"My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7... A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working. I decided it was time to look for a replacement."
Isn't that like deciding to replace your bike because some of the cables are rusted? Like a new set of cables, a new keyboard is a small expense compared to a whole new laptop.
Like replacing bike cables, swapping in a new Carbon X7 keyboard might be slightly challenging for an amateur. iFixit calls the keyboard replacement "moderate" in difficulty [1] taking about an hour with a new keyboard running about a hundred bucks. But it would be a simple job for a repair shop. So it seems hard to justify the expense of a whole new one rather than just the new part.
Of course, sometimes you just want a new laptop, because the bike analogy breaks down a little: unlike bikes, newer ones are inherently faster.
Generation 7. I realize you acknowledged the hardware age, but it's really the difference in my own workflows and experience.
I'm still on a Gen 8 i7 (with 40 GB RAM, to boot) T480s. I take pretty good care of my machine, so it's still in superb physical shape.
But, given today's massive webapps and video calls while having my workspace programs open, I'm in Hell. A failing keyboard would probably push me to repurpose the current machine and upgrade as well (and still replace the keyboard for kicks).
If I wasn't strapped for cash, I would have bought an AMD Framework eons ago.
Your analogy won’t hold scrutiny with a competitive cyclist: newer bikes are also faster given the same rider, even if not as meaningfully as a new CPU.
And modern bikes do make with the need for cable replacement or breakage (hydro lines and electric shifting, while more expensive to service, also require much less of it).
Life tip: Noone appreciates and there's no utility in nitpicking analogies. They're never the actual point of the message and it's incredibly rude and socially inept to lock onto a side quest like that.
idk, the OP is all about the author misunderstanding what they bought. Hence a comment about bikes not understanding bikes deserves just as much scrutiny.
My own life tip: there are plenty of good analogies, so no need to choose use an example you are not familiar with.
With this comment you completely validate izacus (shaky) judgement call: when you write "a comment about bikes not understanding bikes" you are clearly more interested in being rude than pointing out a flaw in the analogy.
We all see that OP does understand bikes in the general sense, indeed the fact you are nitpicking instead of trying to explain one of the many fundamental difference means you think that as well.
To me, it suggests that analogies aren't as useful as we'd like them to be. Either the analogy is perfect, in which case nothing is any simpler, or it's imperfect, in which case you're now distracted by the differences.
They're not totally without value but I find that it's generally better to avoid a analogies. Look for some other route to make the point.
Analogies are a simplification. The problem is not that they can’t capture the whole thing in detail. But that they just don’t stand up to any adversity (because that isn’t what they are for). They are only good for explaining things, not for arguing.
They rely on the recipient going along with the analogy and trying to make it work, not trying to find problems with it. If someone understands the concept well enough to needle the analogy, they probably have a better understanding than the analogy can provide anyway, so it is fine to give it up.
In this case it is neither used for arguing, nor for explanation really, I think, but as a bit of rhetorical flair. The analogy is to an obviously stupid thing to do, throw away your bike because of some easy to fix cabling issue.
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
And the world, people as a mob, will try its best to punish that person for daring to be different. The nail that sticks out gets beaten.
RMS is a flawed person, a stubborn unreasonable man with questionable traits. But dismissing his life's work as "said some decent things" is just ignorant revisionist history. We can acknowledge his flaws while respecting the work he did and the overall message, which changed the world for the better.
I am usually working with historical documents, where both Otsu and adaptive thresholding are frustratingly almost but not quite good enough. My go-to approach lately is "DeepOtsu" [1]. I like that it combines the best of both the traditional and deep learning worlds: a deep neural net enhances the image such that Otsu thresholding is likely to work well.
Bikes can work great for travelers aged from, say, 13 to 70 without much luggage. Not so great for travelers outside that age range, with more luggage, or with physical disabilities. I wonder what fraction of travelers falls into the latter category.
I agree standard bikes are a poor fit for luggage. There are cargo (e)bikes that can comfortably hold large bags (e.g. https://larryvsharry.com/products/ebullitt). They may make sense at major rail stations, but the logistics of keeping them in stock at the station would be hard, and of course this doesn't solve the infrastructure or physical disabilities/age problem.
While we're on that subject, there is a special place in hell for whoever decided to put stairs with the only backup option being the smallest, slowest lift known to man in St Pancras station. Such idiocy.
The article is quite one-sided. My experience is certainly that B6 has an effect on nerves, but in my case that's been a good thing.
I started a software job in 1995, writing a lot of code. By mid-1997, I had severe nerve pain in both wrists, even with ice, stretching, and ibuprofen.
I went to an excellent orthopedist who prescribed two things: a Kinesis Advantage keyboard to mostly immobilize the wrists while typing, and 50 mg of Vitamin B6 per day.
The combination saved my career. I sometimes get out of the habit of taking the B6 for a week or two, out of sheer forgetfulness. After a couple of weeks, I'll start noticing very minor nerve pain if I'm using the Kinesis Advantage keyboard (I'm typing this on one right now.) But if I'm typing on a normal keyboard at a client site, a week or so is enough to bring back noticeable nerve pain, which reminds me to start the B6 regimen again. After a few days on B6, the pain recedes.
I was a little nervous at taking 2500% of the RDA, so I researched the medical literature, and the studies I found showing problems caused by excessive B6 all described people taking 200mg or more per day.
The article notes that "since 2022 the TGA has required a warning label for listed medicines with more than 10mg of B6." So maybe studies showing the potential for harm have come out since then; I don't know. On the other hand, has anyone ever gathered data to show whether supplemental B6 actually does improve cases like mine? Vitamin B6 can't be patented, so there's no money to be made, so who is going to fund that study?
Serious side effects from long term high dose vitamin B6 include peripheral neuropathy. Doses exceeding 500 to 1000 mg per day pose the greatest risk but prolonged intake of lower doses may also result in this side effect. The Therapeutic Goods Association of Australia has found that peripheral neuropathy can occur at doses of less than 50 mg.
In pregnant adult women, vitamin B6 is likely safe at a dose of up to 100 mg per day. In adolescent pregnancy, vitamin B6 is likely safe at a dose of up to 80 mg per day.
In lactating adult women, vitamin B6 is likely safe at a dose of up to 100 mg per day. In adolescents who are lactating, vitamin B6 is likely safe at a dose of up to 80 mg per day.
In children, vitamin B6 is likely safe at a daily dose of 30 mg (1-3 yrs), 40 mg (4-8 yrs), 60 mg (9-13 yrs) and 80 mg (14-18 yrs).
The likelihood of side effects increases at doses higher than 200 mg per day.
In 2023, the European Food Safety Authority set an upper limit of vitamin B6 of 12 mg per day for adults, and 2.2 to 10.7 mg per day for infants and children.
This is great and has a lot of early historical perspective that I had never seen chronicled before.
But it is necessarily limited in the amount of album covers it can feature from what many would consider to be their heyday, the 1950s through the 1970s.
If you just want to feast your eyes on a lot of great album covers from that period, pick up a copy of the "Album Cover Album" [1] or one of its six (!) follow-ups. Designers Storm Thorgerson (who worked with Pink Floyd) and Roger Dean (who worked with Yes) created these incredibly lush books, with album covers printed nice and large in vivid color, organized in a really insightfully thematic way. A bit more speedy than your average used book, but not by much. Highly recommended, good for hours of reverie.
Thorgerson and Powell ran Hipgnosis, which made a large number of the craziest and most memorable covers of the 70s/80s, not just PF. There are only three days left to watch the great documentary that Anton Corbijn made about them: https://www.netflix.com/us/title/81721595
Gotta admit: Yes's wild album covers drew me in so that their sound could get me hooked on Prog Rock so long ago. Creative album covers seem to be one of the many victims of today's single-focused and streaming-focused music landscape.
Jane Jacobs's grandmother, Hannah Breece, was also a remarkable, dynamic woman: the first American schoolteacher in Alaska after its purchase from Russia. Jacobs did valuable work editing her grandmother's incomplete memoirs and publishing them with commentary [1]. If you are interested in Jacobs, give it a read; both women's personalities come through quite distinctly.
Perhaps not. But you could still imagine a for-profit matchmaking service that would do a better job of aligning its interests with those of its clients. For example, it could collect only a small fee upfront with an agreement that if you meet Mr. or Ms. Right you'll release a larger fee held in escrow.
I imagine that would need to be quite personalized and high touch, but it would be an appealing contrast to standard dating sites, which have interests diametrically opposed to those of their users: a user who makes a long-term match will stop paying the membership fee, so the site owner has no real incentive to help the user do anything but churn.
