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EdSharkey

830 karma · joined May 6, 2013

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EdSharkey··on Ted Kaczynski has died
𝑇ℎ𝑜𝑢 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑡 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑚𝑢𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟

-- Practically everyone, starting with God

Coveting your neighbor's stuff is pretty bad too since it precedes most other sins.

EdSharkey··on Vitamin D: Potent regulator of dopaminergic neuron differentiation and function
Vit D in milk has an interesting history. Govt added it to combat rickets in kids. Military needed strong bodies and bones for the fight.
EdSharkey··on 418 I'm a teapot
I like to respond with 418 as the catch all response code for mock web services for requests that dont match any installed expected requests. The reasoning is sometimes 404 is a valid mock response for some test cases, so I needed the "404 for mocks" that would never appear on any legit service. Very clearly highlights when something is going wrong on a test.
EdSharkey··on Heart attack deaths drop over past two decades
Canola is made from rapeseed, which is toxic before processing. (And mostly not toxic after processing. ) The oil it produces used to be used only for greasing engine parts.
EdSharkey··on Heart attack deaths drop over past two decades
Meta comment: parent and GP are an interesting contrast between the "settled science" drum-beat dismissiveness narrative and the science/study-based curiosity counter-narrative.

Here's to hoping that with the death of the dollar, the "settled science" practitioners lose their bullhorns.

EdSharkey··on Heart attack deaths drop over past two decades
That makes sense why I hear olive and avocado as sensible alternatives.
EdSharkey··on Heart attack deaths drop over past two decades
I keep hearing seed oils are a problem and lead to obesity, but we're addicted to them for cooking, mouth feel, etc.

What do you use as a substitute for vegetable oils in your cooking?

EdSharkey··on Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs
It bothers me when someone good/bad naturedly corrects me on "blacklist" and encourages me to say "blocklist". I figure that stems from either overactive empathy or is a power play. Please continue to say "blacklist".
EdSharkey··on ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar
Did any of you catch my kid's chat title: "Funny office fart story"?
EdSharkey··on Twitter was down
He's the richest man in the world again, we're just jealous. ;)
EdSharkey··on Ask HN: How did you rebuild yourself after having hit rock bottom?
No, just chuffing at the rapidly dying zeitgeist of yesterday.

We did some marriage counselling last year and it was great for us, highly recommended.

EdSharkey··on Ask HN: How did you rebuild yourself after having hit rock bottom?
[flagged]
EdSharkey··on My favourite 3 lines of CSS
So that's how test.each works in jest!! Catharsis!
EdSharkey··on IBM CEO Says It's a 'Good Thing' If AI Takes Your Job
There are so many dead ends in your thought processes here, though! Holes I can drive a truck through. What if's a-plenty!

> post-scarcity world

Why do you believe you deserve to be invited into such a world by the owners of that world? Have you not been noticing any patterns in the news, especially in the past 20 years, accelerating in the last 3? I observe that run-of-the-mill humans are not loved nor respected.

Elon winked at us and said "post-scarcity" and toyed with "MBI". Did you wink back? (It's ok to say yes, I wanted to wink as well, he's a great optimist.)

There is no scarcity now, for you and I. There is rampant slavery and injustice all over the world. Add up all the work done and then estimate how many slaves have lived and died complete lives to make cheap crap and give you comfort over just your lifetime? 1? 2? Sugar is over a hundred times cheaper than it should be.

The money systems are rigged for theft and twisted beyond reckoning. Misallocated capital at every turn. We have thrived because of and in spite of the current systems. Our lives depend on this unjust system!

> However, I hope we can get past that, and simply accept that people exist, and let them enjoy existing ...

When I watched The Matrix for the first time, I knew nothing about the movie. Had seen no ads, was kindof heads down in work at the time. A friend wanted me to go see it.

I got all the way to the morpheus red/blue pill scene and he's talking about what the matrix was. He was going on about taxes and religion and then slavery. And I thought, disappointed, oh geez, this is gonna be some race baiting thing... I was in this little petty politics mindframe. Blacks and whites. Liberals and conservatives.

And then right after that, some goofy retro tech sci-fi and I'm thinking, "interesting computer graphics!" but still not understanding anything.

And then, jump scare, surprise! First person shot, eyes slide open, water noises; we're in a pod.

It's an experience I may never have again because of the surprise factor and how it awakened me to monstrous possibilities in my own existence. My mental frame of self and this existence widened considerably that day.

Our matrix of propaganda and lies we tell ourselves has you. Has you willingly and you're grumpy with me for saying so. That's the powers that be's greatest trick: getting us to fight with each other over their invented reality and their pet causes rather than fighting them.

What I will say now is out of love even if it sounds incredibly harsh.

Your words make you sound fat, dumb and happy. You sound content, and maybe a little bored with life.

The loving part is in the word 'sound'. I know you are not those things, or need not be them if you are some of them.

World War 3 will be another banker's war. It appears to be right around the corner and America is starting it/funding it. You must oppose war in all its forms. Small and large offensives are abhorrent. Oppose all war out of principle from now on.

If you ever find yourself making excuses for war or even for funding someone else's war again, then you and I cannot be friends. War is a red line.

EdSharkey··on IBM CEO Says It's a 'Good Thing' If AI Takes Your Job
There's an assumption there which says you have intrinsic value and you don't need to justify your existence. There's a reason why some people get existential when there's talk about being replaced.
EdSharkey··on Modules, not microservices
It's easy to crap on EJB, lots to disagree with, but vendors like WebLogic were trying to do interesting things with them when they were ascending. I recall they had a nifty feature where if you were trying to call a remote EJB and the container knew it was deployed locally, it would automatically do a cheaper local call instead of RMI. It was awkward as hell, but it did do that, and it was faster. J2EE also had the concept of people _roles_ as part of its prescribed SDLC, something we could benefit from exploring, especially the _deployer_ role.

Ideally we could flexibly deploy services/components in the same way as WebLogic EJB. Discovery of where components live could be handled by the container and if services/components were deployed locally to one another, calls would be done locally without hitting the TCP/IP stack. I gather that systems like Kubernetes offer a lot of this kind of deployment flexibility/discovery, but I'd like to see it driven down into the languages/frameworks for maximum payoff.

Also, the right way to do microservices is for services to "own" all their own data and not call downstream services to get what they need. No n+1 problem allowed! This requires "inverting the arrows"/"don't call me, I'll call you" and few organizations have architectures that work that way - hence the fallacies of networked computing reference. Again, the services language/framework needs to prescribe ways of working that seamlessly establish (*and* can periodically/on-demand rebroadcast) data feeds that our upstreams need so they don't need to call us n+1-style.

Microservices are great to see, even with all the problems, they DO solve organizational scaling problems and let teams that hate each other work together productively. But, we have an industry immaturity problem with the architectures and software that is not in any big players' interest in solving because they like renting moar computers on the internet.

I have no actual solutions to offer, and there is no money in tools unless you are lucky and hellbent on succeeding like JetBrains.

EdSharkey··on FatFs – Generic FAT Filesystem Module
Thanks for the tip!
EdSharkey··on FatFs – Generic FAT Filesystem Module
I didn't study in my operating systems class! If only I could shake dumbass young version of me and have them work harder at school!

I know what you are saying is true and I should have no fear. I just need to write lots of tests and log like a mofo until I get all the ioctl commands it needs built out on the javascript side.

EdSharkey··on FatFs – Generic FAT Filesystem Module
I am preferring to use Uint8Array, Uint32Array or just let emscripten do the allocations for me. I haven't dabbled much with web workers, so I have avoided the whole transferrables thing.
EdSharkey··on FatFs – Generic FAT Filesystem Module
I am working on a virtual computer for kids and retro loving adults. I wanted to simulate block storage using Local Storage as the backing store because I felt that blocks were very understandable. I've had block storage working for many years, but when I went to build a filesystem atop it, my design was uninspired and my implementation was buggy.

When I found FatFs, I realized I had a perfect fit: a realish filesystem with an API that I could map right onto system calls, and FAT32 - a klunky old jalopy that will need defragmenters and other disk tools to maintain it. It'll make for an altogether more interesting ecosystem and a gentle challenge for the user to maintain.

Also, there are many areas of my javascript that are primed for conversion to C -> WASM, like sprite collision detection. JavaScript optimizers have done ok with my code, but I'd like my compy to run fast on mobile too. If I am successful with FatFs, I will have a convenient spot in my codebase for converting my busy number-intensive routines into WASM.

EdSharkey··on FatFs – Generic FAT Filesystem Module
I am in the process of compiling this with emscripten to javascript+wasm. The integration between your block storage implementation and FatFs is straightforward other than ioctl, which is mysterious to me and will take me a long time to figure out what all my responibilities are.

This is my first time playing with emscripten and sharing buffers between wasm and javascript is awkward.

EdSharkey··on I am not a supplier
This is one of those important articles that Will have me thinking years down the line. This article is howling into the void for change. Can we change now? Please??

Successful open source providers need to morph themselves into vendors, that is clear. The process needs to be low friction for all parties (subscription model). The article hints that the success of that transformation to vendor is governed by the supplyee being able to continuously drive change/quality requests down to the supplier to get what they need out of the code.

At first blush, I think: "to a package manager, attach: a credit card/subscription system, ticket tracker/change request system and the supplier's email/contact info". A system like that would mean, if you are a big megacorp, whenever one of your devs adds a package to their dependencies, and that package is from someone that wants to form a supplier relationship, the subscription request is automatically submitted to the accounting department for approval. Upon approval, money flows, and yucky details like seats and corporate rates can be negotiated by the accountants or legal. That would be an amazing improvement over the "labor of love" buy-me-a-coffee model we have today.

I think the grumbling begins in such a system where a package was free/unencumbered and it suddenly become a paid one. Kind of feels like a rugpull especially for supplyees that ARE poor and ARE only raccoons rummaging through trash. Perhaps there are rules of how to appropriately rugpull that need to be in-effect.

What I do not glean from the article is how money would necessarily transform an OSS developer into a supplier. Maybe the developer is an amateur supplier and will never get their shit together enough to truly meet the needs of the suppliee. Maybe they are a solo developer and die and leave the supplyee hanging.

The license and copyright I think necessarily need to preserve the AS-IS nature of the software itself due to the power imbalance between supplier and supplyee. But then how do we handle issues of negligence and impropriety on the part of a supplier?

In my mind it comes down to copyright. There has to be a socially acceptable weakening of copyright when a supplier turns bad or goes missing. Some arbiter (the package manager itself) can sever the subscription and give the supplier's copyright away so that it can find a new home.

Such a system ultimately becomes corrupt and the suppliers will get screwed out of their labor though. I can't see how such a system can be made to work in the long term and AS-IS is the best we can do. Le sigh.

EdSharkey··on Ask HN: Comment here about whatever you're passionate about at the moment
Haloo from Portland, OR. I am not passionate right now because my to-do list has been on overload for two quarters, mostly work-wise, and am feeling stuck and frazzled. Could use a little more dopamine (or whatever that motivation chemical is) so I can get that big functional test written and then open that PR and then hit the sack.

What I am pondering, as my passion fires burn low, is the scant tech or evidence of it that slipped past all the human wreckers and natural catastrophes of past ages. The zodiac, the 12-hour clock face, ancient cartographic maps, Codex Oera Linda, pyramids on every continent, submerged pre-historic coastal towns. I dream about the ancient mariners who carried some of that tech to us; their adventures and world would make a fun videogame. Does anything manmade remain preserved under the ice in Antarctica?

Huge, laser and drill-cut stones, some quarried hundreds of miles away, and also man-made (poured?) ultra-hard stones. SO MUCH STONE REMAINS, yet I know almost nothing.

All the achievements of our forebears mostly now wiped away, not even accessible in myth. Understanding my cosmic role today: "to keep it going" as it were and not to be remembered or memorable - although I strive to be - because that's a worthwhile goal. And then Jesus saves and sustains the rest of me so that I do not fall into despair.

Understanding now how close we are to wiping the slate clean again - asking why particularly the political left are suddenly warmongers and legislating poverty by turning the energy spigot off worldwide at a frantic pace. What in hell are tptb racing to get ahead of?? Do they fear something manmade or natural (or other?!)

Regretting how much slavery there is in this fallen world and knowing how much I have thrived as a result of it. Has one whole human life been taken to make mine comfortable? More? Regretting that now, and now selfishly, especially if a crash is looming.

Enough pondering! Gotta make hay while the sun shines.

EdSharkey··on Core US Inflation Rises to 40-Year High, Securing Big Fed Hike
Fed could deflate the currency now by telling member banks to keep more in reserve. They can't steal value from the future (to drink off your lifeblood today) as the middleman if money doesn't flow. That's why that will not happen. Simple as.

The party ends for the banksters when the purchasing power completely runs out on their currency. Who knows what happens now.

Usually we have a big war and pandemic/plague at this stage to wipe the slate and provide cover for a currency reboot, but it appears we are fortunately not having that.

Will we get free from the banksters? (Please say yes!)

EdSharkey··on Chip Backdoors: Assessing the Threat
I don't like the idea that nation states and cooperative corporations can practically shutdown anyone and everything should the need arise.
EdSharkey··on I've been abusing HTTP Status Codes in my APIs for years
As a Service Provider, the ambiguity of 404's we return is purposeful given that callers can be adversarial. All of these borked protocols were designed when we were all young and naive and all was peace and love. We have to live with them and deal with them as they are.

If you care about your callers and they're internal trusted partners, you can return a traceId header they can use to diagnose the 404 to find out if the request was malformed somehow or the requested ID was truly missing or something else bad happened. Splunk can be a pretty rad thing when everyone is on the OpenTelemetry bandwagon. Otherwise, assume the caller is evil and treat them accordingly.

EdSharkey··on Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
I read through the sample and my eyes/brain were able to move over the lines incredibly quickly and recognize the words. I notice it only worked when my intent and goal was to move my eyes quickly over the lines. And, I noticed my eyes could do little fast forward skips as they passed over the words, which is not the norm for me. I don't think this technology would do anything for my retention though, I only skimmed the words. Maybe with practice I could read faster and retain the information as well at speed.
EdSharkey··on Joni Mitchell pulling music from Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young
Is this comment unassailable? Does it completely invalidate grandparent? How dangerous is it culturally if the grandparent's assumptions and opinions are completely invalid??

I'm being serious, this is a culture-wide powder keg ready to explode!

EdSharkey··on Joni Mitchell pulling music from Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young
Yes, beyond a certain digital bux account value, more money ceases to be a useful goal.
EdSharkey··on Joni Mitchell pulling music from Spotify in solidarity with Neil Young
This is an aggressive take. I don't entirely disagree, but it gives people the emotional fuel to dismiss our opinions as cracked. I prefer using mundane "greed" to explain the utter fuckery and torture the last 2 years have been.

The past 5 years have seen constant, back-to-back gaslightings. And, I am surrounded by people who think it's all normal.

A busybody at my place of business revels in dangerously libeling unvaccinated people as "plague bearers". The world is so filled with comfortable useful idiots like that who have NO IDEA how much ego death (or worse) awaits them when/if they find out they were duped.

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