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MrPoush

26 karma · joined June 6, 2022

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MrPoush··on Ozempic keeps wowing: trial data show benefits for kidney disease
It's not the only drug that suppresses appetite, but GLP-1 agonists (Ozempic, Zepbound, etc) appear to work for a larger percentage of the population, and significantly outperform previous appetite suppressants.

There's also findings that suggest that it goes beyond simply suppressing appetite, but also manipulates the "reward" center in the brain. Individuals who take it to lose weight find that they have reduced desire to drink or smoke, suggesting it's less that they struggle with appetite and more the medicine helps overcome addictive behavior.

MrPoush··on Reversing Choplifter
Tom7 implemented some of this with his Learnfun and Playfun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY) - It looks for lexicographical changes to bytes in memory (i.e., one byte seems to almost always increase, and then when it suddenly decrements, a neighboring byte is incremented) as a way of calculating memory location for increasing values (score, x-position), and similarly detects bytes that generally seem to decrease (lives).

It then tries to play the game, choosing inputs that increase the values that should be increasing (move right, gain lives), or tries not to decrease the values that are decreasing (don't die).

MrPoush··on The Infinite/Eternal Jukebox has been revived
It looks like Autocanonizer depends on (the now defunct) Echo Nest (http://the.echonest.com). Spotify bought it back in '16, and the site stopped serving content sometime mid-May of 2020.
MrPoush··on WigglyPaint: A juicy, jiggly drawing program
Under File, select "Prototypes", then double-click "Wigger", then select "Script..." from the Prototype menu.
MrPoush··on Making Hard Things Easy
She was LOVELY in person as well. I got her to sign my copy of How DNS Works.
MrPoush··on Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics
A couple of quick optimizations:

- If weights are repeated, you only need to specify the last unique one

- You can chain filters using a comma

- You can drop that last point in the curve

  ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf tmix=frames=36:weights="1",curves=all='0/0 0.05/1' output.mp4
MrPoush··on Emoji Kitchen
I am kind of amused that the combination of Moon and Robot is so weak that the robot is shrugging its shoulders as if to say, "It is what it is.":

https://emoji.supply/kitchen/?+=rt

MrPoush··on Paper Airplane Designs (2013)
Did a fascination with paper airplanes inspire Glider, or was it just a happy coincidence?
MrPoush··on I've been abusing HTTP Status Codes in my APIs for years
> People get so enamored with trying to make REST APIs into this rigorous thing.

It is a rigorous thing, though. It's a standard, and one that has existed for a very long time.

> I would prefer HTTP status codes just go away altogether. Those are for the web browser software to do things like navigation, not for APIs. Same with HTTP verbs.

Verbs and status codes are fundamental for APIs that consume REST endpoints.

I totally understand thinking that vanilla REST is not the perfect model for every case. Maybe you should be using SOAP, or GraphQL, or HATEOAS. What a seasoned engineer shouldn't be doing is abandoning a shared specification and expecting everyone else to comply.

If I am using a third party's API and they serve nonsensical status codes (4xx when their DB is down, 2xx to let me know something failed), I will reach out and ask for them to fix their bug. If they tell me that the error code is deliberate, I will probably look for a more sensible vendor to work with instead.

MrPoush··on “Harbinger households” consistently buy products that get discontinued (2019)
There was some discussion on reddit about this last year, and the consensus is that the zip codes were not published and likely wouldn't be.

One person worked the paper's methodology backwards and came up with a list of potential candidate cities: https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/i3hb3c/til_t...

Kind of shocked me that I'm nowhere near any of those, as I feel like one of those harbingers (and I feel no desire to move to any of those places).

MrPoush··on Exchanging Old Banknotes
Oh, absolutely! I just feel like it would be a nightmare to refit new bill readers into all the existing US vending machines.
MrPoush··on Exchanging Old Banknotes
I visited the UK recently, and I was quite impressed by the accessibility of their banknotes compared to the US ones:

* braille on the notes

* different colors for different denominations

* different sizing for different denominations

The UK notes are far more accessible to the blind and the illiterate, and it becomes basically impossible to accidentally include a £100 note in a stack of £5s.

They also have holographic printing like the US notes, but theirs are full images embedded in transparent windows.

I know that it would be basically impossible for us to do likewise (our currency is designed to be backwards compatible, and the vending industry would probably throw a fit if you changed the size of the bill on them), but one can wish.

MrPoush··on Republicans in the Ohio House vote to put Canada on a federal watch list
I was naïvely hoping that this was going to be some sort of mistake, but it seems like they're simply mad that Canada took Covid seriously:

> Rep Reggie Stoltzfus (R-Paris Township) said religious leaders who violated COVID protocols in Canada were jailed. And he says that's not a behavior Ohio should condone. ... [He] said this behavior is "very similar to what we see in Communist-controlled China."

MrPoush··on Diet Coke probably isn't a cognitive performance enhancer
It can be very helpful when providing clarity about where a word break should be. There's a reason that Experts Exchange uses http://www.experts-exchange.com rather than the hyphen-free version.
MrPoush··on Fossil versus Git
What was the impetus that inspired Fossil? Reading through the article and the links from it, I get the impression that this was created for ideological reasons rather than a technical need.

I do appreciate them being upfront about not supporting rebasing, as it saves me the time I might have otherwise wasted in trying it out.