One of my problems with blocking things like YouTube is that there’s so much outstanding long form content that’s not always available elsewhere. I love watching semi popularized physics lectures like from Sean Carroll but I can’t help but click on the mindless content next to it after, or even during, my wholesome viewing.
the semi popularized physics lectures are also mindless content. It's infotainment, it might be worse than junk because it disguises itself as learning.
People will consume thousands of hours of that stuff and not be able to solve one physics problem. Endless exercise and fitness science videos and still be out of shape. Watch language learning content and never speak another language. Endless programming tutorials without ever being able to program.
As the author of the article points out, Neil Postman correctly observed that the Sesame Street didn't teach people anything but how to watch television. People watch "education YouTube" but don't get a tangible education, they learn how to watch YouTube.
I first got interested in and learned to cook from cooking shows (Alton Brown, Emeril Lagasse). Of course I had to do my own cooking, but watching them made me realize it wasn't so hard. I'm a shade tree mechanic, but without the service manual, it's helpful to find a video replacing whatever part I'm about to deal with for the first time (Chilton manuals are crap). A few years ago I needed to pull the double-oven out of my cabinet to replace the heating element... I'm sure glad there was a video for that too. What's the right form for a kettlebell swing or a push up? How do I tie that knot again?
Yeah, there's lot of junk on YouTube. You might even say 90% of it. But there's tons of useful content too if you go searching for it.
3blue1brown helped me quite a bit when I needed to learn calculus ahead of school curriculum, the same could be said for circuit design and a few other things.
In general most that an edutainment can give you is awareness that something exists and a bit of motivation to get you going and there is some value in that. Whether on the whole it’s a positive thing is a bit harder to say.
There are degrees of mindless! I know one can't substitute watching lectures for serious study, but it's a great substitute for the far more mindless and addictive content I would be tempted by otherwise. There are lots of interesting topics in the foundations of physics and areas of mathematics my undergrad didn't cover that came to my attention this way. I enjoy getting a sampler now while I don't have the time/energy after work to study them for real, and they will inform what I study when I get and/or make time for them in my life soon.
If you paint with such a broad brush that watching anything on a screen is equally bad, that's a backdoor way to justify scrolling through TikTok ragebait videos since "it's all poison anyway".
Edutainment is a spectrum, while you are correct that everyone should understand they can't "learn quantum theory" in a way that can be applied meaningfully by watching videos, sparking intellectual curiosity and learning new topics/areas of interest is a good thing in general. And most edutainment that isn't so flawed/simplistic as to be wrong is better than watching an influencer whose dayjob is churning out weekly content with some alluring hook to grab viewers and mostly just inane lowest common denominator filler around it.
Sesame Street isn't nearly as harmful for young kids as 2 minute TikTok AI videos that next play into God knows what. It has interesting inoffensive characters teaching useful language and social skills.
I just started reading Infinite Jest and unsurprisingly it seems shockingly relevant to the doomscrolling problem. I’m aware of its flaws, but I’ve heard it recommended a number of times related to our modern problem of amusing ourselves to death. So far it’s surprisingly enjoyable, eerily relatable, and not nearly as difficult to follow as I was warned.
That's great to hear! It's awesome when people decide to tackle longer books. I think the matter of our (declining) attention spans and what it does to our spirit is something DFW thought a lot about, for example in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8juL7cdGj40. It seems remarkably prescient for our age, but perhaps it also suggests that being present and engaged is actually a perennial problem.
A lot of postmodern maximalist books like IJ try to reckon w/ these problems. Its easy to reflexively hate the meaningless, ironic, media-fried worlds they build, but they are mirrors, not instruction manuals.
One of IJ’s most important topics is the critique of the empty destructive postmodern cynicism that you are referring to. Wallace was in fact trying his best to do more than just reflect. One of IJ’s main and most likeable characters, Mario, is basically a walking sentiment of this. Infinite jest is surprisingly preachy in this regard; “this is water” and some of his other essays are even more so in this regard. that’s why literary critics argue that Infinite Jest doesn’t belong to the postmodern, but rather to the post-postmodern, sometimes also called the metamodern, or the new sincerity. Like a hybrid of modern and postmodern that oscillates between the hip and the banal, between cynicism and hope, fiction and truth.
Here is Wallace on this subject:
“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
I think it’s fair to say that Wallace is postmodern but less self-satisfied and complacent about it. The elements of irony and cynicism are still there, but insufficient. So he synthesizes a “what next?”, which is labeled metamodern.
FF seems to use less RAM than Chrome for my 100+ open tabs these days. It’s just as fast for 99% of sites and surprisingly even compatibility is often better. Half the time when my wife encounters a broken webapp in Chrome it works fine when I have her try in FF.
For a long time I've used similar approaches for testing against Postgres, especially when using tools like Testcontainers. It's saved a massive amount of time waiting for my tests to run over the years and it's incredibly simple to implement, even manually.
1. Set up a container image based on our prod Postgres DB's version with current prod migrations pre-applied.
2. Configure Testcontainers to be reuse the container between tests, at least within the same file.
3. ~25 lines of init code that apply local-branch migrations to a template DB and copy test data to it on the first test.
4. When the template DB already exists, test setup just drop the DB and copy it fresh from the template DB.
I find tests that actually perform the actions catch a heck of a lot more bugs and are easier to setup up than code that uses a lot of mocking or "test implementations" of a class. And with just a little care the performance penalty is negligible and way more than worth it.
There are potential parallels with how AIs are trained and the evolutionary pressures that our brains likely evolved under. Human AI trainers accept/reject or give a rating to the AI's response so the selection pressure on AI models is to produce a response that is likely to be accepted by the humans "in its environment" or at least to mirror the responses of humans it's seen provide in its training data.
Long ago I was struck by an idea I heard about human reasoning that I paraphrase as "human reasoning evolved not to reason, but to provide reasons"[1]. Basically that the heaviest evolutionary pressures on our brain were for social utility, like for influencing others to do something for us, or giving pre/post justifications for our actions that most others are likely to accept to avoid punishment. The flawed mechanisms that we developed to do such things are not significantly grounded in logical reasoning, but can sometimes be pressed into duty for that.
LLM models are trained to "generate the best next token" which augments the response so far and makes the evaluator happy. When I reflect on my own mind responding quickly to someone in a meeting it doesn't feel altogether different from that. We don't typically carefully and fully logically reason before we start talking. We typically start talking and think only a little ahead about what we say next that supports and doesn't contradict what we've said already. As we're speaking we are monitoring the other person's facial expressions to infer their emotional response and adjusting our next words based on that. I think at least common neurotypical[2] conversation might be closer to the "next token" reasoning than we would be comfortable admitting.
[1] I _think_ who I heard say that was Hugo Mercier, on either Sean Carroll's consistently amazing science podcast or maybe on Lex Friedman before he veered into Joe Rogan emulation. I'm normally a little suspicious of the theories of psychologists and cognitive scientists, but I intuitively related to many of his lines of thinking.
[2] I'm arguably pretty neurodivergent in more than one way so I think my thought processes are a little different by default, but that makes me more reflective about common conversation. When I'm trying to mask and communicate more similarly to a neurotypical corporate employee I feel like I become a "stochastic parrot" that's just predicting the best next few words to improve the emotional response I'm reading in my conversation partner.
> Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction
Very true in some sense, but I continue to encourage DRY-bias because I've literally never seen teams duplicate code responsibly and later dedupe it when it's the right time. 95% of the time this sentiment is quoted to justify shipping quick slop and stable reusable bits are never extracted into a shared lib later.
In my experience if your organization can't commit to doing WET (write everything twice) code then it probably also will fail at doing DRY (don't repeat yourself) code
Maybe this is an area where AI can help identify duplicate code though to show opportunities for de-duping
Rational behavior in some situations? Mutually assured destruction’s deterrence isn’t very effective if one side is known to be hesitant to launch the nukes. It’s been argued that MAD is what’s been keeping the world relatively peaceful for the last 75 years, no mass conflicts since WW2!
One of my criteria for presidential candidates is that they seem willing and able to push the button when previously stated red lines are crossed, or at least are perceived to be the type capable of it. One of the characters I’ve hated most in all the books that I’ve read is the woman in The Three Body Problem who jeopardized humanity by being too soft to hit the MAD button.
I'm extremely happy after upgrading my network to 10gbit copper ethernet. It was much more expensive than I thought it should be, but worth it even if I only max it occasionally. Now I can easily fully saturate my 10gbit ethernet doing a first Time Machine backup or transferring files to my M.2 SSD NAS which saves me waiting rime and is satisfying to watch.
It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet. My MBP connects to my WiFi7 setup(Ubiquiti E7) at a nominal 1.5-1.9gbit but Time Machine backups and file transfers are slower than plugging into 1gbit ethernet, probably in large part due to latency and retransmissions. Not to mention that ethernet works with near 100% reliability with dramatically less variation in speed and error rate.
It's wild to me Time Machine works on your network. Are you just doing "first backups" over and over again, or have you somehow achieved the very rare state where Time Machine can run for, say, a week at a time without falling over?
Sorry, this is snarky and off topic, but I'm nostalgic for the days when Time Machine "just worked".
For a very long time I thought Time Machine had become flaky, and I'm sure it's partially to blame, but with my current setup I've literally never observed it corrupt a backup and have to start over.
Before I was using one of the common Synology consumer NAS boxes that are often recommended. The NAS didn't report any errors with the drives or its own hardware, but at least once a month TM would glitch on at least one of my home laptops.
My new setup is an Asus FLASHSTOR 12 Pro Gen2 FS6812X. For a year now it's been running without a single apparent TM glitch while backing up multiple personal laptops and my work laptop. Sometimes I'm plugged in and sometimes I'm backing up over WiFi, but it's always worked.
I tried various recommended settings for the Synology and nothing helped so I strongly suspect that the Synology network protocol(SMB, AFP, etc.) implementations were either buggy themselves or at least not compatible with quirks in Apple's implementations. Synology->Asus fixed all my TM problems instantly and seemingly permanantly!
I can't remember the exact phrasing, but are you talking about the error message that essentially says:
"The Tardis is broken. Your backup has diverged into an entirely separate timeline, and I have no way of reconciling it. You may now sacrifice an entire weekend to do an initial backup again."?
I've been on a lucky streak for several years now, where I haven't gotten that one on any of my devices.
"Preparing backup..." taking an unreasonable amount of time is a regular occurrence, and some edge cases around adjusting TM backup size quotas aren't handled well. But other than that, TM has been working reasonably well for me to back up 10 TB over SMB to a Synology NAS.
My gripe is much more with Apple's abysmal support for SMB and NFS, especially after deprecating AFP. I've been back and forth between them over the years and over several OS versions, and their implementations for both are just terrible.
But over time SMB, for me, proved slightly more stable and performant, with the right tweaks in smb.conf, and authentication and permissions/ownership are easier to deal with than NFS, so I stuck with that.
I also yearn for the days where TM just worked, because somehow, the alternatives are even worse:
- Arq Backup does some things quite well, which is why I use it as part of my 3-2-1. But some of its bugs and implementation decisions just scream "hobby grade" to me.
- Kopia looks interesting, but it's not mature enough yet. Failed for me with absolutely cryptic error messages during repo init both times I tried it, with versions several months apart.
- Restic, Borg / Vorta: Not turnkey enough for me.
> "Preparing backup..." taking an unreasonable amount of time is a regular occurrence,
TM heavily throttles disk I/O used for backing up in order to ensure that normal user activity isn't affected. That makes it appear that TM is dramatically slower than you would expect which greatly annoys me. This becomes obvious after you run this command which will make both the preparing and transferring phases go closer to the theoretical speed you'd expect:
> TM heavily throttles disk I/O used for backing up
That makes sense, and I usually quite like that behavior. I barely ever notice an impact when backups are running.
However, this is happening every time on one machine (Intel iMac), and semi-regularly on another one (M3 MBP), after a fresh restart, giving mds_stores some time to settle down, and the most recent backup just hours ago, with no significant changes on disk since.
In a situation like that, I would expect the "Preparing backup..." stage to just take a second to create an APFS snapshot, and maybe a minute to diff that snapshot against the remote state. But not 10+ minutes.
But thank you for the hint about that sysctl parameter! I will certainly give this a try.
I've been using Time Machine for six months pointing to a network share on my TrueNAS box and it has worked fine. Sometimes a backup will fail when the Mac is taken off my home network (it doesn't play nice with Tailscale for whatever reason) but it will always work again if I tell it to retry the failed backup once I'm back on the local network.
> It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now
I honestly just don't need it. Part of that is my ISP options top out around 1200Mbps, certainly. But I also just don't need that kind of speed inside my home. Streaming video needs at most 20Mbps or so, and I don't do much in the way of large file transfers. And when I do large file transfers, it's usually from or to the internet, and my home network is not the bottleneck there.
> It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now
10G was too big of a step up from 1G. The expense and power required made it unattractive. Only recently have the interfaces for 10G over twisted pair become reasonably low power.
2.5G and even 5G are in a much better spot. It's where I recommend most people start as a default.
Yeah, 10GbE-over-copper switches are SO expensive. I bought a Ubiquiti enterprise switch for my home; 10Gb uplink and the copper ports are split between 2.5G and 1G. It's fine because only 1 or 2 clients can even talk 10G, and those are all across the house on Cat5 links anyway so they only negotiate to 2.5 even on a 10G port.
As much as I wanted to "future proof" by having a 24 port 10GbE switch... why? I'll just wait and buy one when I have a use for it.
> As much as I wanted to "future proof" by having a 24 port 10GbE switch... why? I'll just wait and buy one when I have a use for it.
As much as I enjoy looking at those wiring cabinets where every cable is cut to exactly the right length to reach a single port on the switch, this is why I prefer to leave an amount of slack in the wiring: It's good to be able to pull different wires to different switches depending on your needs.
One small high speed switch with enough ports for the couple of devices that can use it. One gigabit switch with a lot of ports to provide connectivity everywhere else.
This is what I ended up doing. A 2.5G switch for the few devices that can use it and a 1Gbit+PoE switch for all the other PoE and 1Gbit and less devices.
It does, actually. I dismissed it originally because I don't need most of the capacity, but considering I have no 10GbE copper ports available, and my home is being remodeled and I'm running some new ethernet to the other side of the house, I could take advantage of these ports now.
Also, I didn't realize my UDM Pro was kneecapped at 3-4Gbps IDS/IPS throughput. I think when I bought it I only had a 1 gig internet connection so it was overkill, but now I've got 10gig. It didn't even cross my mind that I had this bottleneck.
5G barely exists and mostly is the same price as 10Gb. 2.6Gb is taking off and mostly replacing 1Gb, but try to find a 5Gb switch, there really arent any, and most appear to be 10Gb switches with 5Gb PHY in them.
>It's wild to me that 10gbit isn't the norm by now and tech people who should know better seem to think WiFi matches or even exceeds even 1gbit ethernet.
2 things here. Upthread is the discussion about the old 10GBE modules that would constantly turn off due to overheating. Thats left a sour taste in a lot of peoples mouths.
I dont have anything in my home network that matters enough to have 10GBE anywhere. If I did, I would just get fibre. My wireless is fine for most purposes except some HD streaming, and plain old 1 gig works fine there.
Getting Time Machine to work reliably over a network is painful, even the old Apple-made Airport with built in TM stopped working twice a year.
However, I have multiple Macs where I simply have a USB-C laptop SSD attached for Time Machine and they have worked without issue for years. These laptop SSDs come in huge sizes nowadays, and you don't need an especially performant one, so they can be pretty cheap.
Heh it's honestly wild to me anyone needs over a gig. My work has a one gig fiber line supporting hundreds of employees and usage generally remains below 10%.
The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.
> The high expense of 10gig is, in part, because it isn't widely necessary and the people buying it are willing to pay extra.
I think the price has more to do with where you live and how the market is structured than how necessary it is. In Japan where there is competition between ISPs, I pay about $40/mo for 10Gbps.
Routers have also come down in price to where they are pretty affordable for consumers. I use a Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Fiber [1] which has three 10Gbs ports (two SPF+, one 10GbE) for $279. A TP-Link router [2] with an upstream 10GbE port and 2.5GbE LAN ports and Wi-Fi 7 is about $140. 2.5 GbE NICs have become cheap and ubiquitous and could commonly be found on $150 mini pcs (before memory and SSD prices went crazy).
Yeah it's more than more than most people need, but I definitely appreciate having the increased speed when downloading 50GB games, uploading 200GB files to YouTube, or backing up files to the cloud. I've probably never maxed out the full 10Gbps, but exceeding 1Gbps is pretty easy in relatively common use cases.
And if you don't need a router, you can get 10gbit ports for much cheaper than that. The Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S gives you one copper 1gbit port, four 10gbit-capable SFP+ cages, and is ~150USD [0]. Their whole lineup of switches with SFP+ ports can seen here [1].
I put 5Gbit internet into my home (fiber) to build my startup. I'm processing terabytes of data. I have over 100TB of storage in my basement. I can regularly saturate my internet connection. That said, I remember well when a 1Gbit connection provided enough bandwidth for a 500-person call center for daily workloads (back about 10 years ago).
That puts you in an extreme minority, even amongst enterprise businesses. Many medium sized enterprises have storage that looks like "a couple dozen TB total" for hundreds of staff.
Having 100 TB of storage in your home basement is an even more extreme minority than that. ;)
A gigabit connection is more than enough for a 500-person call center today.
Agreed. We had IP phones with 100 Mbps switches in between most of our computers and the rest of the network for a long time and very few people noticed. It'd only really be when I was installing a system upgrade or something, and I'd be like "man, it'd be nice if this didn't take an extra two minutes". For normal web access, 100 Mbps and 1000 Gbps aren't really discernable, until you're downloading large files. A lot of 4K streaming videos though, you'll start to feel it quite a bit faster.
And then hilariously, once you go above a gig, the reality is most sites won't serve them to you any faster than that anyways.
I found the nicest thing about fiber is I can hit over a gb/s uploading, which is often much more critical-path for whatever I’m doing than a download.
If that 500-person call center is a BPO, they'd have trouble with today's data-heavy workloads. I do agree, though. I'm in an extreme minority when it comes to this much bandwidth in my home.
Depends a lot on your work type and your prior exposure. If you only work "locally" and upload/download rarely, you may be way less demanding of your network than if you actually do distributed work with remote storage, high-bandwidth communicating tasks, etc.
Over 20 years ago, I was used to having 1g LAN for basic workstations and laptops in an office setting and probably 10-20g uplink from the building (shared by hundreds of staff). I also used 1g at home for my very small LAN between laptop, desktop, and SAN functions. But, my home ISP links were often terrible, such as 128k ADSL or even just a tethered GPRS phone at some points.
You end up with entirely different work styles when you have these different resource constraints.
1Gb Internet service seems low these days, much less 1Gb LAN. I have 3Gb Google Fiber service and actually get 2+ for individual downloads from some internet services like Steam. Even at 2Gb it's annoying to wait tens of minutes for 100+ GiB games to download. If I go on vacation I come home with 10s of GiBs of photos and videos on multiple devices that start syncing with cloud storage.
During the day I need to pull large data files from the work VPN so it's nice that that can happen at full speed even when Steam and movie streaming are also at full throttle. Combine that with backups and moving various files back and forth to my NAS and I'm very happy to have 10Gb local wiring.
This is one of those things where I just have to express that a lot of the HN crowd is entirely divorced from the reality the rest of the world experiences. ;)
Nearly nobody has multigig anything in the home, a probably surprisingly large percentage of business networking is 1gig LAN or less. And most people would not notice the difference if they did.
I am glad it works for you, but everyone else most certainly doesn't need it. (Yet.)
Personally, I do try for mostly gigabit in my home, because I do selfhost, but I have a ~800 Mbps download service (200 Mbps upload, it's asymmetric) that was only 500 Mbps when I signed up. And to be honest most of my patch cables are CAT5e because I'm cheap. I do make sure to run CAT6 through walls though because I don't want to ever have to do it again.
Also, I used to have Astound, and I feel so much sympathy for Google Fiber customers, you have no idea what's coming. If you thought Google had a reputation for bad customer service... just wait!
I disagree. I pay $120 a month for 5Gbps symmetric connection. I could upgrade that to 10Gbps for 2x, but there is no reason at this point. Even the local max from the cable company is more than 1Gbps, 1.2Gbps down / ~300Mbps up for around $80. Everything is streaming now. I work from home, on video calls. My better half will be watching something the on AppleTV streaming, the kid will be doing the same. I have Backblaze running to do backups to the cloud. 3 different laptops that will run TimeMachine backups to the NAS. The AppleTVs also have the Infuse app on them to stream local video files from the NAS. The security cameras are a constant 60Mpbs 24/7/365 to the NVR. The laptops can push a gig wireless and 2.5Gbps when plugged into the Thunderbolt docks. It is not clear that I need 10Gbps everywhere, but it has its uses. The NAS is at 10G. The link from the main switch to the router is 10G. The 3 APs in the house are at 2.5G and the 2 outside are at 1G. There was a noticeable difference when after I right sized the shared links paths up from 1G. When I say noticeable it both perceived and measured. I used to work doing switch bring up and competitive testing so I have a pretty good idea how this all comes together. Given that a reasonably cheap set of APs can now handle clients at above 1G and internet speeds in some areas being above 1G, moving to at least 2.5G in places is useful and not divorced from reality. I am in tech, but I have help my not tech friends upgrade APs, et.al. for their normal everyday home use cases and they have all been quite happy with the change.
Not being divorced from reality is the only reason I have not dropped $5K on the new Dream Machine Beast that was just released and have not swapped out my Enterprise 48 PoE (1st gen.) for the newest version that has 12 10G-BaseT ports.
I have it more for the fast nas access and being able to treat nas disks as more or less the same performance as if they were directly sata in my machine. Significantly less so about the external network aspect.
> It was much more expensive than I thought it should be
For 10G with copper, short runs will work fine on most anything (10m), with longer working ok on cat-5e cable (20 - 30m or so).
So, if you have existing wiring, especially in wall, just give it a try first, before gutting things. Most 10g ethernet adapters give you BER stats to see the error rate.
And, if there are issues, multi-gig may be an option, where it will drop down to 5 or 2.5 gbps, which is same as 10G, but with a reduced symbol table to handle the lower SNR.
You can definitely get stable 1gig throughput through WiFi. Doesn’t even need WiFi 7/6E - possible on 6. Ran a WiFi bridge like that for years and - no packet loss, consistent gig through and maybe +1ms latency
The gotcha is both ends needs to be good radios. So a router to router bridge tends to work better than router to end user device. Also had near LoS which presumably helped a ton
It only made sense in the SPA way of working. Allowing the history to be updated would allow the browser's default navigation to work. Outside of SPA type of sites, it was only ever going to be abused.
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