Really strange how the reality can be distorted to make room for guns.

I saw all of these hacks in my undergrad physics education and yes, these were the highlights of the whole experience. They should be spread as far and wide as possible.

Google search was great when it came out too. I wonder what 25 years of enshittification will do to LLM services.


Enshittification happened but look at how life changed since 1999 (25 years as you mentioned). Songs in your palm, search in your palm, maps in your palm or car dashboard, live traffic rerouting, track your kids plane from home before leaving for airport, book tickets without calling someone. WhatsApp connected more people than anything.

Of course there are scams and online indoctrination not denying that.

Maybe each service degraded from its original nice view but there is an overall enhancement of our ability to do things.

Hopefully the same happens over next 25 years. A few bad things but a lot of good things.


I think I had most or all of that functionality in 2009, with Android 2.0 on the OG Motorola Droid.

What has Google done for me lately?


But also what new tools will emerge to supplant LLMs as they are supplanting Google? And how good will open source (weights) LLMs be?


absurd, the claim that Google search was better 25 years ago than today. that's vastly trivializing the amount of volume and scale that Google needs to process


Polling has fundamental issues that can't be solved with statistics. The biggest one is the unknown difference between who responds to the poll and who votes. And poll response areas are very low these days - I've heard well under 1% is common (that is, less than 1 out of 100 individuals contacted by the pollster answer the questions).

Nate Silver nailed this in the 2016 election. He said Trump's victory there was consistent with historically normal polling errors.

What may have been less widely appreciated is these errors are not related to causes like limited sample size that are straightforwardly amenable to statistical analysis. They come from the deeper problems with polling and the way those problems shift under our feet a little bit with each election.


Why would we assume that the health of a country is mainly determined by its healthcare system?

I think the big drivers of worse American health outcomes are things like obesity, car-based lifestyles, and long working hours, all of which have nothing to do with our healthcare system.

The healthiest countries succeed by rarely needing their healthcare system because people behave in healthy ways. Needing the system a lot means you've already failed.


I don't think lifestyle explains our problem with infant mortality rates. That's something where you, first thing in life, depend on the health care system before you even have a lifestyle.

In addition, yes, I think we can blame obesity on (the lack of) healthcare. If people routinely met with a physician and got advice, they might be able to turn things around before merely being overweight becomes obesity.

We're effectively in a shortage situation, and by design. If you don't get preventative care, that's considered a good thing by the healthcare system because they would honestly collapse if everyone got the recommended doctor visits. So we have people not getting preventative treatment and dying of preventable causes at depressingly high rates. This is generally considered fine, because the health care system is bursting at the seams with more money than it can count, so it's considered successful.


> If people routinely met with a physician and got advice, they might be able to turn things around before merely being overweight becomes obesity.

Anecdotally, two stories:

- A while back, I had dinner with two friends who do pharma research. At the time they were working on treatment for T2 diabetes. Naive me asked, "Why not just focus on prevention?" They said it's doesn't happen. Too few people are willing to change.

- More recently I had a conversation with a doctor at a social event. A similar topic came up, again I suggest prevention. And again I was told the same, it just doesn't happen.


I'm sure these anecdotes are true. But is it true because this behaviour is immutable or is it because there has been no serious attempt to change it? For instance why not teach how to be healthy in primary school and in society generally? The US and other countries have a high incidence of Type 2 diabetes largely because of over consumption of sugar. This is a social issue. I saw this very clearly when I took my family to the US for three months many years ago and we visited one om my colleagues for Thanksgiving. Our host's wife was astonished when my children asked for a drink of water, she asked them several times if they would not prefer a sweet fizzy drink. But my children were thirsty and knew that water was the best remedy.


> But is it true because this behaviour is immutable or is it because there has been no serious attempt to change it?

Humans conform to the norms around them. This was an evolutionary advantage. That is, "Look at them, they're still alive. I'll do that as well."

That's detrimental in modern times. Doc says, "You're overweight. Drop 20 lbs." You might says "yes" and then you leave, walk thru the waiting area, and see everyone is 40+ lbs too heavy. Consciously and sub-consciously you think "Nah. I'm good look at *them*." This is further exasperated by broader cultural norms. Fat shaming might be bad, agreed. But out-of-shapeness has been normalized, championed, and celebrated. There's also a lack of transparency (read: honesty). The extra weight is said to be perfectly fine. It's not. It comes with plenty of implications and complications.

A great positive example of socialized behavior is smoking. It was marginalized and slowly became less and less "popular". In theory that could work with "fitness" but suggesting obesity is bad will get you canceled. There's no socially acceptable way to stop the cycle. And Big Pharma is happy for this.

P.s. Kudos for teaching your children well. Sadly, you're the minority.


I'm not sure the infant mortality has much of an impact on longevity, and while there may be things the US could do about obesity within the healthcare system, I doubt that the reason for the US-world gap is that the rest of the world does these things and the US doesn't.

You can name things that are bad about US healthcare and could be improved but that's a different topic than why Americans are in relatively poor health compared to other developed countries.


> I'm not sure the infant mortality has much of an impact on longevity

Infant mortality is a measurable performance indicator for the healthcare system regardless of overall population's longevity.


There's still the same problem of disentangling the population health from the efficacy of the system. Maybe mothers are less healthy in the US and that affects infant mortality.

Not an expert by any means, just confused by the complexity of it all.



There's no end of unpopular experiments in double pane formats where one pane holds text and the other holds comments, footnotes, etc.

They're unpopular because they're confusing and brittle. How is the relationship between the two maintained when the developer is hard at work, when the text is not just a set piece for pretty presentation? No answer is given, because there is none.


There's also the issue of screen real estate. I often have other windows (terminal, browser, the build application), and panels within the editor (git, file explorer, console, etc.). It's already a hassle to maintain all this. It would be even more annoying if when I am comparing two code blocks side-by-side, there's another view for each of those that I'd have to either manually handle, or mentally keep in mind to look for something.


Which is why I like vim and Emacs where everything is a buffer that can be displayed in tiled windows. You choose your configuration depending on the current task. Jetbrains' IDEs are ok too, at least in the old UI. You can collpase everything to the fringe with nice shortcuts (XCode does too, but the default shortcut are horrendeous).


It's technically doable, the text in the right pane would be stored as comments in the source. The editor would parse the comments and collapse them into UI elements in the code, so that they could still be copy and pasted e.g. how the little blue capsules in Xcode work.

It's a bad idea because it's wasteful of space while achieving very little over a conventional setup.


>How is the relationship between the two maintained when the developer is hard at work, when the text is not just a set piece for pretty presentation?

The text editor or IDE can provide a feature to show(pop up) or hide(collapse) the side comment section when needed while formatting the comments to make them look bold or italic.

This will become a quality of life improvement if the implementation is done right. If not, it will be very confusing as you mentioned. I think writing API documentation can become very easy and since the function and its comment/description align on the same line, generating API documentation will become easy as well.


> No answer is given, because there is none.

case closed, guys, we can all go home now.


I'm just waiting for an AI-generated audio summary of a code section ;) Includes auto-play, of course.

Straight from my horror cabinet of ideas!


> For EMs, wartime means leading low-morale teams through ambiguity, hard constraints, frequently changing goals, and intense pressure to perform.

Why the assumption that goals are frequently changing? If you're making something that's actually valuable and not just looking good by surfing trends, I would think that the virtue would lie in having a clear vision and sticking to it.


There's a lot of virtue in that, and managers prefer that just as much as engineers do. But sometimes it's as the article says: "Your organization might not have the luxury of years of runway, and the environment you're operating in is rapidly changing". If you've got a big customer making 20% of your revenue who's threatening to jump ship (not an uncommon scenario for small to medium sized companies), you simply have to deliver whatever they want as fast as you can and worry about your vision later.


Either your product is at its core useful, or its not. If the environment is rapidly changing, either your product is still relevant, and you should be focusing on stability, or it's no longer useful and it's too late to change that.

> If you've got a big customer making 20% of your revenue who's threatening to jump ship (not an uncommon scenario for small to medium sized companies), you simply have to deliver whatever they want as fast as you can and worry about your vision later.

But that's one new requirement (or set of), not a changing environment. If that customer is changing their requirements as they go, so that you're constantly shifting focus, you need to either pin them down to one goal, or cut them loose and deal with the fallout. They don't see or care about the "war mode" they've created, and placating them will just invite more demands, and you can't keep it up forever.

The one time I've seen a "war mode" succeed was making a change that was a precondition for acquisition, when a set of requirements was laid out in the acquisition offer. It couldn't be altered once it was accepted, so the "war mode" had a fixed goal and deadline. Apart from something like that, it's just going to result in a spiral.


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