I've seen this expressed as a concern even from one of my colleagues. My retort was:
"English is not my native language and LLMs taught me quite a few very useful formalisms that do land well for people and they change their attitude towards you to be more respectful afterwards. It also showed me how to frame and reframe certain arguments. I agree sounding like an LLM is kind of sad but I am getting a lot of educational value -- and with time I'll sneak my own voice back in these newly learned idioms and ways to talk."
Since you seem interested in the ins and outs of English, I want to say that "retort" has a connotation of anger or sharpness. Your response reads more like a "rebuttal" to me.
This is not a correction; maybe retort is what you meant and I'm not trying to be the English police. I just like discussing the intricacies of language :)
Like most of all widely spoken languages, there's a lot of regional variation in English. There's even a bunch of quizzes online where you answer 20 questions about phrasings, and they can tell you where you're from with a disconcertingly high degree of accuracy.
In my experience a "retort" is sharp or witty, but certainly not angry, whereas the word "rebuttal" is itself essentially antagonistic. You might use it when referring to something or someone that you look down upon, whereas a more neutral term would simply be "response."
Just personally I tend to regard retort as short and reactive while rebuttal as a longer and more considered disagreement. A retort could be defensive and wrong or it could be sharp and insightful - it doesn't imply one or the other. A rebuttal is mostly an attempt to correct something while a retort doesn't need to be a correction (although it could).
Even something like "piss off!" could be a retort, but usually never a rebuttal :)
Just as I was reading your comment I remembered that Samuel Jackson used "retort" in his speech in the "Pulp Fiction" movie and was wondering whether he was openly antagonistic there (I mean, he killed a bunch of guys with a pistol shortly afterwards but still) or was it a witticism.
I admit I am lost on these nuances and I usually kind of use whatever idiom comes to mind, which yes, likely would net me some weird looks depending on where I am geographically.
I appreciate the craftiness of this but with the years I stopped being a fan of Frankenstein setups. The vendor should be honest; if the piece of tech is expected to heat up, just add a fan to it and manual toggle and a knob to control it or have it work auto.
Neither me nor dozens of my acquaintances fell for it. 100% of us said "GitHub is toast, it's just a matter of time". And we and many others were right.
Whoever makes fun of you over it is exactly the people you want to avoid.
Leaving any emotions aside, all the arguments you gave are technical and carry weight: we are not always in the mood for OSS work -- or even have the time and energy, which happens to be the much more oft limitation -- and when we are, we want our infra to just work. If it does not, that might kill your motivation for a week. Or a month.
For an OSS contributor, the main one even, this is actually bad news. You are doing both yourself and your community a big service by making this difficult decision.
What is RMS quote supposed to prove here? We can always find new work? Is that it? If so -- not so fast. When you have a family, your freedom is severely hampered. Most companies understand this and abuse it.
And yes the free software ideology is as naive as a puppy. Every serious individual understands this. Most HN-ers are in a fairly specific bubble (income brackets, geo-location, political leanings, upbringing, the whole package); of course to them this is "heresy". This is well-understood. Happily for me and many others around here, karma farming is not the goal so we don't mind getting some gray arrow treatment every now and then.
Different things. "Rust is safer" generally means memory safety i.e. no double-free, no use-after-free, no buffer-/under-flows, and the like. The safety you seem to have in mind is "minimal dependency count".
You can write simple http server or rest client with stdlib in Go. No need to include tokio, serde and hundred other cargos which constantly break things. I have apps written in Go more than a decade ago work the same now with recent version of Go. Where as, I had issues with getting few year old github apps in rust compiling and working in rust.
I know what you mean about Go vs. Rust here and I've seen it firsthand, though I believe the effect is overblown. I was able to modernize a fairly old project in literal 15 minutes by using Cargo Clippy's fix mode + a few small hand-crafted changes.
To me a rich stdlib is not a selling point. Both ecosystems have a ton of very high-quality libraries.
I’m not the person you asked, but given the choice I avoid a language without JSON parsing officially supported because I need that frequently. It’s the reason I never picked up Lua, despite being interested in it.
Interesting, thanks for sharing your anecdote. Upvoted.
I am openly admitting I don't care. Such libraries are in a huge demand and every programming language ecosystem gains them quite early. So to me the risk of malicious code in them is negligibly small.
To me it’s not just the risk of malicious code, but also convenience. For example, if I’m using a scripted language and sharing it in some form with users, I don’t want to have to worry about keeping the library updated, and fight with the package manager, and ship extraneous files, and…
It's a sign that they learned from Python more than anything else. Better be conservative than have Python's situation of multiple versions of those common functionalities (in the stdlib) that almost nobody uses and goes for 3rd party libraries anyway. Is that a better state of affairs?
The Rust vs. Node comparison seems very shallow to me, and it seems to require a lot of eye squinting to work.
People have beef with Rust in other, more emotional ways, and welcome the opportunity to pretend they dislike it on seemingly-rational grounds a la "Node bad amirite lol".
What stimulants have you landed on? And do you feel they're better for you?
I'm pondering getting a coffee machine at home. 400 EUR is not a sizable investment and one I'd have forgotten about it 3 months but I'm getting cold feet when it gets to committing.
Americano coffee definitely picks me up and is a full net positive for me. But that's only if I drink 2-3 times a week. Not sure how it's going to be if I start getting it every day.
Working with a psychiatrist, I take half the minimum therapeutic dose of generic Adderall as-needed.
Caffeine makes me feel like I'm overclocked, but Adderall lets me run tasks async. The latter is so much more preferable for dealing with the demands of life.
Medicate at 4pm, then I know I can effortlessly interleave chores, family time, social obligations, and my own creative pursuits. Otherwise I'd spend my evenings on the couch stuck trying to offload unsolved problems of the workday.
Vigorous exercise accomplishes the same thing, but I can't always make that happen "as-needed".
That's pretty interesting, thank you. To me Adderall is a bridge too far though. I don't want to truly medicate (though I guess we can always argue semantics i.e. is getting coffee everyday not like medication?).
I just need something like the Americano every now and then really.
I agree on vigorous exercise completely. My last two jobs have been (well, the current one still is) hugely demanding and that led to me dropping a lot of exercise. Still trying to understand why and to undo that because I gained back 5kg (sigh).
Tried Earl Grey too. It's actually awesome but I must be careful; easy to go above a certain dose that just tires me and makes me crash.
One thing I'll try before considering the coffee machine really seriously: theacrine pills. I'll give them 2-3 weeks and will make a decision.
I used to be prescribed lisdexamfetamine for ADHD and after 3 years it did feel "a bridge too far for me" as well.
My stimulant of choice now is low-dose nicotine patches which I feel is extremely underrated, and demonised because of the effects of smoking and vaping. Mind you: I am an ex-smoker and I am quite aware of how strong the addiction can be, yet pure nicotine is the most mellow stimulant there is.
It's been 2 years now since I replaced my ADHD medication with nicotine and I haven't felt the need to increase the dosage. It's cheaper, lasts MUCH longer, doesn't cause anxiety and it doesn't push you around like amphetamine.
I have a moka pot but I guess I am doing it wrong -- maybe I should not fill its coffee compartment to the brim? is there other way of doing it? -- because the coffee that gets out destroys me: heart palpitations, slight arrhythmia, headaches, and energy crash. I can't drink too much caffeine but light doses (i.e. the Americano) actually help me and energize me. It's really weird.
What's good about the aero-press and the French press btw? I am only just trying to understand the landscape.
Look up Moka Pot Voodoo on YouTube. It'll sort you out.
Americano means nothing - its just diluted strong coffee (eg espresso, moka pot). You probably need to learn how much actual coffee your body can handle.
I handle very little, so have a 1 cup moka pot which takes 9-10g of ground coffee. And that's pushing my upper limit. My body can usually handle better a very unsatisfying 6-7g brewed. I need to find some good decaf... (though I have a line on Laurina coffee, which has half as much caffeine. Hopefully I can get some soon).
French press is just a really easy way to get a great cup of coffee. You don't even need one - you could just make cowboy coffee (grounds in hot water) and carefully decant it out at after 5-10 min. Look up James Hoffman french press method. His aeropress series is good too.
You also need to learn that all of this stuff that everyone says is just drug addict self-talk coping. You only actually get a boost at first, and then your body adapts and is in caffeine deficit and is just trying to get back to baseline with more coffee.
The healthiest way to do any of this would be to try as you said (but likely unsuccessfully) to limit your coffee intake to 2-3 days a week, so that you might actually get a kick rather than just sustain your addiction. Once a week as a special occasion might be more successful. It should be treated as a healthy person treats alcohol...
I'm not even joking with all this drug addict talk.
> I have a moka pot but I guess I am doing it wrong -- maybe I should not fill its coffee compartment to the brim?
How big is your moka pot? A "4 cup" Bialetti takes around 16-18g of coffee, which isn't a lot.
No matter how dilute your end product is, the amount of caffeine consumed will roughly be about the same. But I guess diluting it means you take longer to consume all that caffeine.
Yes bialetti original. Sounds like the venus is the difference.
Ps Check out moka pot voodoo on YouTube, if you haven't already. I almost never make a bad brew now (except for literally just now, but was with a new bean, roasted darker than usual. Will grind finer next time).
Moka pot coffee is definitely strong. If that's your only coffee maker, I'd just dilute that with more hot water.
An Aeropress is less concentrated in my experience, and it's pretty easy to use. I prefer iced coffee unless it's cold out, so I fill the collector with ice before I brew. The melted water dilutes it nicely, in my opinion.
Especially if you like Americanos, chances are you'll be happier with filter coffee from good beans, rather than spending it in an espresso machine.
Get an Aeropress, or Hario Switch, or Clever dripper. A kettle and some filters. For beans buy from roasters that do light/meduim roasts, and print a recent roasting date on the package/website. The only expensive item should be a grinder, look at 1zpresso Q/Air/X or Kingrinder K6 if you want to limit price.
Not gonna lie, this sounds like way too much work.
What I am mostly looking for is some sort of an easy access to a diluted coffee like the Americano, really. I am OK with buying 1-2kg of beans because I am fairly sure that's going to last me 3-6 months. Cleaning the machine I've done in offices -- 3 minute job.
But any more commitment just sounds tiring. I am not a coffee connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination. But light caffeine doses absolutely do help me in very measurable ways. I need easy access to that.
Buying a coffee machine is not a big commitment obviously, I am just afraid I'll deem the experiment unsuccessful in a month and then I'll have a nice machine lying around doing nothing that I can't easily sell.
This style, pour over machine that grinds itself, but uses all water you put in, so it's not fully automatic.
It's automatic enough, but also very cheap. Maybe even ⅒ of a price of a fancy espresso machine. And you can add "too much" water (than the setting you set) to make lighter coffee.
I finally gave in and got a breville bambino plus and I have no regrets. It was $400 on sale, produces quite decent espresso, foams milk well, has been very reliable, and doesn't heat up the kitchen - I held off getting an espresso machine for years because the instant heat ones always seemed to suck. This one doesn't. I mostly drink Americanos and straight espressos, my wife drinks lattes, everybody is happy.
But I have to agree with others: for my diluted espresso desires, I used (and still have) an Aeropress for years and it's simply fantastic. Low cost, almost zero maintenance, good results. Very similar output to an americano though lower on crema.
Nice. Does it have a special option for Americano?
That's the main reason I'm leaning towards Delonghi Magnifica Start. It has a button for Americano. I tried moka pot coffee + diluting it with hot water. It's not the same. :(
A cheap proper coffee hand grinder like a Timemore C2 would go so much further than a blade grinder that would shred the coffee beans up inconsistently.
(Buy used for even better value. Hand grinders last forever.)
If you are keen for a machine and you like it diluted, I recommend the Moccamaster. It’s a good-looking classic machine that you could definitely sell.
For a similar coffee with more manual work, get a Chemex
In that case, if you stick to pre-ground coffee, just get an Oxo Rapid Brewer. It’s cheap, easy and fast to use and clean, and only requires a kettle. You’ll get decent coffee.
I have a very nice grinder: a solis caffissima digital coffee grinder. It is available under a different brand name in the US I think.
I make filter coffee with a very basic earthenware filter holder with melitta high quality yet very normal filters and sometimes I mix it up with an aeropress which offers a different type of taste because of the low acidity way of making coffee. I just drip the coffee into a nice thermos so I can make 4 cups in one go and just pour from the thermos.
My coffee is much nicer than I get in most places, both professional and at homes and it doesn’t cost me a lot in effort, money and, very importantly, workspace footprint.
Espresso machines require a lot of space and maintenance and trouble to make.
Having said all this, I am quite intrigued about all the stories about the negative effects of coffee. I just thought it was about influencing sleep, but I had never thought about the memory and mood effects. I will study this some more in the coming months.
"English is not my native language and LLMs taught me quite a few very useful formalisms that do land well for people and they change their attitude towards you to be more respectful afterwards. It also showed me how to frame and reframe certain arguments. I agree sounding like an LLM is kind of sad but I am getting a lot of educational value -- and with time I'll sneak my own voice back in these newly learned idioms and ways to talk."
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