That sounds like a great way to limit the procrastination for many things while at the same time include a bit of mindfulness (i.e. sitting still with your thoughts).
That was a fun 10 hours or so that we were without power in most of Barcelona. Some barrios had ~some~ power but most of us were without.
The one thing that surprised me is how quickly rumors started about power being out in Portugal (true), France (true to an extent), Belgium (false), and the UK (false). Walking back home from work you heard the names of Trump being mentioned as well.
It's a bit scary to personally experience how quickly people can start panicking. On the other hand the bars that had some power had a great afternoon with tons of beer being served before it got too warm :-)
I am in Barcelona too. The combination of no power and patchy internet was the perfect recipe for rumors to spread, which was fun to observe. I went for a walk since I couldn't work and saw tons of people socializing, drinking beers (more than usual), and young people playing without their phones. It'll be a special day to remember, I think.
If we're ready for it and can prepare, it wouldn't be so bad I'd guess. Trouble yesterday was that we had no idea about the scope, I was in the middle of finishing moving houses, but was promptly held back when I arrived with a van to Barcelona and noticed it wasn't just my town that was without power.
I was actually considering going for a ride on the motorcycle today if the outage lasted another day.
Beautiful weather, a tank full of gasoline, and no stress about work? Sign me up!
Most people I spoke to around Maresme area yesterday believed someone incompetent made a mistake somewhere, and that was the reason. Some people jokingly suggested cyber attack/Russian probes, but afaik no one took those seriously.
There was actually a Russian cyber attack on the previous friday, pinging some German city government sites to death. Dresden, Nuremberg and one other. But this was essentially kids play, compared to a nationwide power blackout. A cyber attack to bring down a nation's grid would be high sci-fi. This would need lots of explosives and expensive physical interventions. Russia didn't manage in Ukraine eg.
How warm is "too warm"? I find cold beer, and cold soft drinks as well, quite repulsive. I usually try to order without ice entirely, and if I receive any bottles or cans, I permit them to come to room temp before consumption.
Refrigeration is sort of a scourge to those who enjoy food. We are so used to simply freezing our esophagus and not tasting anything! Food is kept cold because it lasts longer, not because it tastes better.
Sure, refrigeration makes restaurants and grocery stores possible. But it also presents challenges to cooking and it's very resource-intensive -- think about it -- basically everyone everywhere is always running their refrigeration -- that's a huge load on any system.
Pedantic, but most beers should be drank (according to the manufacturers and experts) at 7-13c depending on type of beer. Exceptions always exist to confirm the rule. Which is above fridge and around "cellar" temperatures.
Unless you drink Schultenbrau, which tastes worse cold than at room temperature (/s, kind of).
Do they? But why? Why would they? Are they simply accustomed to tasting it that way? I should say "not tasting it" because chilling a beverage basically kills its flavours, and they never make it to your tongue correctly.
I would say that many people would be surprised and amazed if they tasted such things as Pepsi without ice, and without coming right out of the fridge.
Unfortunately, any lack of refrigeration really messes up supply chains and will eat into anyone's bottom line, so it's not a realistic goal.
This stuff is panel-tested out of the wazoo. There's a reason bitterness, hoppiness, alcohol levels, differ market by market, even on brands of the same brand/line extension.
Beer also does not require refrigeration throughout the entire supply chain, they happily sit in a warm warehouse waiting to be picked up by an unrefrigerated truck, only to be cooled at the outlet or consumer.
There is so much more to enjoyment of consumption than just "taste".
Smell, touch, look, mouthfeel, nostalgia, temperature, color, other various human factors (ie I always eat this with my friends), sounds, cost
ALL of these affect your experience of consuming something.
Your insistence on ignoring the holistic experience because cold things don't react as well to produce taste sensations is misguided.
Never mind that plenty of things a DESIGNED to be consumed cold, and eating it room temp or warm would be contrary to the design. Beer and other soft drinks are often in this category as they intend to be "refreshing".
You don't drink your beer at 85 Celsius right? Why not? You will "taste" it more!
Yes, in fact, there is nothing to kill my enjoyment more than a watered-down icy beverage that murders my tongue and esophagus as it goes down.
Since my youth I’ve been a choral singer and musician. I’m quite sensitive to keeping “my instrument” in top condition. Therefore I take offense from anyone who says that [Scoville levels] of spice should be calibrated for murder, or that beverages should be as close to freezing as possible.
This is doing violence to the consumer, and it’s simply unjust across the board. If I had a nickel for every butt-hurt counter girl just because I asked for “no ice please”; if it really hurts your bottom line then charge double? Consumers aren’t actually afforded much choice about the temperature of food we consume, are we?
There is basically no scientific or cultural reason for food or drink to be consumed while it is cold [below 40°F]. Simply marketing and capitalism because of food safety and profit. Therefore I need not kowtow to someone’s haughty decree that soda is somehow designed to be drunk that way.
I've always theorized that, in prehistory, the only source of cold water would be recent snowmelt; streams that came fairly directly from a probably-clean source. Warm water could have all sorts of things growing in it. So our ancestors who found cool water to be particularly refreshing and sought it out might have suffered less from waterborne illness.
>It's a bit scary to personally experience how quickly people can start panicking.
People have been panicking, internally, for quite some time. What happened is that the threshold to externalize that panic was dropped with this event. So this is a very real example of how people are always looking for confirmation of what they already believe, and for a relatively brief time after they receive that confirmation, can live in a reality that is not at all aligned with base reality. I find this kind of thing fascinating, and it's been happening more and more in recent years due to changing dynamics in the way we communicate.
In my experience, shops you frequent will be sympathetic to that problem and will just let you come back to pay later. And I imagine that any shops that sell stuff that needs to be kept cool were especially amenable to that ...
A security guard at my workplace actually told me they had "received a call" about power being out in Romania as well. I'm not sure how that one rumour spread.
I'd love to do something similar for myself, but having never worked with NFC I see there are tons of different options.
Would you mind mentioning what tags you got?
Unfortunately no, but i can share some insights that i hope can be of value:
- Tech: Everything is hosted in AWS. We are using Golang in docker containers that does the scraping. They run on ECS Fargate spots when needed using cronjob. The scraping result is stored as a parquet in S3 and processed in our RDS Postgresql. We need to be creative and have some methods to identify that a particular product A in store 1 is the same as product A in store 2 so they are mapped together. Sometimes it needs to be verified manually. The data that are of interest for the user/site is indexed into an Elastic search.
Things that might be of interest:
- We always try to avoid parsing the HTML but instead calling the sites APIs directly to reduce scraping time. We also try to scrape the category listing to access multiple prices by one request, this can reduce the total requests from over 100 000 to maybe less than 1000 requests.
- We also try to avoid scraping the sites during peak times and respect their robots.txt. We add some delay to each request. The scrapes are often done during night/early morning.
- The main challenge is that stores can redesign or modify which make our scrapers fail, so we need to be fast and adopt to the new changes.
- Another major hidden challenge is that the stores have different prices for the same product depending on your zip code, so we have our ways of identifying the stores different warehouses, what zip codes belong to a specific warehouse and do a scrape for that warehouse. So a store might have 5 warehouses, so we need to scrape it 5 times with different zip codes
There is much more but i hope that gave you some insights of challenges and some solutions!
Do you run into issues where they block your scraping attempts or are they quite relaxed on this? Circumventing the bot detection often forces us to go for Puppeteer so we can fully control the browser, but that carries quite a heavy cost compared to using a simple HTTP requester.
We have been blocked a couple of times during they years, usually using proxy has been enough. We try to reach out to the stores and try to establish a friendly relationship. The feelings have been mixed depending on what store we are talking to
I'm unfamiliar with the parquet format and trying to understand - are you storing the raw scraped data in that format or are you storing the result of parsing the scraped data?
We are storing the result of the parsed scrape as parquet. I would advice to store the raw data as well in a different s3. The database should only have the data it needs and not act as a storage.
We received some harsh words in the start but everything we are doing is legally and by the book.
We try to establish good relationship with the stores as the customers don't always focus on the price, but sometimes they want a specific product. We are both helping the stores and the customers to find each other. We have sent million of users over the years to the stores (not unique of course as there are only 9 million people living in Sweden)
I'm currently in the process of resigning from my current company after only a year because they're forcing us to come in twice a week, coming from only once a week.
The reason given is: "it's important to have social contacts with the other colleagues that are not in your team".
If people thought that was important then they'd go to the office more often than required. It seems like they don't, so they won't.
It's frustrating and a bit mad to see management push these decisions when there's no valid reason being given.
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The contracts were crafted in a pre-pandemic era, at a time when commutes to the office were a given. Now governments are deciding whether to crack down or rewrite the rules entirely. In some states and cities, policy changes have already been proposed to account for the new reality of hybrid work.
I vaguely remember a study, long ago, about which professors and assistants did the best work.
They found a correlation between where in the hallway your office was and the quality of your output: when more people were walking by, the quality went up.
The assumption was that output of work was comparable or even slightly higher for the loners, but the relevance and creativity was higher for the more walked by people. Other people pull you back to reality and let unrelated things pop up in your mind
I can't find the study and don't condone management pushing their workforce against trying to get work done. Even so, I do find the result of that study plausible.
That does seem like it would make sense if you're working on the same product, in the same team, or in the same location.
My team consists of 6 developers, 4 of which in one city, 1 in another city, and the last one in another country. Every time we 4 go to the office we're still in remote calls and meetings, but this time in an open office with no noise cancellation.
The other people in the office are either sales people constantly in calls, or other teams with their own issues.
The Norwegian dictionary [1] suggests that the expression "lediggang er roten til alt ondt" stems from a merging of two older expressions: "Otium est pulvinar diaboli"/"idle hands are the devil's workshop" and 1 Tim 6,10 "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil"
Wiktionary [2] refers to St. Jerome
> Proverbs 16:27 may have inspired St. Jerome to write in the late 4th century: fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum, or “engage in some occupation, so that the devil may always find you busy.” This was later repeated by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, which was probably the source of its popularity.
