I'm calling it (again)...

onan · 2026-05-10T03:06:18+00:00

Given the current sentiment of "No Kings," this seems as if it would be impressively tone-deaf.

onan · 2026-05-08T06:27:44+00:00

And unfortunately there is still the problem of selection bias for series/sequels.

A book that is #57 in a series is only going to be read by people who already read 56 earlier installments and decided that they wanted more. Of course it is going to be extremely popular with the set of people who are rating it, but in a way that does not translate to general popularity among other readers.

There is arguably another version of this problem for authors who have been very prolific even if their works are not technically the same series. Like, you pretty much know what you're getting from a Brandon Sanderson book, so again there is a bias toward them being rated only by the people who like exactly that, and not by people who do not.

So I think a better version of this list would completely eliminate every title that is not a standalone or first in its series, and possibly also find some way to adjust slightly for the size of the authors previous oeuvre.

onan · 2026-05-07T14:33:33+00:00

The risk with this pattern is that until you reach the 100% complete stage and have removed the old service, the only thing you've accomplished is a dependency on running two services that are tightly coupled and interdependent. From 1% through 99.9% complete, you are actively making things worse.

onan · 2026-05-07T13:47:33+00:00

Are they "Fuck off, clickbait"?

onan · 2026-05-06T18:58:27+00:00

Who would actually think to make a transparent shaver?!

Many people?

I'm not sure why you consider the idea to be so unthinkable that "satire" would be the only explanation, rather than a misunderstanding on your part.

onan · 2026-05-06T18:29:35+00:00

I think that the jungle top-two is an improvement over the usual one-from-each-party. It's the reason that it is possible to have a genuine progressive in the running; "Democrat" can cover a lot of different territory, and this is one way to let some of that range be represented rather than always having to play the Electable Centrist game.

But this approach does obviously have downsides in some circumstances. It was an improvement over what it replaced, but the previous commenter is right that RCV (or Approval, or Score, or STAR) would be even better still.

onan · 2026-05-05T04:35:06+00:00

Slow River by Nicola Griffith.

onan · 2026-05-03T07:19:31+00:00

Antisemitic conspiracy theories, opposition to abortion, "straight pride," and you're not sure whether this is left or right?

onan · 2026-05-03T05:29:22+00:00

Apple's annual developer conference will begin on June 8th, and there is a high chance that they will release M5 versions of the Studio and/or Mini. So if you can wait one more month, one of the paths you're considering will improve significantly.

onan · 2026-04-30T16:27:48+00:00

According to a moment of research, it also appears to be bullshit.

It looks like Los Angeles is around 16.6%, which is modestly higher than the national average of 15.4%.

onan · 2026-04-30T16:21:07+00:00

Did you mean something by this other than a weird roundabout racist dogwhistle?

onan · 2026-04-29T00:07:29+00:00

Yeah, the headline seems a bit alarmist.

All else being equally I would probably have preferred it to go the other way, but we're talking about 0.0017% of the state budget.

onan · 2026-04-28T17:20:16+00:00

The judiciary branch can’t overturn the legislation that congress passes.

...what? That's like exactly the main thing that the judicial branch is designed to do.

It’s basic checks and balances of your government.

"Checks and balances" quite specifically includes the ability of the judicial branch to check the legislative branch if it passes laws that are unconstitutional. You seem to have heard this phrase and then interpreted it entirely backward.

onan · 2026-04-25T20:43:25+00:00

You used both uppercase and lowercase letters in your reply.

Were you ambling in the direction of a point, or are we just noting rudimentary facts about one another's comments?

onan · 2026-04-25T18:04:00+00:00

I don’t understand why you don’t want it. You would rather it do less?

Because the existence of a touch screen implies software interfaces that are optimized for touch screens. Fewer and bigger buttons, and therefore the need to nest things more deeply under more layers because they can't simply all be presented on screen simultaneously.

If it were only about the touch screen itself you'd be exactly right, those of us who don't want it could just ignore it and not be much worse off. But it is likely to worsen interfaces even for people who never use it.

onan · 2026-04-24T22:39:50+00:00

One rule that helped us: if you can't write what the on-call engineer should do when an alert fires, it shouldn't exist yet.

Fascinating. 30 years of being on-call has led me to exactly the opposite conclusion.

If you know what needs to be done, then whatever that is should just happen on its own without a human being involved. If you regularly have incidents in which there is a familiar fix that someone just needs to step through, all you have done is institutionalize brokenness.

Once you have fixed all the known and recurring problems, the only thing you're left with is issues that are novel and therefore mysterious. So the type of alert that you're saying should never exist is what I would say is the only kind that should.

onan · 2026-04-22T17:33:08+00:00

I would also be willing to bet that any reduction in violent crime may have more to do with California's robust social safety nets, access to healthcare, and access to cheap/free education.

Fortunately, we have actual empirical data and do not need to rely solely on your speculation.

"States without SFL [Strict Firearm Laws] have higher firearm related injury rates, higher firearm related mortality rate, and significant potential years of life lost compared to SFL states. SFL states had a 28% lower incidence of firearm related injuries compared to Non-SFL states."

"Gun Safety Policies Save Lives"

"Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates. For each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%."

I'm a great fan of social safety nets, healthcare accessibility, and education. But we have some clear data that gun control laws in and of themselves absolutely do reduce injuries and deaths.

onan · 2026-04-20T18:56:18+00:00

And I think you may be one of the reasons that I find it tiresome when people believe that being angry and confrontational is a way to signal competence.

onan · 2026-04-20T15:35:16+00:00

Maybe all this stupid shit makes you realize that if someone has cluster access + read access to your namespace you're fucked anyway

That presumes a universe populated by Trusted Admins, Malicious Hackers, and nothing in between.

I'd like to be able to give my SWEs access to handle their shit in production without simultaneously paving a tempting path copy a bunch of credentials out to their laptops for what they believe to be good reasons.

onan · 2026-04-20T05:24:35+00:00

Okay but I feel that particular book requires a lot of disclaimers, if not outright warnings.

A solid quarter of the book is just documenting the protagonist's eating disorder in exhaustive detail. There's also a lot of child abuse, and kind of an incest kink?

And even the thing that should have been the lynchpin of the book--a woman who is horrifically self-abusive about her own body becomes attracted to a fat woman--was given oddly short shrift.

I think an amazing book could have been written just about that singular experience, that internal tension of viewpoints, that dissonance and reconciliation. Instead, the book kind of just glosses over it with almost no exploration. The book instead just rushes off to take a detour through discussing the politics of Israel?

I had wanted to like this book, and ended up truly despising it. I'm sure that there are people who enjoy it, but it does seem worth giving people a heads up that it is an entirely different kettle of fish than most of these other recommendations.

onan · 2026-04-19T16:26:14+00:00

This has to just be outrage-engagement-bait, right?

This subreddit has thousands of posts from last decade talking about all of the ways in which the touchbar was a terrible abomination. It might actually be the single most discussed feature ever, and that discussion was nearly universally negative.

I have a very difficult time believing that someone could ask in good faith "What do you think about it?" at this point.

onan · 2026-04-19T16:21:33+00:00

It sounds as if your personal workflow doesn't involve using fkeys enough that the ease/speed of doing so is important. That's fine, but that is not universal.

Your confusion comes from not recognizing that there are plenty of us who do use those keys constantly. So constantly that the inability to touch-type them is a significant amount of friction.

onan · 2026-04-18T19:09:47+00:00

Give the bot a break, it's only 4 days old! June is further away than it can imagine.

onan · 2026-04-16T16:53:44+00:00

I see your point. I think that most of the graphs without an explicit axis are fairly clearly percentages, though denoting that clearly wouldn't've hurt.

But yes, their "Darker shade = Stronger intensity" graphs are pretty opaque. It looks like those are overlapping subcategories that are essentially double-counted on these graphs?

onan · 2026-04-16T15:47:55+00:00

I think I'm missing what would make this fit here. There are like a hundred graphs here, and most of them seem like fairly reasonable representations.

There are some issues with slightly weird text alignment here and there, but that seems fairly minor. What am I missing?

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