dimal

Somehow, I think that using a bureaucracy to fix this bureaucratic tendency won’t solve it. Not that it’s not well-intentioned, but at some point we need to expect that individual humans to behave ethically, or else we’re doomed. Over and over, we try to fix society by adding more and more bureaucracy and the situation only gets worse.

Wikipedia isn’t the cesspool that X is, but yeah, it’s not as reliable as many people think it is.

A screenshot on X? It must be true! I’m sure those links back up the assertion. No one would just post something misleading on X, right? /s

Maybe the assertion in the tweet is true and maybe it isn’t, but to me, this is the real reason that X should be abandoned. No one on X can be trusted to engage in honest discourse. I don’t believe anything, whether it’s coming from the right or the left if it’s posted on X. You might as well have posted something from 4Chan.

What I described was a specific health issue which was relieved by dancing. This indicates to me that this kind of movement is biologically essential, not just a passion. Dancing also improves mood. Depression is rampant in our society. People have solved it with SSRIs, but exercise and movement are very effective also. Again, that’s more evidence that humans need to move, and dancing is what our programming seems to want us to do.

I’m 53 and use LLMs all the time. I admit I think my pre-LLM process was different than many people. I’d create the first version that barely works, then spend a lot of time refining and refactoring, simplifying things, bit by bit.

I get the sense that many developers only like the first part where you get things working and they don’t like re-factoring and refining. LLMS often allow me to get the basic implementation done much quicker, leaving me more time for simplifying, which is the part I enjoy.

I tried navigating to youtube-nocookie.com and got an http cert error, so that doesn't seem like an option.

The support page you linked to talks about "Privacy Enhanced Mode". The language there does not sound like it really protects privacy.

> The Privacy Enhanced Mode of the YouTube embedded player prevents the use of views of embedded YouTube content from influencing the viewer’s browsing experience on YouTube.

So they're not promising not to track users. They're saying they won't use their tracking to personalize anything.

> Dance wasn’t critical.

Says you. For me it is. I suspect for many others it is. I have restless legs syndrome. It’s a neurological disorder that makes your legs and feet feel like they have to move. A lot of people have it. Doctors prescribe drugs for it. What actually helps me? Dancing. This is just one of many good effects I get from dancing. My legs and body need to move. I’m not a good dancer. I look like an idiot. But I absolutely have to dance.

It is capitalism, and I think this is inherent in all stages of capitalism. The goal of any corporation is to maximize profit, period. In earlier forms, monopolists and oligarchs may have used different levers of power, but it’s all ultimately the same thing. Use whatever means are available to make profit.

That sounds like a typically glib and dismissive comment made without really trying to understand the situation.

Until relatively recently, I never thought of myself as disabled, but in the past year I found this model helpful in understanding how I’m excluded from many parts of society because I’m autistic, and autistic needs are never considered. In reality, there’s nothing wrong with me, but many aspects of society are incompatible with me.

Lucky you, that you don’t have this problem!

Off topic but I love the YouTube player interface. Instead of loading it by default (and adding invasive Google tracking to the page), you get the option to opt in. Very nice.

> She started getting frustrated, “it’s my fault, I don’t know how to use this thing properly.”

This is heartbreaking. The woman is being excluded through no fault of her own, and she blames herself. I find this to be a common for people who don’t think of themselves as disabled but are made disabled by bad interfaces. They think there must be something wrong with themselves because everyone else has such an easy time, when really it’s the technology.

I’m autistic and find that well crafted typography helps me to read things more easily with less distraction. It’s not just dyslexics who might struggle with bad typography. I also know some ADHD people with similar issues to me. And 20% of the population is highly sensitive. I’m not saying it would matter for all of them, but for some, it surely does.

Whether this tool makes it “better” is another question. I tend to think there are general rules for “better” typography but when you get to the details, it depends on the individual and how they perceive and process information. One friend who is ADHD likes very cramped text which looks jumbled and messy to me, making it difficult to pick out individual letters. If the before case looks better for you, that’s a valid criticism.

Holding up Florida and Los Angeles as models for development doesn’t seem like a good argument to me. No thanks.

I think I understand the argument but this sounds like it would make things worse. The argument that new features almost always make the language worse doesn’t hold true from my perspective as a developer. (I could imagine the perspective of a language implementor being very different.)

I like that JavaScript now has modules/imports, destructuring, Proxies, async/await, etc. These were all new features at one point, But yeah, why did Symbol.species get in? Seems like it’s to enable some odd subclassing pattern? I’m an anti-OOP zealot, so my hot take would be that maybe OOP subclassing is unnecessarily complex already, so stuff like that shouldn’t make it in. We got the OOP syntactic sugar, which is enough. Stop there.

How much of the extra complexity is from stuff like that that is rarely used? Maybe we just need to be a lot more conservative about what makes it in, but stopping changes and forcing everything into more tooling complexity is not the direction I’d like to go in. We need to reduce tooling, not increase it.

Honest question, why is breaking news important? How exactly does knowing unsubstantiated details about an event immediately male one’s life better?

Off topic but why do product blogs always exist on a separate domain, with no link to the product website? I never heard of GitButler. Reading this is making me curious about it. But the home link in the top left goes to the blog home. If I want to actually see the product, I have to manually edit the url, on my iPad. Why does everyone do this? Seems obvious to have a link to the main site. /rant

A lot of hate in the comments but I’m excited for this. I don’t think I’d ever inflict it on teammates, but this looks like a much nicer way to use functional idioms without making the jump to something like PureScript. I’ll definitely try this for personal projects.

The quote I provided was from the article. I’ve read the whole thing and I’m still parsing it (and your statement about both being fed shitty diets) as going against your original assertion: “Studies of caloric restriction in monkeys didn’t cause lifespan extension, casting doubt on its effect in humans.”

According to Attia, the studies weren’t specifically studying life extension, and all the diets were non-typical for the monkeys being studied. So, to me, this argues not that caloric restriction doesn’t cause lifespan extension in monkeys, but that we cannot know from these studies whether caloric restriction with a healthy diet causes lifespan extension in monkeys, which is what we really want to know. I wouldn’t expect to extend lifespan by eating hamburgers and fries but less of them, and that seems analogous to what the studies did.

To me, this simply leaves the question of caloric restriction in humans unanswered instead of casting doubt on it. Big difference.

Are you reading that right?

> The investigators were comparing median survival between the CR and control (CON) groups, not longevity or lifespan per se.

As I read that, it wasn’t that the study showed that caloric restriction didn’t extent lifespan. It’s that they weren’t investigating the effect of caloric restriction on lifespan, so no conclusions can be made from the study.

And psychiatric drugs don’t ever make things worse? As someone who was severely injured by FDA approved, scientifically validated medications, I’d say some healthy distrust of a corporate-captured bureaucracy is warranted. Remember, OxyContin was FDA approved. Did the FDA ever launch an investigation into how they allowed that disaster to happen? No. They didn’t so much as say “whoops”.

> we do not know, really, what goes on in there when you take a drug like Psilocybin

FYI, same goes for SSRIs. The scientific consensus is that the serotonin deficiency theory of depression was wrong. When SSRIs actually work, we still don’t know why.

I’ve had bad trips, too. Very bad, but I still think that psilocybin (in a controlled, supportive setting) is a better bet. My bad trips were all due to being in bad settings and being completely unprepared for what could go wrong. I was young and dumb and just fucking around. But tripping in positive supportive settings was incredibly helpful. And if we do find a way to do this right, then people don’t have to take drugs for the rest of their lives. Psychiatric drugs are generally lifelong sentences, and negative side effects tend to compound over time, which often leads to polypharmacy, and more side effects.

I was at the T-Mobile internet trucks in Asheville and the woman next to me was obviously stuck in some automated voice menu hell — you know when some one is sitting on the phone quietly listening to whatever the question “What can I help you with?” and then answering with one clear word. I saw her sitting there like that waiting, then respond clearly, “Disaster!” I’m going to guess the system didn’t have a way of handling that answer.

Yeah, this looks like the tutorial I needed. Thanks.

How did you find learning Effect? The sales pitch sounds great, but when I went through the docs it seemed pretty confusing to me. I’m sure there are reasons for the everything but I couldn’t grok it. In particular, I’m thinking of the Express integration example.[0] I look at that and think, I need all that just to create a server and a route? What’s the benefit there? I’m hesitant to buy into the ecosystem after looking at that. I want to like it, though.

[0] https://effect.website/docs/integrations/express

Ah, yeah. I was wondering how it could work without an antenna. I guess an FM antenna needs to be larger than the 5G antenna built into phones too.

Yeah, I should have posted that. This is the one I use the most:

https://text.bpr.org/

I forgot to save the links to the others.

What I want is for every smartphone to have an FM radio built in. There are FM radio IC chips available, and apparently some Android phones have them. It seems like a reasonable thing to require smartphones to have them for emergencies. I had to run my car in the beginning, burning precious gas just to hear on the radio what the hell was actually happening.

We’re dealing with this big time in Asheville now. When cell service came back at all, everyone had shitty intermittent 3G, and none of the websites we needed for basic survival information would load. A bunch of good people created some text only news sites, and today I noticed that the Buncombe county website finally has a low bandwidth site, but even then when I inspected it, it had 130k of bootstrap css and 50k of jQuery blocking rendering. It’s great that people are doing this work, but citizens needed this a week and a half ago. By now, I’ve figured out where to get water, food, non potable water, etc. Seeing tech fail so badly through all this has been eye opening for me, in a depressing way.

Yes, that’s possible with StoryBook. It’s one of the tiny buttons on the top right, I think.

I can understand that POV and would love to be able to do that, but as a neurodivergent person, I could never live that way. The default settings for the world are generally intolerable to me. I customize absolutely everything in my life. Without that, I’d be a jibbering wreck 99% of the time. If I have to forgo pair programming to function optimally the rest of the time, I’ll take that deal.

I would love simpler configs though. In my view, technology should adapt to humans, not the other way around. The problem isn’t that things are too configurable. The problem is that configuration is too difficult.