Re: Today I learned you can pause the Windows Task Man...
Great feature, regrettably obscured by a lack of discoverability.
The norm used to be to show shortcut accelerators right next to their menu dropdowns. That would naturally advertise those most useful to the user, without getting in the way.
Tangentially, the correct way to present nifty tips like this is NOT in a "tour of new features" wizard spammed at the user when they're opening your app to try and get something important done.
rkagerer, 1 day ago
Great feature, regrettably obscured by a lack of discoverability.
The norm used to be to show shortcut accelerators right next to their menu dropdowns. That would naturally advertise those most useful to the user, without getting in the way.
Tangentially, the correct way to present nifty tips like this is NOT in a "tour of new features" wizard spammed at the user when they're opening your app to try and get something important done.
rkagerer, 1 day ago
Re: Getting a job at Apple without going to college or...
I think the sort of more general point, rather than "build something great that someone at Apple notices", is that Graduate and Internship programmes are scale businesses. They get thousands of people applying and will hire atleast dozens, probably some FANG are hiring hundreds. So yes, we're all special snowflakes, but that's not what this process is for. It's about harsh rounds of easy to design problems to winnow the field.
This totally changes when you're a specific candidate with skills Apple values. What this guy experienced wasn't an interview process. They had already decided to hire him before what he described as the interview process. They already know he's good, he experienced the talent acquisition process. The bit that happens when the company has already decided to hire you and is now doing everything it can to sell you on the job.
If someone outside of recruiting contacts you about a job at a company, you will not experience a normal interview process, because they're already quite likely to want to hire you.
SilverBirch, 10 hours ago
I think the sort of more general point, rather than "build something great that someone at Apple notices", is that Graduate and Internship programmes are scale businesses. They get thousands of people applying and will hire atleast dozens, probably some FANG are hiring hundreds. So yes, we're all special snowflakes, but that's not what this process is for. It's about harsh rounds of easy to design problems to winnow the field.
This totally changes when you're a specific candidate with skills Apple values. What this guy experienced wasn't an interview process. They had already decided to hire him before what he described as the interview process. They already know he's good, he experienced the talent acquisition process. The bit that happens when the company has already decided to hire you and is now doing everything it can to sell you on the job.
If someone outside of recruiting contacts you about a job at a company, you will not experience a normal interview process, because they're already quite likely to want to hire you.
SilverBirch, 10 hours ago
Re: How Is LLaMa.cpp Possible?
In case anyone is wondering, yes, there is a cost when a model is quantized.
https://oobabooga.github.io/blog/posts/perplexities/
Essentially, you lose some accuracy and there might be some weird answers and probably more likely to go off the rail and hallucinate. But the quality loss is lower the more parameters you have. So for very large model sizes the differences might be negligible. Also, this is the cost of inference only. Training is a whole other beast and requires much more power.
Still, we are looking at GPT3 level of performance on one server rack. That says something when less than a year ago, such AI was literally magic and only run on a massive datacenter. Bandwidth and memory size are probably, in my ignorance mind, easier to increase than raw compute so maybe we will soon actually have "smart" devices.
tomohelix, 1 day ago
In case anyone is wondering, yes, there is a cost when a model is quantized.
https://oobabooga.github.io/blog/posts/perplexities/
Essentially, you lose some accuracy and there might be some weird answers and probably more likely to go off the rail and hallucinate. But the quality loss is lower the more parameters you have. So for very large model sizes the differences might be negligible. Also, this is the cost of inference only. Training is a whole other beast and requires much more power.
Still, we are looking at GPT3 level of performance on one server rack. That says something when less than a year ago, such AI was literally magic and only run on a massive datacenter. Bandwidth and memory size are probably, in my ignorance mind, easier to increase than raw compute so maybe we will soon actually have "smart" devices.
tomohelix, 1 day ago
Re: Managing difficult software engineers
3.4. The Procrastinator 3.5. The Lone Wolf 3.6. The Negative Nancy 3.7. The Over-Promiser 3.8. The Know-It-All 3.9. The Silent Type 3.10. The Perfectionist 3.11. The Unreliable One 3.12. The Conflict Instigator 3.13. The Burned-Out Employee
I have experienced myself being one of each type of "difficult" software engineer during my career. Not every day, not every month, but from time to time. Sometimes because of the environment (e.g., type of company I worked for), sometimes because of internal issues (e.g., family issues), and sometimes because I really felt like that (e.g., when I was in my mid 20s).
I haven't met any engineer who's never shown any traits of the thirteen "personas" listed in the post. If you're looking for an engineer that has zero traits like the ones listed above, you are perhaps looking for a robot.
danwee, 13 hours ago
3.4. The Procrastinator 3.5. The Lone Wolf 3.6. The Negative Nancy 3.7. The Over-Promiser 3.8. The Know-It-All 3.9. The Silent Type 3.10. The Perfectionist 3.11. The Unreliable One 3.12. The Conflict Instigator 3.13. The Burned-Out Employee
I have experienced myself being one of each type of "difficult" software engineer during my career. Not every day, not every month, but from time to time. Sometimes because of the environment (e.g., type of company I worked for), sometimes because of internal issues (e.g., family issues), and sometimes because I really felt like that (e.g., when I was in my mid 20s).
I haven't met any engineer who's never shown any traits of the thirteen "personas" listed in the post. If you're looking for an engineer that has zero traits like the ones listed above, you are perhaps looking for a robot.
danwee, 13 hours ago
Re: JobCorps.Gov: free job training, food, housing and...
A number of my acquaintances (rural Montana) went through this after high school. It is noble and it is well-intentioned. When students stick with it it often opens new opportunities that wouldn't be available otherwise.
But it's not a silver bullet, and it requires a certain amount of diligence and self-awareness to be able to finish the program. It's not a party atmosphere like college or entry-level employment can be: how many 19-year-olds do you know who want to live in a dorm setting and show up on time? How many 22-year-olds want to go months without drinking?
That said, it's a clear and coherent step forward for people who might otherwise feel lost, and that's a very good thing.
Now, if only they had something for NEETs over job corps's age limit....
presidentender, 7 hours ago
A number of my acquaintances (rural Montana) went through this after high school. It is noble and it is well-intentioned. When students stick with it it often opens new opportunities that wouldn't be available otherwise.
But it's not a silver bullet, and it requires a certain amount of diligence and self-awareness to be able to finish the program. It's not a party atmosphere like college or entry-level employment can be: how many 19-year-olds do you know who want to live in a dorm setting and show up on time? How many 22-year-olds want to go months without drinking?
That said, it's a clear and coherent step forward for people who might otherwise feel lost, and that's a very good thing.
Now, if only they had something for NEETs over job corps's age limit....
presidentender, 7 hours ago
Re: Fusion Foolery
This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning and others:
"In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."
hliyan, 1 day ago
This is such a great paragraph, true not just of fusion, but room temperature superconductors, fast-charging, high-range, non-degrading EVs, machine learning and others:
"In any case, the public reaction to the fusion story tells me a lot about our collective psychology. To me, it speaks to a sense of desperation. I think people sense that the “bad news” side of the ledger is overcrowded of late, and it’s starting to dawn on people that the future could possibly be worse than the present. This causes a cognitive dissonance in that our cultural narrative is one of progress, growth, and innovation. How can these competing visions be squared? News of fusion has the effect of temporarily permitting people to shed the anxiety and embrace the dream all the more strongly."
hliyan, 1 day ago
Re: Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with th...
I did this many years ago when I was a bench tech at a PC shop. It was an old Connor 40 meg drive running DOS. If I squeezed it just right, it would work. Too much? Failure, Abort/retry/ignore. Not enough? Same. So I stood there, squeezing the drive, and hitting ‘r’ for retry, over and over. It worked!
Boss walked by. “What the heck are you doing?”
“I’m milking the data out of this drive!”
randombits0, 21 hours ago
I did this many years ago when I was a bench tech at a PC shop. It was an old Connor 40 meg drive running DOS. If I squeezed it just right, it would work. Too much? Failure, Abort/retry/ignore. Not enough? Same. So I stood there, squeezing the drive, and hitting ‘r’ for retry, over and over. It worked!
Boss walked by. “What the heck are you doing?”
“I’m milking the data out of this drive!”
randombits0, 21 hours ago
Re: My resignation letter as R7RS-large chair
The Scheme community has long held tension between people who want to use Scheme as a teaching language, versus those who want to use it for writing real-world programs.
The former want the language to stay as minimal as possible with a tiny standard library so that there are fewer concepts and options for students to stumble over. The latter want a full-featured language (but still minimal, it is Scheme after all) with a large standard library of useful types and functions so they can get stuff done.
These two perspectives are both reasonable but fairly incompatible.
For most of its history, Scheme leaned towards education. Around the type of the sixth edition (RSR6), pulled somewhat the other way and the language and library spec got much bigger. This alienated a lot of folks who wanted to stay a small teaching language.
For RSR7, they tried to resolve that by simply splitting the language in two: a small one and a large one. Then each subcommunity can have what they want.
Around the same time, the language PLTScheme renamed itself to Racket to clarify that they aren't trying to be beholden to the overall direction of the Scheme community. Racket is also a "large Scheme" in that it's a Scheme-derived language that tries really hard to be batteries included for all sorts of uses. It also can be "subset" into smaller languages for use in teaching.
My impression (from far on the outside) is that Racket has taken up a lot of the oxygen, which may partially explain why RSR7-large never managed to reach consensus and ship.
munificent, 21 hours ago
The Scheme community has long held tension between people who want to use Scheme as a teaching language, versus those who want to use it for writing real-world programs.
The former want the language to stay as minimal as possible with a tiny standard library so that there are fewer concepts and options for students to stumble over. The latter want a full-featured language (but still minimal, it is Scheme after all) with a large standard library of useful types and functions so they can get stuff done.
These two perspectives are both reasonable but fairly incompatible.
For most of its history, Scheme leaned towards education. Around the type of the sixth edition (RSR6), pulled somewhat the other way and the language and library spec got much bigger. This alienated a lot of folks who wanted to stay a small teaching language.
For RSR7, they tried to resolve that by simply splitting the language in two: a small one and a large one. Then each subcommunity can have what they want.
Around the same time, the language PLTScheme renamed itself to Racket to clarify that they aren't trying to be beholden to the overall direction of the Scheme community. Racket is also a "large Scheme" in that it's a Scheme-derived language that tries really hard to be batteries included for all sorts of uses. It also can be "subset" into smaller languages for use in teaching.
My impression (from far on the outside) is that Racket has taken up a lot of the oxygen, which may partially explain why RSR7-large never managed to reach consensus and ship.
munificent, 21 hours ago
Re: Learn as you search (and browse) using generative ...
Ironically, articles got pointlessly long because of Google. Everyone stretches their content because long form ranks better.
A few hours ago I wanted to know the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane. Here is the answer: they're the same thing, just in a different ocean. I clicked three or four articles and had to read for a few minutes to get to that answer.
It's even worse with videos. It takes 10 minutes to answer the simplest questions, because that's the ideal length for monetisation.
nicbou, 1 day ago
Ironically, articles got pointlessly long because of Google. Everyone stretches their content because long form ranks better.
A few hours ago I wanted to know the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane. Here is the answer: they're the same thing, just in a different ocean. I clicked three or four articles and had to read for a few minutes to get to that answer.
It's even worse with videos. It takes 10 minutes to answer the simplest questions, because that's the ideal length for monetisation.
nicbou, 1 day ago
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC,” says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.”
The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe: for every 1 part copper-doped lead phosphate crystal — pure LK-99 — it makes, it produces 17 parts copper and 5 parts sulfur. These leftovers lead to numerous impurities — especially copper sulfide, which the Korean team reported in its sample.
Jain, a copper-sulfide expert, remembered 104ºC as the temperature at which Cu2S undergoes a phase transition if exposed to air. Below that temperature, Cu2S’s resistivity drops dramatically — a signal almost identical to LK-99’s purported superconducting phase transition. “I was almost in disbelief that they missed it.” Jain published a preprint on the important confounding effect on 7 August.
[...]
“That was the moment where I said, ‘Well, obviously, that’s what made them think this was a superconductor,’” says Fuhrer. “The nail in the coffin was this copper sulfide thing.”
Science is hard. Kudos to everyone involved for trying to replicate it and figuring this puzzle out.
vecter, 1 day ago
In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC,” says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.”
The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe: for every 1 part copper-doped lead phosphate crystal — pure LK-99 — it makes, it produces 17 parts copper and 5 parts sulfur. These leftovers lead to numerous impurities — especially copper sulfide, which the Korean team reported in its sample.
Jain, a copper-sulfide expert, remembered 104ºC as the temperature at which Cu2S undergoes a phase transition if exposed to air. Below that temperature, Cu2S’s resistivity drops dramatically — a signal almost identical to LK-99’s purported superconducting phase transition. “I was almost in disbelief that they missed it.” Jain published a preprint on the important confounding effect on 7 August.
[...]
“That was the moment where I said, ‘Well, obviously, that’s what made them think this was a superconductor,’” says Fuhrer. “The nail in the coffin was this copper sulfide thing.”
Science is hard. Kudos to everyone involved for trying to replicate it and figuring this puzzle out.
vecter, 1 day ago
Re: Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with th...
Ah, data compression
HPsquared, 23 hours ago
Ah, data compression
HPsquared, 23 hours ago
Re: Forget ‘quiet quitting’ – ‘loud laborers’ are kill...
Visibility and self-promotion is how you get ahead in the workplace. Staying quiet and focussing on good work because "it'll speak for itself" is naive and in general the result is only to be taken advantage of.
mytailorisrich, 2 days ago
Visibility and self-promotion is how you get ahead in the workplace. Staying quiet and focussing on good work because "it'll speak for itself" is naive and in general the result is only to be taken advantage of.
mytailorisrich, 2 days ago
Re: SUSE to go private
Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever. I can't emphasize enough how rock solid Tumbleweed is. OBS also doubles as their own AUR equivalent - you can make your own repo and do your own builds and install from the command line, or browse and install what other people have done.
Leap is their stable distro, and shares binaries with SLES, their enterprise offering.
Both Leap and Tumbleweed have BTRFS by default, with Snapper for automated snapshots at upgrade and boot. Update messed something up? System won't boot? Just run an old snapshot until it's fixed. Zypper, the package manager, has state-of-the-art dependancy resolution, personally the best I've used.
They have a number of extremely interesting spinoff projects: MicroOS and MicroOS desktop (recently renamed, but the new names are escaping me) which use immutable root filesystems with automated updates and native Podman support. Snapper integration shines there, as well. If it fails to boot after update, it'll automatically roll back.
They're doing quite a bit, and it's all culminating in being very useable. Tumbleweed is the crown jewel, though.
COGlory, 15 hours ago
Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever. I can't emphasize enough how rock solid Tumbleweed is. OBS also doubles as their own AUR equivalent - you can make your own repo and do your own builds and install from the command line, or browse and install what other people have done.
Leap is their stable distro, and shares binaries with SLES, their enterprise offering.
Both Leap and Tumbleweed have BTRFS by default, with Snapper for automated snapshots at upgrade and boot. Update messed something up? System won't boot? Just run an old snapshot until it's fixed. Zypper, the package manager, has state-of-the-art dependancy resolution, personally the best I've used.
They have a number of extremely interesting spinoff projects: MicroOS and MicroOS desktop (recently renamed, but the new names are escaping me) which use immutable root filesystems with automated updates and native Podman support. Snapper integration shines there, as well. If it fails to boot after update, it'll automatically roll back.
They're doing quite a bit, and it's all culminating in being very useable. Tumbleweed is the crown jewel, though.
COGlory, 15 hours ago
Re: Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately...
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
I'm a person that struggles with boundary-setting and have spent numerous years in relationships that have left me as less-than I was before. Imagine people-pleasing to an absolute fault, and being more of a chameleon that adapts to avoid conflicts. This has led to problems of identity, and deriving my sense of worth through others which isn't healthy.
Fortunately, I do not have the same problems professionally and part of my people-pleasing skills have been put to good use there.
However, history continued and continues to repeat itself to this day. I'm more than half-way into this book and am not only seeing patterns from my childhood, my relationships with my parents, and my early relationships (platonic & romantic)
It's been eye-opening, and I consider it my first step in breaking this trend.
leksak, 1 day ago
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
I'm a person that struggles with boundary-setting and have spent numerous years in relationships that have left me as less-than I was before. Imagine people-pleasing to an absolute fault, and being more of a chameleon that adapts to avoid conflicts. This has led to problems of identity, and deriving my sense of worth through others which isn't healthy.
Fortunately, I do not have the same problems professionally and part of my people-pleasing skills have been put to good use there.
However, history continued and continues to repeat itself to this day. I'm more than half-way into this book and am not only seeing patterns from my childhood, my relationships with my parents, and my early relationships (platonic & romantic)
It's been eye-opening, and I consider it my first step in breaking this trend.
leksak, 1 day ago
Re: Htmx is part of the GitHub Accelerator
I've been a HTMX fan "since before was cool"..
Very happy for the recent attention and "success". Also enjoying the shitposting and backlash mostly from the front-end crowd who believe the Web was invented in 2013 and they "made that city". :)
I'm biased since the time Backbone.js came around, I understood part of the pain but was moderately skeptical, fast forward to React with the young energetic bros building dead simple 5 page websites with a Rube Goldberg setup of front-end frameworks, I've cashed out my tech chips and never touched those things.
PedroBatista, 2 days ago
I've been a HTMX fan "since before was cool"..
Very happy for the recent attention and "success". Also enjoying the shitposting and backlash mostly from the front-end crowd who believe the Web was invented in 2013 and they "made that city". :)
I'm biased since the time Backbone.js came around, I understood part of the pain but was moderately skeptical, fast forward to React with the young energetic bros building dead simple 5 page websites with a Rube Goldberg setup of front-end frameworks, I've cashed out my tech chips and never touched those things.
PedroBatista, 2 days ago
Re: Learn as you search (and browse) using generative ...
Hard pass. I don't want Google, or even a trustworthy neutral party, to decide my view of the world. (Compromised as it may be already.)
We're all unique and unpredictable. In a given article, a random sentence or point considered throwaway by most people and algorithms could turn out to be meaningful to me.
I've been trained not to even trust the basic facts they pull of out content like movie showtimes or whatever. Once you see it wrong a few times you realize it's folly not to keep the responsibility of finding information yourself.
add-sub-mul-div, 1 day ago
Hard pass. I don't want Google, or even a trustworthy neutral party, to decide my view of the world. (Compromised as it may be already.)
We're all unique and unpredictable. In a given article, a random sentence or point considered throwaway by most people and algorithms could turn out to be meaningful to me.
I've been trained not to even trust the basic facts they pull of out content like movie showtimes or whatever. Once you see it wrong a few times you realize it's folly not to keep the responsibility of finding information yourself.
add-sub-mul-div, 1 day ago
Re: $HOME, not so sweet $HOME
Staff dev on 1Password’s developer tools here. We screwed this up in our first few releases of the 1Password CLI, largely out of ignorance. Those releases stored config in $HOME/.op at first. But early feedback pointed us to XDG, so we migrated. Now we check:
1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.op (if var is set) 2. $HOME/.config/op 3. $HOME/.op
I hate to be the dev who says “I don’t know why those other code bases find it so difficult that they put up a fight” but our `findConfigDirectory()` function isn’t exactly complicated, even when you consider all the operating systems that the 1Password CLI supports.
(Sorry for the formatting, I’m on my phone.)
mkenyon, 1 day ago
Staff dev on 1Password’s developer tools here. We screwed this up in our first few releases of the 1Password CLI, largely out of ignorance. Those releases stored config in $HOME/.op at first. But early feedback pointed us to XDG, so we migrated. Now we check:
1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.op (if var is set) 2. $HOME/.config/op 3. $HOME/.op
I hate to be the dev who says “I don’t know why those other code bases find it so difficult that they put up a fight” but our `findConfigDirectory()` function isn’t exactly complicated, even when you consider all the operating systems that the 1Password CLI supports.
(Sorry for the formatting, I’m on my phone.)
mkenyon, 1 day ago
Re: Short session expiration does not help security
> Also, it would be better to protect against this by securing the logs or using hard drive encryption.
This one line is emblematic of the flaws in the article.
My take on the article is, “Imagine that everything else in a system is done correctly, and the system, overall, is perfectly secure. In this imaginary world, short sessions don’t help.”
One fact about security which you cannot avoid is that any one particular security feature may fail or be bypassed in some way. What are the consequences of this? Well, it means that you want multiple layers of security. Your server runs its daemons with minimal privileges so that a remote execution vulnerability needs to be combined with a privilege escalation vulnerability. You don’t think about the “right way” to secure something, but you think about multiple ways to secure something, and don’t stop securing it just because you’ve found one good option.
Short sessions are there because there are various ways that sessions could be compromised.
klodolph, 5 hours ago
> Also, it would be better to protect against this by securing the logs or using hard drive encryption.
This one line is emblematic of the flaws in the article.
My take on the article is, “Imagine that everything else in a system is done correctly, and the system, overall, is perfectly secure. In this imaginary world, short sessions don’t help.”
One fact about security which you cannot avoid is that any one particular security feature may fail or be bypassed in some way. What are the consequences of this? Well, it means that you want multiple layers of security. Your server runs its daemons with minimal privileges so that a remote execution vulnerability needs to be combined with a privilege escalation vulnerability. You don’t think about the “right way” to secure something, but you think about multiple ways to secure something, and don’t stop securing it just because you’ve found one good option.
Short sessions are there because there are various ways that sessions could be compromised.
klodolph, 5 hours ago
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
Amen. When someone does the math and adds up the winners and losers in all this, one clear winner will be this video from Asianometry, entitled The History of Superconductors (Before LK-99)[1]. It only lightly touched on LK-99 itself, but did an excellent job going through the actual science-based history of superconductors, covering in particular detail previous hype waves. A major point is that the YBCO superconductors, while an amazing scientific discovery, haven't had revolutionary applications, and have only lightly displaced lower temperature (niobium-titanium metal alloy) superconductors in applications requiring generating strong magnetic fields, including MRI machines. For the curious, [2] goes into considerable detail on potential applications and challenges for HTSC in MRI.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUczYHyOhLM
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/
raphlinus, 1 day ago
Amen. When someone does the math and adds up the winners and losers in all this, one clear winner will be this video from Asianometry, entitled The History of Superconductors (Before LK-99)[1]. It only lightly touched on LK-99 itself, but did an excellent job going through the actual science-based history of superconductors, covering in particular detail previous hype waves. A major point is that the YBCO superconductors, while an amazing scientific discovery, haven't had revolutionary applications, and have only lightly displaced lower temperature (niobium-titanium metal alloy) superconductors in applications requiring generating strong magnetic fields, including MRI machines. For the curious, [2] goes into considerable detail on potential applications and challenges for HTSC in MRI.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUczYHyOhLM
[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/
raphlinus, 1 day ago
YouTube
The History of Superconductors (Before LK-99)
Links:
- The Asianometry Newsletter: https://www.asianometry.com
- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Asianometry
- Threads: https://www.threads.net/@asianometry
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/asianometry
- The Asianometry Newsletter: https://www.asianometry.com
- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Asianometry
- Threads: https://www.threads.net/@asianometry
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/asianometry
Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture
I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian/German) and my wife is from the southern US (Protestant English/German) [1]. In the first several years of our relationship, we had several big disputes about how to treat each other, and how to treat guests. After a while we realized that she had been brought up to feel extreme insecurity over responding to the needs of guests, and I had been brought up to be blithely ignorant to the needs of guests.
Over the years I definitely insulted several southern guests by mostly ignoring them, and she definitely projected insult onto several northern guests by assuming that they were secretly judging us for not being better hosts. We've since realized that southerners tend to prefer "guess" culture and northerners tend to prefer "ask" culture, to use the terminology from the article. There are certainly many exceptions, but this generalization has taught her to chill out a little over hosting duties, and taught me to pick up some slack when taking care of guests.
We still both greatly prefer our native cultures. I don't like being fawned over or offered things I don't want, and she is extremely recalcitrant when it comes to asking for anything.
[1] I mention the distant ancestral backgrounds because it's amusing to me how well I get along with northern Europeans who are plainly spoken and "rude" by US standards, and how a lot of proper hosting culture from the UK reminds me of how her family operates. She finds Scandinavians and Dutch incredibly rude, whereas I find the English hilariously polite, even to their own detriment.
quacked, 3 hours ago
I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian/German) and my wife is from the southern US (Protestant English/German) [1]. In the first several years of our relationship, we had several big disputes about how to treat each other, and how to treat guests. After a while we realized that she had been brought up to feel extreme insecurity over responding to the needs of guests, and I had been brought up to be blithely ignorant to the needs of guests.
Over the years I definitely insulted several southern guests by mostly ignoring them, and she definitely projected insult onto several northern guests by assuming that they were secretly judging us for not being better hosts. We've since realized that southerners tend to prefer "guess" culture and northerners tend to prefer "ask" culture, to use the terminology from the article. There are certainly many exceptions, but this generalization has taught her to chill out a little over hosting duties, and taught me to pick up some slack when taking care of guests.
We still both greatly prefer our native cultures. I don't like being fawned over or offered things I don't want, and she is extremely recalcitrant when it comes to asking for anything.
[1] I mention the distant ancestral backgrounds because it's amusing to me how well I get along with northern Europeans who are plainly spoken and "rude" by US standards, and how a lot of proper hosting culture from the UK reminds me of how her family operates. She finds Scandinavians and Dutch incredibly rude, whereas I find the English hilariously polite, even to their own detriment.
quacked, 3 hours ago
Re: Ask vs. Guess Culture
The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not!
But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you, rather than treating everything as a transaction.
noahlt, 6 hours ago
The "Ask vs Guess" name rhetorically frames it in favor of the Askers. Asking sounds reasonable, guessing does not!
But really it's not about "Guessing", it's about understanding. It's about community, and relationship, and trust. What this culture really wants is for you to pay attention and understand the people around you, rather than treating everything as a transaction.
noahlt, 6 hours ago