I live in Minnesota and do not own a snowblower. Probably my mistake, but I always joke that I get most of my exercise in the winter. Snow is really heavy for those without context.
A couple years ago we had a particularly bad snowfall. The plow has a nasty hate filled habit of dumping all its snow in my driveway. I had a drift at the end of my driveway about 4 feet high and 6 feet deep. Literally up to my chest. I had spent a solid hour just chipping away at it trying to get my car out and had made very little progress.
Right as I was about to give up in frustration, a man in a bobcat drove by. Moments later he turned around, came back, and asked "would you like me to clear that for you?" I told him that would be amazing. Took him a couple minutes and then he waved and drove off before I got a chance to offer him any money or even thank him.
I think about this guy pretty often, it's absolutely the random act of kindness in my life I have appreciated most.
My grandfather was a farmer and scarcely went a day without hours of exercise in his life. He passed away after a heart attack while shoveling his paraplegic neighbor's driveway.
You don't have to be unfit to get done in by shoveling snow.
The heart attack danger is a perfect storm of two factors that do not normally occur together:
1) Extreme physical exertion - sudden, intense arm-heavy exercise often as a Valsalva maneuver (straining and holding the breath). This dramatically increases blood pressure, which puts acute stress on the heart and arteries.
2) Exposure to cold air exacerbating the strain on the heart with vasoconstriction (blood vessel constriction). Cold temperatures cause peripheral blood vessels (arteries and veins) to narrow. This forces the heart to work harder to pump blood through the constricted vessels to keep the body warm, leading to an increase in blood pressure. The combination of constricted vessels and high physical exertion means the heart needs significantly more oxygen to function, but the cold and high pressure can limit the blood and oxygen flow (myocardial oxygen demand is increased). Breathing cold air can also trigger constriction in the coronary arteries that supply the heart muscle itself, further increasing the risk of reduced blood flow and a heart attack.
I remember a friend who was really into his skiing telling me that ski instructors take bets on which overweight 50+ year old first time skiing city person would have the a heart attack first.
Snow can be very heavy depending on the water content. So sometimes it's really light and basically effortless to shovel, but sometimes each shovel full of snow is 10-20 pounds of weight that you have to throw over and over. That gets taxing very quickly, plus people don't generally warm up before doing this intense exercise.
It's not like shoveling snow is super dangerous. Most people don't die from shoveling the snow. But it can happen and it's worth slowing down and taking breaks.
I think it’s a combination of incredible weight, lots of aerobic activity, and the cold which masks some of the fatigue that might tell you to take a break. I am over 40, and over an inch or two just pay someone to deal with the snow.
Physically it is very taxing. Snow is heavy, and the movements aren’t typical of daily activity. Even for a modestly sized property it can take awhile.
It’s the going from zero to 100 that gets folks it seems.
Deep, heavy, wet snow is called heart attack snow for a reason. It sneaks up on you - a driveway you just cleared for years with normal snowfalls is all of a sudden a 10x workout from usual, and your brain doesn’t completely process this. Anything else at that level of intensity would likely trigger you to take breaks.
That said - I think inactivity is far worse. But I still make a point to go shovel my elderly neighbors walks here in Chicago before they have a chance to do it when we get particularly deep snowfalls.
For fat people, getting over heated when doing things is generally the limiting factor on how strenuous one can push the body. In the cold you can exercise a lot harder before you get too hot, so the person can stress the body more than they usually would.
I'm convinced bobcats (used generically) are the single most versatile and useful platform ever created. They're fun to drive and you can solve most problems with them. Not optimally for any specific task, but if something needs to be pushed or lifted or moved or pulled or flattened or piled, you can find a way.
An 863 with hi-flow 2 speed and a pivoting plow was the most ideal snowplow I've ever played with.
after a nar nar day in pow pow cuttin freshies up to your nippy nips, you'll change that assessment!
(my email address was once inadvertently put on a mailing list for the planning of a bachelor party ski weekend, people I did not know or have any connection to, and that's the way they talked. i enjoyed it so much i didn't confess till they demanded to know why i hadn't RSVPed yet)
nar nar = from gnarly meant in the sense of "great"
pow pow = is powder, powdery snow
cuttin = skiing (i.e. leaving a trail behind you after cutting through the snow)
freshies = means fresh, new; not clear in this context, it could refer to "fresh snow" or "fresh tracks"
nippy nips = depth of snow is up to your nips (nipples) and you are cold/excited/goosebumps so your nips are nippy
this is generalized "california surfer talk"; the type of western man who surfs also snowboards, dirt bikes, jet skis, etc as well as clings to a teenaged hangout burnout lifestyle
Yep this is me. I get super pumped whenever we get a snowfall large enough to justify pulling out my ridiculously overkill snowblower.
The entire block on both sides plus the alley gets done those days. Neighbors here at first were skeptical since I guess it’s not normal (it is in Minnesota - every block there has a hero) for the big city, but now I get treats from various houses that catch me doing it.
I honestly do it for the pure joy of using awesome equipment I could otherwise nowhere remotely justify purchasing. Plus knowing I’m helping out my community in a small way is a nice bonus. Also helps me meet people and be social as an introvert.
The other side of the equation is my now dead toro had me covered in gas, frozen fingers, and plenty of swearing, with an itching desire to light it ablaze in the middle of the yard.
About six months ago Ahrefs recommended I remove some Unicode from the pathing on a personal project. Easy enough. Change the routing, set up permanent redirects for the old paths to the new paths.
I used to work for an SEO firm, I have a decent idea of best practices for this sort of thing.
BAM, I went from thousands of indexed pages to about 100
It's been six months and never recovered. If I were a business I would be absolutely furious. As it stands this is a tool I largely built for myself so I'm not too bothered but I don't know what's going on with Google being so fickle.
It’s probably also reflective of the fact that google are throwing all their new resources at AI, as soon as you’ve hit cache invalidation you’re gone, and anything new that’s crawled is probably ranked differently in the post llm world.
exactly my experience, suddenly thousands of non indexed pages, never figured out why, had to disband the business as it was content website selling ads.
Grandia II is the only JRPG I've ever really truly enjoyed the battle system of. I feel like with a lot of JRPG's I'm sitting around doing math.
Grandia 2 was largely just timing things such that if you did it right you would bonk the enemies turn back repeatedly and they'd never get to attack. Way more fun.
The very first area at the start of the game actually encouraged this if you experimented even a little: Combo is the default attack but it doesn't defeat those early enemies so they'll hit you back, but the battles start with just the right timing so if you use Critical first it'll knock them back so your next Combo would hit and defeat them without you taking any damage.
Nice! I started building a toy Go WASM VM myself but a few hours in realized I was in way over my head. Seems very readable, I'm going to want to go to school on this!
I have been a developer for twenty years now. For me to trust code, my want is to understand every single line. I learned long ago working on projects with a team that that becomes impossible for a single person on large projects. I learned to trust that someone understands the code and between blames and Slack I can almost always hunt that person down.
More and more often, while doing code review, I find I will not understand something and I will ask, and the "author" will clearly have no idea what it is doing either.
I find it quite troubling how little actual human thought is going into things. The AIs context window is not nearly large enough to fully understand the entire scope of any decently sized applications ecosystem. It just takes small peaks at bits and makes decisions based on a tiny slice of the world.
It's a powerful tool and as such needs to be guided with care.
I have seen so many projects were people who understood all of it, are just gone. They moved, did something else etc.
As soon as this happens, you no longer have anyone 'getting it'. You have to handle so many people adding/changing very thin lines across all components and you can only hope that the original people had enough foresight adding enough unit tests for core decisions.
Not sure why this is dead, but in nearly all of my consulting gigs sooner or later I ended up having to check on project/service that is effectively abandoned. Last time this morning. Luckily I had claude code and CLI tools to go through few dozen repos and millions LOC to find some obscure endpoints and data structures, since there wasn't even anyone to ask what to look for.
We might have to give up on trust and understanding in complex domains. To draw an analogy from another field, pharmaceutical researchers often don't understand the exact mechanism of action for drugs they develop. Biological systems are too complex and much of the basic research hasn't been done yet. So they rely on rigorous testing to verify that new drugs are safe and effective. It isn't a perfect system — sometimes drugs get recalled or have warnings added later — but works well enough.
Can humans though? There's a reason we don't just lump everything into one giant file and singleton class named DoIt(). Who hasn't come back around to some bit of code in a project and wondered what dumbass wrote this, only for the logs to tell you that it was you that wrote it, years ago. If AI is resulting in code that's more modular, in smaller digestible and understandable chunks, I'm not hearing that as a bad thing!
I found worktrees unnecessarily painful in Git with little advantage over just having two copies of the repo.
Your far better off just having a clone of your primary repo, and have your primary repo as a local remote. Both can have a remote for GitHub and a separate remote for each other.
Genuinely curious, what did you find painful about it? A while back I found it annoying that I'd get errors when cleaning out my branches because they were checked out in a worktree I'd forgotten about, but git now highlights branches checked out in worktrees and has done so for a while.
It was the primary repo at my job at the time. Decades of history, migrated from SVN. Probably some ill-advised large binary blobs committed at one point or another.
Surely it's a tiny fraction of git repos, if not users. But if it's a problem you have, worktrees are very useful.
I thought this this was just going to be about over complicated forms that scare people away.
Back when I was doing client work for a small agency we would get requests for these contact forms that would have 30+ fields, often many of them required. The forms made strong assumptions about why you were contacting them, and if you did not fit that mold the form was particularly painful.
No one wants to take the time to fill this out, you are losing business.
I would always try to talk them into simplifying. All anyone really needed was Name + Email + Text Area but many were insistent and many of these nightmare forms got built. I genuinely wish I had stats on how many people landed on the forms vs actually filled it out.
The worst part was that the vast majority of these just converted into emails to the owner of the small company with no backing database, because we charged extra for that. You'd spend all that time filling out all those fields and they would get concatenated back into a single string (with new lines and field titles).
I'm reminded of this when I try to submit an issue on some of these GitHub repos with wildly overdone templates. I just want to let you know you have a broken link in your documentation but you're forcing me to fill in my OS and build version and last time I went to the dentist and sign a CLA... and I've just not bothered more than a few times. Enjoy your broken link.
The latter is a byproduct of how GitHub's upperhanding[1]/casting couch culture has overtaken the Web community and how a bunch of software gets built, generally. The Shirky era[2] is gone. You're not seen or to be treated as a neighbor showing up with a helpful tip that one of your pipes has burst. You're going to be seen as another person who wants something from them, or, at best, a starlet who can do something for the cigar champers and'll be willing to put up with a lot of crap because you're trying to build a résumé.
This in large part because of two design decisions that GitHub made early on: the contribution graph on profile pages and naming the bugtracker "GitHub Issues" (and promoting a culture where people with support requests are funneled into the same side door as collaborators trying to keep tabs on software defects—i.e. people who need a real bugtracker).
I really tried to get it on my own, but please, what is the connection between the Seinfeld Episode "The Pez Dispenser" and the "Casting Couch Culture of GitHub"?
Suppose we are a design agency which build merchandise shops for sports teams. We have specific market knowledge, research, and experience in tailoring these shops to improve the experience for sports fans.
Out of the blue, a logistics company contacts us to help them build a merchandise shop. Could we do this? Sure, but it would require a lot of upfront work and given that it's not our area of expertise could possible result in a subpar experience for both us and the logistics company.
Given such, it's reasonable disqualify such clients. We can do this through our sales process, but by adding a simple "painful" field (e.g., "What sport does your team play?") you encourage such clients to disqualify themselves.
It saves us the work and effort. And it means the clients who get through the form are more likely to be the type of client we want.
There will always be a balance because our ideal clients will always be vaguely defined to some extent. This means some legit clients might get disqualify unnecessarily (e.g., a lacrosse team because we didn't think to include that in the list of sports), but it also means the quality of leads and/or inquiries which come through the forms would be higher quality.
Sure, if you have too much business that you can't be bothered to check these other leads. Same for browser incompatibility: you end up with a form which demands no blocking of anything, many specific js capabilities, MSIE only (I kid - you would think), etc, etc. Each incompatibility might only concern 2% of the population, but the whole mess mostly works flawlessly on the CEO's computer.
A single qualifying question like "What sport does your team play?" is a good direction - instead of the data fetishism of these forms.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. We should just stop using the term JavaScript. It's a bad choice of name and always has been.
It's caused way too much confusion over the years making people wrongly associate it with Java. My guess would be that associations exactly why Oracle doesn't want to give it up.
I would like to say go back to the original name of LiveScript from before Netscape tried to woo Sun, but the name LiveScript has been co-opted.
Something else with a J would probably be the least painful. JScript is permanently associated with Microsoft's terrible IE implementation. I offer up "JaScript" as it sounds largely like JavaScript but said with a drawl while retaining "JS".
Heck, I'll call it ECMAScript if that's what it takes. I'd rather not, but it's better than "JavaScript"
A couple years ago we had a particularly bad snowfall. The plow has a nasty hate filled habit of dumping all its snow in my driveway. I had a drift at the end of my driveway about 4 feet high and 6 feet deep. Literally up to my chest. I had spent a solid hour just chipping away at it trying to get my car out and had made very little progress.
Right as I was about to give up in frustration, a man in a bobcat drove by. Moments later he turned around, came back, and asked "would you like me to clear that for you?" I told him that would be amazing. Took him a couple minutes and then he waved and drove off before I got a chance to offer him any money or even thank him.
I think about this guy pretty often, it's absolutely the random act of kindness in my life I have appreciated most.
A recent lesser snowfall for context:
https://imgur.com/a/1un20s7
reply