burke

Far worse than "decimate", which implies that nine tenths of it survives.

The latter is pretty easy to vibe-patch in:

https://github.com/burke/helix/pull/1

I have used perkeep. I still do at least in theory. I love the concept of it but it’s become… not quite abandonware, but it never gained enough traction to really take on a full life of its own before the primary author moved on. A bit of a tragedy because the basic idea is pretty compelling.

If Apple would just ship bind mounts and FS/pid namespaces... or even just un-break chroot...

It's pretty frustrating to see a press release with "Try on ChatGPT" and then not see the models available even though I'm paying them $200/mo.

Various suggestions that have improved objective outcomes.

Also, perhaps more often useful, is just "hey, tell me about ___ in the context of whatever I've told you about me" kind of thing".

Sometimes, yeah, the suggestions are very generically applicable and it's just a tool for thought.

Troubleshooting some chronic inflammation issues (plausibly, like OP, an autoimmune issue)

It's suggested a few supplements that have helped a lot, helped me figure out dosing and timing, pointed me towards taking gut inflammation more seriously as a part of what's going on (and suggesting various tests and experiments to help prove/disprove that), explained correlations in various bloodwork results, the list goes on.

It's—of course—not perfectly trustworthy but a lot of things are either trivially verifiable or are low-risk experiments.

Anyone doubting this really has no idea what they're talking about.

Set up a "Health & Fitness" project in Claude (or whatever). Feed it:

* Basic data: height, weight, age, sex

* Basic metric snapshots from Apple Health or whatever: HRV range, RHR, typical sleep structure - go through everything and summarize it

* Typical diet (do you track it in MFP or Cronometer? Great, upload a nutrition report)

* Any supplements and medications you take

* Typical exercise habits

* Any health records you have - bloodwork results, interpreted imaging results, etc.

* Family history like you would describe it to a doctor

* Summary of any health complaints

* Anything else that seems relevant.

Then go through a few conversation loops asking it if there's any more information you could provide that would help it be more useful.

Then ask it things like "Given <health complaint>, what should I be doing more of? Less of?"—or "Please speculate about potential causes of <thing>".

Or, even if you don't have any particular health complaints you're working with, just being able to ask it questions like "What's one supplement I should consider starting or stopping today?" (and then obviously do some follow-up research...)

This is life-changing. Anyone skeptical of this has not tried it.

DC has a staggering density of restricted airspace; Reagan National has unusually tight approach/departure requirements... so it doesn't surprise me that if this was going to happen somewhere, it would be there.

Hah neat! I've never seen anything expect centiseconds before. Had no idea this was the way gifs are encoded. Bizarre.

only gotta wait 2.4 hours though, it's missing a zero :)

I guess your dainty, utopian senses are irrationally offended by something that works

1) What

Ok, probably I'm over-interpreting some first-year pain with the new chips.

Anyway, even at that, virtualization isn't really my preferred way to solve any of the problems I have.

Yep. However, before the Apple Silicon migration, VT-x gave us extremely low-overhead virtualization. We built a tiny linux kernel that booted in a second or two and were able to run whatever we wanted with minimal perf overhead.

In the Apple Silicon migration, obviously emulating x86_64 got slow, but even when we built ARM64 VMs, performance was still miserable: there was (is?) no way -- at least no way we ever figured out -- to get reasonable perf out of virtualization on a macbook.

It's possible that this changed post-M1 and it sounds likely it's set to change with M4.

EDIT: ok, I'm probably hallucinating more problem than there actually turned out to be based on the pain in the first year of the M1 chips.

File Provider: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fileprovider/

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this. First impression skimming the docs is that they've gone to significant trouble to make it not generically useful as a FUSE replacement but I could be misreading.

It's very heavyweight, and there's no good shared filesystem option.

We did use virtualization for a bunch of stuff before the move to Apple Silicon, back when Hypervisor.framework and xhyve actually existed and were plausibly useful.

Those also fell by the wayside in the architecture migration and now virtualization has a massive performance cost.

Apparently the M4 chips are on ARMv9 which is apparently much better at virtualization, but it remains to be seen whether apple provides anything lightweight again.

As someone working in developer tools for a company with thousands of people developing software on MacBooks, MAN do I resent SIP. I've recently started calling it "Systems Implementation Prevention".

It's incredible that it's 2024 and I can't cobble together anything vaguely container-like on macOS because:

* bind mounts don't exist (?!)

* clonefile() could maaaybe do the job but doesn't work cross-volume and a lot of the stuff outside of /Users is a different volume

* there's no filesystem namespace.

* chroot doesn't work either because /usr/lib/libsystem.B.dylib is required, but also pretend.

* And it sounds like chroot runs afoul of some SIP rule nowadays even if you can get past the above.

* A lot of this could be worked around with FUSE, but in order to turn that on, we'd have to turn off a lot of SIP.

The closest we can get without virtualization is sandbox-exec, which just allows allowing/denying file reads by path, with no path translation. And also is deprecated.

Nevermind that dtrace exists but you're not allowed to use it either.

Truly, the worst UNIX.

Lithium ion batteries in devices are sandwiched layers enclosed in a kind of 'pouch', right? So what if you manufactured one of these that looked identical to the normal battery, but only had half a battery inside, and the rest of it was plastic explosive. Maybe put a tiny chip in there that, when a particular pattern of current draw happens, fires a detonator. Then, some firmware hack in the device proper that responds to some event and actuates that current draw pattern. It wouldn't even look suspicious if you opened it up.

parent knows what they’re doing here but a helpful thing to know is that you generally want at least 3-5% salt by weight for safety (though less can be okay, depending on other factors)… but if you’re not building in a margin of safety, you need to weigh the peppers and water together to calculate 5% against, not just the water.

Fair. Probably this phenomenon is more limited to Vipassana specifically than I was guessing.

I take the point about the Theravadan rhetorical move here but I still feel like at the very least the original texts deserve to not be written _out_ of the definition of a word if they can be reasonably interpreted to mean something different from what’s practiced in schools working from later turnings and teachings.

That leaves room for determining what is a reasonable interpretation though, and I am extremely far from any kind of authority on that.

Neat, that is a good one, thanks!

Vitakka and vicara are these two terms translated as applied and sustained thought or so, and are kind of famously debated in terms of their specific meaning.

Some translations/interpretations just take this to mean that the second jhana is “stable” and doesn’t require constantly redirecting your attention at it to sustain it, while the first takes active maintenance. Others interpret it in more of an “any kind of thinking” sense.

And anyway… isn’t it the case that Theravadan meditation practice went practically extinct before being reconstructed from the suttas and commentaries sometime in the 18th/19th centuries? Vipassana at least was reinvented as such. Unless some enclave somewhere preserved an actually unbroken thread of jhana practice based on what was written in the suttas (maybe there was?), it weakens the authority of interpretation argument anyway!

Well, how do the early texts describe the insights that happen as a result of jhana?

The main reference I can think of off the top of my head is something along the lines of “with a mind thus purified [by jhana] the meditator inclines the mind to [insight practice]”, which feels compatible with either the very strong Vsm version or the weaker end of loose interpretations of the suttas. Even a really really weak experience of J4-flavored equanimity still reduces stray selfing enough to make insight practice work better. Obviously this effect is magnified many many times by the pa auk style jhana states.

Perhaps there are other specific claims I haven’t read.

[edit to respond to AN reference in edit] interesting, first I’ve seen this one. On one hand it does seem to imply a slightly higher level of concentration than other suttas I’ve read but even here it only talks about elimination of desirable/arousing sensory phenomena, not the sense of “pretty much all sensual phenomena” that Vsm points to. I don’t actually have a super hard time squaring this with what Jhourney and TWIM teach.

I dunno, I think it’s worthwhile to acknowledge that this describes the (very?) shallow end of the pool but these language game land wars are profoundly uninteresting to me.

This–and TWIM jhanas in general–certainly involve the arising of the relevant jhana factors. People feel real and somewhat life-changing experiences of piti, sukha, equanimity… are those, due to limited concentration, below some critical threshold to earn the name “jhana”? Sure there are reasonable arguments for this position but it’s just a language game. Both strong and weak versions of these states are real phenomena that lead to increases in wellbeing.

Besides, it’s not even entirely clear that the earliest texts are actually describing something all _that_ much more concentrated than Nadia does, although the later visuddhimagga most certainly does, and those teachers certainly teach it.

I’ve heard some teachers contrast Sutta-jhanas to visuddhimagga-jhanas and I think that’s a reasonable distinction.

Even when it works (I’ve never seen this failure), this site is offensively unusable. Anchors don’t go to useful places; search doesn’t work in the MathJax regions… the writing also does a fairly poor job of communicating details in many cases.

It’s really a truly terrible spec site.

Use for any kind of commercial operation forces you into stricter maintenance but for specifically private usage by an owner-pilot, TBO is just a suggestion.

It would be a useful analogy for someone intricately familiar with computers but who was only sort of vaguely familiar with the concept of eating, has thought about houses only on occasion, and knows about refrigerators only insofar as they’re a food-related thing inside a house.

Room temperature is 21°C and every degree Celsius is worth about 2°F; that’s about all it takes.

Seriously. This was the most abusive reading experience I’ve come across in a while. I also only got to read a couple of paragraphs before endless ads.