kortex

> I love public transit but I don't know how to make everyone else love it

By solving the following problems:

- Waiting in the bitter cold / snow, or baking in the sun

- Allow me to transport medium/large size dogs (most restrict animals to being in crates that can fit on a lap), without being a bother to other riders (good luck)

- Reasonable wait times. Even better, do it regardless of time of day

I love my car. I've been in public transit in 5 states and 5 countries, and I'm always whelmed at best. It suffices on a good day.

Citation needed. The best source I could find (in 30s) suggests the WHO neither recommends no discourages drinking distilled water.

https://svalbardi.com/blogs/water/distilled-safety

A casual application of math to the concentrations of minerals in tap water would show you that simply eating vegetables would provide much more in the way of minerals (namely calcium and magnesium). If you drink 2L of 60mg/L Ca and 25mg/L Mg, that's only 12% daily value.

"Unsafe to drink DI water" is a myth. If your diet is that marginal that +/-12% matters, take a supplement.

We need to move away from the term "monopoly" (which may not literally be a mono) and towards anti-competitive.

In my opinion, MacOS is just a nicer experience on the whole than (Ubuntu or Red Hat) Linux (I have limited experience with other distros, but they are all pretty comparable to the big distros at best.

I only ever really had one goofy driver/deep OS bug in Mac - something with the location daemon would cause the wireless internet connection to cut out repeatedly. That bug was left behind with that machine when I left that company, and didn't appear in my next macbook pro.

Linux is just always a struggle with drivers, subtle bugs, and other misc friction. It's not a dealbreaker - ubuntu 22.04 is still my daily driver, but it's very much enough that I would prefer a mac for most development.

For example, if I run a software update, it quietly breaks the fn keys to change screen brightness, and when the machine wakes from sleep, the screen stays black. I figured out after much trial that running ubuntu-drivers fixes it, but it's a pain. I'd rather just turn off auto-updates.

Also the Command key for keyboard shortcuts is brilliant and just works across the whole system. On linux I have to use ctrl-shift to copy/paste and I haven't found a good workaround yet.

I go into more detail downthread, but my take is just like the Prison experiment, the takeaway isn't "humans are terrible", rather "humans will do what is expected of them".

Even if the audience didn't know about her and her whole schtick being risky performance art, the table, the items, and the directions set up an expectation of "risky shit is gonna go down". The real question is how far the audience is willing to go in terms of inflicting risk.

As a performance artist myself, I think there is definitely an aspect of "the audience should hurt me a little bit, or at the very least threaten harm". Why are people fascinated with fire breathers, motorcycle jumpers, escape artists, etc? It's the thrill of risk.

Even without knowledge of her or her works, there's a lot of context that says "the risk is the point".

By putting harmful items out on the table, she made a deliberate choice for risk to be involved. The audience knows this. They know if she wanted a "safe" performance, she would have limited her selection. If the worst items were glue and feathers, the implied worse outcome is making her look like a chicken. Embarrassing, but not a huge harm. She put out a gun and a bullet. That implies (but does not outright verbatim say) that the sky is the limit - shooting me is an acceptable outcome.

That establishes the conceptual limit, but there are still societal shackles on behavior. Which is where "it's all about the risk" comes in. More risk = more sensational news, more notoriety for the artist. Clearly she wants something crazy to happen, else she would not put herself in a crazy position. So the audience starts pushing the limits of what is acceptable. I don't think they are harming her out of a direct desire to cause her harm, per se (might be some sadists in the audience), but there is an expectation that the risk level should ratchet up. But that ratchet doesn't occur without audience participation.

I think this perspective actually tempers the "this piece shows all humans are terrible sadists deep down" interpretation. Just like the Milgram experiments, it boils down to the general principle of humans tending to do the thing they think is expected of them.

Maybe if the exogenous medical system didn't suck so bad, there would be less need to self-medicate.

Also, "self-medicate" is such a disparaging term. Humans have been medicating outside of a clinical context for approximately 99% of our existence as Homo sapiens. I'm pretty sure my cat is "self-medicating" when she can't get a hairball up on her own and so she eats some lawn grass and yakks (usually on my couch).

> if we just all take MDMA the increasingly fractured world will somehow re-unite.

Seems like a strawman. No one (except for maybe that one spunyun wook at the festival whose life and identity revolves around entheogens and entactogens) is seriously suggesting we all just have to take some Soma and sing kumbaya. These are useful tools, which need to be applied in the right context (not specifically clinical, maybe Burning Man is the right context) to be efficacious.

> It's as my old pappy used to say, you can't fix problems with more MDMA that wasn't created by a lack of MDMA.

Again, weird strawman. That's like saying you can't fix asthma with albuterol/budesonide because it wasn't created by an albuterol or budesonide deficiency. Dents in a car aren't caused by a lack of dent-pullers. Quite often the solution is not the exact inverse of the cause. Lateral problem solving is key.

> That's because having similar names does not make them similar in any way.

Well yes, but actually no. Right answer, but the work to get there is a little off.

MDMA is MethyleneDioxy MethAmphetamine. And MethAMPhetAmine is n-methyl alpha-methyl phenethylamine (chemists love portmanteaus). So it's literally a methamphetamine core with a methylenedioxy bridge. That structural similarity gives MDMA some similarity in activity to MA, which itself works due to its similarly to dopamine and epinephrine.

Structural similarities give you a good guess but you really have to test the binding affinities on their own. There are substituted phenethylamines which have barely any activity.

MA itself has found therapeutic uses in treating ADHD and narcolepsy. Side note: this is why NO drug should ever be "Schedule I - no medical uses". How can you ever predict a lack of future medical uses? Cannabis, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ibogaine, these have all found therapeutic uses, yet are sched I.

> but like any powerful drug why would I not suspect something that floods your brain with serotonin would not end up in a situation where your brain anticipates the drug and creates an dependency situation where your brain does not produce serotonin in normal levels without it?

Because this is such an incredible oversimplification of what goes on in the brain. SSRIs also dramatically increase the overall serotonin flux, to the point where if you quit suddenly, the brain is left in a deficit, the effects of which can be quite unpleasant. And contrary to the "serotonin is happy chemical, more serotonin = more better" myth, the net result of all this serotonin is that 5-HT receptors actually downregulate. Ultimately, the result of all these changes is an increase in neuroplasticity.

Blasting 5-HT receptors (eg by LSD, psilocin, etc, and to an extent MDMA) is also shown to increase neuroplasticity.

Neurotoxicity and psychopharmacology are extremely complicated. It's beyond reductionist to say "drug floods brain ergo bad".

Enlightening article. Indeed, the high comorbidity of substance abuse disorders with other developmental, behavioral, and/or executive function disorders, suggests that a lot of it stems directly from untreated congenital conditions. Often the lack of treatment and exacerbation of the condition stem directly from socioeconomic conditions.

In other worlds, well-adjusted people with support networks rarely "get addicted" to drugs (as if they are some sort of cursed potion that anyone who consumes is afflicted).

> You’re not fungible and never were

Sure as heck doesn't feel that way. And that's as a software developer with multiple college degrees and a decade of experience. The neurodivergence means I've always had to mask and be on guard and push well beyond my limits into physical/mental damage, because the fear of losing employment is ever-present. Feels pretty commoditized.

> and anyone who tries to make you believe that deserves the utmost vehement pushback.

The faceless corporations and their boards of investors who value "line go up" over basically every other metric of human wellbeing? Yes, they absolutely deserve pushback, but it's not easy (open source COTS guillotine plans, anyone?).

> Produce value for others, get paid

So if a human is unable to produce value, they don't get (food/education/heathcare/<resource>)? That seems to be the implication. We in developed countries already have some amount of "value risk hedging" (I'm loathe to say "socialism" here), we just disagree endlessly how much is the optimal amount. But we've determined that wards of the state, universal education, and some amount of food support for the poor is the absolute bare minimum for a developed society.

> People, NOT machines, are the ultimate judgers of what is valuable and the ultimate producers of value.

Uhhh we already have software which sifts through resumes to allow/reject candidates, before it gets to any kind of human judge, so we are already gating value assessments.

Context for the unaware: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna_(novel)

No, but I imagine it's a bit easier to catch an unwanted proliferation of files vs unwanted proliferation of registry keys.

> I think if someone went off and redesigned a global KV store for an OS they'd probably require authentication tokens for mutations, so your app would only be able to communicate with the subtrees of the store that it has permissions to (but also, kind of like a file system?)

If I had to design an OS from scratch, this is basically what I would do. I'd provide an API for a prefix-tree based KV store with specific data types (eg bytes, utf-8 string, bool, int, float, datetime...) with some mechanism for namespaces and path access controls or the like. Processes would always have their own space to use ad-lib, and would have controlled access to system-wide or cross-process spaces.

This sort of implementation lets you optimize access patterns so that basically each process gets its own KV/db (if it wishes) which should be roughly as performant as rolling its own kv running on the filesystem. Vs all processes all competing for the same data structure, all the time.

No, because the filesystem is one layer of abstraction lower than the registry. There's nothing with less bottleneck to the filesystem besides raw device access. The registry runs on top of the filesystem. If you wish to use the registry for filesystem-like purposes (eg storing startup config specific to the app or user state), just use filesystem. If you wish to use it like a database for system-wide information, that's a better use-case, but the registry isn't quite a proper database.

Windows programs proliferate $HOME junk, too. And that's an issue in its own right, which should be addressed by platform-specific application dirs (e.g. the platformdirs library for python).

Those sound like exactly the use cases the registry should be used for. However in practice all kinds of state ends up in there that does not need to be accessed by anything other than the game process.

It feels like the Windows Registry is one of those well-intentioned ideas that ended up being a tremendous mess in actual implementation. "Let's use a central database to store things that the OS, drivers, and UI need to access" somehow became "half assed KV dumping ground for every process and their dog to litter with whatever while acting as a singular bottleneck".

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32275078

The down would be separated by vacuum, which is even better of an insulator than air pockets. It's just that vacuum flasks are harder to manufacturer than bags of fluff.

On the moon or in space you could get by with layers of reflective foil with a gap.

It's much easier to install a single static binary than to correctly set up and configure ssh in a safe way. If you need "one and done" file transfers without worrying about open port 22, key exchange, etc, this (or tools like it) is great.

Yep. Also the main loop should cycle as fast as possible, and only execute the control loop as needed. Or really use a timer interrupt.

> Deleted { deleted_at: DateTime<Utc> },

What does this look like under the hood (in memory)? Does the compiler automatically generate a struct/union? Does the value take up the same width regardless of state?

Ah yes, the chaos monkey approach to plumbing. I buy it. The best time to have a leak is during or immediately after doing plumbing work. The worst time is when you are asleep, out of the house, or on vacation.

Isn't it code nowadays to have water hammer arrestors that trap air and create a cushion?

The problem is "config" means different things to different people. Some people see config as "the collection of runtime parameters" basically a bank of switches: Pyproject.toml is config. Others see any form of declarative structured data ingested by a runtime as config: docker-compose.yml is config.

And of course to minimize impedance mismatch, the structure should be similar to the domain.

So yes I want a "config file" to handle at least a dozen levels of nesting without getting obnoxious.

XML is overwrought, YAML is a foot-bazooka, JSON lacks comments, TOML gets unwieldy with more than a few levels of nesting, EDN is neat but kind of obscure...

Maybe we need a new configuration format...

ducks

Actually I think something in the space of JSON5, Jsonnet, GCL, HCL, CUE, etc, will be the one to win out in the long run. JSON-but-fix-most-of-the-warts.

Then there's things which almost sit between fully declarative and turing-complete. Maybe Dhall, if it picks up a few more language implementations. Or CEL.

https://github.com/google/cel-spec

I've gotten bit by trailing commas enough times (both manual edits and writing generators) that I absolutely expect any reasonable syntax to tolerate them. It's just so much easier and more consistent to tolerate them.

That definitely sounds like a loose connection, not an ECU problem. Usually it's a bad clamp on the battery terminal. Often it's the ground clamp in particular.

The easiest diagnosis is to rotate the cables on the terminal several times to rub off oxide build up, then leave them in an orientation so that the natural tension of the cable forces the clamp into good contact.

A "dead" (low voltage) battery will still cause some indicators/lights to come on when you crank, while a bad connection usually acts like zero volts.

The "we've been automating since the industrial revolution and jobs have adapted" argument doesn't really account for scale. If I skin my knee (~1% of my skin) once a month for five years, that's hardly an issue. I might even form callouses. If I lose 60% of my skin to injury at once, that's a far bigger situation.

As a really rough rule of thumb, in both Japanese and South Korean cultures, it would be fairly improper to address or refer to a "stranger" or any non-close-friend [1] by their given name. A jersey nameplate would absolutely constitute a stranger/formal context, so family name would be expected here. Even if you did not know that pretty universally, jersey nameplates/tags (and nameplates writ large) with only one name will be the family name.

1 - "stranger/non-close-friend" here means someone who you aren't already a) quite familiar with and b) in the age bracket / position in hierarchy c) in an informal friendly context. Any teacher, boss, employee, acquaintance, professional, etc, it'll be family name. Classmates, close friends, family members will usually use given name (in informal context - code switching).

As an amusing aside, this is a bit of an in-joke in the anime Mushoku Tensei (Jobless Reincarnation), where the main character is often using surnames and the formal or even Keigo register with his rough-and-tumble party mates and they are like "yo why are you so formal?".

But also, Park and Moon are common Korean family names. Because like the near-majority of South Koreans have the Kim surname, you'll often see initials like "H S KIM"