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PureParadigm

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Your feelings are shared by many others our age. Friends at work are important, especially if you're living alone. I live alone in a city with friends within reach, but only having friends outside of work is not enough social interaction for me.

Consider how much social time there is in high school and college. There was barely a moment to be alone. Classes are full of discussion, meals are eaten together, and shooting the shit with siblings or roommates fills in all the other time. If you forego social interaction during work hours, I don't see how the math adds up to get back to the baseline from high school and college.

It sounds like you have an office to go to even though your team doesn't come in often. This is the case for me too, but luckily I'm at a big enough company where there are people my age on other teams. At first, barely anyone came in, but someone has to break the deadlock so I kept coming in every day regardless. Fast forward a year and there is a group of 20-somethings that come in every day. I've formed some of the best friendships of my life here. I recommend going into the office every day even if it's going to be empty. It's a good routine anyway to get out of the house.

While I don't have any personally, I'd also recommend housemates. A lot of my friends from work have housemates and I feel like it's an easy way to build a large friend group since you can share each other's friends. It especially seems to help those who are new to the city and don't have a friend group yet. Your housemates can also easily become your friends!

I really sympathize with your situation. You're simply asking for what used to be normal to return. Don't lose hope - there are so many of us like you and we just need to find each other.

The problem is that ligature substitution is “dumb” in the sense that it only considers whether certain characters appear in a certain order. It’s not aware of the semantic context.

In many code editors (even my terminal with fish shell!) this is not true. Ligatures are broken up when the text changes style due to syntax highlighting. Syntax highlighting can consider context, so if there is a mistaken ligature, this can be fixed by changing the syntax highlighting rules.

I use Dracula color scheme along with the Cascadia Code font [1]. I've been using this set up in both VSCode for Rust and Java in IntelliJ. I find this combination to be extremely readable. Dracula uses many very different colors which make different parts of code obvious. Cascadia has unique shapes for many of the characters which makes distinguishing them a breeze. Would definitely recommend giving this combo a shot!

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/cascadia-code

I've been running something similar on my three Raspberry Pi 4 with microk8s and flux [1]. Flux is great for a homelab environment because I can fearlessly destroy my cluster and install my services on a fresh one with just a few commands.

Next on my list is set up a service mesh like istio and try inter-cluster networking between my cloud cluster and home Raspberry Pi cluster. Perhaps I can save some money on my cloud cluster by offloading non-essential services to the pi cluster.

I'm also curious about getting a couple more external SSDs and setting up some Ceph storage. Has anyone tried this? How is the performance?

One of my pain points is the interaction of the load balancer (metallb) with the router. It seems to want to assign my cluster an IP from a range, but may choose different ones at different times. Then I have to go update the port-forwarding rules on my router. What solutions do you all use for exposing Kubernetes services to the internet?

[1] https://fluxcd.io/

Pdfsandwich 5 years ago

Using Pdfsandwich in college was like having a superpower. We would often be given PDFs with only image data. While my peers were still scrolling through and copying quotes by hand, I was there in seconds with Ctrl-F to find and copy/paste.

Once you have text in the PDF, you can use any sort of text analysis tools. You can use tools to convert it to plain text and grep through, or anything else you want.

That being said, it's not perfect, but still pretty awesome. Sometimes the spacing was off or it would confuse symbols like 1, I, or l. But these are minor and usually only on poorly scanned PDFs.

I wanted to clear out my account so I deleted the VM but it didn't delete the associated static IP, so I got charged for the unused IP address that month. I didn't know the IP was still around until I got the bill. If this were in Azure I would have deleted the entire resource group and the IP would have gone along with it.

In Azure I put all my stuff in a new resource group and then when I'm done I just delete the entire resource group. This has worked well for me so far and I haven't had any surprise charges like I did on AWS and Digital Ocean.

The key takeaway for me is how this decision affects port scanning. According to the article:

Van Buren is really good news for port scanning, for example: so long as the computer is open to the public, you don’t have to worry about the conditions for use to scan the port.

As a frequent user of nmap, this is good to hear.

The bigger problem is when platforms block the content. In this case very few people will hear about the conspiracy theory. So then few will know that this is something worth investigating. This dramatically hinders research into the (potentially true) conspiracy theory.

I have less of a problem with marking things as unfounded if they are actually unfounded. I wouldn't use the term misleading because not all unfounded claims are false. There's still a lot of gray area here. Maybe the person in charge of making those judgements is not a subject matter expert. Or maybe the person making the claim has some additional information that cannot be revealed. (Perhaps they are inside the organization and cannot leak too much or they will be caught.)

I would set the bar for marking things as misleading as requiring evidence to the contrary. I think it is fine to mark things as lacking evidence, as long as that can be established fairly and reliably. I have my doubts that this can be done reliably, but as long as there is no blocking occurring, I think the harm of a mistake is minimized. Anyone claiming to be an impartial subject matter expert capable of making these judgements should provide evidence of that claim.

Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Suppressing research into these would also lead to poorly informed decisions. For example, government mass surveillance on the scale revealed by Snowden was considered a conspiracy theory before the proof emerged.

So I would disagree that "conspiracy theories are problematic." Some are problematic, but there are also some that turn out to be extremely important. No progress is made without questioning authority and the status quo.

git push. The Android app works with git repos from SSH. I also use Wireguard since I run my SSH server behind the VPN, but this is obviously optional since you can just expose your SSH server to the internet.

I've been using pass for several years now and I recommend it to my friends, but I usually get weird looks when I say I store my passwords in a git repo (it's not as bad as it sounds!). Here's why:

- I host my git repo on my desktop computer (through SSH), so it's not exposed anywhere except if you have SSH access to my computer. (A lot of people seem to think git = GitHub which is not true). So if your git repo is not exposed to the public, you don't leak any of the site names/usernames you use.

- The passwords are GPG encrypted so even if it were leaked that would be okay as long as my secret key remains secure.

As far as usability goes, I usually use the -c option to copy/paste my passwords. I used a browser extension for awhile, but I haven't gotten around to reinstalling since the copy/paste works fine for me. Syncing with my phone and Linux devices works perfectly (since it's just git).

The Windows client seems to be no longer maintained [1], so I would like better support here for my Surface. But this is still okay since I can SSH to my desktop computer from Windows and copy/paste the passwords from there.

[1] https://github.com/mbos/Pass4Win#readme

It's not just international keyboards that are affected by this. I'm a Dvorak user so I run into these issues from time to time.

As the article explains, there is a difference between the physical keyCode and character it corresponds to. Which to use really depends on what it is being used for, and there are situations for both. The article suggests checking the character typed, but this is not always the correct way to do it.

For instance, the most annoying are games which default to WASD based on the letter typed and not the physical keys (I've seen this both in web app and native games). Using WASD based on letters simply does not make sense because the whole purpose is to mimic arrow keys. If you base it off of letters typed, then on Dvorak it's like if you used ,A;H on Qwerty which makes absolutely no sense for directional navigation.

For shortcuts where the letter has a meaning, then you might want to look at the actual character. But beware that even alphanumeric keys are not always in the same place because of layouts such as Dvorak and Colemak.

I notice they use GitHub stars as a metric in the Appendix, supposedly to "insist that we hadn’t done a hard launch yet." I wonder how meaningful this metric is. Is 350 a lot of stars? A little? What am I supposed to take away from this?

Currently the US is not choosing either of these because they both have downsides. In (1), this may embolden Taiwan to take risky and provocative actions such as declaring themselves an independent country. (2) is obviously not in US interests.

Instead, the current US position is strategic ambiguity. It is clear there is probably a line somewhere after which the US will intervene, but it is not clear to either side where this is. The goal is that this will deter both sides from changing the status quo, but as China becomes increasingly aggressive it may be necessary for the US to make its position more explicit.

China's economic growth has been fueled by demographics such as a young labor force. Due to the one child policy and low birth rates, they are facing a demographic collapse in the next few decades [1] as more people retire that are replaced by younger workers. If China is ever going to take over Taiwan, they would want to do so when they will be strongest which will be within the next ten years or so.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/global-population-decline-will-hit-chi...

Due to the one child policy, China is going to experience a demographic collapse this decade as more people retire than are available to replace them in the workforce. So the 2020s is the pivotal decade as China nears the height of its power. The CCP is aware of this and knows that if they are ever going to take Taiwan, it would ideally be this decade. Politically, it will also need a victory as the Chinese economy inevitably slows down due to the demographic collapse.

I fear that if the CCP manages to take Kinmen island without a devastating US response then it will be the Austria moment of our century. Obviously, a strong US response would be damaging to both countries, but the only way to deter an attack on Taiwan is to make the cost of attacking so high for the CCP that it is not worth it. While it will be difficult to justify in the short term, the US must push back strongly when China is "testing the waters" or else it will only escalate from there. If there is only a weak US response, it will embolden the CCP to continue pushing the boundaries until they do something that requires either full scale war or surrender (such as invasion of Taiwan main island).

This being HN, does anyone have any knot suggestions for computer cables? For example, I have several cables that are too long and I tie them up with a twist-tie, but maybe there's a knot for that.

Some features that a good computer cable knot would have:

- No sharp bends (could damage cable internals)

- Stable but able to untie easily by pulling (like shoelaces)

- Can tie with one end still plugged in

Regardless of your thoughts on whether this particular case qualifies as mental illness, we need to work to de-stigmatize mental illness. Being diagnosed with a mental illness should not be considered any more harmful than being diagnosed with any other type of illness. When you hear someone has an illness, you probably feel compassionate towards them, and mental illness should be no different in this respect.

The virus/malware could change your $PATH or create an alias for some command that normally prompts you for your password (even sudo itself) and trick you into revealing your password to the malware. Maybe even install a keylogger depending on your OS.

Basically, if you have malware running as your own user, I'd be surprised if it couldn't find a way to trick you into typing your password to invoke sudo. Even then, it can probably do quite a bit of damage without sudo.

So then the only scenario a sudo password could possibly save me from is when I have malware already running as my user (and it's unlikely that it would help anyway due to the tricks I just mentioned). Of course everyone should do what they think is best, but personally if I were in this scenario it's pretty much game over anyway, so it's not something I'm going to worry about.

For my accounts I usually just allow sudo to work without prompting for password by using the NOPASSWD configuration option. This saves a lot of time if you need to use sudo frequently (in my case I use it for system upgrades).

Unless I'm missing something, the security cost of this should be negligible, especially if you're in the habit of locking your computer screen when you're not using it (and this typically happens by default after a few minutes even if you forget). And if you're relying on the sudo password prompt to protect you against untrusted scripts, I'd argue you have bigger problems.

In regards to (1), sometimes using the phone is both a symptom and the cause (in a reinforcing cycle). In my case, I would use my phone in bed before falling asleep to avoid having to confront thoughts I would have while drifting off since I could stay distracted until I was seconds away from passing out. Unsurprisingly, I would have terrible quality sleep (and I suspect many of the psychological problems mentioned in the article stem from problems phone addiction causes with sleep).

Once I moved the phone to another room at night, I was forced to fall asleep without being distracted. Being alone with my thoughts was extremely uncomfortable the first few nights, but it got better. Now I'm used to falling asleep without distraction and am more in touch with how I feel. So my phone was causing me to become out of touch with my thoughts/feelings which would in turn make it even more uncomfortable to confront them, so I would turn to my phone for distraction and this reinforcing cycle continued until broken. The phone was both a symptom and cause of my sleeping problem, so removing the phone removed the cause and fixed my sleep.