tokyolights2

Sounds similar to [Jevon's Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox), although here the resource is developer time.

Its the curse of engagement. If she read the literature and came to a "boring" opinion it would be much harder to gain a following online. It isn't impossible to gain a following without getting conspiratorial, but it is much harder.

I like the sentiment but it sounds very similar to Soverign Citizen nonsense. You can't just plug your ears and say that a law doesn't apply to you because you didn't consent to it.

I wonder how much of it is that in today's society it is worse to be disagreeable than it is to be inept.

Tangentially related: for those of you using AI tools more than I am, how do LLMs handle things like API updates? I assume the Python2/3 transition was far enough in the past that there aren't too many issues. How about other libraries that have received major updates in the last year?

Maybe a secret positive outcome of using automation to write code is that library maintainers have a new pressure to stop releasing totally incompatible versions every few years (looking at Angular, React...)

FTA

> pumped so much fluid underground in the Permian Basin that it leaked into a prolific oil-producing layer of rock, making it all but impossible to extract crude, according to an April court filing.

> The Permian produces almost as much oil as Iraq and Kuwait combined. But its wells generate up to five barrels of chemical-laden waste fluid for every barrel of crude, creating a growing disposal challenge.

its a lot of water

You are just describing what advertisers actually do in practice. Maybe if everyone had the same access people would realize how invasive it is.

Sandia National Labs is one of the few places in the country (on the planet?) doing blue-sky research. My first thought was similar to yours--If it doesn't have storage, what can I realistically even do with it!?

But sometimes you just have to let the academics cook for a few decades and then something fantastical pops out the other end. If we ever make something that is truely AGI, its architecture is probably going to look more like this SpiNNaker machine than anything we are currently using.

I'm confused, couldn't a Patreon owner take their money and invest it if they want compounding interest?

Where do you think that money comes from and what gives it value? Your bank account is full of your governments' money...

Maybe my brain has been too rotted by listening to Noam Chomsky in my youth, but government spending and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. Everyone in washington is a capitalist, maybe withstanding 1-2 representatives. Large corps are constantly communicating with our leaders, far more frequently than their private constituents. To think that there is some secret, powerful office of the government where they are trying to dismantle capitalism through the use of welfare is a bogeyman. Welfare is there to prop up the ideology of capitalism as it smears against the rough road of reality.

What should the government be spending its money on? So in those countries, social services are making up ~25 percent of government spending. But that includes healthcare and jobs programs, which are services that should directly bolster the larger economy by creating a healthy and more mobile workforce.

Meanwhile the US government spends about 35% of our GDP in a good year [1], and it is well known that over half of that goes to social security, medicare, and a smaller amount to housing. [2]

My only point is that it is easy to see that graph you posted and think that things are out of control, but the reality is just that in a post-war, urbanized, liberal society the governments job is to serve the people and sometimes that means spending money on them. I know surely none of us here will ever take adventage of medicare or social security in our old age. We will not be hiring students who went to state-funded schools (ew) or who live in subsidized housing--if they are that poor they can't work for me! But normal pepole actually do sometimes get help from the government and it is fine.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spendi... [2] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Event sourcing is a pattern (antipatern?) that appears useful because it solves an interpersonal problem. It is the kind of thing that middle management salivates over because it appears to decentralize control, which to such a manager sounds like "gives me more control of my own sphere". Every team creates their own event schemas and subscribes to other teams' events and we all live happily ever after. Never again will we have to wait on some other team to spin up an API for us! It promises an engineering solution to engineering itself.

I could write and write and write about it, but this rather infamous blog post is so good I'll just link it. https://chriskiehl.com/article/event-sourcing-is-hard

I have seen this multiple times before. Management chastising good work because some externality of that work shows up on a graph that they have to talk about at some weekly meeting. It doesn't even have to make the graph look bad, just stick out.

In unix the names of things are just based on what stuck and what was used. My favorite example of name evolution is the jump from `more` to `less` (because less is more...)

My biggest insight about recursion came in my graduate algorithms course. I had a great professor who was talking about dynamic programming. I think that most people can agree that DP is one of the hairier subjects. When I'm griding Leetcode I mostly used to skip these problems and then just hope in an interview I'm never asked about it.

My prof cleared everything up though. He said that DP is what naturally happens whenever you take a recursive algorithm and refactor it to put all the recursive calls into their own data structure. When you are doing recursive fibonacci, you are really just using the call stack as a linked list. So instead of making the recursive call, figure out how value N in the list relies on the previous values and then compute that directly.

For more complicated algorithms where the recursive call has N arguments, that means you need a N-dimensional array (worst case) to store your calls in.

After that lecture I was never scared of dynamic programming because I had a meta-algorithm to produce the DP solution.

1. Write a recursive algo (probably exponentially inefficent)

2. Figure out how to store recursive call data in a data structure

3. Figure out how to populate field (a,b) of the data structure, normally by combining/minimizing/maximizing (a,b-1), (a-1,b)

4. Figure out how to get the answer out of the data structure once you have filled it in

Yeah. I don't have as much of a drive, but I haven't really had any problems with sex. I think it helps that my lovers and I have pretty crazy sex so it is rather easy to get excited :)

I spent two years during the pandemic working at a hand-made beeswax candle factory. I spent most of my day either running the wax filtering machine or dipping taper candles.

When I received an email saying that my job was going to be work-from-home for the forseeable future, I knew that I had to quit. At the time I had really been relying on office friendships and work for too much of my socialization and self-image, so moving to a remote environment took too much away from me.

I found the light factory work really enjoyable. It was so rewarding to make simple, high quality products wit my hands. It was also nice to have a job where I was interacting with a wider cross-section of people, as I tend to not really enjoy tech culture very much. I had forgotten what it was like to work in an environment where there is comradery among the staff and a healthy distrust of management. I feel like in tech people are always grovelling to their bosses and the C-suite, which rubs me the wrong way. A bunch of temporarily-embarrassed billionaires I guess.

I'm back in tech now, but with the perspective that I am working to achieve some mid-term monetary goals. After I pay down my mortgage considerably so I can cut down my monthly expenses, I will highly consider going back to a crafting job of some sort. Life is too short to spend it on the computer.

I can see that. At my medium-sized company the management is taking the position of mostly hiring senior people right now, because we don't have many openings and they feel like they can be picky. I know my company isn't the only one with this mindset. That leaves a lot of arbitrage for people willing to bet on junior staff.

Oh I completely agree that they are connected. I just noticed before starting that I would regularly feel the effects of stress in my body and that would put my in a defensive, exhausted, irritated mood. It is hard to have a good time when gas makes it hard to walk straight.

The thing that made me start the drugs was actually this realization that physical anxiety was preceding any anxious thoughts. For years I had done talk therapy (which was very helpful) but that therapy was mostly based around making me realize my anxious thoughts weren't "real". As soon as I stopped having the physical symptoms now I don't have anxious thoughts to begin with.

I completely believe that somatic therapy can be helpful. I have over the last few months been taking an SSRI to help with genralized anxiety. There has been a small effect in my mood/thinking, but for me the largest change that I noticed was actually in my body. I no longer get tension headaches, I don't have horrible gastro problems, my skin has cleared up. I went from being the most ticklish person I knew to being barely ticklish at all.

I feel strongly that these changes in my bodily function are affecting my mood more than the reverse.

The best part about introducing your friends to each other is that then they can hang out with each other without you having to do anything at all! I definitely have some close friends I expect to see multiple times per week. Others I'm perfectly happy to see once per month. Others who have moved away and I won't see until I visit their city.

Friends and community are not a zero-sum game. The more interconnected and inter-dependent people are, the more likely that everyone is going to have deep and meaningful relationships.

I used to feel much more like you when I was regularly hanging out with friends almost exclusively 1:1. I thought I was doing that because I was introverted, but realistically I was doing it because I had social anxiety. Looking back, hanging mostly 1:1 made me feel like my friends were more distant because there were so many people I didn't see for months that I always felt like I didn't really know my friends.

As a gay person that will probably not end up having a traditional 'family unit' in my lifetime, I question whether or not the family is enough to stave off lonliness. I see a lot of nuclear families that spend what I think is a toxic amount of time with each other. To be able to thrive we need to be a part of a larger community, not just codependent on a spouse. Even worse is when I see people hanging all of their hopes and happiness on a child. When a mother says that their child is their best friend, I don't know if I should worry more for the mother or the child.

I spend so much of my time intentionally trying to cultivate community. In some respects, it is the over-arching theme of my adult life. I find community is very hard to come by so if I have to be the one to make it, so be it. I pay a pretty penny to be a member of a coworking space so I don't spend my workday alone. Three times per week I go to regularly-scheduled events (a game night, running club, and roller-skating night). I'm every week I try to coordinate events between friends that I have made through these groups. I've learned to be an even planner, match maker, (second rate) therapist, baby sitter, and referee. I definitely spend more mental cycles on my friends than I do on work.

The amount of work that I needed to put in was enormous. It was hard and scary at first. I was a wall-flower. Inviting people I don't know well to do something fun is not a skill that I was born with (quite the opposite). But with all this effort put in, I am finding that after multiple years of effort the value is starting to really pay dividends.

I guess the over-all point that I am making is that the American Dream is that you can live how you want, so if you want community, make that your Dream and go do it. Looking back, I really feel like I am an entrepreneur of friendship, and I think that at the end of my life I am not going to regret it.

That is a self-reinforcing cycle. There have been long and successful campaigns by car companies and other self-interested entities in the US to associate public transportation with being poor. Just like how a city street is safer per-capita if there are more people on it, public transit is safer if it is more well-used.

I see this in seattle. When I am commuting in the morning or in the evening my bus is full of yuppies and working class people getting to their job. But if I take the bus on the weekend or during the off hours when well-adjusted people are not on it, the bus is a much less inviting place.

I don't know how to solve the problem other than to believe in the system and hope that other people do as well.

Exactly this. I take a low level of SSRIs because I am an otherwise highly functioning person who has a tendency to get into severe anxious spirals that can last days on end and induce vomiting. I do all the things that a person should do to mitigate, including meditating, exercising, lots of friends, etc etc.

I know that my medication dulls my most intense emotions, but that is the point. It is slightly sad knowing that I don't experience the highest highs that I used to, but it is completely worth it to stop experiencing the lowest lows that were completely debilitating. I would stop taking them immediately if I could be assured that I wouldn't fall back into physically debilitating anxiety.

When I have had conversations with my philosophically oriented friends, I like to talk about what it be like to be a starfish--to experience the whole world in 5-way symmetry.

The way you put it makes it sound almost like bat sonar is some kind of Fourier transform of vision. Like solving a physics problem by transforming the position space into momentum space. Cool stuff :)

> and from your own desires

As a non-religious gay I probably wasn't invited anyway. But this kind of thinking is what leads conservatives to so much repression and hate. The idea that the wants and needs of your body are something which the mind must actively fight. That the scratchy, ill-fitting wool sweater of your culture is something that you must keep on at all costs. And it leads to resentment of people who are not under such self-imposed restrictions.

There is a reason in queer culture that 'shadiness' is a bigger sin than anger. Shadiness is what happens when someone represses their true feelings. Those feelings don't go away though, they just resurface in other unexpected and non-adaptive ways.

Slightly non-sequitur. The best thing that I ever did for my body wrt/ having a desk job is making sure that wherever I am my monitor is at eye level and at least 2ft away from my face. I always found that at the end of the work day I had so much tightness in my neck and temples, but once I started using a portable laptop stand [1] that all went away.

[1] such as https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0192/8184/products/RoostSt...