This line hits really close to home. :-/

Our software engineer mindset tends to immediately put us in "criticize" mode and with social media comment threads, there's a tendency where a single correct critical observation leads people to discard an entire article.

But that's dumb. We should read critically, of course, but we should apply that in a finer-grained way so that we ignore the parts of an article that are wrong and try to learn from the parts that aren't.

There is often a lot of baby in that bathwater we are so quick to discard.

Obviously, it's relevant if the language itself forces the user to worry about some pointless minutia. The problem is that the language created that relevance, when it is otherwise irrelevant to the problem the user is trying to solve.

Forward declarations are relevant in C because the program won't compile without them. But they aren't relevant in any meaningful way to any domain a user might be writing C programs for.

I suspect that it's largely just that brand reputation tends to be very sticky in the minds of people.

It's the same reason that Pyrex, Harley-Davidson, and Dyson are still high reputation brands even though the product they make today is tragically worse than what gave them their initial reputation.

(I tend to think of private equity as often existing as an arbitrage system to take advantage of the fact that they can buy a loved brand, slash the quality and increase the profit, and continue to sell at its original price based on that brand stickiness for a while until people eventually wise up.)

If you're using a decade old phone to sign up for a utility, you've got bigger problems in your life and no self-respecting person should be adding to them.

This is an excellent checklist for doing something novel, but it doesn't provide any guidance towards doing something valuable that's original.

I don't think anyone has tried to build an ocean-going floating platform for raising wolverines for the pet trade, and that certainly checks everything on the checklist. Likewise composing a seven-part symphonic cycle written for bagpipe, slide whistle, and djembe with aleatoric and audience-participation components. Or inventing a way to knit edible garments out of extremely gluten-rich pasta. Training ravens to play Roblox games.

But are those worthwhile projects? I suppose there's only one way to find out.

I think people are entitled to decide the contours and priorities of their own dreams. If snowboarding was the author's main goal in life and "snowboarding" for him was a loosely-defined enough dream to still feel satisfied by whatever accommodations his knees forced upon him, then, yes, he could probably still reach it. But not all dreams are created equal and we don't have infinite agency. We have to pick our battles and the author may feel that while this is a dream, it's not an important enough one to go through all of the risks or other accommodations needed to get there.

Or perhaps his dream is to snowboard in a certain way, and have a certain kind of experience that simply won't work with his knees the way they are. I saw a video once of a guy carrying his brother who had cerebral palsy through a race. It had always been the brother's dream to race and since his disability prevented it, that was how they accomplished it. I am absolutely thrilled that both brothers were able to have an experience that feels so meaningful to them.

But, for me, if my dream were to run a race, being carried wouldn't feel like accomplishing that dream. Maybe another dream, equally worthwhile. But if it's not my feet pounding the pavement, that's not my dream. Perhaps the author's dream is similarly inflexible.

Either way, after someone writes an article about learning how to accept the limitations that life places on it, it seems rude to me to just tell him he didn't want it bad enough.

The injury basically tried to twist my foot off, a "tri-malleolar fracture with dislocation". Even after doctors reduced the dislocation and used plates to put the broken bones back together, the cartilage suffered too much damage and just withered away to nothing.

Arthritis is a miserable, debilitating disease. My understanding is that usually once the cartilage reaches a certain level of loss, there is a positive feedback loop where the remaining cartilage is under too much pressure to regenerate and it continues to degrade. I hope yours gets better or at least maintains.

In my case, replacement or fusion were the only options and I went with replacement (since fusion tends to lead to more arthritis elsewhere in the foot). Replacement looks like it will give me back almost all of the activities I used to be able to do, including most sports, except running.

Good luck. Taking care of a body is hard.

"Table 1 documents that treated counties (those with >90% AT&T 3G coverage) are substantially more urban, White, Republican-leaning, and affluent than control counties. To address this imbalance, we apply the entropy-balancing reweighting of Hainmueller (2012), which solves for the entropy-minimizing set of control-county weights that equalize the treated and reweighted-control means of a specified set of covariates."

Two years ago, I slipped in a puddle on my bike and wrecked my ankle. There were many complications. Four surgeries later and I now have two pieces of titantium and a little slip of ultra-high molecular weight polyethelene (very strong plastic) where my ankle joint used to be.

I can never run again. Technically, at some point when I'm recovered enough from my last surgery, it should be possible. My surgeon said, "if you need to catch a flight or dodge traffic, sure". But I can't ever go out and run miles. It will just wear out the implant too quickly. The plastic can literally crack.

When I was recovering from surgery #3, my physical therapist told me to start walking regularly and keep track of distance. The first time I did, I opened Strava. All of my old runs popped up. I realized with a shock that I could scroll down and see not just the longest run I ever did, but the longest I ever will do.

I have dreams sometimes where I'm running, gliding across the ground effortlessly and painlessly. Usually, at some point I remember, "wait, you're not able to run anymore, you must be dreaming", and that tends to wake me up.

When I drive around the city, sometimes I pass places that used to be on my regular running routes. I remember what it felt like in my body to pound my way down that sidewalk, over that bridge. At first, these moments felt like a stab in my heart. Like a little part of my soul was being ripped out. Over time, that sharp stab faded to an ache, and then something more bittersweet. I lament that running is no longer part of my future, but I am at least grateful that I did run for a while. That chapter of my life is in the past, but at least I wrote the chapter.

For a long while, I was afraid I had lost much more than just running. But it seems like maybe the chronic pain is better and I will at least be able to walk and hike and dance without debilitating pain. But the running is over.

Losing a capability like this feels sort of like a fraction of death. Like a slice of my personhood has been amputated. It's made me realize that for most of us, the final chapters of our story aren't going full bore until the last page. Instead, aging means incrementally giving up more and more ability to do things, and accepting that more and more of our story is written and less and less is left to write.

It's still a struggle to accept that with any level of grace. I get where the author is coming from.

When you are young and healthy, it feels like your body has no real hard limits, and doesn't define the boundary of what is and what isn't possible. But at some point, through age or misfortune, you will learn that, no, sometimes your body tells you "no" and you must listen.

I've been in therapy many years, and you wouldn't believe how often it comes up and we discuss it in the context of some problem in my life. So much of life's difficulties hinge on the axis of trying to figure out where we can place our agency and where we should.

I only skimmed the paper, but I presume it is comparing remote workers to non-remote workers who also have gone through the same post-pandemic economic situation.

Having kids was never a primary motivation. Having sex was. Kids were just a hard-to-avoid downstream consequence of that. Once you have the pill, which makes it much easier to have sex without creating kids (and in particular, which allows women to avoid having kids even when they are raped), then the natural result is that there are a lot fewer babies popping out.

Because for the majority of sex acts, babies were never the goal in the first place.

Birth control.

Yes, that was the first sentence of my comment.

> As a brief recap; the atmosphere become a greater and greater insulating blanket as a direct result of human use of fossil fuels was solid science as far back as 1967 [0] and the larger more influential nations of the world accepted that finding and discussed actions in the 1970s [1].

Yes, and I'm well aware of all of that and am firmly on the side of believing in climate change.

And yet, I still go to a grocery store and buy produce that was grown using fertilizer made from petroleum products, shipped across oceans on ships burning fossil fuels, then driven to the store in trucks burning fossil fuels, wrapped in plastic bags.

So even while I am aware of the problems, my own behavior as a tiny cog in the machine furthers the problems of climate change. I can bring reusable bags to the store (I do), drive a fuel-efficient vehicle (I try to), and shop at farmer's markets to reduce transit usage (sometimes), but that only chips away at the problem. My entire lifestyle is predicated on massive use of petroleum products and processes that worsen climate change. I walk on concrete side walks, have electricity in my home, go to a doctor's office that uses plastics pervasively.

I am part of the system that leads to climate change, as are you. Writing and reading this comment is spending electricity that is likely partially fueled by fossil fuels.