cols

Just checking that you are aware that Putin has been murdering fleeing civilians, targeting health facilities including a maternity ward, and using dumb bombs to level entire cities? At what point does this cross into genocide for you?

Edit: People on this thread seem very confused as to what the word 'genocide' means. Here is the definition from un.org.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

- Killing members of the group;

- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

Everyone in the chain of command has to be willing to commit suicide. From the king to lowly button pusher. Hopefully, cooler heads prevail.

The Stanislav Petrov situation gives me some hope.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Sincere condolences to the Nadella family. It’s my understanding that Zain has two sisters Divya and Tara, my heart goes out to them especially. Siblings are often the forgotten mourners.

Good luck to you! It is truly beautiful out there, even still. If you clear out an acre or two around your house and have some kind of fire line you'd probably be fine. I'd be concerned about the road to your house and how accessible it is to a major hwy.

Several folks died after being trapped on North Fork Rd and it's not hard to see why. It's a super tight, two lane road that goes for miles and miles. After the fire started, there were apparently miles of treefall up and down the road. No way you get out from that even on a dirt bike.

Beautiful house and there was a day I would have been extremely jealous but...

I live in Oregon and in 2020 chose to (was not officially in an evac zone but the smoke was awful) evacuate when the horrible Beachie Creek and Lionshead [0] fires ripped through the Santiam Canyon. Houses that my wife and I had looked at possibly purchasing were torched, as well as some of the most pristine ancient forest I've seen [1].

My outlook about living in the forest drastically changed after these events. The Beachie Creek fire reached 130,000 acres overnight at a growth rate of 2.77 acres per SECOND. [2].

You couldn't pay me enough money to live in a forest at this point. It's just too damn dangerous. Also, the flat roof seems problematic. Everyone I know in the PNW who has owned a flat roof has had issues with it due to pooling water. That far north, I imagine snow accumulation would also be a really big problem in terms of stress on the roof.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiam_Fire

[1] - https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/02/oregon-field-guide-op...

[2] - https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7001/

Not accurate. The MS stack is very much so alive. I get recruiters hitting me up weekly if not daily with C# jobs. Perhaps the MS stack is not common in the startup ecosystem but there is no sign of it dying.

So many businesses and governments are using the stack that it is going to be around for quite some time even if it isn’t the new hotness.

This is a well known effect.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cramerbounce.asp

This year, my (not so little) brother committed suicide in an alcohol induced stupor. He did it in his living room while his wife and young children were home, sleeping.

Therapy has been a life saver. The only true way to get "over" trauma or hardship is to get through. There is no getting "over" horrible things that happen to you. You just have to keep on moving forward, one foot in front of the other.

In the meantime, as other have said, find a passion or a hobby that you can pour some time into. Personally, I've found exercise, reading, spending time with my children (and his children), and practicing Stoicism to be very beneficial.

We look for clean lines of demarcation between life events a lot of times, but really, we can't extricate the future from the past so easily. All of us are, in some way, impacted by these critical, good or bad events. There is no escaping this impact; No human is immune to them. I've found the words of Marcus Aurelius to be particularly helpful:

"Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not 'This is misfortune,' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'"

Good luck.

1) We built our own event driven system for JS interactions. It does exactly what we want, when we want and comes in under a few thousand lines of code. The data transfer happens via a wrapper we wrote around the standard Fetch API called FetchWithTimeout (thank you David Walsh [0]).

We also built our own animation library to handle things like graceful entry and exit transitions (e.g. when an item is deleted, it asynchronously swipes or fades out of view). All of this was done in vanilla JS/CSS. The only external library we used was a sub-1000 line library for toasting messages in the UI. We heavily extended this library and, hopefully, improved upon the original design. We also wrote our own CSS utility library. It's bare bones but it is exactly what we need.

2) We considered Blazor but went with MVC instead. Better suited to our skill set and definitely a bit more optimized when compared to Blazor (at least it was when we started our project).

3) We are building an internal-facing financial management system. We are heavy handed with our security approach but we have the time and the budget to be. We are in a unique situation where we have a lot of time in which to complete our project, so we can be really careful about building what we need. Also, since our application is internal, we completely bypass common user issues like browser compatibility (everyone uses the same browser) and complicated server infrastructure (we have sub 200 employees). It's a pretty fun project tbh.

[0] - https://davidwalsh.name/fetch-timeout

This is almost exactly the direction my team has gone. We use the MS stack (.NET Core, EF Core, MVC, SQL Server 2019, VS2019), we have rolled our own auth and logging, and we have written our own JS and CSS libs to handle browser interaction, adornment of basic input/select controls, and styling.

While it seems like a lot of work, IMHO, the tradeoff of using an ecosystem with such a massive attack surface (NPM) is simply a pill we couldn't swallow. For those of us building systems that actually NEED to be secured, the "convenience" of using NPM isn't worth being kept up at night thinking about all the ways your app could be fubar'd.

Goodwillbooks.com had it for $11.50. As an aside, I really love that website. I am not too picky about the books I buy being in perfect condition, so it works out well for me. YMMV.

I worked for a telecomms/webcasting company for about 5 years as a product manager. I can tell you from personal experience that a significant portion of the Fortune 500 (if not all of them) required ISO 2700X certification to even be considered.

The certification burden increases in proportion to the level of PII you are storing. The burden was much higher for government or med/bio contracts (FedRAMP/HIPPA, etc.). It's also worth it to mention that we had whole teams dedicated to working through RFPs/RFCs as they can get VERY time consuming.

Bottom line is that if you are going to work with the big fish, you will probably need this level of certification to show them you are serious.

I feel you. My strategy of late has been to listen to a playlist of a genre I like but composed of artists I haven’t heard of on Spotify. I do this in the background while I am working. I heart the ones I like and add them to a special playlist and over time I’ve built up a few different playlists and expanded my inventory of tunes. Before being a programmer I was a studio musician and engineer and I swear I listen to more music now than ever.

Edit: incidentally, I totally agree with you about wishing there was a service that focused on mood/tempo more than anything. I’ve found that Spotify has been doing some of this type of aggregating and it’s not too bad. I’ve gotten a ton of good music from the Late Night Vibes playlist.

Cool link. Thanks for posting!

I’ll start out by saying I’m an avid fan of vapor/synth/whatever wave. I’ve heard this argument before and I can’t be the only one to think it’s silly, right? A cursory search of Spotify, Bandcamp, or YouTube will show that ALL the “wave” genres are alive and well some 5 years after this article was written. Some artists have moved on to other aesthetics, some artists have continued to produce the same sound they always did. How is this different from any other genre?

Incidentally here’s some sweet tunes! https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1APbMkLxJGgWT88wpKyCIA?si=...

As a side note, I just discovered another “wave” offshoot called “corporate businesswave”. What a time to be alive. https://open.spotify.com/user/blackscholescat/playlist/39pqs...

For those interested, below is a YT link to a long conversation with Marc Polymeropoulos [0], a survivor of a Havana Syndrome attack and a former CIA Senior Intelligence Service Officer. He describes the evening of his "attack" in detail. He also goes into great detail discussing his attempts to get help through various medical channels. Curiously, it appears as if most/all survivors have developed occipital neuralgia.

He also discusses the fact that apparently, after geofencing the area around the attacks, there is a known Russian agent in the proximity of the victim every time.

I take all of this with a grain of salt; I find it difficult to trust any intelligence agency without a healthy dose of skepticism, but quite interesting nonetheless.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5jTbsvd3rA

Wow, that article is something else. As an avid hiker/mountain biker, I cannot imagine going unprepared into the woods in the best of conditions, let alone in blizzard conditions. The fact that they only had a sleeping bag and an American flag to keep warm is so stupid it’s beyond belief.

All to plant an American flag on the top of a mountain. I truly hope the hiker didn’t actually lose any fingers or toes but I do hope they were made to reimburse SAR cost and fined for littering.

Avid mountain biker here. I like to ride outside 4-5 days a week in good weather when I can. I only own a mountain bike and had been looking all summer for a way to get hard core cardio during the winter months. Also, as a resident of the PNW, this year we experienced horrific fires, oppressive smoke, and awful air quality for a significant chunk of September. This meant no cycling.

Mountain bikes generally don't work too well with trainers so I started looking at spin bikes. I researched the Peloton and honestly, it's kind of a rip off. Huge upfront cost, limited classes for West Coasters (when I looked, anyway), and that pesky monthly fee. You are paying for brand exclusivity, IMO.

I ended up getting a Schwinn IC4 for < $1,000 and no monthly fee. I hook it up to Zwift and an iPad or my TV for structured riding. Overall, I'm very happy with my decision. I would still have preferred the Peloton's integrated screen but at literally twice the price of the IC4 (plus ongoing fees for classes if you choose to utilize them), I just couldn't justify it.

I am also in the Willamette Valley and was just thinking today about the thick fog and warmish temps we’ve been having.

Fog is definitely a part of life in fall and winter where I’m at, but having so much when the daytime temps hit 65-75deg is weird.

Super agree with this. I have a wife, twin 7 y/o boys, and an infant. I would so much rather not have to deal with the commute and office BS on a regular basis.

The time that I previously spent on commuting can now be redirected towards spending time with my family, straightening the house, doing yard work, getting groceries, working on personal projects, reading, exercising, etc.

Even with normally short commute, I find myself saving 1-1.5 hrs daily. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when your margin for time is already SO tight, it can make a big difference.

I was born into a charismatic Christian cult and escaped in my early 20s, left to pick up the pieces of a completely shattered world view. No one in my life, at that point, really understood the internal turmoil I was in. This piece in particular and, in general, all of the Demon Haunted World couldn't have come at a better time for me. It gave me the tools I needed to overcome a lot of the biases and crazy charismatic thought patterns that were established at a very early age. I will forever be indebted to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan for making my life a lot more bearable and for helping me out of the existential quagmire I was stuck in.

If the context is opaque to you then I would encourage you to read the articles and to read the other comments on this thread.

Looks as if he was asked to leave. No surprise given the terrible optics they've been under for the past year. NPM is such a vital tool and I really enjoy using it. I hope their next CEO makes better decisions in regards to the humans who work there. Good luck to all the NPM staff! I'm rooting for you!

From the Register...

"According to people familiar with the matter, Bogensberger was asked to leave by the company's board of directors." [0]

For more context...from Jonathan Cowperthwait, NPM's former vice president of marketing...

"Many of us spent the last year watching our friends and colleagues' struggle through our fingers, but I'm still profoundly confident in the company's ability to turn this around. Sometimes bad executives happen to a good company." [1]

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/20/npm_ceo_bryan_bogen...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/npm-ceo-bryan-bogensberger-r...

You mentioned quitting cannabis. If you don't mind elaborating, I'm curious what benefits you have experienced and why you ended up quitting. Thanks!

I just passed my two year anniversary with no FB, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat and I've never been happier. I convinced my wife to cut the cord about a year ago and she completely agrees. For me it was an addiction. I was compulsively checking FB many times an hour to stay caught up with people. This was after culling my friends list multiple times. Turns out, life goes on just fine without a constant water hose of relationship/political drama.

Ultimately, it is no more difficult to stay in touch with my real friends than it was with FB. I rely on text, phone calls, and emails. Occasionally, I will use LinkedIn to touch base with people, but primarily, I just text/call. And honestly, it's great.

I highly recommend cutting the cord.

Good post! Allow me to rebut your rebuttal.

> I've never had any major issues setting integration with Exchange up.

So, this might have been more on our centralized Exchange system. We were integrating D365 with on-prem Exchange. To be fair to us, this was a scenario that was known, documented, and totally within what MS said they could do. To be fair to MS, it's for sure more muddled than configuring online Exchange with D365. Totally open to the possibility that it was our environment that caused the issues as well.

> You do say that you were on Government Cloud so maybe that was the source of the issue, the extra limitations.

Yes, this was a constant headache. To be fair to Dynamics, there were a lot of advantages in the commercial cloud. However, I think my criticisms of the core platform still stand.

> Agreed, these things used to irritate the hell out of me as they seem to be so arbitrary. Although you also have limitations on Salesforce.

Yes, very true. But I can basically mold the admin screens however I want. I can hide/display cards, tabs, and widgets at will.

> Agreed, the old app was a nightmare and I've not tried the new. Hopefully you are referring to the latter.

Very sadly, I'm referring to the newest iteration. Which has significantly less features than the original Outlook app. That app was essentially almost all of Dynamics functionality in Outlook. The new app is significantly more stripped down.

> I'm pretty sure that this is a google search away, set DelayedEmailSendTime.

As a programmatic solution, yes, that would be the appropriate function. To be clear, I was comparing the flow builder in Dynamics to the flow builder in SFDC. My bad for not being as clear as I could.

> This is a fair criticism. I had a friend whose company landed a Dynamics CRM contract and they struggled to get started precisely because of this.

I'm pretty sure if MS improved this alone they would have a better market share!

> There is an SDK with APIs for C# and Typescript (Javascript) that abstracts this away.

Sadly I'm not a great C# programmer. Most of my skill lies in JavaScript. They offer an SDK for JS but it is really not great to use IMO. Anecdotally, most of the people I've talked with who have had success with Dynamics seem to be strong C# devs. Fair enough and not all that unexpected.

> There are so many tools/frameworks out there that this seems like very petty criticism.

Why should I have to use a framework or write a single line of custom code to push code into production for an expensive platform like Dynamics? I really don't think I should have to. I still stand by this criticism because it's unacceptable UX at the price point IMO.

SF provides this out of the box with relatively little setup headache. So in my mind, SF wins this argument hands down.

> MS is pushing powerApps so this is unlikely to change

Yes, their reps were pushing no code/low code hard. The difference with SF is that while they push no code/low code at conferences, they have a real dev tools for people who want more control. I don't feel like this is at all the case with Dynamics. Granted, I did just the one deployment.

Hope you are having success with Dynamics in general!

I've gotta push back politely here. If you are comparing marketing matrices between D365 and SFDC, then yes, on the surface D365 does "pretty much anything that Salesforce does". But you are missing one big factor: D365 costs half as much and there is a big fat reason for that. The D365 platform is very immature and feels like an afterthought at best.

I had the displeasure of running a D365 setup in a small government agency that took about a year to get off the ground. It was a living nightmare and I would never recommend D365 under any circumstance because of that experience. I'm tempted to say you would be better off using a free or homegrown CRM than choosing Dynamics.

A few lowlights (Disclosure: we were in the government cloud which is notoriously far behind the commercial cloud):

* Had to hire a PFE to set up the Exchange integration. This should be turnkey if you are in the same company's stack, IMO. Instead it took thousands of dollars and days of work by the PFE, our centralized Exchange admins, and myself.

* Little things like hiding the freaking nav bar cards are literally disallowed in Dynamics.

* The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a dumpster fire that didn't work at least half the time. Search queries returning no results, no useful error messages, and an overall appalling UX. It single-handedly killed adoption.

* I spent many hours trying to figure out how to send timed emails. That's because you have to use the advanced logic tools which are a nightmare. I was able to spin up the same timed email in SFDC in a matter of minutes. I truly wish this was an exaggeration but it's not.

* D365 documentation is utter garbage when compared to the SFDC Trailhead. The only option for getting off the ground for our technical staff was to pay for training through one of MS's sketchy vendors. It was overpriced (about $3k) and not at all great.

* The only way to programmatically interface with D365 APIs is through using the ancient SOAP API or their REST endpoint with OData syntax only.

* Oh BTW, if you were hoping for a modern development workflow, think again. You are going to be stuck manually uploading files into Dynamics for things like editing the internal interfaces of Dynamics. Oh and you have to register every single function against every single trigger, manually through a GUI.

* Their customer facing website options are a joke. I can create a fully fledged web app with complete control over the HTML/CSS/JS using the SFDC community, this is definitely not the case with Dynamics. You are limited to the point of only being able to choose layout templates with Dynamics. The last time I checked, you couldn't create your own.

* The development workflow with Dynamics is a joke. With SFDC I get a passable command line tool, multiple VS Code extensions, an easy deployment path, local development with Lightning Web Components, and many other developer tools. Good luck finding any of that with Dynamics.

The above probably could have been shortened to say the following: SFDC is dedicated to CRM while Dynamics is another in a long line of MS products and it feels like it.

I know there are problems with the SF platform, I feel them daily, but I don't think comparing the two is fair to D365.

I don't want to agree with you because it seems really craven, but I'm not sure I can disagree. Speaking only for my state, Oregon doesn't seem to have any interest in actually combating recidivism.

I completely understand the need to ban books like Black Hat Python but they also ban First Html5 Programming and Microsoft Excel 2016 For Dummies?

We do actually want to rehabilitate these folks and teach them valuable life skills right? How is banning books on HTML and Excel helpful? As a tax-paying Oregonian, this is a little baffling.