This is a great article on why it's so unreasonably slow to modify these archives: https://textslashplain.com/2021/06/02/leaky-abstractions/

But it doesn't seem to explain why it's so much slower at regular extraction.

For example, I run TortoiseGit which has a caching feature which is supposed to make it faster at showing what to commit. Disabling it increases the number of items I can delete per second in my Windows Explorer from about 1000 to about 3000 while making not making TortoiseGit operations meaningfully slower (that I can tell).

This is a Dev Drive [0] on my machine, it would probably be slower on my C: drive which has full Windows Defender real time file scanning.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/dev-drive/

Before when I used a granny knot, shoelaces were a regular nuisance for me, but since switching to a reef knot over a decade ago they have not been at all, and I have never had to buy other shoelaces either.

It confuses me that you seem to be defending the granny knot which is objectively worse in every way and you come across as wilfully stubborn to your own detriment.

Cleaning my kitchen after a meal may be a chore, but it’s not an intrinsically bad or unpleasant experience most of the time, it’s just good hygiene and afterwards I have the satisfaction of things being clean. Not cleaning the kitchen feels way worse to me as it ultimately leads to other far more unpleasant situations.

Such it is with updating dependencies, it generally needs to be done, so it’s good to do it, but it’s in no way noteworthy, so chore describes it perfectly, to me it signals that: “it’s work that needed to be done, but not for a feature, functionality change or bug fix on this particular code base, so you’re unlikely to see much change”.

It was because I was essentially tying a granny knot instead of a reef knot and anyone who knows anything about knots would realize that of course they would keep coming undone.

And for the record, since learning how to tie the correct knot (over 10 years ago now), I’ve had no problem with laces that have come with any of the following brands of shoes:

- Nike

- New Balance

- Asics

- Converse

- Vans

If it landed up perpendicular, start over (i.e. the part before you make the loops) with doing the opposite of what you did before e.g. right-over-left rather than left-over-right.

For me it was very easy to fix the pre-loop stage, trying to change the loop stage seemed way harder to me as I was already so practiced at it.

It could make their lives so much better, but kind of awkward to broach. Perhaps sholladay‘s advice will work well.

This article's web page actually has the essential note:

> NOTE: If your finished knot comes out crooked (eg. loops pointing heel-to-toe), it's probably because you tie your Starting Knot the opposite way to mine. This will result in an un-balanced knot, which sits crooked and comes undone more easily. See my Granny Knot page for more information.

Back when I still used to browse Imgur, there was a post illustrating how to identify and fix this easy to make mistake. It turns out that I was starting with the lace left-over-right as opposed to right-over-left (or vice-versa, not sure off-hand).

This quite literally changed my life, just a small muscle memory tweak and now my laces easily stay tied the whole day with a regular knot which is also super easy to release as well.

[0]: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/standardknot.htm

Edit:

I see he has a page dedicated to this mistake here: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393890

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Article says key fobs are the same across all their cars and this looks the same as mine for a Sealion 5, there is no hinge for the key you just pull it out.

Likely the article authors just assumed from looking at the scan, if they’d actually tried to remove the key they would have realised their mistake.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48337859

Points: 7

# Comments: 3

The idea is that it funds public broadcasting and productions thereof, but like a lot of SOEs here, there is loads of corruption and inefficiencies, I only use my TV for streaming of content which is not produced locally, so I resent having to pay it each year.

However, it’s apparently a mission to get off it, even if you sell your TV you’re most certainly going to be harassed for years by debt collectors and what not.

Unlike your case though (where I expect the fine is not nothing), it’s only like R250/y (like 13USD) and they’ve smartly (which is surprising for an otherwise largely incompetent org), made it easy to pay. I get an SMS reminder and can have paid it by credit card within 2 minutes. So I’ll probably not bother trying to get off it as it’s so much more effort and a pretty small amount of money and hassle.

I wrote a similar HN comment around this yesterday, but the short version is that we found for our product that the years of investment in our Docs (which were seemingly never good enough) are now paying enormous dividends in that LLMs seem to understand our product really well. This has manifested in the LLM in our product being highly effective and a few additional clients who found us through AI chats. Turns out the problem with our Docs wasn't so much with their content, but rather that people just weren't looking at them much.

Electricity has been essentially uninterrupted since the last load shedding about two years ago. I did get some solar panels and an inverter installed while load shedding was common as I work from home and didn’t want the stress due to lack of power. Another thing I put in our new kitchen is a couple of gas hobs next to the main induction ones, allows us to cook even during power outages. But as I said, no real outages in two years now.

Water is quite reliable, maybe interrupted half a dozen times in a year. I have 2kl of water backup tanks and a booster pump so I don’t generally feel any outage, although not uncommon, I expect that most middle class don’t have backup tanks like this. Regional water infrastructure hasn’t been keeping up with growth, so there is a large issue looming there.

Crime is common, but not so common that most people have been a victim of it. Most (middle class) people have house alarms linked to armed response services. I’m a member of community association which amongst other services they provide from membership fees, they also have a special arrangement with a security company and additional patrol vehicles are dedicated to our suburb.

Most security systems are door sensors and interior passive beams. I did however add outside beams which tends to catch intruders by surprise and gives early warning. I actually had an intruder in my garden last year and the outside beams caught the guy by surprise, he had dashed by the time the armed response got here. Harrowing for sure, but not tragic fortunately. Since then I added some IP cameras and there was a gap in my electric fencing above my garage which is where it seems they got in from, so I also had that remediated.

Our suburb (like many others, but not most) has road closures (gates get closed across most streets on the suburbs border) in effect except during morning and evening peak traffic times, this helps a lot, but criminals are regularly trying their luck in the area.

The intruder aside, and without load shedding, and being vigilant in case of criminals, it’s not that different than my 2 years I spent in Cork in Ireland where there was the occasional violence incidents with chavs and several water outages.

If I was living in a township (inhabited by those living well below a middle class wage) my experience would be quite different, probably lots more crime and I expect water and electricity to be quite spotty.

How will things be 10, 20 or 30 years from now?

My biggest worry right now is the water supply, but it’s more a worry of inconvenience of it being turned off regularly to manage demand. I’m expecting within 5 years they’ll have addressed it. Basically it’s a repeat of the electricity capacity shortage issue of the past, despite people telling government for over a decade they need to increase infrastructure to meet expanding demand, they do nothing until they run out.

Otherwise, I’m optimistic things will improve overall, not get worse. I think our democracy is maturing. The ANC which has managed to stay in power since the first democratic elections in ‘94 has been progressively losing voter share, it seems the masses are finally saying no to their excessive corruption and incompetence.