I think so. He's more storm-tossed survivor than Moses parting the waves, but he makes the best of the endless shit he's dumped into and preserves his sense of self throughout. I think he responds heroically, far more than he fixes anything external. For example he finds himself marooned on a strange planet and sets up a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich shop, living very comfortably for a while.
For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
Ja, storm tossed survivor /accidental stoic who do we have .. Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind.. Bit of a tossup innit?
From memory so long is a bit of a departure from the rest of the series and felt like adams was giving dent a vacation/term of being the deliberate stoic
Been years too but yes, he gets to live back on earth and shacks up with his girlfriend if I remember correctly. I remember even as a kid thinking it was tonally a bit weird but I need to re-read the entire series with adult eyes.
I was going to reply to jacquesm's comment above about Forrest - they both embody some stoic qualities - but you touched on that anyway.
> Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind
Yossarian! Outstanding. Bit of a cynic more than a stoic perhaps? You're right about Bilbo. Frodo I think not so much. And Samwise of course is pure American.
I think Forrest Gump's major quality is an indomitable spirit and an ability to overcome. (War Hero, runs across American, gets the girl)
I'm not so sure it applies to Arthur Dent, who tends to roll from one situation to the next. There is resolve, but it never really rises above.
I think there is similarity in the storytelling, that both characters find themselves in extreme situations, and somehow navigate them despite their own limitations.
That's a very interesting observation. You see it a lot in "tradesy" videos on YouTube, machinists* and welders and woodworkers and the like. The humor and self deprecation - far more apparent than in most other genres of American media - is really quite close to feeling British. As a transplanted Brit, it's pretty comforting stuff to watch.
*This Old Tony's channel is a particularly good illustration of this point, among many.
And the weird thing is, these are the people who actually make thing.
I think the success (not necessarily financialy, but in the public eye) of the American tech elite can be partly attributed how much more relatable these peole were than the previous ones.
For someone who was used to seeing these corporate types with their perfectly tailored suits who spoke in press releases, I think it was a refreshing change to see Mark Zuckerberg give interviews in his college hoodie in his typically awkward fashion.
I think this created a perception in the eyes of the public that these guys are different, and tech has coasted on this goodwill for quite a while.
Yep. I haven't found any metalworking channel that isn't. Woodworking channels can be a bit more... confident, "I know best so follow my hack if you want to keep your fingers," but many of the established, higher production channels like Lincoln St, Blacktail etc. are all just as deprecatory as the metal stuff.
Intersting. I used to be a professional woodworker, and can't stand the wood working channels. I love This Old Tony though.
I feel like doing a channel that brings in the reality of being a chippy. Tools that look like they were used outside in all weathers, having to make do with the tools you have with you. The crap timber that we have to deal with...I won't ever get around to it though.
A lot of the woodtubers are playing the influencer game for sponsors and views and their content devolves into product placement and reviews. The machinist channels are largely devoid of that with one main exception.
I was late for a train at my local station and the parking machine was taking ages to respond to keypresses. I could see the training pulling up to the platform and I was still stuck entering the second digit of seven. In my shameful frustration I hit the machine fairly hard. While the button presses might take a while to register, the anti-tamper alarm has really low latency and is also quite loud.
You need to find the right person to complain to. Here we are sympathetic, but can't do anything.
The right person is the other riders on the train - but the hard part is to frame this such that they join you on a march to the the agency that owns that machines to complain. I wish you the best of luck figuring out how to do that (I don't know how to do it - and if I did there are might higher priority things that need to be fixed).
Well it was six years ago, I work from home now and take the train once a quarter, and they've augmented the machines with app parking now so I have nothing to complain about anymore :)
I thought that too but they're surprisingly fast. I tracked a dot across the Atlantic (US East Coast to UK) and it took around 4-5 days, which is about right.
There's a very nice effect where if you zoom in, time slows.
This is nice, I enjoyed it. Was a couple points off the optimal score for day 8 but when I clicked "Show optimal" I couldn't then go back to see mine to compare. Either way, stretched the brain a bit.
Only nit: fix the walls. They take up one and a half spaces so are confusing, and they're sci-fi steel with flashing red lights. Turn them into one-square-only fences. You use fences to enclose horses, not raptor walls from Jurassic Park.
This is my feedback too. Turn “show optimal” into a toggle that persists on the page and toggles between yours and the optimal.
And same about the walls. Especially on mobile it’s hard enough to tap the right square, and having a wall poking up from the square below just makes things worse.
Kinda ish. Healthy resting heartbeat is around 60bpm and comfortable exertion heart rate - like doing an indefinitely sustainable run, the kind of thing we evolved to do to run down prey - around double that. The most broadly popular styles of dance music tend to float around 120bpm. It just feels natural to humans. At a guess, some combination of biomechanics (muscle twitch speed, pendulum effect of limb sizes against their articulating joints), heart beat, what most people can manage in terms of sustained exercise (as mentioned above), and attention span linked to multiples of musical phrases.
Specifically about keeping tempo, human drummers don't really. They will move around a central tempo, slowing in verses and increasing tempo in choruses and as the song progresses. If you're hearing a fixed tempo in a song, it's because it was recorded with a click track in the drummer's ear. Super common these days because popular tastes for recorded music currently skew towards perfection.
It stems from franchise law which exists to give franchisees a modicum of protection from adverse practices by the much stronger party in the relationship.
I'm sure that's a part of it, but I'm of the opinion that car dealers and other really local business owners like them are the modern equivalent of the landed gentry.
Locally powerful people can have a lot of leverage, even against a much bigger national-level entity.
One of my former clients was a top 10 automaker. I had a digital consultancy so was very close to their ICE division. They were obsessed with owning the screen, mostly so they could charge subscriptions for it. We were doing all sorts of wild pilots, like AI-powered language tutors for people stuck in their commutes. I was happy to take their money, but of course if any sane person wanted an AI powered language tutor they'd just install an app on their phone and use the bluetooth to talk to it.
OEM margins aren't great and their C suites are desperate to unlock any new revenue streams they can. This is inevitable, and it's a shame the nice thing we had is going away. The baller move would be for Apple to go buy an OEM and roll out a vehicle, but that seems to have stalled. It doesn't have to be self driving!
And as a comment on an article written by, and about, a man who works a manual labor job because he can't support himself as a writer despite having published novels.
The vast majority of authors, even most those who were quite prolific, have never been able to support themselves on that income alone, throughout the modern history of novels. This isn't new with LLMs.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair though I think you're mostly right. The comment you're replying to is right in terms of the value of understanding one or more levels of abstraction below the one you're working in. Conversely you're right in that learning assembler isn't going to do much to help you debug a failing Flutter app. It's just attacking the abstraction stack in detail from the opposite end - equally myopic.
But none the less valuable because of the additional perspective it brings. That's the real point of it, another lens through which to view and understand the mechanics of the application.
For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
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