bvinc

> As a C programmer I would say they are my favorite class of bugs, because they are so easy to fix,

I know what you're trying to say, because at least 95% of segmentation faults are easy to fix, but I take issue with this. The hardest bug that I've ever fixed was a segmentation fault!

You've obviously never experienced random crashes where the best idea anyone has is to bisect code changes in production and see when the crashes stop.

And you've obviously never experienced random crashes on customer machines where you've tested the crashing function for weeks, poured over crash dumps and ran the exact same function with the exact same data and could never reproduce it.

The problem with this line of thinking isn't that it's wrong. I could complain about the media all day.

The problem is that main stream establishment media: NYTimes, APNews, The Guardian, Reuters, etc are the best we have.

The people that complain about the media are the people that seek out alternative media. Alternative media is infinity more misleading and misinformed.

Thomas Jefferson surely didn't mean that you should turn to alternative media like Twitter and YouTube for your news.

I just use uBlock Origin to clean up websites I visit of their trending sections, recommendation sections, comment sections. Sometimes I get rid of links that I might mindlessly click, like the whole top bar of reddit.com.

For example, these filters work really well on youtube.com

youtube.com##.ytp-pause-overlay

youtube.com##.ytp-suggestion-set

youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content

youtube.com###related

The real story here is the story of someone who has actively avoided politics all of her life, but Twitter's engagement increasing algorithms got to her. It showed her outrageous Twitter mobs to feed her outrage cycle until she was hooked on politics and seeking out alt-right thinkers.

The interesting thing is that all those people in Twitter mobs that she's so upset about are also in an outrage cycle, hooked on Twitter.

The real hidden enemy here isn't political correctness, it's social media. It's the massive social experiment that no one signed up for, and it's driving us all insane.

I can certainly say that that's exactly the way I felt complaining about it. I felt like I was an asshole attacking him, and I don't think he liked me very much because of it. The whole thing was very uncomfortable. I didn't throw a fit. I tried to be very understanding and make suggestions.

If it's any consolation, it fell on to me to maintain this code after he moved on to something else, which is why I know so much about how it works.

I tried. I held a meeting to talk about the code. I found the problems hard to predict and hard to describe. It was decided that after the meeting he would work more on making his code less hacky and more production ready.

But the real answer is that our team was very siloed. No one knew what anyone else was doing. The other problem was that he was actually solving real world problems, and he was a very high performer. He got stuff done. Arguing to start over a project that's already working is a difficult position to hold when talking to management.

Someone at my old company basically did this and put it into production.

The first problem he encountered was that multiple connections couldn't both be using the database at a time without clobbering each other. "No problem," he thought, this is a good use case for micro services. A service sitting on top would ensure that there was only one operation being performed at a time.

Next, his problem was that the database would get corrupt sometimes when something bad happened in the middle of writing the file. His solution was to put the entire JSON format inside of a JSON string. If it could be parsed successfully, then he knew the whole file was written. Then all he needed were "backup" files for each table, in case the current one was corrupt.

Next, his problem was that querying and iterating through a large table performed badly, since it required parsing the entire thing first. Querying several times required the whole file to be parsed every time. The solution was to move SOME of the tables over to JSON-inside-SQLite.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the next problem was how to structure the data inside of sqlite. He decided to make a single table called "kitchen_sink" that held every JSON value. There was a column that said which "collection" it belonged to. There was another column that represented the row's primary key. So you could quickly query for a collection name, and a primary key, and get the full JSON row.

So the next problem was that you couldn't query quickly for things that weren't the primary key. So new columns had to be added called "opt_key1" and "opt_key2" where certain rows could put key values, and indexes could be added on those columns, so you could quickly query by it's first optional key, or it's second optional key.

Why aren't cell phone tower communications secured? Why aren't cell towers secured with certificates verified by the network? Why aren't stingray devices considered an attack on the cell network?

If stingray devices work by tricking your phone to connect with older protocols like 3G, why aren't those protocols deprecated just like we deprecate older encryption methods that are no longer secure?

In what metric is it slowing?

There are many different ways of looking at quantum mechanics, so here is one way of answering your confusion. Probably the standard way of looking at quantum mechanics right now is quantum field theory. In quantum field theory, you give up the notion of "particles" and instead view them as vibrations in fields. Once you do that, it makes more sense that these "particles" can turn into other particles, be absorbed or emitted by other particles, or split.

Here's a video of Sean Carroll talking about it, roughly 28:00-33:00.

https://youtu.be/gEKSpZPByD0?t=1680

My understanding is that automatically determining time complexity is impossible in the general case due to the halting problem.

And getting a compiler to truly understand the time complexities of your data structures would involve either extremely difficult theorem proving or just forcing it.

I do think it would still be interesting if a language had support for determining time complexity. It seems like it's often possible even if it isn't in the general case.

I do this exact kind of blocking. On Reddit I blocked the entire bar at the top of other subreddit suggestions.

YouTube, I got rid of suggestions on the side, at the end of the video, and at pause.

Call me crazy but I even got rid of typing suggestions in the Firefox address bar.

On Android, I like the Niagra launcher because I can customize my entire home screen and hide everything else so that I only see it when I'm looking for it. No recommendations!

There was a posts week or two ago from a person running a legit Tor service that was analyzing all of the attacks he received.

He said something seemed to be dos'ing the guard nodes, causing his service to automatically choose a new guard, in an attempt to get his service to connect to a guard node controlled by the adversary. He said in one case, they found his server's actual IP address and dos'd it.

Could that be what happened?

I do this on YouTube of course. But I went a step further and used ublock to hide recommendations on the right, at the end of the video, and when you hit pause.

I agree that there's been an uptick in toxicity and polarization. I think it's partially due to more people being on the internet, the decentralized information sources on the internet, combined with human nature and generational and cultural reasons why it's difficult for some people to determine what is factual.

But the single biggest factor that's driving this, in my opinion, is recommendation systems. Every source of information now follows the same pattern to increase engagement: Fill up the screen with as many different links and recommendations as possible, and determine the links shown by a machine learning algorithm to increase engagement.

If you have an app to communicate with friends, don't show them their friend list, show them a "news feed". A video player? Put recommendations on the side, and at the end of the video, and pop up recommendations when they hit pause, and autoplay the next recommendation. Sort all comments and replies based on engagement.

This increases income, but it makes people go crazy. Because what kinds of content increases engagement? For a lot of people, it's crazy inflammatory content. Women insulting all men, men insulting all women, Black Lives Matters, Back the Blue, flat Earth, vaccines, conspiracy theories... eventually the algorithm will find what triggers you to click or stay engaged. And once it figures it out, you're hooked in a crazy polarized hatred cycle.

And it doesn't help that people and companies and Russian troll farms realize this and push inflammatory content for clicks and followers.

How do you stop this? I have no idea. On a personal level, I use uBlock to clean up all recommendations on sites that I visit, and I make an effort not to respond to engage in any of the toxicity. But that doesn't really solve the problem.

Companies don't want to solve it because they'll lose money. Legislation doesn't seem like the solution. Individuals will complain if you took away recommendations. No one really wants it to stop.

Yup I had this same experience. You could try some ips and end up controlling the teacher's screen that was being projected to the class.

I just want to say that there is definitely a lot of misinformation around statins. All I want to say is that the debate among statins isn't settled like the debate about whether vaccines cause autism.

If you do a dive of only published medical research papers and professional opinions, you'll find nuanced arguments about what even causes heart attacks, how effective statins are, what the very real side effects are (eg: cancer), who all should be taking them, and what alternative treatments (eg: diet, exercise) should be tried first.

I think he's got a point.

As a developer I find myself in a different scenario. I'm usually trying to find out what exactly the 100% guaranteed way to do something is. Instead, I find incomplete documentation and different people with different opinions on what the guarantees are, and most people writing bad code that they assume will usually work.

Just modifying a file in an atomic way requires a complicated dance of multiple files and multiple syncs and a rarely tested cleanup routine the next time the file is opened. No one does this.

I don't know what the solution is.

You're probably never going to see this so I'll keep it short. I just want to say that your disorder might be due to a circadian rhythm disruption. Instead of just focusing on light, you should also focus on darkness. Try not to look at any unnatural light after sundown.

If you want to cheat for convenience, they make red glasses that block all blue and green light which can interrupt your melatonin. You want to find red glasses that have barriers on the side to prevent the light from coming through from the sides. They sell 2 different kinds on Amazon. I found the effect to be very profound. You get tired quickly and when you fall asleep, you feel like you're in a coma and wake up refreshed. Unnatural light after sundown really does interrupt your sleep cycle.

I did this for a few classes because my teachers had such a thick accent that I could barely understand them. I figured out that if I read the book beforehand, I basically knew what they were going to say and I could follow along much easier.

I have always traditionally been someone who would stay up until 2am a few times a week, and always been lacking in sleep. I've turned that around, along with a lot of other healthy changes I've been making, along with diet, exercise, and sauna use.

But the thing that's been an absolute game changer with sleep has been red glasses. So the idea is that blue light and to a lesser extent green light, both interfere with your brain's melatonin production. Everyone tells you to avoid looking at screens or your phones after dark, but who actually manages to do that? Also, these "night light" programs like flux just tone down the blue light, they don't eliminate it. These glasses block almost all blue and green light. They also have a barrier on the side so no light comes in through the side.

Sure, these glasses make you look like a dork, but they're great. If I'm in any state of lacking sleep, I find everything much less stimulating, and I get tired really fast. But even better, I sleep like I went into a coma, and I feel like I've been dreaming a lot more than usual.

There are tons of tips for sleeping better that I think all work, but from my experimentation, the unnatural blue and green light after sun down is by far the biggest problem that we all have.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about.

https://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Savior-Ultra-Disruptive-Melaton...

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07H44C8DT/

Caution: I kept having problems in websites where timestamps were hours off, and every captcha was super annoying. It took me a while to figure out it was due to the fingerprint protection that I had enabled.

These are my uBlock filters that I use to block all of Youtube's recommendations. I think it makes the site much cleaner.

##.ytp-pause-overlay ##.ytp-suggestion-set ##.ytp-endscreen-content youtube.com###related

I personally try to hide all recommendations everywhere.

Healthier than what? I buy antibiotic free grass fed beef from local farms.

> but the overall view that there is no singular "I" is very counter to my self conception

And the idea that the Earth being round and rotating around the sun is also very counter to my intuition.

Think of it this way. Instead of asking "Does this feel correct to me?", ask, "If this was correct, would I feel any different?"

I understand how it can achieve better performance by bypassing the file system.

But I'd like to compare this to hypothetical key-value software that stores its data directly on a partition (instead of in files). Isn't this essentially the same thing? The only difference that I can see is that the software would be much harder to update, and you can offload some CPU on to the processor on the drive.

Am I looking at this correctly? I don't get why you would want this to be a hardware device.

Are smart pointers thread safe?

If there was a profit motive, and it wasn't free to emit greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, I bet we would figure it out.

Just embed the gopath directory inside of the repo. Use makefiles and project files that set the gopath for you.

My understanding is that Google does this internally, which is why gopath works the way it does. It's meant for monorepos.

I use the bins right by the entrance of Lowe's and Home Depot stores. They also have bins for compact florescent bulbs.