throw4321

The article mentions Metformin's use in preventing Long Covid. More info on that from Eric Topol's blog: https://erictopol.substack.com/p/preventing-long-covid

The original study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4375620

What officials actually say doesn't make a difference anymore. People do not get bamboozled because of lack of facts. People who get bamboozled are past facts.

Does your task need great code?

Not a rhetorical question. Often the goal is the functional minimum. If that's your gig, it's hard to appreciate code quality maximization, and vice versa.

If you do maximize quality, I'll one-up the suggestion in the article. Treat your first write as throwaway code. And your second. Up until the point where the rewrite would be roughly identical.

It's basically early refactoring, but with the code at its freshest in your mind. Coding it the first couple times implicitly maps out the problem domain.

You also leave no internal technical debt on the table. A surprising amount reveals itself right after you wrote it in. It gnaws at your ability to proceed. Subconsciously, it splits your attention in two: how the code is and how it should be. With each "fail" your attention spreads out and thins out.

Finally, this habit makes you more fluid in the language. Quality-maximized code takes longer, but your actual typing rate ends up being much faster.

People breathe, so you need outdoor air to replenish the oxygen and get rid of the carbon dioxide. That's "fresh" air.

Unfortunately, outdoor air has particulate and ozone pollution. Filtering it gives you "clean" air.

In winter and summer, you also heat or cool the indoor air for comfort. If you just pump in outside air, you effectively also pump out the indoor air. This wastes the energy that had gone into heating or cooling it.

These systems save that energy by transfering heat between the air that's getting pumped in and the air that's getting pumped out.

Not sure if SJ was to blame, but your sentiment about the commoditization of software engineering is right on target. It was industry-wide.

It's true that teams had to grow in size as software got more complex. Was commoditization the best way to do it? It certainly aggregated power in the hands of management. That was probably an intended consequence.

One unintended consequence is that tech leads and staff engineers became increasingly selected more for political than technical merit. That in turn decreased the per-capita merit of the workforce as a whole.

Post-ZIRP and post-AI, a lot of layoffs are still ahead IMO.

> you'd be an idiot to not have a pile of BTC right now

I do agree with your overall take that there is a recent trend towards de-democratization of investment opportunities. The invention of the stock market was a huge deal because it massively moved the needle towards democratization.

BTC ain't it, however. Good luck proving the hypothesis that BTC is not tulips.

Personally, I see two major outcome sets. Either Russia "conquers the planet" or it doesn't. If it does, BTC is no longer any use to Russian-aligned oligarchs to bypass sanctions. If it doesn't, the West will eventually wisen up and hamper BTC transactions to the point that the alternatives win out.

Those are two likely crashpoints. There are 10000 possible others. Musical chairs always ends, it's just a matter of when.

The point of the market is not for you to do better than anyone else. The point is to price things right so that the market as a whole makes money. By picking stocks, you're either a gambling monkey or a more conservative gambling monkey.

Would love to watch a Park Chan Wook biopic of this (if he did biopics.)

In 2016/2017 there was much more awareness of Russian interference than there is now. The protests were more about legitimacy than about disagreement or dislike.

By 2021 the Putin/MAGA forces had accreted so much power that it was safer for Republican senators to bend the knee and acquit in the impeachement trial.

Some 2004 highlights for the nostalgic:

- MySpace was surging, Facebook was launched.

- Iraq counterinsurgency. Eventually Iraq fared better than Syria, while Afghanistan fared worse. No one in 2004 would have guessed this.

- WoW was released.

- Paris Hilton, Russell Brand, The Da Vinci Code, The Wardrobe Malfunction. Maybe not a year for culture.

Just for reference, in the US there were protests after protests in late 2016 and early 2017. The only difference they made is tiring out the participants.

You're assuming they're not gonna go the way of Cheney and Romney.

Around the world, most of this stuff is dry runs for other stuff.

Might want to check back in a month or two.

One of the problems with a 10-month preannouncement is that the competition is ready to trash the actual announcement. Half an hour in, I already see half a dozen barely-concealed posts ranging from downplays to over-demands to non-user criticism.