andrewzah

"This is just software engineering, why would I do that in my free time?"

I was of this opinion until I realized I was basically doing digital logic in minecraft. You're right in that engineering without crud is very fun.

You can configure rubocop however you want.

If you find the defaults to be not good (which I agree), then simply update the rubocop.yml.

You can complain about anything that you want to complain about, even if there is no legal/etc justification.

Google is totally allowed to terminate your account for no reason, but it's still considered a dick move.

And do what? Force people and businesses to have clients they don't want (outside of protected characteristics)?

I don't get why people think that the government here can actually do anything without severely impinging on personal freedoms. As a government contractor, I see first hand how f'ing useless our cronyist, bureaucratic government is. Anything they try to do will backfire and make things worse for the average citizen.

The only real solution is to get people to stop treating facebook like the one and only place for messaging people or posting things. They're only "overlords" so long as people only use facebook or twitter.

"let's make everything political."

Everything -is- political. For some people, the status quo is amenable to them. For others, it is not. If you want to avoid politics, I think the only real way is to venture into the wilderness and live solo.

"Should you be able to fire them freely because you're not OK with their political beliefs?"

I can't speak for other countries, but the US protects from being fired due to certain characteristics. Aside from that, yes, absolutely, employers should be able to fire employees.

That said, there is nothing preventing said employees from giving said employer bad press, etc. There is nothing preventing employers from getting tried in the court of public opinion.

I don't see why we should expect the government to intervene and say "well, you can't fire anyone, for any reason, ever, as they claim it's retribution for X, Y, or Z". That, I believe, would be referred to by most americans as the dreaded "socialism" that we're so keen to avoid in favor of free market capitalism.

Alternatively, if I spend time and resources building my own cloud infrastructure, I would like to be able to choose my clients. Political beliefs are not a protected class, nor should they be.

And politics aside, if a client had a bad moderation policy or refused to moderate their content per my standard, then I should be allowed to terminate the contract. They should then be free to choose another provider.

You can complain if you want, but the end of the day, it's really your own fault for choosing to depend on google. If you don't like google's behavior, then you should either be self-hosting or at least diversify with other providers. Expecting the government to step in and be useful in any way here is a pipe dream.

Parler learned a hard lesson to not depend on AWS. I bet a lot of AWS customers also saw that and began taking steps to either move off of AWS or at least make it easy to migrate if needed.

"What I will tell you is that they had a disproportionate number of abuse reports that went unprocessed. And as a result, they left themselves wide open to people using their platform for purposes that maybe weren't the original intention of the people who manage it. Does that necessarily mean that we not only take that site offline, but we burn it to the ground?" Monster said. "I don't know, but I think the site can be rehabilitated so it could be more self-governing."

Just to note that Rob Monster does have certain criteria for allowing sites to use his services, as well.

"It's one thing to be sent to detention. It's another thing to get a suspension. It's another thing to be sent to a penal colony for the rest of your life," Monster said.

Getting kicked off of a provider is not "being sent to a penal colony". Nobody is forced to host your site. This is partly how free market capitalism works, last I recall. Allow me to play a sad song for parler on the world's smallest violin.

It is what it is. That same recommendation engine does wonders for music.

For controversial stuff etc, it's better to watch it in incognito. And really any topic that you're not actually interested in. I watched a few minecraft videos to figure out a redstone thing I was working on, and my recommendations were flooded with garbage minecraft videos.

I frequently add videos to playlists, both educational content and music-related, and I see "video was removed" more often than I'd like.

I set up youtube-dl to fetch all videos in my playlists daily at 4am. Digital hoarding is very cheap.

What's the benefit here over starting a tmux session and cloning the repo in /tmp?

Knowing me, I'd close out and then realize I needed to search something else, etc.

"but the way you Americans trivialise a toy good for nothing but war in many cases"

Ever heard of hunters? A LOT of people hunt. Also, until relatively recently it was common for american kids to bring guns to schools, and leave them in their car until after school so they could go hunting, etc. Instead of addressing things like mental health issues, it's easier to demonize guns because the politicians don't actually have to do anything other than introduce token legislation.

It's a right written in the constitution, and only referring to guns as "weapons of war" is political rhetoric. And hunting is not the only reason to own a gun- that's also political rhetoric.

It definitely doesn't help! I've decided to eliminate coffee completely as even if it doesn't trigger itching symptoms, it absolutely makes me more stressed. I like non-caffeinated tea more anyway, but it's hard to turn down family members making lattes...

I had a look at the symptoms and I don't think it matches what I have. I believe my urine and stool test would have ruled out high mediators, although I can ask my GP next time if they were checking for that or not.

Ultimately I think my solution will be to go to a tertiary/quaternary center like Duke.

All of my showers since last ~April have been coldish/lukewarm. Bedsheets, blankets and pillowcases get changed/washed almost daily. In addition to switching to gentle detergents.

"A food and symptom journal can be helpful for trying to connect the dots."

This is a good idea, I will try this once I start cutting out foods again.

"High IgE levels can be due to parasitic infections and these have something of a tendency to go underdiagnosed in the US because they get seen as "third world problems."

How does one go about testing this? I visited my gp multiple times and a bunch of tests were taken. Aside from the general itching and rashes, I don't really have other symptoms. Maybe a little fatigue occasionally.

The initial tests looked for fungal infections, and I took anti-fungal pills for about a month as well. After the biopsy at the dermatologist, they told me it was atopic dermatitis / eczema.

"One of them recommends using soap only for "pits and bits" :) But as runners both, that's hard to do when covered in sweat and salt."

I switched to natural soap bars a while ago, as I like those anyways more than typical body washes one gets from e.g. cvs or walmart. For hair, shampoo every time is simply not necessary. I use that 1x a week, but some people don't use it at all- check out nopoo. I don't have issues with my scalp but my dermatologist did mention that Head and Shoulders can make eczema issues worse because it's abrasive.

I will check that book out.

"But its getting out of control. I was reading that itching from eczema drives people to suicide, just like dry eyes"

While I don't have those thoughts, I completely understand it. I'm not sure if people who've never had this kinda of eczema before can understand it. But the constant itching (which is both physical and mental) and the mess afterwards from scratching is brutal after a while. Scratching at 3am (after sitting in bed and trying to concentrate on anything other than the immense signal to scratch) brings a brief bout of euphoric relief, then regret and depending on the size of the scab, blood/sticky fluid. I basically had to wash my sheets and blanket daily because there would be residue all over.

For a while, the backs of my thumbs both kept on weeping. So imagine sticky fluid getting on your keyboard, guitar, etc and constantly having to wipe it. The same happened to the entire back of my right hand as it had gotten a bit infected, so I had to go to the ER and get a corticosteroid (dexamethasone) shot to calm the situation enough that it could get back to "normal"- scabs and immense itching urges.

"Which you may want to check out because of IgE. It goes into how typical antihistamines don't work because the itch signal is from a different pathway, etc."

This is something that I have been noticing too. I took benydryl occasionally and it seemed to have no real effect other than maybe placebo. Same with hydroxyzine- I've taken at max 100mg (4 25mg tablets) about 30 mins before bed, and the only thing it did was make me real sluggish the next morning / sleep through alarms.

The 'thousand yard stare' comes from soldiers who have fought on the battlefield. It's a blank stare as the person's mind is elsewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand-yard_stare

What does "coding" exactly mean here?

If we include the whiteboarding and sketches, I'm coding all the time! If we're talking about literally inputting code, well it's because it's very difficult to solve hard problems without some sort of planning first.

Also, administration of issue trackers, etc. Meetings. Helping a coworker. Writing documentation. Waiting on a response from a 3rd party vendor, etc.

I know you're joking, but this is a horrible condition. While researching I've seen some anecdotal stories about the condition just... clearing up after a while for some people, so hence my question.

Yes, actually. In that period I was doing intermittent fasting in addition to running 5k daily. I started at ~210/215 lbs and dropped down to around ~190 or so. Once I started taking meds and winter hit I stopped running so I'm back to around 210.

So I have done this for major things like coffee, milk, wheat. For about a week or so at a time. I guess I can try each again for 2+ weeks... However I'm not convinced the current issue (itching) is related. The symptoms only really present themself at night when going to bed, as I guess I have no other stimuli to focus on. During the day it's basically not an issue.

I plan on trying longer fasts (3days, 5days), maybe 7days as well.

It was ruled out early on, along with fungal infections, HIV, etc in an array of tests. Basically every test I've had has come out clean, minus occasionally a little high blood pressure. And the IgE levels in orbit as mentioned above.

Did it go away on its own?

> what you have changed about your diet, medication or anything else either in May or shortly before that

Well, there are only 2 things I can think of. Firstly, due to covid I had been working at home from March to May. Before covid I would still go out a lot to cafes/social workspaces and get sunlight. And around mid-march I started running. By May I was running about 5k-7k daily throughout my neighborhood.

So we initially thought it was a bug related thing, but everything came back clean. We tried eliminating food, but nothing really seemed to have an effect after a week or two.

I spoke to my immunologist and he believes it's not food related as I already have food related allergies (peanuts), so eating something else should give me quick reactions like peanuts do. Also, he said it's rare for adults to spontaneously develop something like that. Bloodwork has been inconclusive because my IgE is so high that it's causing false positives. I did a diff of my allergy bloodwork from and back in October, and multiple values did increase.

I have tried basically everything- getting more sunlight, using sensitive detergent (3 different brands), cutting out coffee/gluten etc. Hell, we even replaced the carpet in my parents house with hardwood, and once I moved into my house we cut out the carpet as well.

This is something that I've been thinking about lately.

Last ~May, I spontaneously developed rashes exactly in the middle of the back of my hands at the same time. This lead to skin sensitivity and ultimately skin rashes across my body.

At this point I've visited my dermatologist what, 20 times? In addition to my general physician, bloodwork, etc. Biopsies and bloodwork and other tests don't show anything abnormal, asides from excessively high IgE - 600 and now about 1,000. I recently started on Dupixent but it's too early to tell if it's helping or not.

There doesn't seem to be any clear indicator, so I'm wondering if I ate something + stress, which affected my gut microbiome. My family has no history of this sort of issue and it seriously started about overnight.

It is fascinating to see improvement in this space.

People -really- care about good ranking systems. I personally saw this when I administrated rankings for a local fighting game scene. Back then we used Glicko since matches were 1-on-1.

"Since all workstations ran Ubuntu and all servers ran Ubuntu"

Admittedly our company is small (~5 fulltime devs), but we have: mac osx catalina, debian buster, debian bullseye, and ubuntu bionic beaver. So precompiling .debs won't work here. Docker gives us all a common ground, minus some wonky mac docker issues with DNS.

Also, this assumes that one is using a server in the first place. We run our own kubernetes cluster that we automatically provision and deploy pods to, so there is no server to upload files to.

"You aren't relying on some guy with a blog post to keep his server up. <...> And it makes you very directly consider what your dependencies are. Do you really need that unmaintained library written in an esoteric language that requires a SPARC to compile? Docker allows you to hide bad dependencies behind the idea that they are inside a container so the harm they can cause is limited and the headache is localized."

Again, this is a strawman. You can butcher things with docker, or without docker. The same can happen with i.e. Ansible & Terraform (which we also use). I can, and do, analyze our images to see what we can reduce to. Most of our images are either on Scratch or Alpine Linux, thanks to multi-stage builds.

Since each build is localized to a container, we can independently update images and not have to worry about dependency mismatches, or random directories being modified, etc.

My opinion will be biased because I've written at least ~120 docker images in the last two months and spend a good bit of time tweaking and optimizing them.

The difference is we have a choice in those matters. I.e. my telephone does not work in that sense, because I will not pick up for an unknown number in most cases. A communicable human is on the other end.

With "AI" (machine learning / neural nets), we're letting opaque boxes arbitrarily control and ban accounts at will. It's like forcing people to use cars that randomly decide that it won't drive that day for no good reason.

"AI is not going to be any different in this respect"

The other examples all include accountable humans, "AI" here does not. We're already seeing issues of machine learning applying sexist biases for example because of datasets and poor training. What are you going to do, hold google, or any other faceless corporation, accountable for its bad translations? Good luck.

It's only going to get worse in the future as other stratified aspects of society get cemented by "AI".