jefftk

Software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.

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post on reddit/here/etc for free

Most of those sites (and very near 100% when weighted by traffic) are funded by ads, though.

There are people on youtube supported by patreon and donations. There are periodicals/substacks/etc supported by subscriptions.

Most of these have a model where some visitors pay while others don't pay and see ads. Substack is an exception, with free users not seeing any ads, but I'd bet that this is just them being new (most new sites deprioritize advertising to maximize growth) and that in a few years they'll show ads to free users, limit how many articles you can read as a free user, or both.

There is not a shortage of content, there is a shortage of curation.

I think this is mostly not true? Unless you want to call standard journalism curation?

But this is also in the world today, one which has ads. I think you'd need to claim that even if we, say, banned ads, we'd still not see a shortage of content?

This initially seems like it would be better, but before doing the survey I considered it and decided not to do it because:

  • For a lot of these the age at which you first did it, or would have been ready to do it, is quite low, running into childhood amnesia.

  • Even when it is within a period of your life you remember it's pretty hard, often, to figure out how old you were. Especially, how old you were when you did the first time as opposed to some random time you remember. And even for the latter, it can take some time to connect it to other events and match it up with an age.

  • There are a lot of ones where I would have been ready sooner, and I expect my parents would agree, but it just didn't come up. For example, there were enough people around growing up that I don't think I spent a night home alone before leaving for college.

Your guess about bias maybe right, but I think all three of my children are, so far, more mature and responsible than I was at their ages.

Personally, I put 5y for that one.

What question do you wish I'd asked?

allow the creation of new forms that have more complex results by breaking the symmetry created by always having to refer to the left- or right-starting individuals as an indivisible set

Today callers do this by adding "1st" or "2nd": the "1st Lark" is the Lark in each couple that is going down the hall, and the "1st Robin" is the Robin in each couple that's going up the hall. If they want to refer to the whole couple they say "1s" or "2s", as in "1s lead down between the "2s".

Quick technicality (you can ignore this if you don't care): the "robins and larks" scheme is still gendered, though it has the advantage of divorcing dance genders from social genders.

While this might be technically correct (ex: Filipino has two linguistic genders, common and neuter) this is different enough from how most people speak about gender in dance that I think it's actively unhelpful?

In normal use:

  • Gendered calling: using male words for the Lark/Gent/Left-side dancer and female ones for the Robin/Lady/Right-side dancer. "Ladies chain", "Men by the left", "Ladies, leave him there".

  • Gender-free calling: using names for the roles that are unrelated to male/female. At this point, almost everywhere does Larks/Robins, but there's a bit of Leads/Follows.

  • Positional calling: not referencing roles at all. Theoretically within "gender-free calling", but it's rare to see it used that way.

If you are already using a database and think you might want a simple index (ex: on an ID) then sure, just add it. But if feeling like you should have an index pushes you to start using a database, or if you want the support something complicated like full text search, then I don't think it's so clear.

(This post is not anti-index, it is anti-"you should never be doing full table scans in production")

Maybe use more than one octave of range? So if we wanted to do it in Am we'd turn 123-456-7890 into A3 B3 C4 - D4 E4 F4 - G4 A4 B4 G3

I've only skimmed your post, but is part of the claim that the things that brains instinctually know are too minor to count?

You could do that, but I don't think it would sound very good? And I don't think it would make it easier for a kid to memorize?

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