hnick

FWIW ritalin reduced my anxiety a fair bit. It changed my brain from one with multiple concurrent streams of thought, often negative and never truly going away, to focusing on the task at hand.

As a direct outcome it means I don't have bad thoughts and feelings sitting in the back of my mind when trying to do something else 24/7 so I'm generally more balanced. Indirectly, it was helped by actually getting stuff done and feeling less shit in general and not putting myself down as much for failing.

A study I glanced over a while ago said something like 40% of people respond to dex or ritalin, around 80% to either (I'm in this group but dex had more annoying side effects), and the last 20% to neither (but there is other stuff out there). So it's definitely worth trying both branches of the common meds first. You should also talk about dosages because there is titration period where they need to monitor and adjust to see how your specific body responds.

It can also use fonts which map glyphs via characters which do not represent the final visual item e.g. "PDF" could be "1#F" and you only really know what it looks like by rendering then viewing/OCR.

A nice file won't, but sometimes the best work is in not dealing with nice things.

I assume you mean open source or free, but just noting Acrobat Pro was almost there when I last used it years ago. The problem was you had it in reverse, browsing the content tree not inspecting the page, but it did highlight the object on the page. Not down to the command though, just the object/stream.

Which (as I'm sure you know), also literally has 'content' :)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/content

Even if the format is understood, it's also very much a case of Acrobat handling extremely badly formed PDFs instead of erroring out if it were strictly adhering. If you've ever seen a save prompt when making no changes, that happened.

"It works on Acrobat" was something we got told a lot from clients sending us PDFs that were broken according to the official spec - we just had to deal with it.

PDF was basically created as a final presentation format, it's essentially append-only by design, which is why you hear so often of redactions just marking up a white/black box over text.

You can edit text streams, which needs a decompress/recompress, messes up all the object reference offsets for the entire file, potentially adds or removes characters to the subset font, which may not be referenced by the glyphs but a number instead to intentionally break copy/paste/scrape (e.g. 'a' is not 'a' in the text stream, but a random number), etc. Assuming the text is even marked up as strings, and not individually positioned characters with nested offset co-ordinate scaling to further muddy the waters.

The fact so many people want to edit PDFs probably indicates a design flaw on Adobe's side, when considering what customers really want.

I can't find it right now but I recall seeing somewhere that around 40% of ADHD patients reported better effects on Ritalin (methylphenidate) or dexamphetamine roughly equally, another 40% says both are about as good as each other, and the final 20% don't find either very effective.

In my personal testing the Ritalin was much better, dexamphetamine was more up/down and shorter lived. However I didn't really get a crash or lethargy with either, it's just the focus wearing thin (and yes, the benefits were real and massive starting for the first time in my forties).

According to my psych, both have been around 70+ years and are fairly well understood. Longer term therapeutic doses shouldn't be habit forming and tolerance is minor after the initial phase, there's no withdrawal effects and it's easy to forget to take a dose if your routine changes. My morning coffee is far more demanding in that regard.

Ritalin was a game changer. After the initial adjustment it just feels like it brings me up to normal, I'm not particularly stimulated (in fact my lack of wandering mind makes it easier to doze during the day), I just prefer coding to games etc. It feels like it unlocks access to natural reward mechanisms instead of chasing artificial feel-good rewards. I can't even listen to a YouTube video while coding when using it, which was a normal activity for me since my brain felt bored and went off on its own without it.

Just mentioning because curiously it almost entirely put me off caffeine. I still enjoy my morning coffee as a ritual, but sometimes don't finish it. If I have another then the side effects are severe, Ritalin massively boosts those - nerves, jitters, hitting the toilet. Not terrible or dangerous, but just interesting, and honestly caffeine never did a whole lot for me mentally so it's no big loss.

From a skim it looks like the highest setting tested was 60°C which can kill, but wouldn't be considered sufficient in all cases for food safety for example.

My own washing machine is nothing special (front-loader Euromaid, whatever was cheap ~10 years ago) and you can manually bump to temperature up to 70/80/90°C for a cycle (which adds some time). I haven't measured it though to see how accurate it is and I'd imagine 90°C at least isn't great for those rubbery painted patterns or general clothing integrity either.

I started using the higher temperatures occasionally since I have some old t-shirts, but I always have to stop wearing them since the underarms develop a crust - I guess it's some kind of bio-reaction between me, my bacteria ride hitchers, and deodorant. Higher temps do seem to delay this build-up (which seems impossible to clean off), but does seem to reduce the life expectancy of the clothing. When I see people (mostly women) still wearing shirts they got in high school, it makes me a little envious. Mine got that issue in < 5 years before changing the wash temps :(

Search just seems bad in general in many applications. So many these days do not even support a verbatim (as in, find what I typed, exactly) search. They insist on ignoring certain characters, fuzzy matching, or treating everything as individual words and if it finds one it has done its job and earned a gold star.

I have a feeling it's based on tokenising the input rather than a string scan like we'd do in the old days. Harder to match a literal string if all you have is a tree of tokens or something, I guess.

Opengrok was the first time I ran into this years ago. We had a perl code base, perl syntax is well known as "an explosion in an ASCII factory", so it was a real pain trying to find exact text matches using it.

Yeah that makes sense, if they collaborate and share information. But more-so it avoids the case where a patch drops then people suddenly get banned - it's easier to match the exact version and what changed or is different compared to others on the market that avoided it, which I think they want to avoid most.

I think ultimately it's to avoid devoting too many resources to the arms race by breaking it up into sprints. Mass ban waves also make community impact and news, and in some cases for the regular players it refreshes the scene just for a bit by clearing the muck. They can time it to coincide with in-game events or updates too then (which often break cheats), giving a window for non-cheaters to enjoy.

The intent is usually to gather data then ban in waves. If a new tool comes out and you ban a couple of players the tool authors might figure out why and update it. Let it sit a while and you can get hundreds/thousands of players who get a message to rethink their choice to cheat.

An additional benefit is that this can include multiple cheat programs and versions in one ban wave, so it may be harder to narrow down exactly what the flaw was. That's the why for no warnings (or explanations) - false positives and recourse if mistakenly flagged is another matter entirely.

I think what you mean is what I wasn't sure about (but found with a quick search), some banks do offer home loan and insurance bundles here in AU. I found one that offered a discount on the insurance if you get the loan with them, for the life of the loan.

But legally, you are allowed to change insurers at any time. They would probably not be allowed to include that as a contract-breaker clause in the loan itself due to free-market-reasons, or force you to take only their insurance to have the loan (we tend to have a few laws about keeping conflicts of interest like this at arms length but I'm not sure about this case). But if insurance is legally required, I suppose they can ask for proof periodically after you leave to terminate the loan.

Some of the sites we work on are insurance based. We save every step of the calculation (inputs and outputs, e.g. rates and sub-totals). An administrative user can see the entire calculation from start to end, including overrides at various steps (e.g. a manual discount), and breakdowns per state or item insured if appropriate. This seems like the acceptable bare minimum to me, rather than just showing a magic number. And it definitely helps to expose bugs.

Yes from what I heard it would be very few users, definitely not the general public. Maybe academia, signage, marketing, historical/legal use, etc. It might be enough to simply plug the gap with occasional images instead of fonts. But CJK fonts often do apparently include Hanja.

I'm not Korean but my understanding is they do use the Chinese-derived script occasionally, for emphasis or to solve ambiguity, among other things. So some users will need access to that script too.

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

I liked perl's taint mode. It seemed pretty good against the "oops, forgot to sanitise this and you used it as output" situation that probably accounts for a lot of these issues. It won't force you to correctly sanitise, but assuming you have that capability it lets you know about gaps so you can plug them.

Can help routing induced latency as the other comment says (or force a new route if having downstream issues with your ISP peering), and some games in the past could leak IPs especially if using a p2p model and a VPN can mitigate that (especially one that only routes traffic for the game).

IIRC you also need one when playing from some countries, whether due to legal reasons or server restrictions.

I'm not sure if it qualifies as mixing logical levels but I once tracked down a printer bug where the PDF failed to print.

The culprit was an embedded TrueType font that had what (I think) was a strange but valid glyph name with a double forward slash instead of the typical single (IIRC whatever generated the PDF just named the glyphs after characters so /a, /b and then naturally // for slash). Either way it worked fine in most viewers and printers.

The larger scale production printer on the other hand, like many, converted to postscript in the processor as one of its steps. A // is for an immediately evaluated name in postscript so when it came through unchanged, parsing this crashed the printer.

So we have a font, in a PDF, which got turned into Postscript, by software, on a certain machine which presumably advertised printing PDF but does it by converting to PS behind the scenes.

A lot of layers there and different people working on their own piece of the puzzle should have been 'encapsulated' from the others but it leaked.

Yes I live here and it seems quite successful. Most smokers I see now in my area (not counting vapes) are foreign Asian students who didn't grow up with it.

I don't think it'd work well online for similar reasons, the internet is global, it would just disadvantage local companies for no real gain due to our population. It would have to be a concerted global effort. I think there is quite a bit of overlap with accessibility too (simple and quiet is easier to parse for computers and humans than confusing noise), so maybe a push in that direction.

I had a small laugh when I read your comment and imagined legislation for fighting attention-grabbing sites, requiring them to all look like this site.

Want to see an image? Follow a link, sir. It is far too distracting to have it simply be there, between the words, enticing us.

Yeah they really do vary a lot. Something I did not appreciate until getting my first as an adult (as a child, I had no positive feelings towards dogs which I find sad now).

I have heard trainers who suggest meal time is meal time, the food is taken if it is not eaten, it's not a self-serve grazing buffet. I think part of it is about making it clear who is in charge, especially if a dog is not listening during training, but there are other reasons I forget like resource guarding and predictable toileting. But we all decide how much we let them express their personalities :)

A rule of thumb we were taught is half the food comes from training (not to the point of cruelty, adjust the training to be easier if needed so they get enough). You can adjust per dog, but many people treat training rewards as "treats" which are surplus to their needs, so greedy or food-loving dogs (I would be one, as is our first dog) will take it but others won't care.

High stress or emotional arousal or a distracting environment will supersede this but it's a decent starting point which people often miss. Luckily our second dog likes play and praise so that gives us more options.

Too many don't actually verify the identity. I often get emails lying in the footer with something like "you are receiving these emails because you signed up" - no I didn't, someone else did, and you didn't check. But fast onboarding is king, right?

And then the unsubscribe, close account, or basic support is all locked behind the login, or it's an international phone call. As far as I know, even if it's my email it's not legally my account so signing in would be illegal.

We offered it on a site with a "guest login" where people redeem vouchers but might not want to make an account. So I think that's one valid use case. We need to associate the voucher with the email, so we need to ensure they own it by clicking the link, in case of support hassles down the line for lost vouchers. And if they make the account later they can see their old ones from before.

Multiple newer parents I've met (in Australia) have practiced complete avoidance of such serious potential allergens. The idea seems to be that a very young child may have a reaction, but not be able to tell you and just cry or go red - as per usual at that age, so you probably don't realise it's serious until it's too late.

They gradually introduce these foods later. Maybe too late, if the idea of early exposure is accurate, but it's very much a case of "can't be too safe" when I asked them.

I've heard of the "technically illegal" thing and find it odd, is that actually true? Over here in Australia I think they just decided it was easier to make them all illegal too, with the schedule saying things like "TETRAHYDROCANNABINOLS and their alkyl homologues" as a catch-all.

Applies to other things like music too. Sometimes people are ahead of their time and most people can't digest it.

I might have misunderstood. I took it to mean that engineers would be responsible for all code they write - the same as another engineer may be liable for any bridge they build - which would mean the common "as is", "no warranty", "not fit for any purpose" cute clauses common to OSS would no longer apply as this is clearly skirting around the fact that you made a tool to do a specific thing, and harming your computer isn't the intended outcome.

You can already enforce responsibility via contract but sure, some kind of licensing board that can revoke a license so you can no longer practice as a SWE would help with pushback against client/employer pressure. In a global market though it may be difficult to present this as a positive compared to overseas resources once they get fed up with it. It would probably need either regulation, or the private equivalent - insurance companies finding a real, quantifiable risk to apply to premiums.