Only after I've got my ham radio license that I learned how these USB switches are annoying sources of RFI, even the more expensive ones. KVM switches are fine though.
For the best part of my life I use a controlled set of tags[1] rather than hierarchical categories. This is mostly due to the fact that stuff can be a lot of things at the same time.
That said, one of the best use cases for Johnny's system I've found is when you have to share an online drive with hundreds of people, where you can't use tags, and even if you could, there would be no consensus. Strangely, nowadays I can find my way around a huge project's online files quite easily just by the prefix numbers of each categorical level.
> Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay.
This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.
This person’s view is so insular and so self-centered that they truly seem to believe that IRC is not complicated. This is an excellent illustration of how important it is to stay grounded and connected to your real-world user base.
This is a silly statement. The technology doesn't embody any 'elitism', back in the day there were many channels/networks with non-technical users. Back when Shoutcast was a thing, servers often had an associated IRC channel where people would make requests, or just talk music, just as one example. This also makes the "keep technically illiterate users away" statement silly, I've seen middle school age kids connect to IRC channels without any apparent difficulty.
I stopped being engaged when the author uses "normalcattle" in a unironic, disdainful tone. Then later on there's praise of RMS. I like the overall message, as a long time daily IRC user, but the contempt seeping from the whole article is a turn off.
At least for this particular case it was not a matter of teaching journalists statistics or anything STEM-related. If it weren't for the leaked messages, we'd never hear about it. Epistemic sincerity and a good notion of statistics are important for sure, but giving whistleblowers legal cover and a means of releasing this kind of material is just as important.
I understand that learning English may have not been that hard for you, and given that you come from a Scandinavian country, most likely you speak near-perfect English (I've been to Norway once, it's amazing how even the old lady in the yarn store speaks English so fluently!) Also, no one is contesting the benefits of learning something new.
But keep in mind that different cultures face significantly different difficulties when it comes to pick up a foreign language. I'm based in Brazil and I can tell you with reasonable confidence: the average person in Latin America struggles A LOT to get past Harry Potter books and achieve full work proficiency. This can be due to significantly different grammatical structures, word roots, phonemes, and whatnot, or---most importantly---due to the fact that most of us can't afford quality language courses at affordable prices. In reality, good and affordable schools in our own native language is considered a privilege to many.
So either due to structural differences between languages (especially those that don't share the same Germanic roots as English), or due to economical and social issues, some non-English speakers have to spend hours of deliberate practice to be on the same ground as people from a few other countries, in academia or in a multi-cultural IT team. I myself can't count the number of hours of pronunciation practice I amassed throughout the years for being too afraid of sounding dumb in my daily scrums. This is something I'm pretty sure a native speaker doesn't have to mind with when starting at a new job.
That said, I don't see how the "UK vs. rest of Europe in numbers of papers" could support the claim that a head start doesn't exist. There are a number of infinitely more relevant variables that could explain scientific throughput by country.
Both HN and XKCD probably have a fairly broad audience with decent overlap. Seems to happen with popular websites, they lack strong specific correlation with anything.
Yeah, seems like a difficult thing to tune with recommendation algorithms.
I think it essentially boils down to the Friendship Paradox. I've mostly ignored the problem as I'm more interested in the fringes of the graph, but I'll note even the likes of Spotify and Youtube struggles with this.
You mentioned rich data earlier, and as an amateur sitting on the sidelines I think that's the key. Once I fed my entire library into LibraryThing, its recommendations were orders of magnitude better than, say, Amazon's, who only knew which books I'd bought through them. In fact they were so good it was mostly recommending books I'd already read, but didn't own.
My toy, which relied on scraping <ul> and <ol> lists of people's favourite bands from personal websites, had almost nothing to go on by comparison. last.fm might have been able to do something good with the data they collected, but they seemed to die on the vine once they were acquired.
I received an email inquiring about my note-taking system, so I'll copy-paste my response here:
Nothing revolutionary about my system. The short answer is that I use Notion, because it checks a lot of boxes right out of the gate: it's cross-platform, easily searchable, shareable, and strikes that perfect balance between unstructured and structured data.
The longer answer is: I have top-level documents for each facet of my life, and each of those documents is organized with a particular structure to optimize for a particular use case. Much of it ends up as some combination of nested documents, databases, and kanban-style boards. The databases and kanban boards make use of templates to normalize data whenever possible.
For example, I have a top-level "Automotive" document. Within that document are sub-documents for each of my vehicles. Each vehicle document primarily serves as a quick reference with vehicle metadata like VIN number, license plate number, etc, and maybe some general notes. The vehicle document contains a "Maintenance Log", which is a kanban board to track upcoming maintenance, completed maintenance, repairs, and everything in between. The maintenance items are templatized to streamline entry and reduce cognitive overhead.
I've found that the combination of templatized kanban boards and free form documents can be applied to basically anything, from programming projects, to house renovations, managing job interviews, cooking / menu planning, etc, with slight variations to adapt to a given use case.
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I'm really pleased with how well this system has worked for me, and have considered writing about it in more detail. How meta. Perhaps I should blog about it :)
