NaraVara's recent activity
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Comment on AI was eroding trust in my classroom — so I got rid of typed papers and bought my students notebooks instead in ~life
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentI don’t have a link but I just remember a hypothesis floating around that “Long COVID” might be a result of COVID resetting the immune system in a way that allows previously infected but dormant...I don’t have a link but I just remember a hypothesis floating around that “Long COVID” might be a result of COVID resetting the immune system in a way that allows previously infected but dormant viruses, like Epstein-Barr, to pop back up. Hence why the symptoms seem to be so broad and inconsistent from case to case.
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara (edited )Link ParentThere’s a decently supported hypothesis out there that getting a bad COVID infection seems to un-train your immune system so it stops recognizing many viruses that it used to be able to identify...There’s a decently supported hypothesis out there that getting a bad COVID infection seems to un-train your immune system so it stops recognizing many viruses that it used to be able to identify and respond to before. It’s basically like our anti-virus has been reset to factory settings and forgot how to find the weak spot on a bunch of stuff it used to be able to speedrun through.
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara Link ParentThat is unless your daycare does drop-in care for elementary school kids on school holidays. Then you get sudden infusions of new contact as a bunch of kids from random elementary schools all over...That is unless your daycare does drop-in care for elementary school kids on school holidays. Then you get sudden infusions of new contact as a bunch of kids from random elementary schools all over the area all pop in for a day or week to create a fresh melange of contagions by combining germs from each of their respective Petri dishes every month or two.
Oh and live in a city where like 70% of people in your income range have jobs that require frequent work-related travel. So parents can go to other states or countries and bring their exotic germs back to their children to share with the class.
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Comment on Why do I almost never catch colds anymore? in ~health
NaraVara LinkTry having kids and you’ll see how resilient your immune system really is. Also there’s just generally less crowding and more sanitation than there used to be. There’s still hand sanitizer...Try having kids and you’ll see how resilient your immune system really is.
Also there’s just generally less crowding and more sanitation than there used to be. There’s still hand sanitizer dispensers everywhere and people are way more habituated to washing their hands. A lot of people still work from home or have hybrid schedules so there’s less people rubbing up against each other in public leading to illnesses spreading around. Restaurants and stores still have some of the health protocols in place for people handling food.
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Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
NaraVara Link ParentI think the big change with Claude Code will be democratizing a lot of software development. Relative neophytes will be able to set up a scalable, enterprise-tier architecture for an application...I think the big change with Claude Code will be democratizing a lot of software development. Relative neophytes will be able to set up a scalable, enterprise-tier architecture for an application with very little help. This can only mean a flowering of many many startups and many many internal corporate development projects to solve their problems instead of relying on some commercial off the shelf tool.
It’s gonna be a bad time for B2B SaaS, and any business line that relies on slinging bits around is going to be commoditized out of existence by a thousand bespoke mom&pops. But it’ll be a great time to do IT for a traditional company that has to interact with the real world, making stuff or moving stuff. They’re starved for talent and resources and they’re about to see a world where every random clerk is able to directly solve a bunch of small problems that they didn’t know how to write syntax for automation scripting or macros for before and do now.
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Comment on I don’t know if my software engineering job will still exist in ten years in ~comp
NaraVara LinkSo one thing I’ll add from my own experience. I started my career as a data analyst/data scientist and it was a role I was very good at. Like good enough to where people were willing to let a lot...So one thing I’ll add from my own experience. I started my career as a data analyst/data scientist and it was a role I was very good at. Like good enough to where people were willing to let a lot of unprofessional behavior slide (not anything immoral more things like talking back to my manager in front of others, flouting administrative paperwork stuff, that sort of thing, general refusal to manage up out of pride, etc.) because people were generally willing to let a lot of things slide because I was pretty much irreplaceable.
But I switched career tracks into project management after that initial stint due to burnout (the flip-side of being “irreplaceable” is that you end up being the single point of failure on everything you touch). About 6-8 years in I started managing teams of data scientists and in the time between when I left that specific field of expertise and then started managing people who did the job I used to do the discipline had basically completely changed. Like much of the stuff I was skilled at that set me apart from others were basically table stakes now (and a whole other set of skills that used to be table stakes are precious jewels now but that’s another story) and the level of sophistication of data sets, technical tools, canned functions, and other stuff at people’s disposal is genuinely staggering.
But rather than eliminating data scientist jobs this ended up creating way way more. The job looks a bit different now than it did then. It’s a more python and less stata, etc. but the changes happened gradually enough for people in it that it doesn’t seem like as radical a leap as it is for me who left and came back. It also requires a different kind of brain and background to be good now. Data wonks used to come from the social sciences and now it’s its own discipline. We used to care a lot about the underlying math and methodology details and now you don’t really have to (though I’d argue you still should). It’s all way more efficient now but since the cost of doing analysis has gone way down, people have found way more occasions and places to need data analysis. If anything it’s gone too far and we’re allowing data to make strategic decisions to inappropriate degrees.
But the discipline has changed. You have to think a lot more like a programmer now and you’re less close to the reality the data represents than you used to be IMO. But I don’t think I’d have been as interested in it if it was like this when I was coming up. Insofar as I add value as a manager I often feel it’s more like an ability to inject some of the “old ways” into caring more about what the p value says about objective reality than what your p value says about the data.
All that to say I think over time LLMs will make it so people are still writing software, but the software developers will look different and apply different skills from the ones who came before. For some this will be a natural transition but for others they’re not gonna make it. I think you’ll see some of the work of building new features start being done by people who would be “product managers” today and there will just be a lot more of them and they’ll start learning skills that programmers have now. So it’s not “over” it’s just going to look very different. As different as medicine transitioning from visiting with herbalists and apothecaries to the evidence-based medical establishment we have today.
The technology is still immature so we don’t actually know what LLM-centric business processes will look like. Only once they arise will we start to understand what kinds of tasks and choices will still need a person doing or at least supervising them. I think more than the problem of jobs disappearing I worry about the brittleness and stagnation we’ll be introducing if we cut those jobs in a fit of over enthusiasm for a technology with limitations that the people making these decisions don’t understand.
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Comment on Apple announces Macbook Neo, a new budget Mac in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentI think the target user is someone trying to upgrade from a Chromebook, so this will beat the pants off that. People who are trying to get a real computer at a discount are being steered to the...I think the target user is someone trying to upgrade from a Chromebook, so this will beat the pants off that. People who are trying to get a real computer at a discount are being steered to the MacBook Air, which starts at $200 more. That’s maybe $50 more than what 8GB of extra RAM would cost at Apple markups anyway, and you’re getting a lot more for it.
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Comment on Almost a third of Gen Z men agree a wife should obey her husband in ~life.men
NaraVara Link ParentWhen you’re doing a survey across multiple countries, cultures, and languages it’s basically impossible to localize those sorts of nuances in wording in a way where meaning will be consistent...When you’re doing a survey across multiple countries, cultures, and languages it’s basically impossible to localize those sorts of nuances in wording in a way where meaning will be consistent between them. The simpler and more blunt the statement the more internally valid your findings will be. But even the bluntest sounding statements can end up having nuances in how they’re interpreted after translation. It’s a hornet’s nest.
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Comment on Almost a third of Gen Z men agree a wife should obey her husband in ~life.men
NaraVara Link ParentI think this is basically tracking number of men who have been married/in long-term relationships with women before and understand how they work vs. men who are operating mostly on naive...I think this is basically tracking number of men who have been married/in long-term relationships with women before and understand how they work vs. men who are operating mostly on naive theorizing from ambient messaging. So it’s going to track closely with age.
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Comment on Audible offers Standard membership plan - $8.99 for access to Audible Plus and a book a month that is NOT retained when you're unsubscribed. in ~books
NaraVara LinkI have to assume there are ways to retain it, though perhaps through methods IP lawyers would deem to be . . .unnatural.I have to assume there are ways to retain it, though perhaps through methods IP lawyers would deem to be . . .unnatural.
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Comment on What’s your preferred work monitor setup? in ~comp
NaraVara LinkIt actually depends on OS. If it’s a Mac I prefer having one big monitor, like 32” at least. Maybe with a smaller side monitor, but an iPad set up would work as well. If it’s a PC I think at least...It actually depends on OS. If it’s a Mac I prefer having one big monitor, like 32” at least. Maybe with a smaller side monitor, but an iPad set up would work as well.
If it’s a PC I think at least 2. Just because Windows UI seems to not do well unless windows are maximized. Everything seems designed to run full screen.
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Comment on Writers who don't read books: a response in ~books
NaraVara Link ParentFrankly most creative outlets are going to need some amount of initial practice before you can actually start enjoying them. You kind of have to suck it up and learn to enjoy the act of...Frankly most creative outlets are going to need some amount of initial practice before you can actually start enjoying them. You kind of have to suck it up and learn to enjoy the act of learning/practicing/training.
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Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe “proactive step” would have been not getting onto a centralized platform hosted on someone else’s computer in the first place. As soon as you do that you’re in basically a semi-public zone...I've been through this enough times that I'd rather take proactive steps early on to get off the train instead of riding it into the wreck.
The “proactive step” would have been not getting onto a centralized platform hosted on someone else’s computer in the first place. As soon as you do that you’re in basically a semi-public zone where you don’t have much expectation of absolute privacy.
They always boil the frog. They won't ever publicly announce such a thing.
They don’t “always boil the frog” actually. If anything, they tend to try and move out way too aggressively, get way over their skis, and never fucking shut up about their plans to do evil for the sake of doing evil. The people wanting to do this stuff are clownish caricatures, not secret shadowy puppet-masters.
Or anyone who may feel vulnerable to an oppressive government that does not want to give out data that they browse LGBT content.
Age verification doesn’t meaningfully bring that any closer or farther away though. They literally can identify you right now if you’re a person of interest unless you’re taking pretty extreme measures to obfuscate your identity, which isn’t really something one would do on Discord in the first place.
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Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThe irony is that the American reflexive aversion to government data collection or identification of any kind ends up making our PII less secure as we yield up all the information to each and...The irony is that the American reflexive aversion to government data collection or identification of any kind ends up making our PII less secure as we yield up all the information to each and every service provider who all sell it to the same handful of data brokers on the back end. But it’s not the government so it’s fine, it’s just Mark Zuckerberg. . .
. . .who sells it back to the government anyway with fewer data protections, transparency, audit, or oversight than if it was just done by a public agency.
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Comment on Discord: Getting global age assurance right: what we got wrong and what's changing in ~tech
NaraVara Link ParentThis is true of everything though. It’s fine until you push it to the point where it’s not. So you just stop using it once it’s not instead of catastrophizing about how everything could...This is true of everything though. It’s fine until you push it to the point where it’s not. So you just stop using it once it’s not instead of catastrophizing about how everything could potentially be a theoretical step towards doing something else that there isn’t much indication they’re doing.
It’s not even like they couldn’t just lock out LGBT content now if they wanted, that’s a control on the content rather than the identity of the viewers. All this would do is enable them to lock it out only for <18 users rather than globally.
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Comment on Third spaces: What do we want, and how do we get them? in ~life
NaraVara (edited )LinkThe thing is that third spaces haven’t been disappearing since the ‘90s. The 90s were the absolute nadir, but the types of spaces that were third places have exploded since then. There’s been a...- Exemplary
The thing is that third spaces haven’t been disappearing since the ‘90s. The 90s were the absolute nadir, but the types of spaces that were third places have exploded since then. There’s been a huge resurgence of cocktail culture, microbrews, and third wave coffee. There’s been an explosion of casual groups via Meetups, social sports leagues, interesting restaurants, and a bunch of other types of places and activities that were where people used to hang out.
What’s actually changed is that home also just got harder to leave, so people stopped hanging out. Being at home no longer just means having your personal library of media and the selection of periodicals you subscribe to. It means having all the streaming media, all the porn, video games, dating apps, and so on.
Third spaces are all over the place, it’s the social structures that have atrophied. People think nothing of changing plans at the last minute now, people don’t commit to social appointments. Flaking on commitments has lost much of its taboo and a lot of the occasions where people used to connect interpersonally have turned into things that require a lot more intention and deliberate effort expended instead of just being incidental.
I’ll give an example. I was chatting with another dad at school drop off the other day and somehow we got on the topic of a The Green Knight and he mentioned there’s a new translation by a German author. 15-20 years ago I’d have given him my email and asked him to send me the name when he remembers it. Today, I googled it and found it and what may have been an opportunity for us to randomly get to know each other turned into a dry and efficient information gathering exercise. It’s not even that I couldn’t have tried if I wanted to talk more about the subject with him, that’s not my point. My point is that in the past the easiest way for me to learn more about the topic of our conversation would be to find another occasion to continue the conversation. But today there is a much easier and lower friction way to do the same that provides immediate gratification. This has happened everywhere, in numerous human endeavors, and it’s sandblasted away all the points of friction where we actually connected with each other. It’s not the lack of places to hang out, it’s that not hanging out is too easy while making plans and sticking to them remains hard!
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Comment on The hunt for dark breakfast in ~food
NaraVara Link ParentYeah he mentions in the piece that he’s sort of cheating by excluding sliced breads since they don’t go in the stand mixer. If he did I think french toast or bread pudding will end up falling in...Yeah he mentions in the piece that he’s sort of cheating by excluding sliced breads since they don’t go in the stand mixer. If he did I think french toast or bread pudding will end up falling in that center quadrant.
But even with that limitation I think you start to approach pudding territory with those proportions, which we don’t really do here in the States but I think a Brit would recognize Yorkshire pudding there, or even a Southern spoon bread if we’re willing to grant cornmeal as “flour.”
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Comment on The hunt for dark breakfast in ~food
NaraVara LinkJoin the descent into madness.Join the descent into madness.
I was days into my research before I finally found a clue. In an obscure document on the website of the International House of Pancakes Corporation there was a hint that the dark breakfast had been made. IHOP omelettes include pancake batter. While I cannot place IHOP omelettes exactly on the map, by interpolating between pancakes and omelettes, we can bound where they must occur, and confirm that the manifold possibilities do indeed pass through the Dark Breakfast Abyss.
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The hunt for dark breakfast
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That’s kind of funny because growing up one of my least favorite things about writing assignments was having to type them up neatly on my mom’s digital typewriter after I already hand-wrote and proofread my draft.
And that was WAY better than having to do it on the even older mechanical typewriter because I had a delete key and could edit in line without having to commit each keystroke to print.