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swasheck

1,351 karma · joined June 30, 2011

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swasheck··on Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America
Warrant’s “Ode to Tipper Gore” is something of a classic
swasheck··on Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat
i am currently hiking through switzerland (in cossonay this evening) and have been struck by how wet the forest ground is compared to my home (colorado, usa). locals have told me that’s very recent because of the storms that came through a few days ago.

the mittelland seems dry but since i’m walking through farmland, mostly, everything around me looks green, while i walk on dusty paths.

today was very hot.

swasheck··on CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
maybe. i use it every other year though and otherwise simply don’t. i never said that it wasn’t super cheap, i just said it wasn’t cost-effective for my usage profile.
swasheck··on CoMaps: The Offline App That Guided Rescuers Without a Signal in Venezuela
after about 6 years of using OSMAnd, i’m pivoting to CoMaps for a hike through switzerland that i’m leaving for tonight. i don’t actually need all of the features of OSMAnd and just downloading maps costs a subscription now. id pay outright for it but i just can’t justify a subscription for how infrequently i use it
swasheck··on Dolly Parton has died
the unifying power of dolly actually forced him to transcend even that. apparently he had nothing but nice things to say about her (and nothing about himself) on truth.
swasheck··on Ox Alpha
the u.s. is friends with then now. haven’t you heard?
swasheck··on A Preview of DuckDB v2.0
which statistical functions do you want? i’m curious because i love duckdb and use it for a variety of projects but always want to learn more about how to use tools better.
swasheck··on Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
honestly, this is an unhelpful comment. but thank you for your thoughts - wish I had considered such a simple solution
swasheck··on Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
condescending comments really aren’t helpful. while i feel no compulsion to explain myself to you, I will say that most of my bookshelves are stocked with books, and I tend to leave notebooks in random places and forget about them until I need one. then I just open a new one and start writing some more. So I have fragments of thoughts scattered across multiple notebooks. I was hoping this could be a new way to navigate and manage that in my mind.
swasheck··on Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2
i’ll address this as if it was a genuine question.

my handwriting is awful, not to mention that my physical notebook management is awful. i’ve considered a supernote nomad as a way to streamline some of those issues. theyre just so expensive that i cant really justify a $500 experiment.

swasheck··on AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot
there’s space for both perspectives.

they are not “leaders” in the purest sense - they don’t demonstrate characteristics of leading, but rather characteristics of people who strive for power and influence.

yet i also get that, in spite of the deficit of true leadership skills, they still guide the group into a specific direction for better or worse.

swasheck··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation

swasheck··on Ancient Rome's version of Google Maps: how long to reach the beach
i’ve walked the via francigena and the italian section has quite a few sections of ancient roman road. they’re admittedly not contiguous, and are worn more extensively now, so i don’t get the same overall experience of treading on the stones for kilometers as they would have.

i target 35km/day with a 40L pack and finish my segments within 6-7 hours. asphalt, dirt and grass, and hiking trails (rocks, roots, dirt, etc) are the most standard surfaces and, to be honest, they’re all exhausting in their own rights so a change in surface is always welcome.

i can’t imagine marching most of this with near double body weight and then having to make camp.

swasheck··on The startup's Postgres survival guide
you’re going to pay the cost regardless. one approach absorbs the cost up front, and the other defers it, with interest
swasheck··on My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded
catastrophic converter is such a hilarious autocorrect.
swasheck··on Grok Build
this is an argument from silence because your defense for your assertion rests on the lack of evidence from the assertion to which you replied.

you made the assertion that it is ad hominem and now you must support it.

swasheck··on Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)
yeah. that’s been my experience as well. my doctor gave me the impression that melatonin helps set the cycle but magnesium glycinate is what calms the body.
swasheck··on FCC approves test of space mirror to light night sky
somebody watched die another day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Another_Day) and thought, “hmm. great idea.”
swasheck··on Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church
i’m no apologist for christian history but you are both dancing around the nuances to make your own respective points. both things can be true but they require a lot of words: the roman republic, and subsequent empire were happy to allow conquered peoples to maintain their own ways of life as long as a few basic (in their estimation) requirements were met (taxes, fealty, etc). it was ripe for corruption to the conquered peoples tended to rebel and they got put down with severe violence

christianity offered a unifying thematic message and de facto polity under which constantine believed he could more effectively maintain power and peace. this system was ripe for corruption but now the people are generally kept in line by the conflation of church and state.

islam arises primarily as a repudiation of polytheism and what is perceived as loose monotheism and nonviolently sweeps through the area quickly.

regional leaders quickly learn the same lesson that constantine learned and use islam to prevent rebellion and exert control, with the added lesson learned that it’s best to just ensure everyone follows the same code from the start so that you don’t have to do a lot of political cleanup in the transition to a new belief system.

fractured “european” leaders realize how much power they’ve lost and decide that they should unify under the christian brand to go take back their power.

and the cycle goes on and on

swasheck··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
I don’t understand this comment because in no way did I express that I’m not the team player. Seems like this is something of a sacred cow for you. Or maybe it’s a language barrier thing, but all I was trying to do was say that as a member of the data platform team, when I recommend handwritten SQL to address specific limitations of an orm, that is the response that I got. Hope this helps.
swasheck··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
the amount of vitriol my comment generated was unexpected. i was sharing that my experience was the opposite of the comment I was replying to. So many people have read things into it that simply do not make sense to me, including this one. It wasn’t a flex, it was a statement of experience that was simply a different experience than the post I was replying to asserted as truth. As a senior member of the data team, I interact with developer teams regularly and suggest manual handwritten sql for particular performance edge cases, and I met with the response I mentioned. It’s not me not being the team player, it’s the development team using the ORM that has decided that the level of effort to maintain handwritten and ORM sequel is too much for their team to handle
swasheck··on What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
> Folks who dislike ORMs seem to have this false dichotomy that "the ORM _must_ be used for all queries", which is a self-imposed/unpractical restriction

my experience is the exact opposite. People who love and advocate the merits of ORM insist that everything be executed through ORM because it introduces too much complexity for them to blend handwritten SQL with the ORM generated queries

swasheck··on Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults
this happens to me quite frequently. i grew up playing years of baseball and my throwing shoulder is a bit loose as it is. combined with the way i fall asleep (on my stomach with my forearm under my pillow) i tend to dislocate or severely strain it pretty regularly
swasheck··on Show HN: I made Google Trends for Hacker News by indexing 18 years of comments
maybe more like google ngram viewer? https://books.google.com/ngrams/about
swasheck··on Biohub releases a world model of protein biology
> Biology doesn't work like that most of the time, it's squishy and weird and unpredictable, and the models we have of biology (including genomics!) are faulty at best, misleading at worst.

interesting. i came to tech from a molecular biology background and my impression was the opposite. biology is predictable most of the time, but sometimes random and squishy. the trick is that we’re trying to learn why things work predictably and what causes the variations, and that why/how unknown is what is most uncomfortable for people outside of the disciplines.

i’m not fully disagreeing with you because it sounds like you have experiences that inform your perspective. i find it interesting because my own experiences bring me in from the inverse perspective.

swasheck··on A fundamental principle of aeronautical engineering has been overturned
yeah. what are the effects of too much roughness? may be safer and easier to maintain at smooth than at a specific roughness spec
swasheck··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
windmills cause cancer and kill bald eagles so we can’t do wind. /s
swasheck··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
IP theft may only be part of the story though. it’s a question of priorities. US optimizes for profit which can place limits reinvestment. China seems to optimize for ubiquity and dominance, and has the capital to throw at those goals. when you’re beholden to the shareholder/ceo/investor, you make concessions to stay within their will. when you’re beholden to the state, you do the same.
swasheck··on The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients
the next season of natural selection just dropped. pop the corn (in olive oil, natch).
swasheck··on Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
there is no logic - just fallacy. it is a red herring, wrapped up in equivocation. he commits appeal to emotion, non sequitur, false equivalence along the way.
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