felizuno

wow Paul I haven't seen your name in years but loved what you used to do with Echo Nest and the Rdio API <3

SWF was simultaneously brilliant and a festering wound that required amputation, and I would have welcomed a replacement that wasn't the biggest attack surface on the internet. I too love Homestar Runner.

IMO the fact that it belonged to Adobe was the biggest problem, if SWF had been managed by a more capable software org it could have been maintained in a way that kept it from getting banned from the internet. And remember, that's how bad it was - it got banned from the internet because it was absolutely indefensible to leave it around. SWF getting cancelled magically stopped every single family member I have from calling me with weird viruses and corruption they managed to stumble into. I saw more malicious code execution through SWF than I saw from my dumb little cousins torrenting sus ROMs and photoshop crackers. I'd rather not have it than have those problems persist.

Check out The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, it has a few theories on through lines. The book is about these mystery cults, and specifically how they may have been using and early form of LSD. Part of the theory is the classically reported ego death experience might be what is referenced by the rebirth/resurrection claims. As for overlaps with Christianity, there are lots of fun theories including that John the Baptist was an initiate and may have actually initiated Jesus. This is a little difficult to square with the fact that the greek mystery cults claim to have exclusively initiated women, but hey they don't call them mystery cults because they are fully understood.

For sure. Buying wholesale and selling retail is one of the most common/accessible windows of arbitrage you can find.

I guess I don't get what's objectionable about working for someone who doesn't understand how you do what you do. Isn't what matters being appreciated? I certainly can't work for someone who doesn't value what I do, but I can care less whether they actually understand how I do it.

I have also had huge results with 5-HTP (in combination with vitamin D). I had that breakthrough in 2017 and it has been a consistent improvement ever since so I feel comfortable suggesting it. I have more recently had a similar "OMFG" moment with supplementing creatine but I'm only a few months into that so not ready to make claims about durability. I was diagnosed with chronic depression as a child (in 1994) and have taken Wellbutrin, Prozac, Lexapro, and Celexa at different points in my life. Personally I never experienced benefits that outweighed the side effects with any of those drugs. Taking an approach that centers on whole-body (and really specifically intestinal) serotonin has made the biggest difference in my life. Avoiding processed carbohydrates like pasta and bread has also been a piece of the puzzle, but unequivocally 5-HTP + VitD has been the standout difference maker.

You know, you might be right that in the end it was a settlement of sorts. I remember for a while they were fighting it specifically because it was about playlists (named groups of songs) which was not defined in the licensing in a way that clearly did or did not overlap with albums. The more I think about it, there was such a threat of refusing to renew licenses that it's possible they renewed with explicit language that prevented these playlists. I know for sure the playlists were purged. All said it was a hilarious amount of lawyer money over some of the dumbest CDs ever.

When I worked with Rdio the RIAA sued them because users would make playlists named "Now that's what I call music < X >" with the same songs as the CDs. All the songs were fully licensed to be streamed on the service. The RIAA won those lawsuits.

edit: they might have actually settled, but the RIAA got what they wanted with no concessions

Software is not an industry famous for socially/emotionally aware practitioners. Lots of people make perfect the enemy of "good enough", or leave useless PR nits to show that they are participating, or disregard the level of effort involved and cut straight to their pet grievances. These are all ways of disrespecting somebody's work that you're going to encounter a lot.

One piece of advice I give all new jr devs (I've mentored more than 100 at this point) is: "Don't feel feelings about your code, because your code doesn't feel any feelings about you. Investing emotions in your code is entering into an abusive relationship".

It's hard when you're proud of something you made and it gets criticized, or replaced in production in a short amount of time, or immediately polluted by somebody who doesn't seem to care as much as you did. Try to realize that the actionable grievance is the wasted time and effort. It can be hard to get people to respect your feelings, but it is pretty easy to make a case that wasting your time and effort should be avoided.

So many adjectives... and "radical" in the title is a doozy considering this article is essentially a stoner summary of LeDoux's "Deep History of Ourselves" with the science replaced with thesaurus suggestions.

yeah, this part is where I am confused - the dispute itself is about bad business to business behavior, but the class status of this lawsuit drills down to harm caused to end users. I'm trying to figure out what expectations end users are entitled to since it's obviously not the case that WP users can hold Automattic directly liable when they are hacked.

I _think_ the argument is that WPE gave them the (at the time reasonable) expectation that risk mitigation was handled by them, and Automattic made that expectation impossible to meet retroactively hence tortious interference, but is there language that passes the liability up the chain from the end users? To me it seems like WPE has a case but the end users as a class might face headwinds.

And for everybody angrily downvoting me I agree with you that Matt is an asshole but that doesn't mean I don't want to understand the nuance of a class claim in a case like this.

thank you, now I'm learning the things I wanted to learn when I made my comment

I have to assume there is bright-line "swim at your own risk" language that protects Automattic from claims like this.

Are you serious? That's like saying expecting people to stay healthy while eating every meal out of a garbage dumpster is laughable. The solution isn't to change the content, it's to stop eating out of a garbage dumpster. And yes, I think you should exercise the self control to not overconsume things, whether it's information or ice cream. If you bombard yourself with more information than you can critically process then that's a "you" problem.

While I find it annoying to present inaccurate details as "history" I still think we need to put the onus on information consumers to think critically and go beyond taking everything at face value. The world is full of manipulation, lies of omission, and actual lies as well. Taking things at face value (especially on TikTok and YouTube) is foolish. If you don't want to be a fool the ball is in your court, the world will not be becoming more foolproof.

I am in here taking a strong stance against CC, but I am happy to agree with you and steel-man your point: I think Clean Code is perfectly fine and workable in academic and single-developer software projects.

I think most of this pushback (certainly all of mine) is about it creeping into production environments and exacerbating personality traits that tend to be problematic in team settings, which does not invalidate the abstract idea and should instead be scoped to its practice.

I'm not seeking these people out to hate on them, but when I encounter them the social and code environments around them always exhibit the same dysfunctions. I've seen it multiple times. When your team is threatening to quit because they can't stand working with you, the problem is _probably_ with you and not them. And when you get fired and bugs go down, velocity goes up, and the morale problems disappear, it's now obvious that the problem was you. It's not a hand wavy theoretical take, it's a consistent pattern from dozens of instances at a variety of companies.

Clean Code zealots are consistently some of the least likable, least productive, least pragmatic people I have ever worked with. I've had multiple clients where the whole team is threatening to quit unless the CC zealot is fired. And when they are fired guess what - bugs go down, shipped features go up, and meetings become productive. "Idiots who froth at the mouth" is an understatement IMO

I'm a self respecting developer who has been using React in production for almost 10 years now, and SiwftUI is significantly better than RN. I wasn't a huge fan of learning to deal with XCode, but yeah it's not fandom it just actually works better with fewer quirks and downstream perf issues.

There is a very simple rebuttal to this: In almost every high $$ trial the defense and prosecution will both call expert witnesses. These experts will then directly contradict and disagree with each other. Which of these experts should be trusted? It was an expert who testified that cigarettes are good for you, an expert who testified that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and an expert who verified that Oxycontin is not addictive. Those are not the people you want to learn from, no.

We celebrate countless outsiders like Galileo and Darwin who have disrupted the consensus of "experts" and were considered highly political at the time. History simply does not defend the infallibility of "experts", and does support the idea that you should not blindly trust a person who claims expertise.

Everybody should look into the work of Philip Tetlock and consider reading his book Superforecasters. There is a mountain of scientific evidence to show that the more a person considers themselves an expert in a topic the more vulnerable they are to making assumptions and being proven wrong as time progresses.

Articles like this on either side are a waste of time to write and read. Commenting on them is even worse (and here I am too...)

Zero people are receiving value from any of this energy, because it is impossible to - these are intellectual empty calories. Nobody here will be changing their mind, and these comments won't bring anybody closer to changing their mind. Literally nothing of substance is being created, and nothing will change because of any of it.

It proves that you and I are foolish that we participate in such useless activities while our short lives slip away. I'm here hypocritically yelling into the wind like an idiot right now. All of this is a sad waste of human potential.

Imagine if the time spent writing this article and all these 1400+ comments went into something simple like picking up litter where we live. What a real appreciable difference that would make. I'm going to go do that to offset the time I spent writing this stupid comment.

I've been convinced that random is so maximally inclusive that there is no error category. Obviously uniformity is an anti-random condition that would bait the label "error" but I think it's still perfectly random to flip a coin tails 2, 4, 6, 6k times consecutively and the uniformity is simply a shocking instance of random. To your point, I don't think random implies balance though I understand that statistically this is the expected outcome of large set randomness such as ...the universe... (OP)

Many of my thoughts on randomness are seeded by David Deutsch's "Beginning of infinity" which is an interesting read FWTW

Buses and trains don’t run 24 hours a day. I paid a premium to live a walkable distance to most things I do. We drive so little that I fill my tank once every 2-3 MONTHS. But when my four month old has a fever in the middle of the night I absolutely need my car or I would have to call an ambulance. SMH

If you ported an already working app then you missed out on the unmitigated disaster of Atlas Content Modeler, which was advertised as production ready but slowly became abandonware without them ever really acknowledging it. I hope you never need to consume your content via GraphQL, because they absolutely can't handle it at reasonable traffic loads.

After some seriously bad experiences with them I hope WPEngine loses their shirt. WRT their headless tooling the advertising versus the reality is insane. They held one of our clients hostage asking for $10k/month, we left for Kinsta for low hundreds per month and have had nothing but performance improvements and great support. I frankly don't like WordPress at all and don't really care about this lawsuit, but was burned so bad by WPEngine I can't help but stop by and say bad things about them.

no, the prosecutors office cut deals with both of them because they were a) only able to schedule murder trials and b) scared to face a jury in Seattle

I will say here what I have said many times in real life: if I had been carrying a gun I would probably have been shot with it - dead men tell no tales and they certainly ran my pockets.

I was jumped from in front and behind by two people by complete surprise and tackled to the ground. The amount of time between the beginning of the assault and losing consciousness was only a few seconds. From the video it looks like they already tried to kill me by repeatedly stomping on my head and kicking me in the face. I'm speculating but I think if they found a gun on me they would have just shot me with it.

I think we probably agree to a large extent. There are a lot of comments here, so I want to quote one of my responses to another person in an effort to inject some consistency, but tl;dr the reason I think decriminalization is the issue is that AFAIK our criminal justice system is the only way we can confiscate drugs or force a person into treatment such as inpatient detox and/or rehab:

""" To me it's not so much about punishing drug use (jail time), it's about stopping drug addiction (intervention and recovery). For example I think intervening in such a way that a user is confirmed to get at least a few hours of sleep before potentially using meth again would be a big start.

I'll admit that I support confiscating drugs when found, but I'm not advocating that arrest is always appropriate. I am in favor of punishing selling meth, which I acknowledge is perhaps hypocritical given my other beliefs knowing that plenty of people sell to support their habits.

I do think it's important to have a mechanism of mandatory intervention, and my non-lawyer understanding is that criminalizing drugs is really the only way to put mandatory intervention on the table. I met mothers who could not force their children into rehab, for example. I should be clear that I don't feel this way about all drugs, but I think that methamphetamine specifically poses a risk to the safety of both users and people around them that merits mandatory intervention.

If we had functional mechanisms to to enact mandatory interventions for users that were non-criminal I'm definitely open to that. Depending on the targeted success rate it seems like inpatient detox + rehab would be required in many cases, and I am simply not aware of non-judicial ways we can force a person into those circumstances against their will (which in the case of meth I admit I support even if that opinion is controversial).

I am not an expert, but nonetheless I'm now entangled with the topic as one that defines significant aspects of my life (loss of smell and hearing, PTSD, facial disfiguration). I think we can do better than we have been, both recently and since Nixon, but I think that having tough conversations is part of how we'll get better. My experience is that people in my situation frequently have our perspectives invalidated as "politically incorrect" or otherwise irrelevant [...], and I wanted to speak up to make sure people know that we exist and we don't want our numbers to grow. """

Thanks for your comment, it's good to have perspectives from other people with real life experiences. It sounds like you're in a better place which is great to hear :)

Me and most people I met who were victimized by drug users "blame addiction" in the narrow sense that we don't think the people who victimized us would have behaved that way in the absence of the drugs. I don't think the general attitude was that drug users are bad people, more that drug use can result in people acting in ways that they otherwise wouldn't. I certainly don't think using any drug reduces a person's human value.

I'm in support of targeting pathways and outcomes that I think might be similar to yours. We probably have different perspectives on some forms of harm reduction and agree on others, which I think is inevitable based on our different experiences. I think we agree that medical attention and pathways to overcoming addiction outside of jail are important ingredients to a successful recovery.

To me it's not so much about punishing drug use (jail time), it's about stopping drug addiction (intervention and recovery). For example I think intervening in such a way that a user is confirmed to get at least a few hours of sleep before potentially using meth again would be a big start.

I'll admit that I support confiscating drugs when found, but I'm not advocating that arrest is always appropriate. I am in favor of punishing selling meth, which I acknowledge is perhaps hypocritical given my other beliefs knowing that plenty of people sell to support their habits.

I do think it's important to have a mechanism of mandatory intervention, and my non-lawyer understanding is that criminalizing drugs is really the only way to put mandatory intervention on the table. I met mothers who could not force their children into rehab, for example. I should be clear that I don't feel this way about all drugs, but I think that methamphetamine specifically poses a risk to the safety of both users and people around them that merits mandatory intervention.

If we had functional mechanisms to to enact mandatory interventions for users that were non-criminal I'm definitely open to that. Depending on the targeted success rate it seems like inpatient detox + rehab would be required in many cases, and I am simply not aware of non-judicial way we can force a person into those circumstances against their will (which in the case of meth I admit I support even if that opinion is controversial).

I am not an expert, but nonetheless I'm now entangled with the topic as one that defines significant aspects of my life (loss of smell and hearing, PTSD, facial disfiguration). I think we can do better than we have been, both recently and since Nixon, but I think that having tough conversations is part of how we'll get better. My experience is that people in my situation frequently have our perspectives invalidated as "politically incorrect" or otherwise irrelevant (not what you're doing BTW thank you for your perspective), and I wanted to speak up to make sure people know that we exist and we don't want our numbers to grow.

Congratulations on your recovery, and FWIW I really like your your username/giraffes :)

It's hard, and for the record I'm also anti-prohibition about many substances (just not meth). I had weed in my pocket when I was assaulted that I campaigned to legalize in WA. I shared streets with plenty of harmless drug users too.

I'm sorry for calling you out, after seeing this comment it's obvious I would have done better to give you some space to think. It's an emotionally charged experience that I'm still learning how to rationalize years later - but haste makes waste and I was hasty.

I just want to make sure people know that victims like me exist, and though we are often treated as if our perspectives are invalid/uncouth/politically incorrect most of us simply want to stop other people from going through similar experiences. Telling people off doesn't spread that message and isn't helping bring smart ideas to the table, which I regret.