You should start with the Beginner's Quest CTF, by implementing a writeup's solution without looking at the writeup's actual code, and by playing other CTF style challenges such as Overthewire's Bandit.
> On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
> That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
> The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
I find myself returning to this Metafilter comment a lot over the years, from someone who survived war in Bosnia. (Warning: graphic content.)
> I was conscripted into some faction of the Bosnian Army in order to "defend" our city. In truth, we had few arms or anything with which to defend. And as a very tall, largely starved girl, I wouldn't have made much of a soldier anyhow. So I was a "nurse." No training, of course. And no supplies, either. I was near the front line fairly often. There wasn't much you could do.
> One day, some shell exploded right on or near two young soldiers and they were torn into dozens of pieces. I say "dozens" because it wasn't hundreds or millions - I'd seen that happen too, and it's totally different. You could count these pieces. They were big lumps. A fellow "nurse" and I were near enough that we got there before anyone else. There was no one to save.
> As these soldiers were Bosnian Muslims whose bodies - what there was of them - would be returned to their families, we realized that we needed to collect these pieces to put the soldiers back together, kind of, because Muslims believe a body should be buried "whole" - to the extent that it's possible. With "only" dozens of pieces, it's kind of possible to do this. So we set about trying to match parts - one guy's leg get ripped off above the knee, but this leg has the knee attached, so it can't be this first guy's. That sort of thing. "Look," my fellow "nurse" said, "this one ate rice!" Rice was one of the few kinds of food that was readily doled out. Everyone hated it because they were tired of it, because it required a lot of water to cook (and no one had running water) and because it required a lot of heat to cook (and there was no gas and the trees were mostly gone and we'd already burned most of our books.) But we hadn't had rice in a while; this soldier must have been had some at home, stashed away.
> This guy's stomach was blown up, so rice was all over the various parts of his body that came from his torso. And I remember being so happy, because the hardest things to connect to a specific person are internal organs, but this guy's organs had rice on them, so you could tell they were "his." Ones without rice were, presumably, the other soldier's. So the job of piecing together bodies was made much easier than it normally would have been, when you try to make each "body" weigh about the same, even if you know parts are mixed. Of course, I don't need to add that when something like this happens, it's not just people - and rice - everywhere, but uniquely awful smells, and the flies get there so fast I still don't know how they do it.
> Later that day, I snaked my way to my aunt's, a few kilometers away. I remember smiling; I rarely smiled during the war. My aunt had made soup - good soup - and I ate a lot and told her and my cousins about my day. We all agreed it that things had gone pretty well, considering. I was pretty happy about piecing two young men together successfully because of the rice and having a stomach full of warm soup.
> War is dehumanizing. If, as in the Okinawa quote, you still worry about getting shit and piss on you, if you can even still smell the rotting flesh, and if it bothers you enough that you consider not eating your rations, if you can still consider your situation to be something like "hell's own cesspool," well . . . then you're still pretty fucking lucky. People like to read about that stuff; that's why they make it into popular movies and comic books.
> People don't make movies about the happiness of a young girl who finds she can reassemble people with ease, thanks to the fact that one of them ate a lot of rice earlier that day. Because it isn't very romantic or macho and it isn't full of hard-ass symbolism.
> The thing about war, too, is that it affects many many more civilians than it does soldiers. The military-centric ideas in the article don't grasp that. War, according to romantic notions going as far back as the Greeks, is more about guys toughing it out than women and children left to pick up the pieces.
> I found that piece very hard to read - self-serving and smug in the sense of looking for romanticism. I reckon that, if the author had ever seen war, he'd be quite embarrassed by it.
> Guess what - most people prefer the movie version of any human experience. War is mostly long, boring, cold, hungry and tedious . . . then every once in a while someone lobs a grenade at you or shells your house or a sniper's bullet pierces your arm or rapes and kills someone you know and you get hysterical . . . and then it goes back to being long, boring, cold, hungry and tedious for eons and eons. While I like a lot of the human experiences eschewed by many people I know, war is one in which the movie version is quite plainly preferable.
There’s some amazing (and harrowing) content in her comment history — highly recommend giving it a read. It made me realize that even films like Saving Private Ryan present war as a titillating kind of hell. Something like Threads will probably come closer to the truth of it.
> Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.
Very nicely put.
Book recommendations: Faux Number go up is beautifully reported, in particular on the many scam and trafficking victims, the culture (Bored Ape parties), some of the players (eg SBF, the Tether people, etc.), and the underlying anarcho-capitalist mindset.
On the impact on the underprivileged (that the "check your financial privilege" and "banking the unbanked" predatory inclusion crypto crowd purports to care so much for), the green-washing of Bitcoin, the crypto philanthropy "bad samaritans", Metaverse and Web3, check Peter Howson's Let Them Eat Crypto.
Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money is another non-technical examination of fraud in crypto, El Salvador, and the severe consequences for victims.
This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.
Been using it for a couple of hours and it seems it’s much better at following the prompt. Right away it seems the quality is worse compared to some SDXL models but I’ll reserve judgement until a couple more days of testing.
It’s fast too! I would reckon about 2-3x faster than non-turbo SDXL.
Agreed that Takahata was a master in his own right.
Everybody knows about Grave of the Fireflies, but a few years ago I discovered the more subdued Only Yesterday and found it impressive. It stirred emotions, a true animated movie for adults.
I also enjoyed Princess Kaguya a lot. The art style alone is very different from Miyazaki's style (which I love, of course).
Disappointing that the TL;DR doesn't address the title question.
As a backpacker and a sailor, I strongly feel that DWR/Gore-Tex stuff is garbage anyways- it's (only slightly) breathable when new, but when the coating wears after a few weeks or months, or gets dirty it becomes no longer hydrophobic, and the water sheets on completely blocking the pores. This leads to zero breathability like a sheet of plastic, yet they usually also manage to leak water in constant all day heavy rains or ocean spray. The gore-tex membrane inside is very fragile and becomes ripped and unglued pretty rapidly, in places you cannot see- you don't know until you are counting on it, and it fails.
Two vastly superior alternatives that are PFAS free, much cheaper, more durable, more waterproof, and already on the shelf at most major outdoor stores:
* Polyurethane coated polyester raincoats, e.g. by Helley-Hansen cost about $100 USD new, and are more durable and waterproof than DWR/Nylon/Gore-Tex. Zero breathability (just like Gore-Tex in practice!) but because designers know this, they have excellent vents added, with waterproof zippers to close in extreme weather. Although they look similar, these are much better than your standard cheap PVC raincoat. I use these for sailing and stay bone dry with waves crashing over my body all day long.
* Membrane only jackets (membrane on the outside) such as Columbia OutDry. Because the surface material is fundamentally hydrophobic, they need no PFAS DWR coating, and stay waterproof and breathable even when dirty or aged. Only about $150 new.
// Edit: a third great option is PFAS free Nikwax brand waterproofing you can apply yourself to almost any garment. I've personally only used this on tents and car convertible tops, but it worked great.
That's a very interesting idea, and one that I hadn't considered. And indeed, Ireland in comparison is a place where people try not to get too political in conversation for obvious reasons, especially in the North where I grew up.
Your comment reminded me of another story, from the first time I visited home after being over here for 2 years, bringing my Dutch girlfriend with me to show her around and share with her a better understanding of where I came from.
I grew up in Belfast, which outside of the city centre was strongly divided between Protestants and Catholics. I grew up myself close to an interface between two of these areas, where violence was so bad and so regular that a wall had been erected to keep the communities apart and keep them from fighting.
This was one of the things that was shocking to my girlfriend, as well as the paintings on the wall showing masked men with guns to denote who controlled the area. After talking and walking for a while she noted that she was curious about the paintings on "the other side."
I explained to her that, by the age of 27 when I left the country, there was large portions of the city that I'd never visited because I didn't feel comfortable going there. She argued that peace had long been found and that if we went there no one would ever even know where I was from, so I agreed and we took a visit to The Falls Road in West Belfast, a working class Catholic area which was important in the history of The Troubles.
We saw their wall, we saw their murals which were honestly less intimidating than the ones I'd grown up with. We got to the top of the road and explored some side streets, one of which had a house pub, a house that had been converted into a pub.
My girlfriend wanted to go in and get a real sense of the local life. I was honestly quite scared because, on my side of town, such bars were always strongly associated with a heavy paramilitary clientele and would be unwelcoming to outsiders. But, I guess being Dutch, she said "Come on, we don't have to talk to anyone, we'll just get a drink and enjoy the atmosphere and you can say you've done it." Again, I agreed.
We entered into a small dark room. We hadn't even ordered our drinks before the locals noticed we were having to think about what was available and became curious. As soon as my girlfriend opened her mouth with her Dutch accent we were asked by the group around the bar, and the barmaid herself, where we'd come from.
She explained that she was Dutch and was welcomed with a friendly joke about "King Billy," William of Orange who had fought in Ireland for the Protestant Ascendancy in the 17th Century.
While this was happening a man approached me from antother part of the room and asked if I was a musician, as I was holding a set of mandolin strings. We got quickly into conversation as he was himself a banjo player, and I had been curious about finding a bar to hear some traditional music as I had started playing it myself while living in Holland.
Another gentleman then joined us and asked us where we were staying and I, still feeling uneasy, was quick to mention that it was in South Belfast, a mostly neutral part of town. I was told we weren't the only non-locals in the bar that night as there was a boy from Scotland as well, and he was quickly pointed out.
Conversation flowed naturally on and eventually I was asked what part of town I was from, and I decided to be honest and say East Belfast. The latest gentleman to have entered the conversation assumed that I was from the Short Strand, a small Catholic enclave in anotherwise Protestant neighbourhood. He actually phrased it as, "What part of the Strand are you from?" to which I responded, "I'm not, I'm from the Other Side" and he asked immediately "What are you doing up here then? Are you not afeared?"
I explained that I'd left the country and seen things from the outside, seen that we were one people living on one island, and that I was here with my girlfriend who was Dutch and just wanted to see the whole city. He shook my hand and said, "Well, you're a braver man that I am" before moving to another table.
Soon after the first man I'd spoken to, the musician, came up and said he'd heard that I was Protestant. He too shook my hand and said "That's just the way it should be. I hope you'll come back again." We finished our drinks and left soon after, as we had agreed.
I'm still not sure what to make of it all. Sometimes I regret having left and contributed to the "brain drain" at home, not being there to do my part in helping with the peace process. But sometimes I look back on that day and feel that in some small way I did my bit.
There were major banking panics in the US in 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, 1899, 1901, 1907 & 1908. All while the US was on a hard gold standard with weak central banks.
That’s of course without considering any of the pre and during depression era panics, where there was a quasi gold standard.
Savings can either be punished by inflation or risk. That’s an immutable financial fact. The only time you aren’t being punished for savings is if you exist in an economy where money can’t be put to productive use and is thus deflationary. Sometimes that’s good for savers but generally it means you are experiencing bad stagnation more broadly in the economy.
It's not one book, but for everything before calculus it would be difficult to beat the books in Israel Gelfand's High School Mathematics Correspondence Curriculum [0]. These are designed for self study and give a fresh perspective on topics they cover.
Yes, exactly. There's a real-life example of an author group who got sufficiently annoyed at a reviewer requesting an inappropriate subgroup analysis: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Reviewers asked for the subgroup analysis; authors said "no, this is statistically nonsense"; reviewers said "yes, but we'll reject the paper otherwise"; reviewers said "ok, but only if you let us also split on astrological sign".
Result: paper reports that aspirin has an effect, but only if you're not a Gemini or Libra. Too good.
It is debatable if Clean Code actually improves the programmer efficiency and programs readability. I find people applying it religiously often create over-complex designs like FizzBuzz Enterprise.
Even Uncle Bob's examples are not the state of the art in readability:
https://qntm.org/clean
The main problem seems to be that Clean Code is mostly a premature optimisation in code flexibility. It makes code more complex and objectively worse in hope it would be easier to extend later. Unfortunately we often dont know how the code will change, and in practice the code has to be significantly changed/rewritten anyway when a business requirement change appears.
IMHO optimizing for simplicity and readability has served me the best. Instead of avoiding the changes in code, it is better to write code so obvious that anyone can safely and easily change it when really needed.
And finally, performance of the program vs performance of the developer is a false dichotomy. So many times I've seen a more readable, simpler code turned out to be more efficient as well. You often can have both.
It is criminal that the article does not mention the fantastic "must watch" National Geographic documentary : Survivors of the Skeleton Coast - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce09ZygnMLg
The only video that i know of where you can see a Lion feeding on a Whale carcass on the beach!
Pizza Hut pan pizza is the easiest pizza to make yourself at home. You don't need a stand mixer, it's a no knead recipe (long overnight rise builds all the gluten). You don't need a fancy super hot oven, it just cooks at 400 degrees F in a cast iron skillet. Give this recipe a shot, it's unbelievably good and very accessible: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe or https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-srfPL5CWZs
It absolutely blows my mind; if this[1] failure of an attempt at a "get out of jail free" disclaimer is something you feel the need to write out so poorly, and in all caps, after your diatribe, maybe - MAYBE - you shouldn't have said a goddamn word.
To understand how error correction works and to learn more about Hamming codes & Reed-Solomon, 3Blue1Brown and Ben Eater were invaluable. 3Blue1Brown and Ben Eater are by far some of the best educational content creators within their fields, mathematics and computer engineering respectively.
I would strongly recommend anyone interested in the topic to check out any of these videos:
As an aside, Ben Eater does all of his videos and demonstrations using an 8-bit computer he has built step by step in videos on a breadboard. Very impressive and inspiring.
Others have mentioned relativenumber, but for horizontal I just use search. For example:
This is a line of text.
If the cursor is on "is" and you want to delete everything before "text", this is what I do:
d/text<enter>
Any movement works for these actions, even searching to "select" everything between the cursor and the target. Often I'll use visual mode to get a quick confirmation before deleting it:
v/text<enter>h
(check selection is what I want)
d
The visual mode one isn't exactly the same because one additional character, the first "t" in "text", is in the visual selection area, hence the "h" to go back one.
You should start with the Beginner's Quest CTF, by implementing a writeup's solution without looking at the writeup's actual code, and by playing other CTF style challenges such as Overthewire's Bandit.
https://capturetheflag.withgoogle.com/beginners-quest
https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/