FigurativeVoid

I love this bit from the documentary "Behind the Curve (2018)." One of the scientists poses the following question: "What evidence could I show you that would change your position?"

If someone can't answer that, it's probably not worth arguing about.

It looks like xcancel doesn't support articles yet. There may be another service?

Technology shapes behavior. To ignore that is to ignore history.

Acetaminophen has a quirky effect if you’re on a CGM. It makes your interstitial glucose read higher than your blood glucose.

Context: I’m t1 diabetic.

I was recovering from an injury, and I switched from ibuprofen to acetaminophen. But the whole time I was on it, my sensor glucose was reading 50-60 mg/dl higher than my blood glucose. This is really bad on a closed loop system as my pump kept trying to lower my blood sugar, but it was pushing me into hypoglycemia (50 mg/dl).

Turns out this is a common effect, but a relatively new discovery that no one told me about.

I wonder if communities will move away from things like buses to public autonomous cars.

If you could run a fleet of $30k Waymo’s, that would be nice

Especially in the US. In countries with more robust public transport, you can get away with not having a car. That's basically impossible in the US.

I've started to dislike the narrative that "Apple never leads the pack, but it waits to release the best product."

But that hasn't been true for a decade. Most improvements have been marginal, and they totally missed the boat on LLMs.

Probably one of the best products apple has made of late: relatively affordable, good ux, user replaceable batteries. Glad to see this iteration hasn't made it worse.

I have been trying to make more friends in the real and virtual world the past two years, and I have been pretty successful. Most of my new friends come from the following: Volleyball, MtG, or a writing group.

Really, I think that it comes down to make making or joining a space with a shared activity and moderating out the crap.

The problem is most communities are losing those spaces in favor of private social clubs. That's what we need to fight.

https://literallythevoid.com/

I have a few ideas that I want to write more about, and I'm sure I'll get to them when I have time.

The real goal is to capture more internet friends.

It would have to be catastrophic for most businesses to make think about escaping the cloud. The cost of migration and maintenance are massive for small and medium businesses.

I have a distinct moment in my memory of when I stopped being a voracious reader, and started spending more time online: when I got an iPod touch.

To reverse the trend, I’m trying to read physical books or ebooks on a dedicated ereader as much as possible. No one seems to care, they are on their phones.

When I do use social media, I try to use a computer where I have much more control over what’s happening. So far I’ve read a ton more books this year.

On which side?

I have thought that we should make entering the medical professions much easier. In order to become a nurse, you usually need a 4 year degree. This has two issues:

1. This is way to much time in the classroom. Much of that coursework simply isn't necessary.

2. You have people that would be good nurses piking other programs because they can't get passing marks in classes that are irrelevant to day to day nursing.

Binding what are essentially professional programs to the academy is a mistake. Don't get me wrong, I love the academy. But we need nurses.

Oh it never worked. It was bad design by someone who was well meaning, but inexperienced.

All these issues were resolved, usually, by parsing the date into a proper Date class.

I used to work at a company that stored all dates as ints in a YYYYMMDD format. When I asked why, I was told it was so we could subtract 2 dates to get the difference.

I asked them why they couldn’t use DATEDIFF since this was in a sql db.

They said they hadn’t heard of it and that it must be new.

I had no idea how many ads load the average page. I just forgot because I have been using uBlock for so long.

I have been hesitant to use Firefox, just because I am used to chrome. But after Google forcibly disabled software that I chose to run, I'm all in on Firefox.

Incredible.

I sometimes forget that manga writers use very real locations as references. I believe this is the backdrop for several Tokyo Ghoul scenes.

Digital whiteboarding tools are close, but I think they miss some of the magic of working in a shared space with an analog too.

I can make more complex drawings in excalidraw than I could on a really drawing surface. I suspect that leads to simpler drawings and thus simpler designs.

One of the few things that I miss about working in an office is a large whiteboard and standing in front of it with a colleague.

Working on an architecture with a peer and marker really led to some elegant class designs.

This is the thing that irritates me most. If I get in one line, I don't have to do anything. If I get in the other I have to unpack my laptop, take of my shoes, accessories, whatever.

Once there was a woman in front of me who asked why we take our shoes off and the response was "Once someone put a bomb in there shoes."

1. I don't love remedies to problems that happened once.

2. We had an international pandemic once... by your logic shouldn't we always mask at the airport?

It's absolutely security theater.

The thing that's irritating about Read ID (at least in Ohio) is that the BMV would let you get an Ohio ID cheaper than a Real ID. Seems like a money grab when you know that people are eventually going to need a Real ID to fly.

You're correct. But I think that it is still difficult to make an argument that is original enough to make a professor happy.

I have been working on a bash only static site generator. I don’t think that I’ll share it, but its nice to know I own the tool chain and that I should be able to replicate it forever.

I have a few thoughts, so I’m just going to write them out and see where they all go. I went to school in the US, so everything here applies for the US.

- Credentialism isn’t a secret. Students attend university not to learn, but to get a credential. The only way to get said credential is to get good grades, and there are lots of ways to get good grades. When I studied chemical engineering, it was an open secret that everyone was cheating. The professors didn’t care so long as it appeared that you weren’t. People readily took easy classes or sought easy professors. Many people looked to get accommodations that they didn’t need so that tests would be easier. I don’t hate accommodations, I had a few.

- This professor that authored this post is complaining that students don’t have original thoughts. For undergraduates, classes are primarily about competency. Having an original thought is really hard work. You have to have a breadth of knowledge in a field that can’t be attained in an undergraduate course.

- I hate to blame technology. Our phones and computers are some of the most valuable tools that we have. I love to read. My parents went out of their way to make sure that my siblings and I could all read well, and we weren’t allowed to watch television. TikTok is more fun than reading. Phones are more fun than reading. I don’t blame people for using them over reading.

The state of education and reading in America is a travesty. I don’t have any solutions.

I did.

The article makes no claims about dreams or the relationship between dreams and sleep quality.

Anecdotally, I’ve found that theanine radically increases the vividness and memorability of my dreams.

Of course that might be be a great effect depending on the content of my dreams.

That could mean deeper sleep, but I’ve not really measured that.

The more that we have AI trawling our writing, the more important I think it is to realize that AI is part of the audience.

I have been thinking about writing more "cookbook" style posts so that users and AI have good modern examples to look at. CSS-tricks is a great example. It has good code and and is easy to search.

One thing that articles that include code need to tag good and bad examples. AI will get better at recognizing the bad, but we should have more comments that say "This is bad. Use the better pattern."

A second thought. It leads to lazy application development. Whenever you have production intervention that happens more than a few times, you should just make a feature that does it safely via application code.