jsjohns2

It always strikes me how much commonality exists across different software engineering disciplines—not to mention across fields outside of engineering (e.g., how double-entry bookkeeping mirrors immutable design principles, or how federalism resembles class-based OOP).

Great to see an attempt at describing this phenomenon. A great start to what will surely be an awesome resource.

To those bashing the author as uninformed -- this is George V. Neville-Neil. Member of FreeBSD Core Team who wrote the book on FreeBSD. He might know a thing or two about POSIX! [1]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operati...

> In arbitration, this doesn't work. It's a vastly more even playing field for consumers, who tend to have less money than the companies they're suing and less downside in the case outcome (money damages versus e.g. having been sexually harassed).

I dunno, not my personal experience. I took a large bank to arbitration over a low value credit reporting dispute. Offered to "settle" several times for nothing more than a fix to my credit report, which would have cost the bank $0.

The bank refused and so we went all the way to a final judgement.

The arbitration dragged out over 16 months. 4 days of hearings in which multiple attorneys and witnesses were present on the bank's side. Numerous conference calls, 800 emails, 250 pages of legal briefs, 1000+ pages of exhibits, discovery, etc. I would not be surprised if the total outlay eclipsed half a million for them.

Lest anyone come away from this thinking that arbitration is good for the consumer, this story only has a happy ending because the business chose to settle.

I also took a corporation to arbitration. A Big 4 bank destroyed my credit over a billing mistake that was their fault, relating to a credit card account with a $230 balance. Despite seeking nothing more than to have my credit fixed, the bank refused to settle. I contacted upwards of 100 attorneys with no luck, so decided to self-represent.

16 months, 25 hours under oath, and over 2,000 hours later, I "won" a judgement forcing the bank to fix my credit -- but no monetary recovery at all.

I suspect that there is a strong non-linear effect, i.e., introducing novel drugs into a state with very cheap housing does not move the needle that much on homelessness (WV) but is catastrophic when done in a city with expensive housing (LA).

We should address the housing problem. We should also address the drug problem.

Jake, I get the argument. Fifty years of bad housing policy have yielded high housing prices today, high housing prices leads to homelessness, and homelessness leads to drug abuse. Fixing housing policy now will lead to lower housing prices, homelessness, and drug abuse in the future.

So we should fix housing policy. Ok.

That seems very reasonable and logical, except that no one seems to know how to actually make housing policy changes happen. You write a (interesting and informative) blog post about Proposition HHH, Matt Yglesias writes a blog post about 1950s boarding houses, PhDs at Zillow churn out peer-reviewed papers, and LA voters even throw $1,200,000,000 at Proposition HHH -- and yet the problem gets worse and worse.

You write that the "homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform". Well, what if zoning reform is also intractable?

Focusing exclusively on fixing housing policy, which appears to be intractable for the foreseeable future, is a mistake. We should be focusing on drug abuse as well, which is a very serious problem in LA.

Comparing the number of available beds with the number of unsheltered homeless people does not disprove parent's argument that there is a bed for everyone who wants a bed.

A better question would be -- what the average shelter utilization?

Comparing LA and WV is like comparing apples and oranges. At least those are both fruits.

Those locales differ on much more than just housing costs.

If you are naïve enough to think that we will simply build our way out of the homelessness crisis, I encourage you to book a flight to Los Angeles and strike up a conversation with any first responder. They will all tell you the same story -- the homeless are nearly all on Methamphetamine and/or Fentanyl.

Yes, rent prices have increased over the last decade. But the affordability, purity, availability, and use of those very destructive drugs have also increased over the same time period.

The chart that I would be interested in seeing is are those elements plotted against homelessness rate. I suspect that the correlation coefficient between per-capita meth use and homelessness rate would be ~1.

You may have a circadian rhythm disorder, e.g., delayed sleep-wake phase disorder (DSWPD) [1]. It is rare in the general population (<1%) but my intuition is that software engineers are overrepresented. Irrespective of whether you do, there are likely concomitant behavioral issues that are exacerbating the issue.

I struggled with sleep for years. I had difficulty falling asleep before 2am or so, difficulty getting out of bed, and any multi-day period without obligations (e.g. holiday) inevitably resulted in my bedtime shifting by an hour or more each consecutive night. Tried everything. Described symptoms to several somnologists, primary care doctors, psychiatrist, psychologist, etc. Last couple of years I saw improvement. What helped was:

- 0.5mg melatonin 7 hours before bedtime [2] [3]

- Do a CBT-I program with a psychologist

---

Taking melatonin near bedtime did absolutely nothing for me. Taking melatonin at 5pm was magic. Symptoms that had persisted for years evaporated within two weeks.

CBT-I is very effective for behavioral issues but it's not magic. It is expensive and take a lot of time and effort. Don't use a self-directed app or book. Find a psychologist who specializes in CBT-I. Insurance may not cover it. It will require a couple of months of effort and cost $2,000 or so. It is worth every penny.

Everyone knows that light can affect your circadian rhythm, but body temperature can as well. Cold = sleep, warmth = wake. Consider investing in something that can increase temperature in the AM. Might be as simple as a space heater on a timed outlet. Might be as sophisticated as an Eight Sleep mattress.

[1]: https://www.uptodate.com/contents/delayed-sleep-wake-phase-d...

[2]: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/

[3]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

> I’m not sure what you are getting at?

There is one general characterization of a homeless person who has severe mental illness or is in the throes of addiction. There is another of a person who is simply down on his luck. He sleeps in his car on a side street at night, showers at the local YMCA, and takes the bus to his minimum wage job. If housing was cheaper, or if government assistance better, then he could afford a small apartment.

I agree that the latter exist and I think you would agree that the former exists. The data suggests that the majority of the population falls into the latter camp.

What I'm getting at is -- we should treat the data with more skepticism. It doesn't match what I see with my own eyes. Something is off. Either my eyes are grossly deceiving me or it's just wrong. Yes, I'm more likely to overestimate the number in the former camp than underestimate -- but it's just overwhelming. The ratio seems like it's 100:1 not 7:3 or something. They can't be that good at blending into society.

> Being in a tent doesn’t mean someone is mentally ill or using hard drugs.

My intuition is that there is a very tight correlation between the two. It seems almost tautological to me that someone who chooses* to live in filth in a tent on a median or under an overpass is mentally ill. Maybe I'm wrong.

* "Chooses", not in the sense that they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job, but in the sense that -- why don't they put up their tent in a cleaner less densely populated part of town and take a free bus ride into town?

If this isn’t a problem in need of an immediate solution, then what is? Those people need help today, not if/when LA figures out how to fix fifty years of housing stock mismanagement. I would be surprised if the old woman in the sand is alive in five years.

And what about the vagrant trying to break into my apartment complex last week? The other one with a sharp object who got arrested in my neighbor’s backyard a couple of weeks ago? The young guy in my old neighborhood who was stabbed to death in his backyard by a different vagrant? The man passed out snoring right outside my girlfriend’s front doorstep?

Well, where is this invisible majority hiding?

No RVs at all in Santa Monica, limited parking in general, close to zero tents, a limited number of parks, and no forests. The city proper is filled with tent encampments but is otherwise not that much different.

But how does this solve the immediate problem of psychotic people roaming my neighborhood?

> Edit to add: before someone mentions "mental illness" and "drugs" and other contributors to homelessness, yes those are real factors: that said, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed.

I live in Santa Monica, CA. The notion that mental illness and drugs are not the primary contributors to homelessness runs totally counter to common sense and my lived experience.

Today, on 4th & Pacific, there was a man passed out asleep on a the median in broad daylight. No tent. Just splayed out baking in the sun. Earlier this week, I saw a man stop by each trash can along the Venice boardwalk to dig through and pick out half-eaten fast food. Eyes rolled back. An emaciated old woman passed out in the sand in a fetal position. A man using a power drill on the air and muttering to himself.

These people are not on the margins. They are never bouncing back. Homes could be $0 and they would still be on the streets. And they are the rule not the exception.

Meth is dirt cheap, widely available in Los Angeles, and it induces psychosis. Isn't it obvious that's the issue?

This is a flawed comparison. GraphQL is probably a superior query language. The more salient question is how the complexity of back-end API endpoint implementation differs.

The answer is that it varies widely between ecosystems (i.e. you are going to have a totally different experience developing a GraphQL endpoint in PostGraphile, Graphene, and Apollo)...and the paper doesn't mention which back-end technology was used.

Also an excellent read on the subject: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

> For a while, Bitcoin was used for transactions that people wanted to keep secret from government authorities, like drug deals. It soon became apparent, however, that if authorities wanted to track these transactions, they could. For instance, Silk Road, the first major online drug market, which made use of Bitcoin, was shut down by the F.B.I. in 2013.

This is pretty weak reasoning from one of the "top 5% economists in the world". The Silk Road shutdown was (reportedly) the result of poor OPSEC on the part of Ulbricht and has nothing to do with the anonymity characteristics of Bitcoin.

Soylent is great, but you should check out Joylent if you get a chance. Similar nutritional profile to Soylent, but cheaper, better tasting, and cooler branding.

I've been getting 90% of my calories from Joylent for about 5 months.

Yes! Many people seem to miss this for whatever reason. There is no risk-free choice if you are unlucky enough to have poor eyesight.

Personal anecdote: I have a retinal scar from an eye infection that was a direct result of wearing contacts. The $2K I spent on LASIK in my early twenties was the best money I've ever spent.

I did a good amount of research and came to the conclusion that the expected value of LASIK outweighed that of contacts over a lifetime. To simplify things a bit, you are trading a one-time risk of a serious post-surgery complication for a risk of a contact-caused eye infection spread out over the remaining years of your life.

Sure, some actions are more harmful than others. Killing a person is worse than imprisoning them indefinitely.

But the degree to which it is worse (and whether it is enough to ban the death penalty) seems quite subjective.

Seems to me that you could use an identical line of reasoning to conclude that prison sentences longer than N years should be banned.

Is it a matter of degree? Or is there something fundamentally different about the death penalty that warrants a ban?

The lack of an "undo" button is not exclusive to the death penalty, many serious forms of punishment are irreversible.

Why, in your view, is it much worse for the state to jail an innocent person for a long time (say, their entire adult life) instead of killing them?

> The OP specifically mentioned "immune" and "metabolic" dysfunction, not symptoms.

Fair enough.

> The symptoms, abnormalities, triggers and cures match perfectly with what you would expect from exhaustion due to chronic stress.

Based on your research, what are the cures for "chronic stress"? The treatments discussed in the PACE paper (CBT, GET, etc.)? I'm genuinely interested -- my sister was diagnosed with CFS over a year ago and has made little progress since then.

> - there is no "unique and consistent to ME/CFS sufferers" dysfunction, except perhaps in HPA axis (the main stress system) responsiveness (but even this is somewhat up for debate).

This is at odds with the current scientific consensus. Table 1 of "Myalgic encephalomyelitis: International Consensus Criteria" (2011) describes one primary dysfunction (postexertional neuroimmune exhaustion) and several secondary dysfunctions [1].

Furthermore, post-exertional malaise, which is similar to postexertional neuroimmune exhaustion, has been described as a "hallmark" symptom of ME/CFS at least as far back as 2007 [2].

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2796.2011....

[2] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J092v14n02_07

> Do you think any of the firmware in your system comes from your OEM and is secure?

No, of course not. But I'm surprised that Lenovo would tacitly admit this.

Quite the hilarious "security advisory" [0] that Lenovo put out. They manage to take zero responsibility, shift blame to the researcher/IBV/Intel, and admit that they ship SMM code of both unknown author and purpose.

[0] https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/LEN-8324

I'm really skeptical of the "honesty is the best policy" lesson being taught here. The reality is that being dishonest (on a resume or otherwise) can be very advantageous. Why else would people lie?

Be honest because you believe it's the moral thing to do, not because you expect to be rewarded for it.

Selection bias much? It's very common in the South.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/darwin-birthday-believe-ev...

The best part is the blog's un-resizable 425px column of text, containing 150+ character shell commands.