Balladeer

"...get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, it'll be fine. You won't have to vote anymore."

https://youtu.be/gE7xoHJkgvE?si=MVL_GibOGn2WDpLV&t=18

"I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics...and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary by the military."

https://youtu.be/BfSAOPPSYC8?si=C-6ZUrvU0yoFl9Aw&t=22

How does "R language" compare to searching for one of the popular R packages? Searching for "tidyverse", "dplyr", or "ggplot" seems to get a good chunk of hits. That being said, yeah, there does seem to be a trio of skills that often go together (R, python, SQL)

How long did it take you to go from "making a new server / copying configs is fine" to "this is tedious enough I'd like to abstract it?"

Like, was it a years-long journey or is this the type of thing that becomes immediately obvious once you start working w/ N servers or something?

I'm trying to learn the space between "physical machines in my apartment" and "cloud-native everything" and that's led me to the point where I'm happily using cloud-init to configure servers and running fun little docker compose systems on them.

I believe it is. See https://www.wired.com/story/battle-over-books3/

I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors.

I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes.

Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness.

I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed.

- [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu...

Hah! Thanks for the correction / info; I do appreciate it.

Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

A lot of the optimism seems to rely on this statement and...I'm not convinced? But I also admit I'm not well informed on the topic. Does anyone have suggested reading on 'market discipline', as they're calling it?

I mean, the first person on their "Patron Saints of Techno-Optimism" is Jeff Bezos, who is actively dealing with an antitrust lawsuit from the FTC regarding Amazon's frequent and regular push toward monopoly power.

I understand and even expect the lack of empathy from RTO executives, but the lack of empathy on the part of the 'remote work for everyone, always' camp saddens me.

I've worked primarily remote since 2016; but I have the option of going to an office a few miles away when I want to. My wife, forced to work from home, finds the entire experience to be socially isolating and misery inducing.

work from our own comfy homes instead of rolling into a crowded, stuffy office everyday?

This one-sidedness is a strawman. Not everyone's home is comfy or has space for working; some people made housing decisions based on one person leaving the home for most of every day (e.g. choosing a smaller apartment closer to city). Not every office is crowded and stuffy; some are quite pleasant. Not every worker gets their social needs met outside of work, and forcing them home ends up isolating them from the primary source of social interaction in their world, with all of the mental health and well-being issues that entails.

Personally, think that "more remote work" is the way to go, but the issue is more nuanced than "why are people resisting this obviously beneficial change?"

some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life

Do you have any learning recommendations for someone looking to start down this path? I've only ever worked in an infra-renter context, and I've begun exploring the 'rent from Hetzner, manage your own infra' for personal projects, but I would love to learn from the paths of experts where possible.

This "article" is a 10+ year-old website that's been tracking an ecosystem-wide migration from one style of preparing python code for distribution to another, more robust style of preparation.

I'm cautiously optimistic here. I have a very specific idea that the Vision Pro might make real. There's a great urban park nearby and I so want to just...walk while I work. Not on a treadmill and not 'to get away from my work'. Just: walk on a safe road / trail and do my computer work at the same time.

I've been exploring the consumer AR space --- I have a Viture One and have been eyeing the Xreal Air, but neither seems to solve the problem of "keep the virtual screen stable while I walk through real space".

If the Vision Pro can do that for several hours at a time, my interest in getting one will skyrocket.

(The whole 'how do you type while walking' issue is a separate problem, but one I feel is far more solvable than the virtual screen stability issue).

For typical use cases, you're probably persisting the data, so I'll assume your use case is "Python with a database ORM like Django or SQLAlchemy".

The really short version of "use statemachine" is: store a single, explicit state for every 'thing' and create a log row every time that state changes.

- Make a python model / database table to represent "the things whose state can change" (like an Order or a Task).

- Give each a unique id and a 'state' column that is either a text field or an enumerated type (or a foreign key to a 'valid_states' table if you want to get fancy). Do this _instead_ of adding boolean columns like 'is_completed' or 'is_deleted'.

- Create a log table with the same columns as your Order table -- whenever you update an Order's state (or create a new one), add a new row to the log table with the new state and a timestamp. Now your 'Order' table shows the current state of every Order, while your log table shows every state that every Order has ever been in, which will come in _super_ handy for analytics later.

Everything else can be built on top of the above:

- defining valid states and their transitions (aka formalizing the state machine)

- preventing 'invalid' transitions if you want

- creating analytics tables to show the 'typical' flow of an Order (e.g. columns like 'creation_date', 'payment_date', 'ship_date', 'return_date')

- triggering other systems when Orders enter or leave a given state - etc

This "suddenly requirements change" is why I get instantly wary whenever I see a boolean column like `completed` in a design.

Sure, you start with two explicit states. But then you add `deleted` and now you have four states, whether you know it or not. Then there's talk of adding a third boolean column, and folks are wondering what it _means_ to be "deleted" but not "completed" and whether that is a valid state, and pretty soon the team is reinventing the concept of a state machine without any of the vocabulary that makes it straightforward.

Yeah, having a nuanced vocabulary to talk about misophonia really helped me. Even just in the context of English, the vocabulary just wasn't there back in the early 2010s when I first sought out treatment; basically all you could find as a lay-person was articles like "What is this 'misophonia' thing? Is it even real?".

Thankfully, the field has developed in the last decade, but I can only imagine that if people find themselves struggling to conduct day-to-day interactions due to language differences, then trying to talk about something as nuanced as misophonia responses would be unreasonably difficult, if not impossible.

I can empathize with you; I do hope you're able to find some relief.

My treatment was basically a targeted form of Cognitive behavioral therapy.

The first big hurdle was to learn that I had developed 'toxic hopefulness' regarding the behaviors of others: I had taught myself to eat quietly (because as a kid I learned that was the morally correct thing to do), and so I believed that because I could do it, it was reasonable to expect every other person in the world to change like I had. This is why the sounds of the city -- sirens, cars, crowds -- didn't bother me, but a single person eating did: because I had attached a moral judgement to 'correct' eating as a child.

Now, when the whole world didn't change to eat quietly like I did, I developed deep-seated moral indignation, which I covered with anger (I am very much a 'flight' person in life, except for when my misophonia triggers, and I have an emotional reflex to 'fight').

And because I was embarrassed about that anger, I added a layer of anxiety, where I was hyper-vigilant to sounds that might set off a misophonic response, which, in turn, made me that much more susceptible to people eating, or anything that could sound like someone eating. It turns out the first quarter-second of most sounds (opening doors, engines starting, boots stomping, etc) can sound like the crunch of a chip to a brain that's anxiously awaiting eating sounds.

So, if I had to boil my therapy down to a few points (and for reals -- I'm not a therapist, this is just my personal experience) it was:

1) come to terms with my toxic hopefulness and accept that there are entirely predictable ways in which the people will never change to accommodate me.

2) learn skills to manage the emotional reaction to hearing a triggering sound. For me, this came down to variations on telling myself, "This activity is natural. It is okay for people to make noise while eating" while imagining a triggering situation. I started really simple, for seconds at a time, before building up to more intense imaginal situations.

Those two combine such that it took a stronger sound to 'trigger' my misophonia, and when triggered, I developed skills to managed my emotional reflex, which in turn made the hypervigilant anxiety about getting triggered go down, which made it harder to trigger a response, which meant the skills I learned were more effective, and so on in a self-healing cycle.

Hope that helps a little.

Having gone through therapy for misophonia over the last year, I'm happy that research on the phenomenon has progressed quite a bit since I last gave up on treatment back in the early 2010s. While not 100% gone, I find my misophonia response is nearly gone and I now have skills to deal with it should a response happen. (My therapist's goal was to take misophonia "from the size of an elephant down to a mouse.")

Some interesting things to look for here in the comments of folks describing their own experiences:

- occurrences are often much stronger with family members or friends

- occurrences are often stronger at home or in places that "should" be safe and controllable.

- the content of the sound is what matters (e.g. chewing, engines, tapping, etc), not strictly the quality of the sound (loudness, pitch, etc) -- that's a different thing called hyperacusis

- misophonia often forms in childhood

Anyway, for the many folks here suffering from it: yes, misophonia is real, but also, it is treatable.

The book "Stolen Focus" had an interesting point on this effect that resonated with me. While mind wandering -- letting your mind explore the past and future -- can be a gift and creative boon, it can only do so in a low-stress environment. People often rate "mind wandering" as one of the least pleasant daily activities, even below chores, because, mind-wandering in a high stress environment leads to rumination, and "ruminating on negative emotions becomes torment."

Mineable cryptocurrencies inject the new money to whoever mines them, which could be anyone

While true in theory, is it true in practice? Those with the most resources to mine will mine the most and thus receive the most, allowing them to mine more, and the cycle of centralization continues.

That's true regardless of PoW or PoS, isn't it?