Reminds me, Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers” book had a section about his interesting observation that pro hockey players’ birthdays are skewed to the earlier months of the year. He attributed that to a kind of butterfly effect:

1. Youth hockey leagues set league cutoffs by age, and mostly all start at the same time.
2. The early month kids are slightly older, bigger, and stronger
3. Since they are better at the very beginning, they get more playing time, more encouragement, maybe visit more “all-star” events, where they might get extra coaching, etc.
4. eventually those kids actually just become better, because they had a better environment to grow.

I mean idk how accurate this exact instance is, but I feel it’s a good thought experiment in thinking of how seemingly insignificant parts of the environment (like when in the year all the youth hockey leagues start) can impact whatever talent is. The whole nature vs nurture thing.

My only thing I know about Salon is that at one point, they had a piece about how depressing it was to live in a hacker house, and I was like “wait. I lived in this exact apartment”. I remembered the Pinterest guy who lived in the closet. That was slightly surreal.

Oh nonono don’t worry about me! I’m just exaggerating and making up a dramatic story. Started writing and got carried away a little bit 😂. Luckily for me, I was always on good teams. But I did work in big companies long enough that I’ve definitely seen variations of this kind of thing play out.

Anyone got store recs for non-english books? Or that mostly just gonna vary a ton by language?

Wish granted. Now management questions why everything “takes you so long”, and you were passed up for promotion in order to promote Jim (just last week, he did a presentation about his new feature that uses fancyAssDB).

Don’t worry, though. They’ll need your help soon, in order to make Jim’s fancyAssDB pet project sync with the oldAssDB legacy server (which is a completely different User/id structure. TBH might need to refactor most of Jim’s code to fit. Have fun extending all of Jim’s hardcoded features). He quit the company to join a crypto startup. Still no promotion though, since you finish stuff kinda slow (I mean, Jim built it in 2 weeks, so it can’t be too complicated).

EDIT:

So now I hear you thinking “well at some point, they’ll notice how much better my code works, and that features are much easier to integrate”.

But don’t worry, because the next month, your manager will be promoted to head of a new department and forget you exist. Meanwhile, the new head of your department doesn’t know you, and is thinking of promoting Frank.

While you were fixing Jim’s code, Frank added some features to your old project using fancyAssLib3 to save some time. He’s doing a presentation on it tomorrow, and management is very interested, because they haven’t heard about this code yet. It’s Frank’s codebase, right? I mean, he’s doing a presentation on it.

Yupyup I understand that feeling for sure. I have the same nitpick problem. Just figured I’d mention this one because it’s the least dongly feeling dongle that I’ve tried by a large margin, and so has become the only one I’ve actually continued using.

fwiw, I found the form factor of this dac to be much more enjoyable than the pigtail adapters, because it feels more like “part of the headphone cable”: https://www.ddhifi.com/en/product-review/11321/

I’ve found that for me, the most “prone to damage” part for usb-c audio is just the usb-c connection… so idk how much a usb-c headset improves over an adapter… I just want them to add back headphone jacks. 😭

I don’t ever use a dishwasher, so I have no idea what works in those things 😂

Fwiw, this was also on HN yesterday. Never tried it myself, though:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941232

^ fwiw, I have one of these, prefer lighter roasts, and prefer the taste of paper filters. So checks out I guess. I do like the fabric filter, though.

I use something similar that I bought in Taiwan as a backup to paper filters, since I am often traveling and can’t always find v60-style filters. Some thoughts:

• It can be annoying to clean
• When I want more than a rinse, I wash it extra by boiling it in tea; that seems to work well.
• It does have a bit of a different flavor compared to paper. As a light-roast drinker who grinds with a Timemore C3, I prefer paper for taste. In the James Hoffman vid other people linked, he describes it as “extra richness and body” for light roasts, but I kinda describe it more as “clouding some of the bite and clarity”. It’s definitely still quite good, and I still prefer the cloth over French press.
• I do find it quite convenient for my use as a backup to paper filters in my “ultra-portable” setup.

Pictured here with small *PAT Tetradrip. A proper v60 is 100% better taste than the Tetradrip; but it’s a really convenient foldy-size.

Whoa those space ones are really cool!

It’s like you’re building headphone chimeras. I didn’t realize you could just buy brand parts like that!

So I’ve been trying to learn Spanish and Chinese recently, and as a programmer, I’ve also been making a few tools to help me with it! Right now, the first works, and the second is…. well it kinda works, but it’s more in-progress

1. Emoji Flashcards - http://flashcards.bpev.me

Generates Emoji-Audio-Text flashcards with audio in a bunch of languages (meant to be used with Anki). The idea is that it’s better to avoid using your native tongue when learning a language, so use common visual images (Also, please help fix my translations 😂)! But my friend just vetted the Japanese deck, and I’ve been updating the Mexican Spanish deck as I go, so maybe those ones are pretty okay right now.

2. Multireader - https://github.com/bpevs/multireader

For reading e-books with select-to-translate, so I can read a book in another language, and highlight when I don’t know a word. I want to make it create flashcards from the words I highlight.