ccleve

Which companies are the "good" ones?

I've long thought that there should a be a penalty when a business fails to deal in good faith. When a business fails to respond to a customer complaint, or responds in a way which is disingenuous, or automated, or does not take the time to actually understand and respond appropriately, there should be a cause of action.

In other words, the customer should be able to sue for bad faith dealing. The law should recognize that forcing a customer to fight to resolve a legitimate issue causes the customer harm, and the customer is entitled to collect damages over and above any other damages they have sustained (in this case, over and above the $277).

One or more class action lawsuits would help straighten this company out.

This one was a good start: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...

The next step is for company executives to face personal liability for failing to deal with these issues.

Do you have a link to the slides or the video of that presentation? I found this, but no links: https://www.postgresql.eu/events/pgconfeu2023/schedule/sessi...

This paper is from 2013. It is out-of-date. More recent large scale studies of Vitamin D supplementation show no benefit, except in cases of substantial deficiency.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-021-00593-z

Sunlight, however, does show benefits. This suggests that Vitamin D is just a side effect of sunlight exposure, and does not by itself do any good.

The designs don't look great.

Here's an idea: produce designs that use the commercial Tailwind components. Your designs will look great. Have a link for the user to buy the components if they don't already own them. Work out an affiliate deal with Tailwind Labs. You can get rid of the time limits and the pricing.

If you start generating money for them they may buy your app.

I haven't worked with pgzx, but it's possible that memory management is easier. Zig uses memory arenas, and so does Postgres. If one can map directly to the other, it would be a huge win.

With Rust/pgrx (which I have used, extensively) memory integration is more difficult. There's pg memory, and there's Rust memory, and they're not the same, and you have to play games to pass data between them. Lifetime issues crop up. Rust might be able to solve the problem in the future with custom allocators, but it's just not there yet.

The obvious way to do this would be with a heavy-lift helicopter, but the article says this:

>Helicopters are more costly than airplanes, and flying with a dangling blade designed to catch wind would prove complex and dangerous.

Um, why not enclose the blade in a tube?

There are heavy-lift helicopters that can go 170 mph and carry 40 tons. No runway required.

The study they performed is utter garbage. They saw the result they wanted to see.

They produced a unique game where players were given eight minutes to collect as many berries as possible by hovering a mouse pointer over a bush. Each time they foraged from the same bush a player’s harvest would slightly decline but if they moved to a new bush they would suffer a time penalty.

So what would most players do? Stick to the same reliable berry-supplying bush? Or risk wasting time by trying another bush to see if it had more fruit? Explore or exploit?

Around 450 people participated in the experiment, and all were simultaneously screened for ADHD symptoms. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found those with higher ADHD scores moved on to new bushes sooner than others but more importantly, those with ADHD also tended to collect higher volumes of berries overall.

Writing in the newly published study, Barack and colleagues noted that participants without ADHD characteristics tended to over-harvest single patches. Looking at what would be an optimal harvest strategy for the game it was discovered that players with high ADHD scores were more successful overall.

The outcome of this game is 100% dependent on the parameters: the decline in the harvest from a given bush, and the time penalty. If you change the parameters to favor persistence, then guess what, persistence wins.

Here's the money quote:

>> Importantly, these test scores better position Admissions to identify high-achieving less-advantaged applicants and high-achieving applicants who attend high schools for which Dartmouth has less information to interpret the transcripts.

Precisely. SATs aren't about hurting the poor or disadvantaged. It's about giving them a chance.

There's a recently published paper on something called Starling. As far as I can tell, it's a more efficient DiskANN. It claims enormous performance benefits.

The paper is tedious and near-unreadable, so I didn't finish reading it. Maybe there's something here, maybe not. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.02116.pdf

The code here is really well designed. This project can serve as a tutorial on how to build a Postgres extension. Have a look at this:

https://github.com/buzzm/postgresbson/blob/main/pgbson--2.0....

and this:

https://github.com/buzzm/postgresbson/blob/main/pgbson.c

Really nice stuff.

Here's pretty good website that tracks judicial abuse:

https://abusivediscretion.com/

If 718g lasts a week, then that's 100g per day, or 3.5 ounces of food per day. That's even less likely.

There are 1600 calories per pound of dried beans (https://modernsurvivalblog.com/survival-kitchen/calories-per...) 3.5 oz would contain 350 calories.

The average person needs 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day. No, this guy isn't living on 350 calories per day.

718 grams is 1.6 pounds, times 7 is 11.2 pounds. 61 cents would mean that you are paying a nickel a pound, or only a quarter for a 5 lb bag. This seems unlikely.

Pittenger is doing the most important work in this area. There is also a good clinic at Stanford.

This is a good interview with Pittenger that give more detail on what his group is up to: https://aspire.care/clinicians/antibodies-pandas-bind-cins-a...

How does it differ from ZomboDB?

How do you measure?

Agreed. We're at a point where if you want to get into a top college, you have to be interesting. You must have done something unusual, ambitious, creative, or anything beyond sports or band or violin and a bunch of AP courses.

Guess what? Kids who have never had time to play are ones who have never had time to develop cool interests.

Jack Nicholson said it best (repeatedly): All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

I came here to post exactly this. It is appalling that we live in a neighborhood where everyone can walk, there are plenty of kids that my son knows within a mile, he's 14 and more than old enough to be out on his own, but every one of his friends is in a math class, or French school, or out of town on vacation, constantly. He goes to the park and there is no one there. So he stays home and watches anime. The only way we can get him out is to call other parents and schedule something.

There is something deeply wrong here. I blame other parents who overschedule their kids.

Tell us as much as you can about the tech stack. What is going to be able to handle truly massive volumes of transactions? Database, hardware, communications channels, programming lang, everything.

Is there any documentation on the "extensibility patches"? What did you have to do to core Postgres to get this new approach to work?

I still have high hopes. But man, the pace of development on this project is slow.

This is a really good analysis, and it points to a central flaw in Rust. As a practical matter, you have to have more than one pointer to a data structure all the time. You really can't implement some things without it.

Rust makes this really, really difficult. If you can live with immutable pointers, you can have as many as you like, but the lifetime syntax you have to juggle can become a horror show, and can force lifetime annotations on a whole chain of structures. If you can't live with immutable references, then you are forced to use the unnecessarily ugly Rc<> syntax.

I often find myself using the array indexes trick, which leads to buggy code.

In Java, I never had to do this. Multiple "pointers" are fine. The garbage collector takes care of memory safety. In this one sense, Rust is a less-safe language than Java.

I have been writing Rust for two years now. I would not use it again if I could avoid it. It is a giant waste of time.

All the books have approximately the same number of reviews. Is Amazon completely uninterested in dealing with fake reviews?

TLEs = trusted language extensions?

Curiously, the Illinois House just passed a law prohibiting the banning of library books. If this book were to exist in a library, and someone complained about it, it sure would make an interesting test case.

https://abc7chicago.com/book-bans-illinois-library-house-of-...

This is true. I was a congressional staffer long ago, and before that I was an intern at the Legislative Digest, an official publication that summarizes legislation for the members of Congress. These summaries were often the only thing that members would read before they voted. If a member was really ambitious, he or she might read the committee report as well. But that's it.

I wasn't 23 years old when I was writing these summaries. I was 21. There was no one in the office over 30, and no lawyers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Digest

This is exceptionally poor legal advice.

Non-competes are legit if they are narrowly limited in time and scope. It's perfectly fine for a company to demand that if they hand over their proprietary know-how to you, know-how that has cost them years to acquire, you won't take it to the competitor across the street. And no, an NDA is not enough to protect them. They own this information, not you, and no, you can't take it.

NDAs are legit for obvious reasons.

Work-for-hire clauses are absolutely required. If a company is paying you, they own what you create on company time and company equipment. No, you can't take it and sell it elsewhere. It's perfectly fine for you to resist signing a clause that says they own what you create offsite (so long as it's not related to your day job), but a company cannot continue to operate if employees can take what the company paid for.

There's a lot more to the relationship between pathogens and neurological conditions. This article has some good information: https://return.life/2022/05/endemic-pathogens/ (Please ignore the clickbaity tone, there's actually good stuff here).

We know there are a ton of correlations. We don't have causal links, although there is quite a bit of speculation about inflammation.