apothegm

Data-harvesting makes it sound far more innocent than it is. It exists to influence the outcome of elections. Through using the harvested data for propaganda, intimidation, and I’m sure they’re looking for ways to interfere with the actual registration rolls.

It is not reassuring that these things have a human driver, when that driver has no rear view window.

The LED will display it first, but will the signal reach your visual centers first? And how about the time for your brain to process that signal and make you consciously aware of the visual vs. the way the pain signal is forwarded to conscious processes?

If it’s allowed to write any sort of scripts, it will find a way to execute arbitrary code. If it’s got access to any form of internet connection it will find a way to use that arbitrary code to do as it wishes with that connection. So much for sandboxes.

And that’s setting aside “sandboxes” that are just instruction-based restrictions on what executables may be called. Anything that isn’t a deterministic external filter _will_ be ignored at some point.

Many though not all of these patterns are useful even in a small company.

I’m on a tiny team building an application that’s unlikely to ever average more than a handful or two of concurrent active users.

We’re using DB replicas for redundancy and failover and may eventually use the read replica to remove load off the primary. We’re using caching (which comes almost “for free” with our framework) to save slow/resource-intensive expensive DB and third-party API queries for lookups against rarely changing data sets.

We run background jobs and need at-least-once processing, which means consumers must be idempotent; not to mention idempotent handling of webhooks from one of our vendors. In fact, I can’t think of a small company I’ve worked at beyond proof of concept stage that hasn’t needed idempotence and benefitted from caching some things.

My last small company dealt with high volume and needed rate limiting and outboxes. In other highish volume contexts I’ve pre-computed expensive data structures (idempotently) and cached them in a document database.

Next time you’re at a small company might be a time to look around and ask yourself if any of these patterns is needed or would improve your software’s reliability or performance.

You start over from a point in the chat history from before they screwed up, or you start a new chat.

For those of us not in the know, what happened at The Australian?

Somewhere on the order of $25M, adjustable for inflation. Enough to live darn comfortably off the interest for one’s entire life even in a mediocre stock market, and to leave a heck of a legacy for one’s dependents. Not enough to single-handedly change the course of an entire democracy just by throwing money around.

Why not both?

Set up an overnight job that sanitizes snapshots of prod data — replacing PII or other sensitive data with randomly generated cruft — and loads that into a pre-prod environment for use in debugging. For easiest troubleshooting, have it preserve primary keys; and have customer service look up the PKs of affected users’ records.

This won’t work for all classes of bug, but helps a lot.

Also helpful: extensive logging, telemetry, and exception capture with not just stack but context; session recordings to video (the service we use for that blanks out user inputs for privacy purposes but lets you see where things went wrong).

“Need”?

There were fewer ramps and more stairs in airports and their parking garages prior to the 90s, due to the ACA.

And people drag luggage around on city streets all the time. Many tourist destinations are pedestrian cities even outside their most central downtown areas. And luggage also needs to be dragged around hotels — and in suburban areas their absurdly large parking lots.

The skate wheels are a plausible argument, though.

And yet strollers predate rolling luggage by over a century. (Even 2.5 centuries depending on which sources you trust.)

In fact, for some people high contrast is headache-inducing.

I’ve installed a utility on my laptop that supports “sub-zero” display dimming for nighttime use because monitors are now over-optimized for max brightness, with min brightness being retina-searing for eyes adjusted to a dim room.

Yup. Or people with temporary disabilities — who have simply broken limb or had a surgery. Most places are hellish to navigate on crutches. Heavy doors alone make so many places nearly inaccessible, and that’s before you even get to stairs.

Not to mention luggage. I find it hard to believe that it’s a coincidence that rolling luggage became common shortly after curb cuts and wheelchair ramps did.

Regulators were able to restrict CFC use because the patents had expired and the manufacturers were ready to move on to the next compounds they’d already developed anyway.

Money from a dominant investment doesn’t accrue to the founders. Money from an acquisition does.

Starting a war that makes fossil fuel painfully expensive and its supply uncertain has a tendency to do that.

The trouble is that we’re adding renewables to add capacity, not as a way to bring significant amounts of fossil fuel capacity offline.

Because when we did that accidentally the outcomes were so great?

And no one will force you to.

For me, this one doesn’t seem to have enough accuracy to be worth the trouble.

But a few years of improvements and maybe a blood test like that is what you need to get insurance to cover a baseline neurological evaluation plus re-evaluation every few years to see whether it’s time to start aggressive treatment.

Maybe in another decade aggressive treatment will be available for disease at earlier stages and good enough to prevent progression at all and maintain nearly full quality of life.

This isn’t a game changer right now, but every time something like this makes it through trials it gives me a bit more hope that we will in fact beat this thing. Likely within my lifetime. Maybe even before I succumb to it.

Kisunla. Apparently my family member had about the best reaction to the drug you could hope for — from what I understand it’s not always quite so effective.

With the original course of treatment complete we then transitioned to a maintenance regimen of … I can’t remember the name off the top of my head but it’s the other one that’s similar but a bit less aggressive — they had originally presented it as one of the possibilities when we were deciding to start treatment. They’re also adding on a neuroplastocity-enhancing drug as a complement, along with some occupational therapy.

Best of luck to you and your family!

As someone with a family member taking one of the newest drugs, I can attest that it does seem to meaningfully slow progression — from rapid decline nearly to a halt in my loved one’s case.

The risk of dangerous side effects seems to be much higher for those with APOE4 — before approving the treatment they required among other things a genetic test ruling that out. (There are several other genetic variants that predispose to Alzheimer’s, fwiw.) We were lucky and saw none of the concerning side effects.

Are we “there” yet? Where’s there?

The prognosis after this treatment is a massive improvement over what it would have been at this stage of progression if it had been reached even 5 years ago.

If you can detect the disease even earlier and halt progress at a point where you retain more cognitive function, that’s a huge win — and gives you time to wait it out a bit longer in hope that we’re able to develop a treatment that doesn’t just pause but can reverse progression.

Yeah, I doubt we’re ready yet to administer these drugs to people who are asymptomatic (not to mention how pricey they currently are). But for someone who likely has the genes for it, just _knowing_ would in some ways be a relief.

Is there an easy way for a n00b with LMStudio to switch it to medium? Asking for a friend… XD

I agree that the opposition has lost the plot, but to depict that as anywhere approaching this administration’s level of grift, extreme anti-intellectual (invent-your-own-reality) stance, or what I’ve seen described as “the cruelty is the point” is like comparing a schoolyard bully to a serial killer.

The availability of universal healthcare does not preclude the availability of privately paid healthcare as well.

Sensible politicians? In the US? In this era? For a _generation_???

It looks like that from inside the US too. At least, to a lot of us.

Or even on fairly high end (by general public standards, not gaming community standards) consumer hardware. Fantastic fit for M-series Macs with 32-96GB RAM.