legerdemain

I appreciate the response! (As an aside, there's also Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale.) I didn't mean to aggrandize my efforts, which have been largely personal: trying to organize groups and projects on topics that I care about. I have not been running a failing hacker space for a decade!

I've mostly been active around Palo Alto and Mountain View, which is ultimately my biggest mistake. The long and the short of it is, people from the larger companies generally don't seem interested in "extracurricular" activity, and students at local colleges don't stick around in the area. The most enthusiastic hackers here are growth hackers, which I am not and don't care for. I also get a lot of individuals who feel like they're washing out of their profession, but that's not the same mindset as tech enthusiasm.

I agree that fishing in San Jose proper is likely to turn out more students, recent grads, and other kinds of people who are more about exploring and trying things.

The story of the janitor who invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos is also either an exaggeration so big as to be meaningless, or a straight-up lie.

Not a criticism of your response, but you'll notice that every space you mentioned is either in SF or in Oakland. I have been looking for and trying to build community in South Bay for almost a decade now. The conclusion I've come to is that the people who might populate a healthy hacker space don't live here in sufficient numbers, and the people who do live here have very different interests, goals, and community needs.

I've obviously been to Noisebridge. It didn't become a part of my life because it is at least an hour drive away, and often much longer during the times of day when I can reasonably go there.

Modern counterculture (for the sake of argument, defined as non-commercial and deeply personal crap produced by marginal individuals) has shifted to mostly online and mostly to expressions that I'm not interested in: most particularly, furries. Furry software, furry art, furry music, furry meetups.

Maybe it was Counter Culture Lab in Oakland, which is a maker space with a focus on microbiology.

Ah, got it.

I'd need to move from South Bay to SF first to make repeated visits worthwhile. Over an hour each way is... yeah.

A news website run by a VC firm that is also a startup accelerator? "Countercultural"?

I appreciate your well-intentioned effort to help. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm not incorporating and ponying up $30k to get an office lease. There's commitment, and then there's commitment.

Our hacker space has had tons of leadership drama over the years, from misuse of funds to a co-founder trying to get a trademark on our name to do a hostile takeover.

Basically, if your hacker space exists because some tech people made big money in company stocks and decided to buy a personal playground, you're constantly subject to their whims and caprices.

The closest one to me on the map is something called "the fifth space," but I can't find any online presence at all for it (it shares a name with an interfaith org in India, which is what most results are for).

The consortium lists spaces in SF, Oakland, and father out. This could be a major motivator to move to SF.

Meanwhile, here in South Bay, an activist board member (who is a senior lead at Tesla by day) just fired our longtime hacker space director with zero days notice because membership wasn't growing fast enough. Now our events are struggling and members are leaving because of this cavalier display of leadership.

It is almost impossible to find tech-adjacent countercultural spaces in the Bay that aren't fully co-opted by a self-devouring corporate mindset.

Last time you wrote that you'd have an update for me after FOSDEM, but you didn't post until I posted my question again.

I'm in the SF Bay area.

Will makes a dubious claim to support a dubious distinction. Plenty of large, complex infrastructure is written in Python.

   > Dynamic programming languages are arguably still far from systems languages,
   > since dynamic types and idioms like “ask forgiveness, not permission” are not
   > conducive for good code quality.

I find it amusing that, when asked to give a defining characteristic of systems programming, key figures behind C++, Rust, D, and Go gave radically different and unrelated answers: "client applications," "resource-constrained applications," "cloud infrastructure," and "unsafe pointer casts."

If anything, a more practical definition is "only C and C++ are systems programming languages, by fiat, because it's an artificial category whose historical roots have long since lost pertinence."

I generally expect Lowe to present findings engagingly and as fairly as I can expect to see in the lay press. And that's about it for me.

I literally have a bag of erythritol in my pantry and I am literally eating from it with a spoon. I am eager to see follow-up studies. That said, the fact that the authors found a substantial effect and identified a clear mechanism of action is what makes me pay attention. And I appreciate Derek Lowe bringing it to my layman's attention.

Your dismissal is facile because you focused on parts of the report that are a part of the background, but you instead presented as germane to the report's overall credibility.

As one example, you started by dismissing the finding of adverse effect in fruit flies, as if the author was presenting it as being relevant to humans.

In reality, Lowe writes that the fruit fly result is a curiosity. The specific finding from human medicine that he is actually reporting on is far more relevant and concerning.

I posted Lowe's summary of the abstract because you preferred to focus on tangential minutia and ignored what is actually the novel and significant finding here.

I care that the report is by Derek Lowe because he has spent literally years convincing me of his scientific expertise, industry experience, and journalistic bona fides. You have done nothing to show that you have any of these, and your choice of what you focused on makes me think the opposite.

I don't understand your facetious and, frankly, spurious attempt to dismiss this report from Derek Lowe. Lowe has spent decades informing lay audiences about pharmacology and biochemistry. A facile dismissal of his reporting as "not scientific" is not a credible counterargument.

The core finding, which is what you are ultimately trying to find fault with, is this:

   In 1,157 patients volunteers undergoing three-year longitudinal evaluation,
   the patients in the highest quartile of plasma erythritol concentration were
   very strong outliers for CV events. That correlation holds up after
   controlling for all sorts of other dietary and physical variables (weight,
   age, gender, known cardiovascular risk factors, and more). And on top of
   that, the authors demonstrate a surprising but extremely plausible
   explanation for these findings: erythritol, in both in vitro and in vivo
   assays, enhances platelet aggregation.

WW1 military rations, from https://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/memoir/ration.html

  > British Daily Ration, 1914:
  > 
  > 1 1/4 lb fresh or frozen meat, or 1 lb preserved or salt meat;
  > 1 1/4 lb bread, or 1 lb biscuit or flour;
  > 4 oz. bacon;
  > 3 oz. cheese;
  > 5/8 oz. tea;
  > 4 oz. jam;
  > 3 oz. sugar;
  > 1/2 oz salt;
  > 1/36 oz. pepper;
  > 1/20 oz. mustard;
  > 8 oz. fresh or 2 oz. dried vegetables;
  > 1/10 gill lime juice if fresh vegetables not issued;
  > 1/2 gill rum;
  > not exceeding 2 oz. tobacco per week.

So, mostly meat, bread, bacon, and sugar?

"Maid of honor" suggests you identify as a woman. Experience suggests that women (at least in the US) have richer and more fluid social lives. I can easily find a good handful of "girls hanging out" social groups on Meetup in my relatively socially impoverished suburb. I suspect that my luck approaching random dudes with giant headphones on, staring intently at their laptop screens in a Starbucks will be pretty different.

Specifically the membership-based fraternal private societies, like the ones you mentioned? They were started at the same period of American history, and I only know of one exception that doesn't have "faith in a higher power" as a tenet of good citizenship. Heck, even the Jaycees, who explicitly target younger people.

The exception is the Rotary Society. The average Rotarian is male, white, and 58 years old.

Also, the Philz down the street and Coffeebar further down the street (although both have higher prices and worse hours than La Tartine).

I can vouch for the La Quinta Inn mentioned in the article. It's a comfortable and affordable place to spend a night if you flew in to Burlington on the way to somewhere in the region (Lake Placid, in my case).

I'm a member of 125 Meetup groups at the last count.

Most Meetup groups are zombie groups with thousands of members and no events.

The Meetup engagement algorithm drives people to keep joining groups and keep RSVPing to events, but very little to encourage repeat attendance or to prune zombie groups and events from your calendar. As a consequence, most groups have tons of inactive "members," and most events have tons of fake "attendees."

Even though I'm a "member" in over 100 groups, my Meetup calendar is mostly full of corporate Zoom events that are basically ads.

I've been going to a few and I even have one of my own that I run twice a month at a local co-working space.

I don't know why anyone comes to either my meetup or the ones I go to, but they are 100% not people I want to hang out and drink with. Mostly middle-aged Asian and Indian men who are polite, quiet, socially distant, usually with no particular enthusiasm for the topic of the meetup. I don't know why they're there or why they're so numerous, but they're definitely not there to socialize and have fun.

Almost all Starbuckses are bad, but you have several other options with plenty of seating near the Redwood City Caltrain.

Try La Tartine just around the corner, which has plentiful seating, decent prices, and closes pretty late.

My understanding is that to get reasonable WASM file sizes, one must use tinygo (a C reimplementation). tinygo is a WIP, although I wish I could find a better updated description of what's missing than this page on their site: https://tinygo.org/docs/reference/lang-support/

  > You can ingest and emit JSON in any language.

How is this relevant? Serving a JS application to a client is not like serving a JSON API.

  > You can even compile backend-friendly code to run in JS on the frontend, via emscripten (and increasingly, Wasm), which will output very lean and JIT-friendly code.

Not in my experience. Compared to front-to-back JS, shipping your applications as WASM ends up with downloads and memory footprints that are several times larger than the same application in ordinary JS, and this matters a lot for slower networks and mobile clients.

Edit: not to mention that Go has a very limited WASM story, so your "realistic" choices for shipping back end code to the front end are C++ and Rust.

In my experience with Palantir "alums," none of the crotchety perfectionists I knew ended up working with Rust after leaving. I guess AI (as the author of this post is affectionately known) beat the trend by starting his own company!

This comment is presumptuous, dismissive, and also wrong. People who write application-like front ends in React (etc.) want back ends that can interoperate with those front ends.

They accomplish things like built-time code generation, static server-side rendering, and other kinds of code transformation that are difficult and flaky without a back end that can understand JS.

I have looked for non-tinkertoy solutions in Java and Go. There aren't any, and senior people in those communities are hostile to the very idea. (Maybe remembering Java Nashorn?) Maybe the only people friendly to the idea of interoperable back ends are Rust people (where you have libraries like Yew/Sycamore/Dioxus/Leptos that actively imitate JS frameworks).

But yes, your claim is that the only reason to write JS back ends is ignorance and enfeeblement is ignorant and repugnant.