I went to a small Montessori school on the Rio Grande while I was growing up, and among the other "new age"-y things going on at the school, we would spend half a day every week in permaculture class. We spent that class doing things like gardening, constructing adobe stuff like ovens and a gathering space shaped like a turtle (the head formed a pizza oven too - it was really cool), collecting eggs from a chicken coop, recycling fibers and scrap paper into (very brittle) paper, and making tea out of the herbs we grew - mint, chamomile, lavender, etc.
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!
This reminds me of the lessons from the book "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn. One of the main characters is teaching another lessons throughout the book using a Montessori approach. One of the big lessons is to only take what you need, and to appreciate these things we take for granted. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already.
I was just talking to a friend about the fatal flaw in Marxian analysis of capitalism Both the analysis and the proposed solution focused on owning the means of production, but none of it says anything about the well-being of the humans, the community, and the eco-system involved.
In contrast, look at say, how the Hopi views things. There is a faction among the Hopi that never signed anything with the US government. Their view is that ownership is granted to those that take care of it. It isn’t about the means of production, but rather, your ability to participate in the land’s wel-being. A further implication is that, within this world view, you cannot accumulate capital beyond your personal ability to take care of it. Instead of gaining property rights, and having social expectations for taking care of it, you don’t get those rights until you demonstrate ongoing care.
It goes even further. Can you own a person because you “take care” of that person? If you reject that idea, what about any living being? Do you really own the trees, the birds, the bees? Instead, you view this as being in relation within a community that take care of the land. You obtain an yield (one of the permaculture design principles), but you don’t exclusively do so. Other living beings within the land can also obtain a yield, whether it is also the food, water or habitat.
Apparently forest cover is ~30%. Note that "forest" here uses the wood industry's definition of forest (tree plantation), not the ecological one.
Also, it blows my mind every day how thorough and complete our estrangement with nature has become... Barely anyone seems to notice or be disturbed by the loss of natural heritage in this country.
I grew up in northeastern America and have gotten used to it's wilderness. After moving to Berlin, I was shocked to discover that much of what looked like "forests" on the maps of Eastern Germany are actually just grids of identical coniferous trees in a barely-alive landscape, criss-crossed by dirt roads.
Conversely, it never ceases to amuse and sadden me how astounded Germans are by my stories of wilderness just a few hours drive from NYC.
If you ever get lost in here in The Netherlands, just walk straight for 30 minutes and you'll hit a probably decent, paved road. Or stand still and wait for the sounds of a car.
I might me exaggerating for some exceptional places, but not much.
Another fun fact: there is actually no true wilderness in Europe - literally the entire biome has been demonstrated to have been selectively cultivated by humans for 10's of thousands of years.
There are cultivated areas of wilderness in North and South America. But the way it is cultivated is more like the modern “perennial food forest”, and not “scientific forestry” you see in Europe.
I thought about working with 4-H to create a permaculture track.
I live in the city. I have been applying permaculture design principles to my back and front yard. I am exposing my kids to all of this, and it is not too late for you if that is what you want to do.
You have to do things a bit differently in the city, but you absolutely can apply the 12 design principles and 3 ethical principles.
Haha, I have to assume so, but honestly I didn't spend much time in the chicken coop because I thought it smelled bad. I'm not sure where the eggs went, also. And yea, on reflection, it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school? I remember a friend getting pecked by a chicken once. This was a pretty agg-y area in New Mexico and most everyone I grew up with had at least some animals on their land, so it wasn't unusual.
But what about the allergens? The risk of salmonella? Have you seen the damage an angy chicken can do with those claws? I've heard that Avian Influenza is on the rise again. Can't they just learn about chickens on their EduTablets?
...is what I imagine I'd hear at the Parent/Teacher conferences leading up to the average public school's field trip to a local farm.
That kind of fear is not what I want to impart my children. Life becomes so small and dark when living life like that. But I get that I’m not the average parent. We already have chickens in the backyard.
Hen pecking don’t really hurt. They are more likely to run away from you. If you don’t pet them on their head, they won’t take it as establishing pecking order. Their claws only come out when they are raising chicks — as any mother caring for her young will do.
It’s the roosters you have to watch for, and you don’t need them in a flock. Dealing with roosters is trainable — using a mop is unreasonably effective with communicating with roosters because they think it is a giant rooster.
Disease is something you take care of by keeping the coop clean, and letting the chickens forage — pasture raising them.
But for my children, I think it is very important for them to know where food really comes from, and it’s not the grocery store.
We here at EduTablets Technologies haves accounted for these issues through our new VR enhanced farm edusperiences. Children can hold a chicken in their arms without risk of disease or injury through our novel child sized full body immersion suits. Through eye tracking, heart rate monitors, and continuous EEG scans, we can constantly update our individualized AI models that construct unique chicken experiences for each child while maximizing their learning potential.
Well on a serious note, there was a story that made the rounds recently about a study that showed children in families with pets had reduced allergies/sensitivities to allergens.
> it probably wasn't, like, above-board to have kids working with live animals in school.
These days there are American children as young as 13 washing down slaughterhouses on school nights and sleepwalking to school. In a nation where child labor of this kind is completely legal, I think it’s fair to say that a few chickens at school is just fine.
Your comment was correctly downvoted and flagged because it broke the site guidelines badly—several of them.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? We've had to ask you this many times. If you keep it up we'll have to ban you. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Ah, they didn't have us apologize to plants - only to thank 'em. It wasn't a guilty thing we did, but it was a lesson to appreciate that they were growing and that we could enjoy them.
I'm surprised you didn't stop at the idea that it also implies plants have hearing and can understand language and process some kind of human meaning - I feel like those are more absurd than the idea than a plant feels. (More organisms on this planet demonstrate something like feelings than the capacity to verbally communicate.) But yes, I project the idea the plants have something like human feelings, and that's definitely a product of that kind of education reverberating through my life. It was a kind of spiritual lesson, and the school incorporated other spiritual elements like performing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address during some school assemblies and camping trips. I'm not confused about those as an adult.
I also know that a plant's experience on this planet is alien to mine, and it's silly to apply human meaning to what I think it's going through. I think our brains have enough space to hold these ideas up there though and reflect on them, and I think children deserve more than a functionalist education. I don't think I'm messed up as a result of that education, and I'm living a happy life - fair to say I had a heck of a time catching up on math and language in middle school though!
If we are viewing this spiritually, then yes, plants have consciousness, though not necessarily human consciousness.
There are shamanic practices involving plant teachers and interacting with the spirit of the plant. There are these Tantric ideas of plant medicine and the afflictions they heal, arising together.
Or that, our bodies are optimized for walking, yet we carry the means as climbers when our ancestors lived and learned from the standing people. (our lats are both the largest upper body muscle and the most underused one in day-to-day modern life). There is meaning and significance in climbing and walking. I can go on.
I love both your comments and am saving them as references to be used in a book or essays that I am working on that discusses the lack of non-selfist values in modern culture and how this is far more consequential than whether we choose a socialist or capitalist laws and economic system.
Also, if you've never read Ursula K LeGuin, you should give one of her sci-fi books a go. In Left Hand of Darkness a non-human character feels a deep sadness when they abandon a sleigh that has carried them across a frozen polar region, saving their lives. The human doesn't understand this, as the sleigh is just an inanimate object, a tool, and they had known all along they'd have to abandon it once it served its purpose.
I think that modernity had shifted the mainstream view away from that, but it need not that way. When I look at Christopher Alexander’s life’s work and what the various people tried to do during the Renaissance, you can still be in relation to all around you. Alexander’s talks on centers and unfolding brings you to designing in this way.
I appreciate that! I'll have to keep an eye out for it. I definitely agree with that perspective - I don't think it matters much how we organize the bits and pieces of the system if we don't have a shared value for life beyond our own. I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values. But I'm also not sure if it's tractable or "good" for a worldwide population to develop shared values - I think "valuing life" is something we should all practice, but who's to say how that actually renders out in the minds of 7bn people? Tricky stuff, and I have no answers haha. I was a CS major, and I'm sure freshmen philosophy majors could do circles around me on this.
Hoo - I remember that scene and the mix of feelings it brought up for me. It reminded me of an attachment to physical objects that I attribute to watching Toy Story growing up. I love the way she wrote, and I still have a long list of her books to dive into. Another scene that left its mark on me is from The Dispossessed when Shevek shares a moment with the pet otter at a dinner party:
The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. "Ammar," Shevek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being – "brother."
From Shevek's perspective, he had never seen or known this kind of creature to exist, and he was staring at something alien to him and still finding a connection. I think in a way thanking the herbs was a lesson in looking across the "gulf of being", though the herbs didn't return the attention with a gold, intelligent gaze. Maybe it was something more like what Werner Herzog sees in chickens haha [1]. To me, when he calls a chicken's gaze "stupid", I don't think he's saying that in a negative sense but instead in a way that's recognizing their being as it is in human terms. The connotation that we put into the word "stupid" is what makes his perspective sound like a harsh judgement, but I think he's just being "brutally honest".
I can't help but mention the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief as well [2]! Definitely a song (and album) to get lost in:
From way up there it looks so small
From way down here it looks so small
One peculiar organism aren't we all together?
Everybody steps on ants
Everybody eats the plants
...
When I took another look
The past was not a history book
That was just some linear perception
...
When I say celestial
I mean extra-terrestrial
I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart
...
Kiss your body up and down other than your elbows
'Cause as for your elbows, they're on their own
Wandering like a rolling stone
Rubbing up against the edges of experience
I think the motif underlying each of these that matters to me is embracing "radical alterity" or "the other". "Accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart" and recognizing the "edges of [your] experience" and where you can and can't know yourself. Adrienne Lenker frequently talks about how LeGuin is one of her favorite authors, and I think this song is definitely in conversation with LeGuin. There's so much in there! The whole album is worth a listen (and several more) if you haven't heard it already.
> I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values.
Agreed, but I think that will fall out naturally from having a non-selfist value system, which would dispense with the current world's elevation of selfishness from vice to virtue. As long as we continue to worship at the alter of selfishness, no alternative to capitalism is going to do much better. To your point about some monolithic value system: we wouldn't want that. Just as for physical evolution diversity of the values "gene pool" is healthy. But the selfish gene (intentional play off Dawkins' idea) needs to become recessive at most. It's both fine and healthy if people disagree with how to create a better community and how to share the world empathetically and morally as long as we share the same intention: sharing the world empathetically and morally. Selfism by definition is immoral as morality by definition by my reckoning is all about choosing the common/greater good over one's personal gain. Moral conscience is that voice that tells you "Yeah, I know you want that so much, but you have to resist because it hurts other people."
I haven't read the The Dispossessed yet. I'll move it up my list. I was introduced to LeGuin in a class at Berkeley titled Women in Religion offered by the Berkeley School of Theology / Graduate Theological Union (separate from UC Berkeley but they have a collaborative relationship, and students of each can take classes in the other) and taught by a feminist theologian woman... I'm an atheist leaning agnostic and it was one of my favorite classes I ever took at Berkeley.
I never heard of Big Thief and will give their music a listen, definitely!
It might be years before my writing sees the light of day, but if you would be so kind, shoot me an email so we can keep in touch. I'll send you one as well, given all the spam filters that hinder such first time comms.
I remember a sci-fi book where the main character asked the robot to do something, and the robot did, and the character thanked it. And someone said "why did you thank it? It has no feelings and can't understand it." The reply was something along the lines of "the thanks comes from me, and if I stop doing it for robots I'll stop doing it for people, too, eventually."
> One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one
And the response:
> It's messed up for a school to get children to verbally apologize to plants. It implies that plants have feelings.
The followup to that is about the confusion/"these are the same things" for thanking something being the same as apologizing for that same thing - that gratitude is the same as remorse.
---
The difference is:
> Thank you for the leaf that I will use for tea
vs
> I'm sorry that I'm picking your leaf for my own enjoyment
The first example here is thanking (a plant) and the second example is apologizing for taking action implying feeling sorry for the harm caused to the plant.
Thea person you are responding to understood that; what they didn’t understand was what the person they were responding to had come to understand about part of the population from the person they were responding to conflating thanking with understanding.
And, I think that was the hardest to understand thing I’ve ever said.
And if I may expand on this, if someone conflates thanking and apologizing and/or associates both with weakness, it has profound implications for how that person will behave within a society. It may (at least partly) explain why there is so little "instinctive" kindness towards other people, especially when these people are not part of your social circle or they are "abstract" (i.e. when they are featured in the media).
The original post only talked about thanking the plants. The reply only talks about apologizing to the plants. Clearly the reply thinks that's the same thing here.
Why not be grateful regardless of whether things have feelings?
The practice of gratitude is a good one, internally and externally, for the living and the inert. We don’t have to imagine the plants have souls; it’s the simple act of acknowledgment and appreciation that instills a sense of value and importance upon the things that keep us alive.
They don't learn to apologise to the plants, they just learn to be grateful for what they can take for "free". That probably doesn't fit into your tiny narrative of "green activists" being all shamans who believe plants have feelings, so you extrapolate, project and make a fool of yourself.
Its not about teaching kids that plants have feelings.
Its about teaching kids that they have feelings. Saying thank-you to a plant may not benefit the plant much, but it does improve the mood and tone of the individual saying it.
Being thankful for things actually helps with mental health. If you can't be thankful, even to the trivial little life forms that provide you with food and comfort, you've got a thankfulness imbalance that no amount of chemical consumption is going to help you fix...
They didn't apologize, they expressed gratitude (that's what "thank you" means). Although the usage here was debatable, as the plant didn't have any say in its leaves being cropped, and of course it only makes sense to thank for a deliberate act. So, in a way, these children were taught inconsistent logic.
Personally, I don't see anything inconsistent about being grateful for something that wasn't a deliberate act. I can see at least two reasons for doing so:
Part of expressing gratitude is for the benefit of the person expressing gratitude rather than for the person being thanked.
Even if it wasn't a deliberate act, the person being thanked may appreciate knowing that they benefited someone. Although, this wouldn't apply to plants which aren't sentient.
It is only insofar inconsistent as most spiritual/social norms are. This seems to me to be very similar to the gratefulness expressed i.e. by Christians and other religious people towards a higher power (which often explicitly is "incomprehensible" and thus probably not really addressable with human comprehensions of gratefulness).
Oho! So excited about this. I’ve used a hybrid of Radix UI and React Aria on previous projects. Radix had a much nicer DX out of the box with pre-wired components, but my team was always apprehensive about the long-term support for Radix post-acquisition. Really excited to see React Aria adopting a similar component-based interface.
Couple questions/feedbacks if you’re still in the comments, Devon!
1. Radix implements an asChild prop to help merge the library components down into other components that might already have their own styling or behaviors. Did y’all consider supporting this sort of polymorphic approach? Or is there another way to merge components? The main spots where I’ve used it are buttons and dropdown triggers, so it might not be broadly applicable.
2. Is it easier to extend from the React Aria types with this interface now? My previous implementations with React Aria - I’ve always been a little confused about which inputs to the hooks are useful to include in the component’s props interface and how to correctly annotate them, whether that’s recreating the types or extending from the numerous options within the react-aria package. Radix at least has some suggestions for conventions, and I feel a bit more confident following them.
3. More on the feedback side - React Aria has typically implemented similar-but-different props for the common HTML form control attributes like “disabled” and “onChange” as “isDisabled” and “onValueChange” - I really appreciate these at one level for the internal consistency throughout the library, but I’ve found these choices make it a bit more annoying to integrate React Aria with other third-party libraries meant to “just work” with the regular attributes. E.g. spreading Formik form props for a field into a form control, but having to re-map the onChange prop to onValueChange. Definitely trade offs in either direction, but I’m curious how y’all made the choice and if there are some remediations y’all have found along the way?
Thanks so much for your (and the team’s) work on this! And on Parcel and the million other projects you’re building.
1. We decided to start simple for the first release but it’s definitely possible to add something like asChild if the need arises. There are some tradeoffs to this though, eg it’s easier to mess up the DOM structure required for accessibility. There are some other approaches we’ll be documenting for this as well.
2. TS should be easier now. All the docs examples are now written in TS so you can see where the interfaces are imported from.
3. Yeah prop naming is a trade off. When we started, we decided to make all of the components follow a consistent naming convention. The DOM is quite limited in its functionality (eg you can only submit strings and not more complex objects) and we knew we’d need quite a bit more capability so we decided not to follow it in some areas. But we know integrating with form libraries is a pain point and we might have some documentation or helpers for that in the future.
1. Understood! Yes, I agree about messing up the DOM, and I'm sure you've seen some egregious cases haha. asChild definitely enables some less deliberate choices when composing bits and pieces together and assumes some good habits around event handlers - probably not an approach that scales well for growing teams, but definitely convenient for hacking on things. Can I bum you for a link or some search terms for the "other approaches"? I'm curious about them.
2. You're spoiling us. Thank you. Re-visiting the hooks docs, I think I was just meant to use the `Aria...Props` interfaces the whole time haha. I have a feeling I overcomplicated some things in that codebase.
3. "you can only submit strings and not more complex objects" - I think this is the crux of the tradeoff. Frankly, the only thing I use Formik for when I bring it in is binding Zod schemas to form state to get validation messages in a pinch. If React Aria had a first-class schema-driven Form component or similar, I'd be a satisfied "customer".
Had another random question overnight -
4. Have y'all considered implementing anything in the realm of the "CSS Spatial Navigation" proposal? The conversation around it looks like it has gone quiet in the past few years, but I think there's definitely an opportunity for non-grid-y 2D navigation in web UIs.
I had a similar pleasant experience with a Wooting 60HE keyboard I purchased recently. Updated my keyboard’s firmware and settings right in Chrome! So much nicer than downloading icky gaming peripheral software. I’ve been told a lot of that stuff is borderline spyware.
Excited to try it out with some ESPHome projects too now.
Hey, I spent some spare time noodling on a specialized tool for fretboard flashcards a few months back. I haven’t built decks for learning modes yet, but I’d be curious to hear what sort of format you’d find useful and I’m happy to give it a whirl. You can check it out at https://awhitty.me/fretcards/
I’d be really happy to hear any other feedback as well. So far I’ve implemented a crude per-session spaced repetition algorithm, but I’ve had a mind to build more decks, offline support, local-first spaced repetition, and some extra doodads.
I agree with other commenters - playing is the best way to get this stuff truly dialed in. Have fun with it, too! Drilling scales saps energy, imo. Best to eat a balanced diet.
I 100% agree, and I've only visited NYC a couple times.
Each time I visit, I try to eat at least one slice of pizza and one bagel every day. The thing that blows me away is how generally good they are, no matter where I buy them. Of course I'll look at reviews, but I won't walk more than 5 blocks to get a slice. Never been disappointed.
Same thing visiting Paris - you can hunt for the BEST croissant, but the remarkable thing is that nearly everywhere you shop, you'll find a really, really good one. I live near Arsicault in SF, and though they might make the BEST croissant in the US (and I will probably live a shorter life due to the number of them I put in my body every week), I'd trade that for a really good croissant on every corner.
I think it reflects having shared cultural values around the food and a knowledge in the community of what makes the food great both in terms of inputs and outputs, and I hope we never stop valuing good pizza!!
One thing I've heard said about French food generally in the past is that there's an entire supply chain in France around French food in particular so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.
You can rinse and repeat in many places for various items. For example, when I was last in Germany, you'd get good sandwiches with good bread at any random train station in a system of any size. Try that in the US.
> so you really tend not to get bad French staples at very many places--even if it's a random touristy place.
French here! I'm usually not that picky with croissants, but much more with other patisseries, such as eclairs. It's a bit harder to find good patisseries, and the quality doesn't always correlate with the price. Even in what looks like legit "patisseries artisanales", you can find eclairs which are basically frozen industrial stuff and sell for 3.50+ euros, which I think is a scam.
That being said, yes, I think you can normally find decent bread, croissants and patisseries (and cheese) pretty much everywhere in France.
On a side note, I lived in London and I noticed that Sainsbury made good bread and croissants, for much cheaper than the fancy "French" bakeries.
Maybe I'm wrong but I had the impression that in France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships whereas in America for example, pastry shops give a baker a recipe to follow and that's pretty much it (for the ones that bake in-house I mean)
It varies. Your neighborhood bakery/pastry shop may have a baker that learned from their parent(s). Or it could be a higher-end shop with a trained patisserie chef. Or it could be a 'front' bakery that receives their daily shipment from a regional factory that makes them by hand or by machine.
> France pastry shops had legit pastry chefs who had to go through apprenticeships
It depends. Nowadays it's not always the case. To reduce costs, apparently quite a lot of shops sell industrial pastries. For bread, there's a label apparent on the shop that certifies whether the bread is made in house ("artisan boulanger"), but it's not true for pastries. It's hard to say exactly what is made in-house without asking.
For simpler items like croissants, IMO the recipe and following directions is all that matters.
I've made a decent amount of semi complex desserts from recipe authors I trust and they turned out great.
Sure, there are some minor physical skills you learn and knowledge you gain, but for baking I find that as long as you follow good recipes precisely you can get great results.
This does fall apart when you start talking about decorating desserts as that is definitely more art/skill than science.
In the 80s some bright spark realised that the smell of baking bread makes people hungry and buy more food, so now most large-enough UK supermarkets bake in-store.
Not to mention they have typically been making the regional food for centuries, if not millennia. The selection can be more limited in the EU, but the quality is incredible, and at a very low price point compared to US.
You can get cheese and wine made in the US ~ as good as French, but it’s 5x as expensive.
I don’t know about the cheese but I disagree with you about the wine. For example Californian wine is excellent, and you get a much higher quality for the money than with French wine for anything below $150. French wine is in much higher demand so all the lowest quality is sold too, instead of being made vinegar or discarded, becoming the entry level. French wine is subjected to strict rules that don’t allow them correct them like the Californian do, like adding a bit of water here or there… etc. In places where you have to import both the quality difference for the money is evident, within the us is abysmal
California wine can be excellent but is overpriced, and I am a native Californian raised on California wine. French wine has impressively consistent quality at low price points. You can’t easily buy good cheap French wine in California I’ve discovered, but you can in other parts of the country. There are certain types of wine that California does better, but France does much better for the price generally. This was not the case a few decades ago, but global competition crushed the price of French wine and opened the global wine trade. France has so many regions that produce excellent wine without the brand premium of Bordeaux, Burgundy, et al.
Because I no longer live in California, there is excellent distribution of French wine where I live. Now I can buy myriad discerning $15 bottles of French wine that frankly are much better than what you can typically buy from California for the same price point in the US. California wines are overpriced for the quality. I’d prefer that were not the case but that’s the reality in my experience.
At any price point, French wine is lower risk than California wine. Their reputation for wine is deserved.
You need to sample the price/quality in France, not on goods exported elsewhere - that’s the key point of this observation. French products are often expensive abroad, but dirt-cheap locally.
The top-quartile 5-10 EUR bottle of wine at the hypermarche is way better than anything in the <$20 price range made in the US. A $15 lump of cheese would be a few EUR in France at quality-parity.
Just want to say you took the words out of my mouth on this one. I was given the exact same advice re: Parisian croissants, and I feel exactly the same way about Arsicault in SF. I’d I’ve never had a better one in the US, let alone SF.
Note to others: Arsicault is worth the visit if you’re in SF! Also don’t be a sucker and wait in line for an hour on a Saturday morning. Just go at like 11am on a Tuesday and walk right in.
I've spent a lot of time in Paris and NYC but have found it very hard to find a randomly good croissant; less so a randomly good slice. I've tried many of the foodie favorites for both and been largely unimpressed. There have a few truly excellent. Maybe they ruined me for others.
Finding a decent croissant is fairly easy in Paris, but if you've ever tasted an actually good croissant, buttery but not sickening, airy but not empty, crispy but not dry, you know how incredibly difficult to find those are.
Not Boston’s but I’ve had a ton of “you have to try this one bagel shop in town, it’s just like New York!”
Generally speaking they’ve been decent enough bagels, but the shops don’t have the turnover to be able to ask “what’s hot?” and get a reasonable answer.
Also, the appetizing game tends to be pretty weak. Occasionally a shop will fly in Acme, which is admittedly impressive, but it tends to only be nova. I’m hard pressed to find herring in cream sauce, whitefish salad, or belly lox outside of the tristate area.
It's basically a Jewish deli which I'm happy to see is apparently open for dinner again. (Closed for dinner pre-COVID.) Yes, very good in Kendall in Cambridge though they also apparently have a couple of other locations now.
There are a number of foods that are supposedly only being amazing within a certain geographic location, but the best ones I've had were far outside if that location.
The best shrimp poboy I had was in Tampa; nothing I could find in New Orleans even came close. There was a New York style pizza place in Shanghai which people that went back to America would talk about missing (better than any pizza I've had in NYC). An Italian person I knew visited D.C. and when they got back to Rome they kept talking about how much they missed the pizza place in Washington.
For bagels, best I've ever had is probably a split between New Jersey (not _far_ from NYC) and Montreal.
Best pizza I’ve ever had. Franks in New Haven is close, but just not that crazy about thin crust.
(Ironically, some of the worst “real” pizza I’ve had was at the Atlanta restaurant owned by someone whose “How to make real pizza” page gets posted here every year or two. Yea, it had a nice char but everything about it was just bland bland bland)
> There was a New York style pizza place in Shanghai which people that went back to America would talk about missing (better than any pizza I've had in NYC).
I really like croissants but haven't ever been to Paris. My last trip abroad was to Portugal and it was crazy how some sandwich shop at the train station had croissants that tasted better than any specialty bakeshop I've ever been to in the US.
It's not about quality when they're reducing sauce to save money, as stated in the article. The slices may still be better than in any other state, but the focus has shifted from quality to price.
Doppio Zero on Hayes by Davis Symphony was quite good, although a bit fancier. Amici's East Coast Pizzeria on Lombard in Marina was also very tasty. Also, it's not as fun, but Mountain Mikes is also great, inexpensive pizza, like in your Papa Johns range but better overall.
Looks like other commenters identified it as Blood Music, but this sounded a bit like “Steve Fever” by Greg Egan [0] to me. Similar themes! Great gateway drug to other Egan stories.
Saman worked on many things at Mapbox, most notably to me is the interface for Studio [0], which continues to be an impressive expression of a really advanced set of features for map design. He also explicitly mentioned a stint as an engineering manager at the company in the post- maybe you didn’t catch that? Or maybe you don’t consider management to be doing “actual work”? If you think the latter, maybe consider organizing at your own workplace?
You might live in California and have certainly seen the drought, but the lake didn't go dry due to drought.
The lake was fed by diverting water from nearby San Francisquito Creek. The university chose to stop filling the lake for recreational use in 2001 to protect the endangered California tiger salamander as the article notes. The lake was still sometimes artificially filled to support salamander breeding, but it was not maintained to a level suitable for (most forms of) recreation (though I still saw members of KA attempt to take a raft out on 1-2ft of water during a rainy week -- I think their raft was more full of beer than the lake was of water, though my memory is hazy).
The university has since removed the dam used to divert water to Lake Lag as part of a process of habitat restoration upstream. I'm not sure how that will affect the population of salamanders that depended on that water in Lake Lag, but I believe they also breed upstream and will have more sustainable natural habitat. Also, water from Searsville Dam just upstream from this project is used to irrigate Stanford's golf course, and that is cited as a reason not to remove that dam (the other reason is that removing it would change habitats that formed from the lake it created).
The school has sometimes turned off its campus fountains during periods of drought. They shut the fountains down for 2 years while I was there. During that same time I didn't see them shut off water to the golf courses though, and that consumes substantially more water than the fountains. They did restore water in the fountains for the weeks leading up to our graduation, and I can recommend grabbing a pitcher of beer or two from the CoHo and walking it straight down to the fountain outside the bookstore for a soak, if the school still allows it.
To summarize, if we are to infer Stanford's priorities based on how it has approached the complex dynamics around Lake Lag and its (former) tributary, I believe that would look like: golf course > endangered salamander > students.
Folks who write JavaScript today might not remember a time when it was normal to write JS and ship the same files verbatim to end users. We’ve seen a Cambrian explosion of new syntax, new tools, and new ways to build applications using JavaScript in the last decade. Many of those features are now built into modern browsers, but static typing is one of the last Big New Ideas that hasn’t made it into mainline JavaScript.
We’re conditioned to expect there will be a compilation step between our source code and the code that runs in a browser. That forces many decisions about how we structure our projects and the kinds of tools we can use to deliver the software we write. Minimizing or eliminating the reasons why folks might need that build-the-code step between the code they write and the code their users run opens up doors and new ways of writing and delivering software, and that’s exciting!
Think, for instance, what would it take to get something like the TypeScript type checker in Chrome’s devtools? A first step would be to adopt the type annotation syntax.
I dunno I think there is a lot of historical revisionism happening in regards to how joyous coding in JavaScript used to be. I've been doing web-dev since the early 2000's, JavaScript is way more usable today than it's ever been in the past.
Right, I agree it’s much nicer to write JavaScript now than ever before. Merely pointing out that it’s not meant to be a compiled language. As a community we continue to expect a build step to exist when it really doesn’t have to for a broad class of projects. Transpilers were never the end-goal.
It’s true that there are some optimizations done in the build step that benefit end users, and folks will probably (correctly) continue to choose to minify, tree shake, bundle + bundle split, eliminate dead code, etc. for serious applications.
But to be able to write a modern web app without having to npm install a single module would be stellar! And it’s becoming more and more possible. How do you teach someone how to write a JS project in 2022? I imagine it starts with, “Well, first you’ll need to install node and npm - that’s gonna run JavaScript on your computer but don’t mind that much for now. Now we’ll install some dependencies required to build your code…” and so on. It takes a while and many conceptual hurdles to get to the part where someone can run the code they wrote in a browser.
even if we add types to js... minification, dead code elimination, and even precomputing or other performance optimizations will still require a compiler.
not sure what typechecking inside chrome would add....
maybe it could be used for faster js execution like how asm.js works
Also bought a Matrix Portal and have had a lot of fun with it! Dabbled in writing a raytracer for it, but I don’t know enough about ARM nor C++ to optimize it for decent frame rates. Now the thing runs a newton’s cradle simulator using Box2D, and that’s been a fun desk toy.
Neat. I'd love to see what that looks like (raytracer or cradle). Found an old Hack a Day from 2014 (https://hackaday.com/2014/11/25/ray-tracing-on-an-arduino/) where someone is raytracing on a 16Mhz micro. Should be faster on the 120Mhz portal, but it took almost 3 days :P
One of the most profound memories I have from that school is of Ms. Susan teaching us to say "thank you" to the plants when we took a few of their leaves for the tea. We'd look at the plant, find some good leaves, pluck 'em off, and then say "thank you" and move to the next one. It was kind of an intimate moment to share with a mint plant haha. It was probably also very cute for the teachers to watch a flock of kids roam around a garden and stare intently at some herbs for an hour.
It was the kind of thing that really sinks in when you're a kid. I didn't know it wasn't a "normal" kind of education, and I just figured, "we take our time and say thank you to the plants when take something from them" was a general rule of life that the adults follow too. I really cherish those memories now! Sometimes I thought they were boring af at the time - learning about compositing toilets isn't really priority #1 for a 9 year-old - but I hope other kids growing up are taught a similar connection to nature today. We've gotta say thank you to the plants!