m-chrzan

>Do we have the numbers yet on the effects of vaping all day every day on cardiovascular health and lung cancer?

Not that I know of, and I grant that this is an unknown, and we could end up learning about extremely bad 20-/30-/40-year effects in the future. That said, there are very clear, very significant, and very well studied harms of cigarette smoking. Research is being done on vaping, and so far all harms identified are significantly lower than smoking.

>Also nicotine itself is not without harm.

Sure, and thanks for the paper. I'm not well versed in bio enough to tell the significance of everything in there, but, correct me if I'm wrong, for the most part this is showing there exist harms, but they're not particularly well quantified yet, especially in terms of human subjects? For this to really matter, you'd need to quantify the surplus of nicotine you get from vaping vs. smoking, and then compare the relative harms of those two doses. Could be that 5x the dose causes 5x the harm, or could be that the smoking dose passes some threshold, and 5x the dose from vaping is just marginal additional harm on top of that. And then still compare that to the other differences between smoking and vaping in terms of harm.

>Speaking from personal experience, vaping is far more addicting.

Sure, and I'm not disagreeing with that. I disagree that "degree of addictiveness" is the metric that's wise to use when choosing a nicotine delivery method. Obviously the #1 choice should be NULL, not smoking at all, but if one is already addicted to nicotine and not ready to quit it at the moment, smoking cigarettes is, as far as we know, the worst option. Even intermittent smoking, or low-volume (like your 3-4 a day) causes non-linear harm. See this paper for example: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.109.9... .

While the book does focus on smoking, and uses some of these physical aspects of cigarettes specifically as arguments, the main thrust of the book is actually a framework that generalizes pretty well to dealing with any addiction. For example, https://easypeasymethod.org/ is a simple rewrite of Carr's book for dealing with porn addiction.

So as long as you have your own reasons for why you want to quit vaping (and if you're picking up the book, you probably already do) it can still be helpful. The books from whyquit.com I mentioned in a sibling comment mention some vaping-specific arguments, and they're framed as quitting nicotine in general, not just smoking specifically.

Are you speaking at all from experience?

>Most people [...] need about an hour break in between smokes.

I've never seen anything like that. When there's a group of social smokers standing around, it's very common for something like "Oh, I just finished mine and you're only half-way through yours, I'll light up another one to keep you company" to happen. I've seen plenty of people who aren't chain smokers (yet), but can easily go through 2-4 cigarettes in a row if they're suddenly in a stressful situation and smoking "to relax".

>So in terms of pure addiction I would 100% argue that cigarettes are better than vaping.

But that's not a metric that's in any way helpful for a health decision. Nicotine in and of itself is not particularly physically harmful - it's toxic at high doses and elevates heart rate for a bit, but that's about it. The delivery method is what causes most of the harm, and smoking is 100% known to cause a lot of harm in a lot of different ways. And "With vaping that limit is completely gone" is also not accurate. Unlike the Navier-Stokes equations, dopamine receptors don't experience infinite blowup in finite time. So choosing a delivery method based on the amount of nicotine taken daily is not going to change much in terms of addiction (if you're already heavily addicted, you'll remain heavily addicted), but can have a huge impact on physical health.

Another good resource is whyquit.com

They have three books that follow a similar method as Carr's book. All resources available free, in multiple translations:

The original, Never Take Another Puff: https://whyquit.com/joel/index-ebook.html

Freedom From Nicotine, a more modern take, with a lot of data and references: https://whyquit.com/ffn/

Smart Turkey, essentially a condensed, much shorter version of FFN: https://whyquit.com/smart/

There's a computerphile video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZJc1p6RE78) with Dr. Mark Pound explaining a paper by John Kirchenbauer, Jonas Geiping et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10226) that described a method for watermarking LLM output like this. It's not directly stated anywhere in the Claude support article that this is what they're using, but the properties of the watermark described seem to point to this method.

Yes. In the ideal world messaging would've have followed the same federalized model as email. XMPP offers this, unfortunately few people use it or even are aware of it.

A lot of people, out of habit, rely on high fructose corn syrup for calories.

Do you have any experience with pup to compare with yq? That's the jq look-alike for HTML I first stumbled upon.

Also here's a blog post about the Corner going into more details: https://m-chrzan.xyz/blog/sunday-corner.html

pass is great. I use the dmenu script to get passwords into my clipboard without leaving the keyboard or being locked into browsers with a supported extension.

As others have mentioned, the Android app has slight issues, but they're not dealbreakers for me.

There's some interesting pass plugins, e.g. pass-otp. You can get 2FA passcodes from the commandline rather than being locked into Google's Authenticator.

I don't want to come of as insensitive, it sounds like you've had some really bad experiences with ternaries in the past and it's important to acknowledge your experience. But I just want to say that not all ternaries are like that.

In a more serious tone, ternaries in places where they should be used, i.e. as expressions, are in my opinion much clearer to read than replacing them with an if-else statement. In my mind, an if/else block is an imperative entity that describes two different actions that could happen. Even if in reality both branches are trivial, my mind will be unnecessarily occupied with the fact that it needs to reason about code here, not just data. A ternary, on the other hand, is a declarative entity, saying that this expression takes on this or that value, usually in such a way that each branch of it maintains some invariant with respect to what's in the conditional.

Do I understand correctly that the encoding is only done to obfuscate the URL from automatic spam filters? So the choice of Morse code was arbitrary - any other simple substitution scheme could have been used to the same effect (maybe very common ones like base64 encoding or ROT13 are already being checked for?).

Looks like a nice tool, but it seems to be built around a very specific workflow that you've found works for you.

Personally I have been managing most of my plaintext notes with the minimal tools required to do so: a text editor and a file system. For technical notes about software I add git into the mix[1], mostly as a means of synchronization between machines.

[1]: https://m-chrzan.xyz/blog/cheatsheets.html

What makes it cooler?

I believe the point of these tools is to be UNIXy, doing one thing well, and delegating the rest to other tools you already use. The script just downloads source code and drops you into an editor. Presumably, if you're a developer, you already have your editor set up for handling source code directories.

Looks like github1s really kicked off everyone making these git previewers.

Thread about git-peek (which the author here cites as inspiration) from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26108039

And the top commenter there created a cute bash 10-liner that basically implements the same functionality: https://git.sr.ht/~alexdavid/dotfiles/tree/master/bin/git-pe...

What exactly do you need this for? If it's for authenticating with their IMAP/SMTP, app passwords have worked for me with Gmail, even on 2FA-secured G Suite accounts. No idea about Microsoft though.

Do you have any recommend resources for someome "with at minimal tech know-how" where to get started with running their own email infrastructure?

This is specifically what you shouldn't be worried about just based on the speedup that the article focuses on. This is about a constant-factor speedup from a better-engineered classical component, not the exponential speedup you get from being able to handle additional qubits.

Note that this is not about quantum speedup, but, rather conversely, making the classical part of the computation more efficient. Still important to get these quantum-adjacent things correct, but not as groundbreaking as one could hope for just reading the headline.

Could it be that people are just so used to platforms, that even in the case of the email protocol, they prefer to jump onto the Gmail platform that abstracts away from the protocol and provides a nice, easy to use platform? If so, "protocols, not platforms" remains justified, and proponents might hope that as people get more comfortable with protocols, they will drift away not only from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world, but also the Gmails.

For me personally, even if we end up with large players offering the largest (presumably most product-focused) instances of various protocols (Gmail with email, imagine Tiwtter hosting the largest Mastodon instance, Discord providing Matrix hosting), the fact I have the freedom to federate and set up my own instance or pay a smaller provider that will respect my privacy, is still a much better situation than the current "platforms, no protocols".

Would the inverse prefix, for 10^-27, be holi-?

I've always thought the solution should be an open federated IM standard, like email but for conversations rather than correspondence. If that were the widely adopted solution, you'd end up with large free providers that work perfectly fine for most regular users (like gmail), paid services that fully respect your privacy, and the more technical folks would be free to host their own servers.

I guess Matrix is doing this, but unfortunately, the way history has played out, centralized IM had first mover advantage by a huge margin and that's what people are used to now - that a messenger is an application on your phone that you can only use to contact other users of that same application.

Automata theory aficionado here. Regular languages are really neat! They have an air of being an "important" mathematical object, given how many different "natural" characterizations of them exist.

In a standard CS course you'll start out learning that regular expressions and finite state automata define the same class of languages. But they're also equivalent to:

- Languages generated by regular grammars (only rules of the form A -> a, A -> Ba, or A -> epsilon)

- Languages definable in monadic second-order (MSO) logic

- Languages "recognized" by a finite monoid (this algebraic appraoch to formal languages is super interesting and rich!)

- Language's whose Myhill-Nerode relation has finitely many equivalence classes

Nice! I've gotten so jaded with how big and slow most of the modern web is, that randomly stumbling upon a tiny site prompted me to write about the joy of it on my blog (a much less than 1MB site itself): https://m-chrzan.xyz/blog/small-big-sites.html

The javascript implementation defines deg2rad as

  deg * Math.PI / 360

It's been a while since high school math, but shouldn't that be divided by 180? Looks like the numbers in the docs are based on this incorrect conversion.

Curl can also handle cookies using the -c and -b flags. I wrote a simple dungeon crawler whose user-side "client" is a single line of bash, and the game server is stateless - the entire game state gets stored in the cookie:

  c=x; while [ $c ]; do clear; curl -c k -b k hex.m-chrzan.xyz/­$c; read c; done

(just make sure you don't have an important file called "k" in the directory you run it in, or it will get overwritten)