jeff_petersen's comments

The Caesar series was my favorite growing up. And the other city-building games that followed, like Zeus, Pharaoh, and Emperor.

There have been a handful of indie games lately doing things in the same style, but nothing that seems quite polished enough yet.

> I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well

I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.

> And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.

What did you switch her to?

> I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.

I've done that exact project for like 6 giant pharma companies.

> is it fair to say things are this way due to no gun control?

I don't think so. Maryland isn't the most restrictive state when it comes to firearm policy[1], but it's a long distance from "no gun control." I'm also not certain that the chance of armed encounters is terribly high in Bethesda, though I'm uncertain if those crime statistics are recorded or what terms I should use to search for them. To give a comparison, the homicide rate per capita (which I suspect would correlate to some extent with police interaction with armed individuals) in Montgomery County (where Bethesda is) was 1.4/100,000 in 2016 [2]. For Australia at large, the rate is 1.0/100,000 [3], so pretty comparable. These police officers don't seem to operate in an area that is notably more dangerous/violent than Australia.

I do, however, think the issue is cultural. Many police officers in the US seem to perceive that they are in danger 24/7, and this effects how they interact with people on a daily basis. There is a preference for an overwhelming show of force even when it's absolutely uncalled for. This probably contributes to a feedback loop that causes the general population and the police to trust each other less and be more confrontational. And I don't seem to be alone in identifying this as a problem; if you search for problems with police culture in the US, you will find a large body of criticism for the default behavior of police officers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Maryland

[2] https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/POL/Resources/Files/MCPD%... (Page 4)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Australia#Murder

Bush and Trump both will be remembered for a long time. We’ve only had 45 presidents, the English learn about god knows how many insignificant kings in school, so the notion that two of your least favorite presidents will be forgotten in short order seems to be wishful thinking.

Vaporware

In my (bigcorp) experience, its all windows all the way with macs available only to developers who have a need (iOS dev usually).

And don’t forget that developers are a tiny minority of employees.

Yep his blog and books are great. Incidentally I started looking into Dart yesterday. Seems like a comfy language, more so than Typescript in my opinion.

I do, it's pretty much a necessity in an open office where I'm surrounded by several people talking loudly into several different conference calls on speakerphone.

Right now I use Beyerdynamic DT770s because I heard they were very comfortable (I wear glasses, and I hate in ear phones). The ear cups are fantastic but the headband digs into my scalp. So I'm on the search as well.

Perhaps the AR-18 would fit, the IRA were big fans

Wasn't this actually an X-files episode? I remember a rich techie developing a home AI that Scully and Mulder eventually fooled by stealing a license plate it recognized and putting it on a different car.

Vimium is fantastic (and I say that as an emacs user). Does vimfx for Firefox have similar smooth scrolling? Last time I tried FF vim extensions I was disappointed that they all seemed to scroll jumpily by lines

> Contractors never say no. It's not their fault. They're not paid to say no.

I'm a contractor, working for a consulting firm, and we say no all the time. Sometimes it's not a hard no, but more of a gentle nudge in a better direction. But we often advise our clients away from certain requests because that's what we're paid for. We're the experts and they value our expertise, that's why they hired us.

I know for a fact that what you describe exists, because about a quarter of our jobs involve cleaning up after someone like that, but I wouldn't say it's a feature of contractors in general but of cheap contractors.

> Not sure he would have wished its publication.

The first half of the book is collected published works of his (columns, articles, etc.) including an introduction to P.G. Wodehouse's posthumously published and unfinished Sunset at Blandings. In that introduction he makes it clear how fascinating he thinks it is to see a master at work. I think, based on that, he wouldn't be too upset to see that he got the same treatment.

That said, The Salmon of Doubt is very much unfinished and for me isn't the best part of the collection by far. Still worth a try, even if you just don't read that last section.

Great series of books, I'll second this recommendation

> Despite the fact that one could make a strong argument that these Mac fans are the reason Apple existed long enough to even make the iPod in the first place.

There's an interesting pop poli-sci book called The Dictator's Handbook (which despite the name draws examples from corporations and small-town governments in addition to actual dictatorships) which examines how people come to power. It generally works out to keeping the "essential" group happy. At one point the users you mention were "essentials" but they have been supplanted by other users. Apple no longer needs to pander to them, so they don't.

Homophobia isn't excusable no matter what position the target holds.

I'm a very happy injector user, nice close shave, minimal plastic waste. My only complaint is that the blades are expensive compared to double-edges (still cheap compared to cartridge razors)

Ah I see, I thought you were just talking about carbon sequestration

> CO2 capture is an area of active research and it's entirely possible that advances there will make Tesla and Solar City moot.

I don't know how likely that is. Even if carbon capture comes through, the low hanging fruit of fossil fuels are gone so now we have to get more invasive in harvesting the hard-to-get ones (strip mining, fracking, etc). It's likely that even with C02 emissions taken care of that we'll want electric vehicles and renewable power in general.