zzzmarcus's comments

I sent them all to ChatGPT 4o one by one and had it guess the books, this is how it did:

1. Anthony Trollope – I didn’t get this one. 2. Evelyn Waugh – Correct! 3. Henry James – Correct! 4. Graham Greene – I missed this, was thinking of the wrong tone. 5. W. Shakespeare (i) – Correct! 6. Samuel Richardson – Correct! 7. David Foster Wallace – I guessed Gaddis, but this makes perfect sense. Partial credit. 8. Marcel Proust – Correct! 9. Mrs. Gaskell – Correct! 10. Ian McEwan – Partial credit; I guessed Atonement after Henry James. 11. E. M. Forster – Correct! 12. Cormac McCarthy – Correct! 13. P. G. Wodehouse – Correct! 14. Alan Bennett – I guessed Chekhov/Osborne, so I missed this. 15. Jane Austen – Correct! 16. Dan Brown – Correct! 17. Agatha Christie – Correct! 18. Zadie Smith – Missed this one. 19. W. Shakespeare (ii) – Correct! 20. Iris Murdoch – Correct! 21. Ernest Hemingway – Correct! 22. John Banville – Correct! 23. Harold Pinter – Correct! 24. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Correct! 25. Tennessee Williams – Correct! 26. Oscar Wilde – Correct! 27. D. H. Lawrence – Correct! 28. Thomas Hardy – Correct! 29. Virginia Woolf – Missed this one, was thinking of Galsworthy. 30. Tom Stoppard – Correct!

Final score: 25/30 with a couple of partial credits. Not bad!

This may not be a popular answer, but the truth is, this is a self-confirming story that gets stronger each time you tell it to yourself.

You can prove this to yourself.

Tomorrow, when you go to work, check in at regular intervals and ask yourself, “What’s wrong with what’s happening?”

Usually, the answer will be something like “It’s pointless,” “It’s tedious,” “I’d rather be doing X than Y,” or “I’m tired.” Short of your work causing you physical harm, it doesn’t matter what the answer is.

Look into why you answered that with as much detachment as possible. Ask yourself questions like, “Is the thing I’m doing inherently unpleasant? Is it hated by everyone who does it? Is it possible that if I dropped the contextual story around what I’m doing, it’s actually about the same as doing anything else?”

You will find that the misery comes from comparing what you’re doing to some ideal that is just that—an imaginary idea that does not actually exist. It’s pretend. Stop comparing reality to pretend things. Take what you’re doing for what it is. Your mind is not going to love doing this because it thrives on resistance to what is. That’s fine; just recognize that and keep investigating what’s happening.

Keep doing this until you realize that you’re creating your own hell and that you can also escape it with just a few creative adjustments to the story you’re telling yourself.

Moving places or changing jobs won’t fix it. Working less or more won’t fix it. Having a more meaningful job won’t fix it. Having no job won’t fix it.

This is not complacency—change can and will happen, but it’s not going to happen until you’re content with what you’re doing now. Good change comes as a result of accepting what’s real now. Good change doesn’t come from escaping what you’re doing now for some pretend ideal.

and Bernardo Kastrup.

I've never used BeeRef or PureRef but if you're on the latest version of OS X and don't need cross platform compatibility, Apple's new app Freeform seems to overlap in functionality with Bee/PureRef quite a bit.

The French movie Nothing to Hide on Netflix is a great companion to this software. It shows just how bad things can get when messages come in at the wrong time.

Similarly, the Bar-tailed Godwit migrates ~7000 miles on a very different route:

https://www.audubon.org/news/these-mighty-shorebirds-keep-br...

Yes

That's just... false. Disgust is a response we evolved to keep us from eating things that could kill us.

Here's a direct link to their asks: https://twitter.com/AlphabetWorkers/status/13473315873151713...

The gist of it seems to be that "YouTube must no longer be a tool of fascist recruitment and oppression. Anything less is to countenance deadly violence..."

I've been using TheBrain (https://www.thebrain.com) for ~10 years now and haven't found anything that comes close to it in terms of flexibility. If you haven't looked at it in awhile, it's worth checking out again. They have a new desktop app, much better mobile apps, and even after all these years, development continues steadily.

I've got 16,399 thoughts in mine and add more just about every day. Anything I think I may want to know later goes there. More ephemeral notes go in Apple Notes (I used Evernote for a long time but became annoyed with their business model and haven't missed it). Everything else goes in The Brain.

Search great, the ability to link notes as parent/children/siblings is extremely powerful once you get the hang of it.

It's not free, but it is, in my opinion, easily worth the cost.

This is seriously impressive!

I've also been in the process of moving off both Dropbox and Google Backup & Sync because they are such resource hogs on the Mac. iCloud drive isn't perfect, especially when it comes to sharing, but I'll accept that if it means my fans aren't going to be on full blast when it's running.

I can't remember a time when I've had Dropbox open and not found it at the top of the CPU tab of Activity Monitor. This may be because I have a couple symlinks (not many, just some dotfiles) or because I have a large number of files (nothing ridiculous, ~100k photos backed up) but the fact is, it's been long enough for Dropbox to have figured this out and fixed it.

It's bad enough to where I now leave Dropbox off all the time, then only turn it on when I need to sync something. With iCloud sync I don't even think about it, which is the way it should be.

I opened Dropbox before starting this comment to see the new UI and even after giving it enough time to catch up, it' still using between 48 and 127% CPU. It makes even Outlook feel breezy.

That's great! Seems like a VERY hard job to break into--lots of discipline, learning from painful failure, and hard work. Do you have any of your comedy on Youtube?

Awesome. I've been following your Instagram and, to a lesser extent, blog since you started your recent trip around Africa. Such an awesome adventure

Avalara's pricing is here: https://www.avalara.com/trustfile/en/pricing.html

Nice! I've been using a similar app for years. Love it: http://www.artfulmac.com

Here's another, very similar project, that is still actively maintained.

https://github.com/rhysd/NyaoVim

I hope you can keep it going! I've been an Artful user for quite awhile and really appreciate it.

This mentality can be a little dangerous. You're training yourself to cater to your moods. This can result in important but not urgent tasks that you're never really in the mood to do never getting done. Or, if it's a task that has to be done, a lot of resistance because you're used to waiting for motivation to kick in.

For me, a better approach has been to consciously force myself to do things I don't feel like doing. I push through low energy, distractions, or boredom and just get it done.

You might expect this to lead to sub-optimal performance or suffering through unenjoyable tasks. Sometimes it does, but in my experience, a more common result is the good feeling of having pushed through a barrier and found a second, or third wind.

You should at least be familiar with the major front-end libraries and frameworks - React, Angular and Ember. You don't necessarily need to "know" them, but at least know about them.

You should be familiar with what ES6 is and what Babel does. These technologies probably won't be specific questions per se but if they come up and you can't speak about them, it'd be a red flag.

Even for a front-end developer you should have a basic knowledge of data structures like linked lists, binary trees, min/max heaps, depth/breadth first search, tries, recursion, hash tables, etc. These often come up in whiteboarding questions.

Practice whiteboarding on an actual whiteboard so you get used to writing code then practice on hackerrank so you get used to quickly writing code that actually compiles. Some companies only use whiteboards, others want your code to run.

Make sure you think of test cases for your problems. TDD in an interview is usually a good sign.

Usually knowing this stuff and having some sample code will usually get you through most of the interview. Knowing the specific things mentioned in other comments is useful, but I can't imagine not hiring someone because they didn't know some specific CSS selector or how to use flexbox.

Other tips - don't get visibly flustered, talk your way through problems. Stay postive about past employers. Good luck!