This is a comment for a rather niche audience, but Barth basically had two literary stages: in his mid to late-twenties, he wrote straightforward modernist fiction (The End of the Road and Floating Opera). The bulk of his career was spent writing post-modern fiction, which included the books most often cited in this thread.
I found his earlier work far more diverting: it featured tight, well-written plots with interesting characters and ideas. By contrast, stuff like Giles Goat-Boy was gobbledygook written for other post-modern academics. Gore Vidal actually has a great essay on this: it seems like Barth started out as a great novelist, but turned toward the (again just my opinion) rather fallow field of post-modernism to further his prestige. Which is a shame, because again, The End of the Road is delightful. I guess my point is this: if your introduction to Barth is seeing people recommend the Sotweed Factor, and you find it inscrutable, I recommend picking up his earlier work instead.
Honestly, yes. I had a deep skepticism of a lot of VC-backed moonshots/SPACs in 2021. However, it’s hard to deny that these moonshots were at least aimed in the right direction — way more capital going to EVs, biotech, quantum computing, etc. You get some frauds in the mix (Nikola), but it’s socially utile to have a few of these projects gaining traction instead of highly profitable zombies.
ZIRP also seemed to be shifting investment tides toward green projects and away from oil. The new regime has allowed pollution to continue, and powered tyrannical governments like Saudi Arabia.
Facebook seems to be the ultimate in simplicity for small restaurants. Has a number of advantages, like built in chat, picture hosting and a feed of posts.
Yeah, this would be the way. This hypothetical restaurant would probably only need the following pages:
- Home page
- About Us
- Menu
- [Maybe 1 or 2 info pages]
- A contact page (with or without a form)
That's something that can be easily done with static HTML and CSS, and hosted on just about any random shared hosting service you can imagine. Assuming it doesn't become a major viral hit, it'd probably use a couple of megabytes of space on the hard drive and under a hundred megs of bandwidth.
Maybe up that number a tiny bit if Bob decides he wants to run a blog on the domain and you decide to just do the whole thing in WordPress or Drupal or whatever else.
Either way, a site that small could be built like its 1980 and it'd be perfectly fine.
I've made several "Bob's Restaurant" websites for clients. Early on I thought just that. "This can be statically implemented using the core web technologies HTML and CSS" - It wowed the client visually at first and they signed off on the product agreeing that the simple site was enough for them. Then the client wanted their Facebook, Google Maps, and Instagram integrated throughout the site over time. Now the site has JavaScript in its stack and external code running on it via APIs.
Early on the client wanted to make changes to the menu, and have a feed of events from their Google calendar. I implemented a Google Calendar feed script. Enter the world of dates in JS and learning how to use OAuth to hook into their feed. The client was getting confused as to why all this work had to be done for such simple little features and there was extra cost associated, and at the same time requested that they can CRUD menu items. I told them we need a CMS for that. They didn't like hearing the was more time and cost associated. By this time the statically implemented, elegantly designed Home | Menu | About site delivered the purpose of a visual mockup rather than a website that will help the business retain and add growth.
It could be said that this story is one of not planning and getting the spec right with the client, which in part is true. The part that was wrong is that the site could be this simple CSS HTML static site when in fact, even for a small business lacked the features and flexibility needed. Initially, the client and I decided that we would have me make the changes and updates to the static food and drink menu pages. This turned out to be very inefficient for both parties. Small businesses often don't want to pay hourly rates to have minor updates done on their website, which was the case because I don't work for free.
In the end the HTML/CSS site had a CMS, Database, and multiple external services. I learned from this moving forward and came up with the right stack for the scale of business I work with. However, in the late 2010's I noticed more small businesses opting into products like Squarespace and Wix, and selling clients with certain small businesses (nick nack shops and local bars restaurants) on custom site builds was getting harder.
Back to the original post. I get the point of the blog was to make a statement against unneeded complexity. Sure, however, it's important to remember that the work of producing digital products is inherently technical and complex. Developers should strive to be a smart programmer and spend time picking the right tools for the job.
Do you give any credence to the reports that creatine can cause hair loss? It seems like one study found a link, but nobody has tried to directly replicate it since. Anecdotally, Reddit is filled with stories of people claiming it caused hair loss, though I’m sure there are a ton of confounding variables.
To be clear, no one is arguing that Creatine causes hairloss, simply that it exacerbates hairloss in people with so called androgenetic alopecia.
I recall a study that was set to try and replicate these results, but I worry that it was impacted by COVID. If anyone else can find it, I'd be very interested to see it.
I’d be worried about using ChatGPT for this given its tendency to hallucinate. Did you have to verify each response it gave you, or were you willing to trust the output?
I wouldn't verify each response, but I would (sorta) verify at the end by moving on to read within the topic.
As you start to grok a topic, you should start to recognize internal inconsistencies and then you can probe those details. When you feel you have some understanding, you can then start consuming media on the topic at a higher level and any problems in your understanding should fall out fairly quickly.
From a legal standpoint, why is it a qualified use of government paternalism to outlaw gambling? We should not be asking the government to set laws based on morality.
Practically speaking, and apologies in advance for how obvious this argument is…when you ban gambling, it doesn’t disappear, it simply goes underground. Criminal actors benefit while the state is unable to enforce any protections or see any recompense. Moreover, it’s unclear what brightline exists between “gambling” and a ton of economic decisions. If I buy a plot of land because I think it might have oil, is that gambling? When I lock in an insurance policy, is that gambling?
I get it’s popular to immediately call for government enforcement whenever you experience personal moral outrage, but the real world contains far more nuance. Making gambling and some of its “sinful” corollaries like drug use illegal has never solved the problem, and has exacerbated it for the worst off.
I'm totally fine with allowing gambling at the condition that it be completely off limits to minors and it be properly labelled and easy to filter out. But now, what we see is games specifically targeting children are rife with gambling type mechanism to get the child to spend money. As for the App Store, sure they display that there might be micro transactions, but the hardly tell you if they are of the gem types or the "10$ to unlock full game" types. I also should be able to have an option in a menu somewhere to completely hide all those gambling type games. Right now, when I go look for games, I specifically filter for only the paid ones, yet those games still want to double dip and get you to pay micro transaction, which just discourages me from spending my money at all.
It is deemed a qualified use to limit gambling because gambling addiction hurts more than just the addict. Their family suffers, maybe society suffers because of crime. Limiting (not outlawing) allows for outreach, voluntary blacklists, escape for their family should they cross the line and other safety measures.
As for the brightline between economic decisions: yeah, the definition is not perfect. Poker isn't gambling for some definitions because it is 'a game of skill'. While buying a plot of land with oil is certainly a skill AND it is expected to generate profits. But we can't protect as m
well against hopeful stupidity.
Buying an insurance policy isn't gambling as it reduces risk. ...selling one is gambling if you didn't do the math though.
I think I agree on your take on gambling and some of its “sinful” corollaries, but aren't this and other dark patterns more about tricking and fooling people into something? At a casino I know it is money in, very likely no money out, maybe big money.
Here it is money in, for a chance to play better against.. what even humans, or just more virtualities?
I know i know, where to draw the line will be superhard or impossible, but this has the touch of plain betrayal to me, that classic gambling hasn't (as long as it is fair).
Jeez. In her last Tweets which were sent just 6 days ago, she states:
>"A few notes on the balance sheet info that has been circulating recently:
- that specific balance sheet is for a subset of our corporate entities, we have > $10b of assets that aren’t reflected there"
Not just any religion, it’s a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital (an offshoot of the Mennonites, who believed the end of the world was predicted in the Bible). This has all sorts of weird implications; from my memory, they can’t serve caffeine on the premises. There’s a giant painting of Jesus guiding a surgeon’s hands in the front of the Orlando branch when you walk inside.
I grew up overseas. All the hospitals were technically "islamic" but the great thing about that was zero religeous paintings. There were no crosses hanging over beds, but neither was any other image. Christians felt as welcomed as anyone else. The architecture and decoration was agnostic. Even the attached mosque was basically just a square room pointing in a strange direction, and was open to all peoples.
Isn't that a direct result of the Islamic belief that man made art is offensive to God? The same reason mosques are decorated with geometric patterns and not "art".
I found his earlier work far more diverting: it featured tight, well-written plots with interesting characters and ideas. By contrast, stuff like Giles Goat-Boy was gobbledygook written for other post-modern academics. Gore Vidal actually has a great essay on this: it seems like Barth started out as a great novelist, but turned toward the (again just my opinion) rather fallow field of post-modernism to further his prestige. Which is a shame, because again, The End of the Road is delightful. I guess my point is this: if your introduction to Barth is seeing people recommend the Sotweed Factor, and you find it inscrutable, I recommend picking up his earlier work instead.