Adam Vartanian
@flooey.org
Software engineer at Relay. Counterculture-adjacent. Strong opinions, rarely posted. (he)
I feel like the obvious answer is that people who don’t feel that way leave because they don’t want to hang out with jerks. (I certainly avoid anyone who acts that way.)
November 27, 2025 at 8:03 AM
I feel like the obvious answer is that people who don’t feel that way leave because they don’t want to hang out with jerks. (I certainly avoid anyone who acts that way.)
I loved it! I was surprised Hong Kong never came up, since it seems like the realization of the original idea, and I have no idea whether it’s born out its usefulness. But otherwise was great, and I too adore the tunnel at O’Hare.
November 19, 2025 at 8:02 PM
I loved it! I was surprised Hong Kong never came up, since it seems like the realization of the original idea, and I have no idea whether it’s born out its usefulness. But otherwise was great, and I too adore the tunnel at O’Hare.
I’ve never remember an individual’s eye color in my life, so back to square one for me
November 11, 2025 at 7:20 PM
I’ve never remember an individual’s eye color in my life, so back to square one for me
This doesn’t mean they were specifically choosing that. AWS runs the control plane for some of their services solely in us-east-1, so even if all your AWS setup is entirely in the EU, an outage in us-east-1 can cause you problems.
October 23, 2025 at 12:11 PM
This doesn’t mean they were specifically choosing that. AWS runs the control plane for some of their services solely in us-east-1, so even if all your AWS setup is entirely in the EU, an outage in us-east-1 can cause you problems.
That’s pretty common, yeah. You use your dominant hand for the dominant hand part of the task, whether that’s forking or knifing.
September 30, 2025 at 10:49 AM
That’s pretty common, yeah. You use your dominant hand for the dominant hand part of the task, whether that’s forking or knifing.
Of course that means that when talking about taxes, people should just say what they mean: they want to tax the rich. (There’s certainly a problem there that most people consider themselves “normal” — people making less are struggling and people making more are rich — but that’s humans for you.)
September 30, 2025 at 6:40 AM
Of course that means that when talking about taxes, people should just say what they mean: they want to tax the rich. (There’s certainly a problem there that most people consider themselves “normal” — people making less are struggling and people making more are rich — but that’s humans for you.)
I actually disagree, and I think the Brits have a better understanding of this. Social class is a separate axis to income, and they’re correlated but not the same. Class is about prestige, not pay. An elementary school teacher is higher class than a plumber, even if they make half as much.
September 30, 2025 at 6:40 AM
I actually disagree, and I think the Brits have a better understanding of this. Social class is a separate axis to income, and they’re correlated but not the same. Class is about prestige, not pay. An elementary school teacher is higher class than a plumber, even if they make half as much.
That doesn’t mean you’re not hearing a lot of negativity from your play group or content creators or whoever, but I think when you’re saying Magic players have “mostly negative [opinions]” you’re suffering from sampling bias.
September 29, 2025 at 7:06 PM
That doesn’t mean you’re not hearing a lot of negativity from your play group or content creators or whoever, but I think when you’re saying Magic players have “mostly negative [opinions]” you’re suffering from sampling bias.
So, I kind of feel like this is happening to you here. I don’t think Magic players overall are actually unhappy. Certainly the circles I move in aren’t, and the numbers from WotC imply people are signing up to play Magic in droves.
September 29, 2025 at 7:06 PM
So, I kind of feel like this is happening to you here. I don’t think Magic players overall are actually unhappy. Certainly the circles I move in aren’t, and the numbers from WotC imply people are signing up to play Magic in droves.
Palin lives in my neighborhood! He’s an awesome guy, he was a patron of a local primary school until it closed.
September 2, 2025 at 8:18 PM
Palin lives in my neighborhood! He’s an awesome guy, he was a patron of a local primary school until it closed.
And so a big part of the big dreams and fancy tech demos is signaling to investors that you’re going to be one of the winners. You aren’t getting your $50bil if you don’t have a good story why your company will be one of the special ones.
August 22, 2025 at 7:15 PM
And so a big part of the big dreams and fancy tech demos is signaling to investors that you’re going to be one of the winners. You aren’t getting your $50bil if you don’t have a good story why your company will be one of the special ones.
Illustratively, if you imagine 10 companies that each take $50bil in investment, and then 9 fail but one becomes a $300bil company, that doesn’t math out industry-wide, but the investors in that one company are very happy.
August 22, 2025 at 7:15 PM
Illustratively, if you imagine 10 companies that each take $50bil in investment, and then 9 fail but one becomes a $300bil company, that doesn’t math out industry-wide, but the investors in that one company are very happy.
So, I think you’re right in the large but off a bit in the small. This is a classic gold rush where most likely most companies will fail but a few will succeed wildly. Everyone’s gambling that they can pick the winners.
August 22, 2025 at 7:15 PM
So, I think you’re right in the large but off a bit in the small. This is a classic gold rush where most likely most companies will fail but a few will succeed wildly. Everyone’s gambling that they can pick the winners.
I’m neutral on it. I haven’t read the story, so none of these characters mean anything to me, nor do I have any idea which is supposed to be earlier or later. (This isn’t a complaint, just saying that if the second card was a different character instead it would make no difference to me.)
August 20, 2025 at 7:04 PM
I’m neutral on it. I haven’t read the story, so none of these characters mean anything to me, nor do I have any idea which is supposed to be earlier or later. (This isn’t a complaint, just saying that if the second card was a different character instead it would make no difference to me.)
On the plus side, the kids’ school is excellent about this, and very supportive of all parents and caregivers no matter what your particular family structure is like.
August 11, 2025 at 8:53 AM
On the plus side, the kids’ school is excellent about this, and very supportive of all parents and caregivers no matter what your particular family structure is like.
I’m sad to say, it doesn’t stop at books. Even in a relatively wealthy and liberal part of London, our nursery had a “Nursery mums” WhatsApp group that was used for planning social events, which of course I couldn’t join, so I had to find out everything from my wife.
August 11, 2025 at 8:53 AM
I’m sad to say, it doesn’t stop at books. Even in a relatively wealthy and liberal part of London, our nursery had a “Nursery mums” WhatsApp group that was used for planning social events, which of course I couldn’t join, so I had to find out everything from my wife.
This mostly reads to me as yet another lesson that, as much as I’d wish otherwise, software engineering quality is not very important for succeeding as a business in most domains.
August 4, 2025 at 3:20 PM
This mostly reads to me as yet another lesson that, as much as I’d wish otherwise, software engineering quality is not very important for succeeding as a business in most domains.
I saw someone suggest that all government expenditures should be reported as billions, and it made so much sense. $73 million and $28 billion are weirdly hard to compare, they’re both “big number”, but $0.073 billion and $28 billion is way clearer.
August 2, 2025 at 4:34 PM
I saw someone suggest that all government expenditures should be reported as billions, and it made so much sense. $73 million and $28 billion are weirdly hard to compare, they’re both “big number”, but $0.073 billion and $28 billion is way clearer.
In the old days, you got assigned a number when you arrived at the airport and then they boarded in approximately number order. Nowadays it’s printed on your boarding pass based on booking order and you can pay extra to get a better number.
July 21, 2025 at 7:57 PM
In the old days, you got assigned a number when you arrived at the airport and then they boarded in approximately number order. Nowadays it’s printed on your boarding pass based on booking order and you can pay extra to get a better number.
The thing is, it’s often not even cheaper despite being smaller! I live in a 1400 sqft house in London (which is normal for the area) and it’s worth more than my parents’ 2400 sqft house in the SF Bay Area. But you’re not allowed to build things in London so housing is ridiculously expensive.
July 20, 2025 at 7:52 AM
The thing is, it’s often not even cheaper despite being smaller! I live in a 1400 sqft house in London (which is normal for the area) and it’s worth more than my parents’ 2400 sqft house in the SF Bay Area. But you’re not allowed to build things in London so housing is ridiculously expensive.