> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything.
To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.
They're trying to explain everything but what they're actually doing is labelling everything with dubious labels and then putting social pressure on people to act like their labels. Under the guise of acceptance they're alienating everybody from each other by trying to put everybody into a bucket. It's best to notice this kind of thing but not put too much energy into refuting it because it's just not where conversations or attention should be, this kind of thought should wither in obscurity instead of seeking some kind of victory over it.
Haven't we been doing exactly what you say since like forever? Aren't "asshole" or "creep" or "nice" just labels coined a long time ago that already distort someones actual behavior or some situation between 2 people? Or used for being mocked or commended? I say at least in current times the new generations are expanding that vocabulary in trying to be more precise but the people that are more of a following type keep defaulting to exclusionary behavior.
They are also fully funded to compensate when they do something wrong. An apology from a Fortune 500 company with a history of unethical behavior is worthless.
I highly recommend this book: Sky High!: A Soaring History of Aviation especially for those with children as a fun illustrated history of the individuals and their contributions to making modern aviation possible today. Suffice to say and as other commenters said, no one individual or pair of individuals made the airplane.
This article largely misses the cargo culty things developers do in practice - like massively overcomplicating their infrastructure using kubernetes and message busses when they've no real need.
There is a large Venn space here with RDD, résumé driven development.
You mean I could serve my 10 active user application on a literal potato writing data to Google Sheets, instead of spinning up a five node container cluster with ten microservices each? How would my solution architect justify his job then?
Jokes aside, I don't think this is really cargo cult. It seems more like people genuinely believe in adding bloat just to get promotions or bragging rights. In my opinion, actual cargo cult behavior would be a novice saying they want to solve a front-end slowness issue by migrating the whole application to React because "React just works, dude." Or it could be the Stackoverflow-driven development approach, which is now evolving into ChatGPT-driven development.
But the real winner is when there's a development process problem, and someone says, "What we need is Agile!" as if requiring the team to follow ceremonies that no stakeholders care about will magically fix everything.
System design interviews encourage this. Not everything needs to be infinitely scalable. I've whittled down more than a few things to static webpages generated using a cron job.
My best friend's son died at the hands of a negligent daycare, he escaped his crib, knocked a stroller over on to himself which wasn't supposed to be there, and suffocated to death. My friend called me that night to tell me. It's been 5 years and I think about it every single day. Frankly it has turned me from a person with zero anxiety to one with a good deal. I've checked on my younger daughter's breathing every single night since then. She's 7 years old and I still can't stop myself from checking on her. My friend is one of the good-est people I know. A genuinely good person. Why him? And if him, certainly why not me?
I've had nothing like this happen, but somehow I get this--I was spooked by anecdotes about SIDS before having kids. When we had our daughter, and she was sleeping in her crib in our room, the first couple of months I'd basically wake up when she wasn't making noise, would then in dazed half-sleep wait for her to make any noise to confirm she was still alive (or check, sometimes), and could only then fall back asleep again. This only really quieted down one year in, when the statistical risk goes down. I guess it's fairly easy to get hypersensitized to dangers like this.
> My best friend's son died ... It's been 5 years and I think about it every single day.
Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote possibilities. Most times, it does not.
They exist, but cannot be predicted nor controlled. Hopefully, the following help quell anxiety resulting from considering all which could happen.
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.[0]
Or:
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the
rest as it happens. Some things are up to us [eph' hêmin]
and some things are not up to us.[0]
Or:
If there's a remedy when trouble strikes,
What reason is there for dejection?
And if there is no help for it,
What use is there in being glum?[0]
> Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote possibilities. Most times, it does not.
That's very true. And for a lot of people, and I'd guess HN has a very dense concentration of them, that's very hard to not do, because we've been trained to do exactly that, for professional work.
Cybersecurity is exactly that. What are all the remote possibilities you can come up with, and how do you defend them? Then reality hits, and it's so much worse than you ever feared, because you didn't think that Intel would release chips that couldn't keep secrets if you asked in the proper way. "I speculate, with my little gadget, the contents of all of physical memory..."
What's SRE, ops, any of those fields, but trying to imagine the remote possibilities of how things go down, and how you can mitigate it, or at least fail cleanly? And then, of course, reality hits, and you end up with someone shutting down a datacenter edge router with a dial up modem, because they'd been sufficiently paranoid about things to insist that there would still be a POTS route in, for when everything else went wrong and in-band signaling no longer worked. Which, of course, happened.
The high reliability hardware sorts, I expect, deal with something similar. "But what if a super high energy cosmic ray flipped this bit?"
I don't know how to turn this off when it's not helpful. I've done it too long. :/
>> Sometimes it helps to contemplate the nature of remote possibilities. Most times, it does not.
> ... for a lot of people, and I'd guess HN has a very dense concentration of them, that's very hard to not do, because we've been trained to do exactly that, for professional work.
I can definitely relate. Working in various teams quite similar to what you describe, I'd say these examples are fine exemplars of the "sometimes it helps" category.
Luckily, these are engineering related and not arbitrary familial threat vectors, real or imagined, as the latter are often (not always) not quantifiable to a statistically meaningful degree.
> I don't know how to turn this off when it's not helpful. I've done it too long. :/
Extra resources for schools = free breakfast, lunch, afterschool activities = kids cost less money = parents can work less demanding/normal hour jobs = more parental involvement.
That’s a lot of logic, but resources for schools is a lot more than free food, better books, etc. schools are one of the best ways to distribute community resources. The alternative (read: kids who got expelled from normal schools) near me hosts adult job fairs, has family counseling, etc.
There are loads of successful implementations! Just look outside of the US to Nordic countries or, say, Japan or Korea. The US does a lot of things pretty badly.
I agree that free healthy food for all kids is a great idea. Unfortunately, I have very little trust in US school administrators and school districts to provide healthy meals which nourish children instead of food industry espoused slop which sets them up with an unhealthy eating habits for life.
Here's a comparison of school meals in Korea vs. the US. There are similar comparisons with Japan, France, and Germany. Somehow the US is uniquely unable to feed kids healthy food. I blame political corruption and food industry marketing.
For low income kids, healthy v not doesn’t matter when the alternative is not eating. Ideally yes we provide healthier food, but that shouldn’t stop us from providing free meals even if they’re not amazing.
I'm in the market for a watch. Turned 41, my weight has slowly crept up despite working out 4-5 times a week - not too bad, like not obese. My cholesterol is bad partially due to genetics but mostly due to diet. I also have a mild sleep apnea, especially when my weight is high. I'm focusing on dropping weight this year and would love to start tracking sleep, recovery, apnea, and any heart issues before/as they happen. I do not want another screen though and though I've looked at the Apple watch multiple times, I've not actually purchased it yet.
I don't believe the Garmin tracks apnea signals or heart issues at all unfortunately
It will alert you if your heart rate goes above a certain limit (that you've set) when you're not exercising. It tracks sleep too, but I don't know about sleep apnea signals. It does track pulse ox, so a low sleep quality report and low pulse ox might indicate sleep apnea? idk
I have an older relative who uses their Venu3 to take their own ECG and combine that with a Garmin Index BPM (~$150) to help monitor their heart function. The ECG is simple to use on the watch and the BPM syncs to Garmin Connect so that all that data is stored daily for their cardiac specialist to review when they go in for appointments. They had a diagnosis of A-Fib a while back that explained all their decrease in energy levels and since beginning treatment for it they have had no further issues. Now they have the ability to sit and take an ECG to transmit to their cardiologist if they start feeling bad. For them it provides peace of mind that their meds are working as designed. They regularly get in 5k - 10k steps daily which is pretty great for someone making a strong run at 90 y.o.
I don't think Garmin has a device that is able to track or identify sleep anea events but would not be surprised to see that functionality appear in the near future on some product.
I have an Instinct 2 Solar and it has been great for me. I told other relatives about it and they have picked their own models to suit their lifestyles.
I think that is Garmin's strength, the wide variety of fitness devices suited for almost any activity or personality.
I was in the same boat with genetics and cholesterol. It is all the diet.
At some point I realized I had to stop eating cheese completely. No pizza, no nachos, no tacos with cheese. I can stay in good shape with a once a week cheat night but I don't have the genetics to deal with the cholesterol like that.
It sucked at first but the things I do enjoy now, I enjoy them just as much.
Consuming cholesterol, like in cheese, has little effect on serum cholesterol levels. Almost all of the cholesterol in your body is endogenously produced.
Also, wasn’t cholesterol that thing where there’s no actual scientifically proven “good” value but the margins were decided on assumptions (and to sell medication)?
one thing my first garmin from 2016 did for me was to make me more active, because its activity nags with minimum-enforced active time ensured that I wouldn't just keep sitting all day. Their newer models track hrv and offer ecg in some models/countries to help with heart health tracking.
Unfortunately for Rubyists (myself included) those are huge benefits though nowadays. It's much easier to find Python developers.
Having an out-of-the-box admin interface means business people can operationalize and workaround short comings of the software today, not tomorrow. I think functional admin interfaces can often be the difference between a successful company and one which is constantly operating off of spreadsheets in the background and never fully commits to their software.
To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.