AstroDogCatcher

Yes. First experienced TMJ pain as a teenager and almost overdosed on painkillers while trying to get rid of it at 3AM. Still recurrs about 2-3 times per year, but I've now learned to feel it coming on much earlier and start loading up on codiene in advance.

Thanks - fascinating stuff. I'm now even more convinced I want to give it a try, but I think I'll play around with public data and tutorials before leaping into home sequencing.

Interested outsider here; I work with a lot of HCLS research customers but don't have a biology-related background. Can you explain the problems with the Nanopore sequencer accuracy in more detail? Basically, I was wondering if I could get one for myself and sequence my own genome, then user the data to learn about life-sciences computing techniques. If I were to buy one of the USB-attachable devices and run it, is the data simply not viable for use in a genomics pipeline, or is it just that the results would be questionable? Also, if accuracy is an issue, what about just running the same sample N times and doing some error correction?

Exactly the same situation in the UK - snow is common but rarely persistent enough to justify the infrastructure investment to deal with it. Also, having an excuse to combine moaning about the weather with moaning about our inept government is basically enough to trigger a collective national orgasm.

As a recent Mac adopter after spending 10 years as a Linux user, Homebrew is exactly what I need it to be.

Linux OS package managers are, almost by necessity, full of outdated packages which are not the versions I want to use for day-to-day CLI applications. Snaps, Flatpaks and AppImages all have their own downsides due to half-baked isolation goals and the associated usability compromises. Language-specific package managers are a mixed bag, but too narrow in scope when thinking about usage of tools rather than development based on libraries. Maybe Nix or the Arch AUR are a better option, but they come with a learning curve and/or stability compromise. I don't care how the packages are arranged on my Mac; the system is too locked down for me to really have the level of control I'd like anyway, so better to just accept the usability advantages and get on withy life.

In a cloud setting, I guess having user /home dirs on separate volumes from the root disk and having them relocatable is a reasonable analogue. The real issue is that much like the pen drive thing, absolutely no-one actually does this.

The key difference is that one of these things has the backing and approval of recognized governments who also control law enforcement, while the other is just some guys on the internet. I'm not so sure "finding a pre-existing bitcoin wallet I can claim, and doing so" is really any different than "generating hashes until the blockchain hands me a prize".

Suggesting the explanation provided is insufficiently clear, no?

Julia has some nice ideas but it is time for a do-over as a fully open language (ie without the commercial backer actively upselling in their mailing list), and with the "time to first plot" and package management problems addressed.

The latter - the results are astoundingly bad. You should remove that demo ASAP.

I just tried the demo sketch thing on the Gradio site and it wasn't able to correctly interpret a single digit I tried, even after 6 or 7 attempts with different values. Serious question - is this a spoof site? I find it hard to believe character recognition can be that bad, in a marketing demo no less.

At this point I think if you desperately need MS Office, MacOS is the way to go. I will never buy a Windows machine again, and being forced to use it in a work setting would be a deal-breaker. Fortunately at this point even MS isn't stupid enough to make that a requirement as far as I'm aware.

Perhaps we should put computers inside each businesses location, to minimize the blast radius of any specific outage and make people take responsibility for their own stack.

I am mildly opposed to technology advocacy actually, but that is besides the point. Dev advocates are paid to market software and tools, and everyone knows their inherent bias and can factor it in when assessing their claims. When someone is pro-bitcoin, it is impossible to know whether they have a genuine interest in the technology (divorced from use-cases), a desire to see a new financial system come into being (regardless of the technical mechanism), some mixture of both, or if they have the literal definition of a vested interest like the dev advocate and just want to see their coin values increase for monetary gain. Most importantly, that final group get away with lying and other questionable behaviour because unlike with the paid advocate, there is no-one (ie an employer) to hold them accountable for their bullshitting.

I understood you perfectly; I simply don't agree. Your model for decision-making bears no resemblance to reality at Amazon or anywhere else.

This is nothing to do with one-way/two-way door decisions, you are conflating that concept with an understanding of "unintended consequences" in order to take a cheap shot at Amazon. Ordinarily I'd enjoy that as much as the next person, but this case is too ham-fisted to leave unchallenged.

I am mostly indifferent to bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, but strongly opposed to people shilling for them. I see no evidence thus far for bitcoin being anything other than a vehicle for speculation; just one more form of gambling with the froth on top of our financial system, distracting people and diverting resources from actual useful activity.

Bitcoin being legal tender in certain places seems like more of a negative indicator on those countries, rather than a positive indicator for bitcoin.

I'm a regular employee but at a professional services org - you basically described how I generate my timesheets.

The main difference is that at the end of the day I try to just stop when I have "enough" hours, since I don't get paid for overtime like I would as a contractor.

To the original topic: roughly 40% of my week is wasted on pointless meetings or inter-meeting dead time. The other time is roughly equally split between useful meetings, actual work, and admin or training tasks.

The issue with the pointless meetings is that they are generally a series, where one 10-minute slot out of every four one-hour meetings is genuinely useful - but you don't know in advance when that slot will occur. The other kind of pointless meetings generally involve customers who are unprepared.

For some customers, I imagine this will start off as an emotionally-driven request...until they see the price.

The Julia crowd really need to hang less value on the REPL - people writing serious production code don't use one, and scientists using Python have moved on to notebooks. At this point, having Julia be so focused on the REPL is a weird affectation.

I'd flip that meme slightly; it is true that scientists write shitty code...but it turns out computer scientists do exactly the same, and with less humility.

100% agree. Getting an M1 Mac has solidified this feeling for me too; I still want to be a Linux desktop user on philosophical grounds and will never go back to Windows, but as I age I have rapidly lost interest in tinkering and now want it to Just Work. Actually it isn't really the distro which needs fixing, but rather the package management space. Appimage/Snap/Flatpak need to be consolidated into a single open standard which is as easy to use as Homebrew.

Feels like this exists mostly as a prop for immature CS students to "impress" people with.

If compliance is an issue, I doubt whether there is such a thing as a "suitable substitute". Certainly none of the commercial applications I interact with accepted CentOS as an alternative to RHEL, so they certainly won't allow a substitution for Rocky or Alma.

While AL2022 isn't a drop-in RHEL alternative, it seems much more likely that vendors will accept it as a commercially supported install base given that it is a first-class citizen on the biggest cloud.

If you want to make Ubuntu as nice as MacOS I think you need a private company willing to spend money and time in a concerted effort to get it to that point, which IMO won't happen.

Canonical employees would like a word with you.

I've never met two people I'd describe as equally competent across the board, so it seems like an irrelevant exercise. We have also not touched on what personal growth and emotional maturity a person can gain in a few months away from work.

I suppose my conclusion is that as you argue, people probably will discriminate - but it is that part we should be pushing back against in order to make this proposal work, rather than just accepting it as an unavoidable consequence of parenting.

I want to also add that I have no children and no intent to have them; but I like the idea of the work culture we are describing here for other reasons. For example, acceptance that taking a sabbatical might be a significant positive step for some professionals if we can step back from the evaluation grind.

I don't really disagree with your point, but personal experience tells me that inherent competence and motivation have far more impact on the value an employee can deliver than raw experience (on the timescales of weeks or months, which is the point we are focused on here).

Evidence from the other half of the population suggests they are correct.

Mandatory leave is probably going to be deemed too heavy handed, but much more non-transferable use-it-or-lose-it time off should be available so that people feel inclined to use at least some of it.

+1 to this; also an AWS employee, also use other VPS providers for personal projects (Hetzner and Vultr). Don't need the full breadth of AWS services to tinker with Caddy and Tailscale, but more than that I simply follow the practice of "don't shit where you eat".