unquietcode

It's hard for me to imagine that the 'ideal' language for AI would even be readable by humans at all. Left to their own devices, these systems seem to make up their own way of communicating ideas.

It is used as fertilizer, often not for food consumption. You would be depressed to know how many horrible things are to be found in human excrement, including pharmaceuticals, plastics, fire retardants, etc. To me the greatest use of human waste would be carbon sequestration. Think about it: we have an existing network of pipelines directly from every house to a centralized facility that can collect, dry, and [optionally] store that output in the soil or elsewhere for many years.

It's honestly quite pathetic, but not at all unexpected these days. I do sometimes wish that when the negligence is so gross (sending API keys in the response of an unsecured request?) that the government would issue a fine. If you don't feel that your developers are security minded, there are many computer security professionals around the globe available to help. Maybe using some of those hundreds of millions of VC dollars for a quick audit would be the norm if there were actual penalties for this kind of reckless behavior.

This really needs to be a system library; I'm rooting for it.

Counter-opinion: your resume will likely be viewed as a PDF or printed on a piece of paper and taken into an interview session, so all that really matters it how it looks on a standard size page for the region in which you're applying.

I still use it for everything. Memory at that scale just isn't an issue anymore. Your grammar would have to be huge and your data structures highly unoptimized for it to matter all that much.

Well sure, but this time it's "Democratic Feudalism".

I used to at least have some minor visuals in my dreams, but not for about a decade. Now it's more like being aware of concepts and people and places but without actually seeing anything. When I awake I will sometimes retain a shopping-list like accounting of the dream, which is also how most of my memories are stored. "There was a schoolbus. Conor was there. I felt unease." When I remember something that happened to me it is often displayed in third person, built up incrementally from those lists of facts.

Well I absolutely cannot draw, but one of the most interesting things about the recent talk about aphantasia is how many creative people are able to execute their craft with relative ease, even without seeing things. Some seem to fallback to tools like constant tracing and erasing to try and build the image in front of them rather than in their heads. That mental visualization does not seem to impede the visual arts is fascinating and inspiring to me.

But no, I can't draw or paint or sculpt anything, but that never bothered me, and has rarely impeded my career in computing.

These are considered first-line defense for a variety of mental states, like anxiety, stress, depression, motivation, etc. In only once instance however were the practitioners able to offer me non-visual alternatives. This speaks to an unawareness on the other side that some people really can't do what they are asking. There are, in fact, many different styles of meditation that could be deployed instead. But being asked to 'visualize your thoughts as words floating away" or "find your happy place, like a beach, and place yourself there" are 100% ineffective when you can't see a darn thing.

So I have been practicing various exercises over time, but no effect. You are right about meditation though, you have to pick the ones that require an abundance of nothing. However many techniques and classes emphasize the visual types of meditation, from which I do feel left out.

This has been nagging me for weeks since I 'discovered' that almost everyone around me can visualize things in their mind. Frankly, it helps explain a lot about my life. The inability to picture the face of friends, family, places I've visited, all contribute to a sense of isolation and distance that I feel daily. My strong preference for non-fiction, too, is likely an artifact of reading fiction word by word but 'seeing' nothing interesting. My failed attempts at all sort sorts of meditation and mindfulness exercises are also now suspect. The anecdotes about being unable to understand the concept of 'counting sheep' also resonate strongly with me. That face-blindness is also commonly co-morbid also helps me understand that aspect of myself better.

All in all, while I don't feel 'robbed' of this ability to visualize things, it does seem to lob off a chunk of things which are particularly joyful to the human experience. I can't really visualize a future life for myself, let alone my current life. To discover all of this after decades of being alive is quite mind-blowing, and I'm glad it's getting the wave of media attention that it is now (or else I would not have known).

But then, perhaps, in this case, ignorance would be a bit more blissful.

Sure, but just for reference...

This: $900,000

AAPL: $922,780,000,000

I think they'll be OK.

It is the single strongest reason I continually try to migrate myself away from long-term use of these drugs. While I have basically accepted that I will probably need to be on these or similar medications for the rest of my life, the side effect profiles and withdrawal symptoms of even a single missed dose is a punch to the gut. As soon as you are feeling better and like you want to go and enjoy life, you can't. It is all very frustrating and makes me question whether being alive will for me ever be a truly enjoyable experience.

Nausea, tremors, memory loss--these are just the basics. Throw in anhedonia and loss of desire for good measure, and long after you've stopped the medications too.

The options as I see them are either: be miserable, and probably just die, or: be not miserable, but sabotaged and unable to actually enjoy your newfound life. This usually just leads to a cycle of starting and stopping medications, desperately trying to have a happy yet functional life that is worth living.

Onzin Incorporated - San Francisco, California, USA [REMOTE]

Greetings! We are a small business in the US looking to hire a backend or DevOps engineer to work remotely with our team full or part time. The team is several engineers already, and you would be joining them in supporting our ongoing internal and external projects by helping to set up and provision backend systems and services, as well as some light application programming like API servers.

Our work is a combination of in-house projects with external client engagements filling in the gaps. For this role we would be looking for deep experience with back-end and infrastructure technologies like Amazon AWS or Google GCP, provisioning tools like Ansible / Puppet / Salt, Python development, shell scripting, Linux system administration, docker and containerization technologies, build and deploy servers, CloudFormation and Terraform for infrastructure management, as well as some basic networking skills. There will also be tasks involving setting up backend components like databases, job queues, and micro-services.

This is a great role for mid or senior level engineers who are looking for flexibility and some independence in how their work gets completed. Do note that while we are excited to be growing our business and adding a new position this year, we will likely remain a small team for the foreseeable future. We are also not a traditional ‘product’ company, and most of our time is spent on smaller applications and projects that eventually reach completion.

If you would like to know more, send a message to hiring@onzininc.com with your questions. To apply, please send a resume and few remarks about your background and technical experience to the same address. Thank you for reading, and good luck out there!

Facebook gonna Facebook. It's long past time to consider regulation of an ethically bankrupt corporation.

This is ridiculous. It's 2018 and you're complaining about a few MB of bandwidth and a few seconds of CPU time? The whole point of JWT is that they are basically cookies for places where using cookies uniformly is not feasible. The author's solution is to go back to using cookies, which just doesn't work well enough. I'll stick with tokens for now thanks.

While most people would argue that tax breaks and other subsidies can have outsized rewards in the long run, I think the disparity between these corporate handouts and the public service needs is striking. Cities are giving away hundreds of millions to companies which might not even deliver on their promises, while local programs with proven value are asking for funds in the range of half a million to several million and being denied. Resource allocation has never been our strong-suit as a society, but this is just depressing. Surely we can do better to balance the needs and desires of corporations with those of normal flesh-and-blood human beings?

It's worth noting that in complex systems, forgetting can be just as important as remembering. The ability to evolve and change is in part predicated on the ability to selectively forget some elements that are no longer helpful. As another commenter pointed out, some aspects of our society's cultural memory are, probably, best left in the past, if preserved at all.

You can commit most crimes in this world with relative impunity, but the number one rule is never steal from the rich.

I'm all for this train, but if it costs this much to build and even more to maintain, and it's not even the newest train technologies, then it's probably just doomed to fail.

Oh good. I just finished upgrading my project to Webpack 3. Can't wait to do it all again...

I'm all for rapid progress, but the pace of web development is absolutely breakneck.

It's so normal that I'm actively looking for a new career. I'm tired of being paid to write and maintain garbage code for garbage people.

aka "LOL zero day exploit needs to be patched ASAP thx"

Remote / California, USA | Part-time / Retainer

I am looking for a front-end developer working consistent part-time hours or on retainer for some up and coming web application projects. The primary skill set includes HTML, JavaScript, CSS, React, with responsive and mobile-friendly web design. Full stack skills and/or React Native and mobile development skills would be helpful, but are not required. You should be able to operate without full designs, and indeed we would be looking to you for best practices in the design and layout of webpages.

The initial trial period would involve some small improvements to existing websites, and eventually ramping up to 5-10 hours per week and including some brand new applications. Our basic development process would involve you interacting with us on Slack and GitHub, completing tasks and communicating progress as you go. Feel free to maintain a flexible schedule with little-to-no overlap with our California timezone. We can also pay you in Bitcoin, if you'd prefer. :)

Contact me (Benjamin) for more information: blouis AT unquietcode.com

Or: Why you should not put things like usernames at the top level of your domain. sheesh...

TIL people are still using Struts in their crazy old enterprise applications. Jesus...

The war against security researchers continues to dismay, and it always feels like the boot of the man showing up to put the intellectuals in their place.

East 1 is indeed the oldest and has the most non-standard configuration of the bunch (besides China, of course). I definitely would recommend east 2 or west 2 for any new deployments.

The MongoDB hack and the importance of hiring competent people.