joveian

It is not hard for anyone to find things they can't afford so it can easily feel that way. So it is helpful to consider the reality in more depth when reaching for that as an excuse.

A quick look at your comments history suggests you are in the US. Of course individual circumstances can vary but overall looking at median disposable income adjusted for purchasing power parity (median equivalised household disposable income), the US is the wealthiest non-tiny country in the world (tecnically this data only covers the OECD and Luxembourg, a country smaller than many US cities, is the wealthiest).

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-gl...

I have severe sleep issues and have tried a bunch of sleep related supplements and medications. Although I do not have a dietary deficiency Magnesium might be the single most effective for me at keeping me asleep, although it does nothing to help me get to sleep and unfortunately the most effective dose taking magnesium alone is around 500mg which is enough to make me even more tired than usual the next day (so not really a good option on its own for me). I have found a combination of 250mg magnesium (carbonate or extended release oxide + citrate, which seem to work equivalently in my limited testing other than that the scoop I have for the carbonate powder is for 350mg so I might take somewhat more in that form) and 2.5mg baclofen to work better than either at higher doses alone (baclofen in higher amounts quickly stops working when taking it multiple days). Unfortunately sleep issues of any severity are often fairly random so it takes quite a while to have any confidence that something is actually helping even if it seems to at first; magnesium is one of the very few that seem to help me.

I have recently been taking those with .3mg DR melatonin and 8-9mg diphenhydramine and it still has some effect the next day but much less than the higer doses of magnesium. The diphenhydramine is for my Non-24 and does not help me sleep but can improve my functioning some the next day when part of my body wants to be sleeping during the day (unfortunately like many things it seems to quickly lose effectiveness so I am going to try taking it less often). My thinking is that for long term use for sleep it is imporant that the medication or supplement be cleared from the body quickly, though too early and it may be hard to stay asleep.

Sleep doctors have told me that waking up at the same time every day is most important. It doesn't look like the paper tried to differentiate between irregularity waking up and irregularity going to sleep but I suspect trying to wake up as close to the same time every day as you can reasonable manage is the best thing most people can do to improve their sleep quality (getting to sleep earlier some days if needed). My sense is that the most obvious part of what we consider to be sleep quality is actually waking up quality. Sleep deprivation affects memory in subtle and eventually not so subtle ways but not feeling awake seems in my experience to be based on how waking up happens and sleeping less when relatively well rested often has a positive effect on feeling awake (at least for a while, getting tired early is another effect of not sleeping enough). There is a particular thing that I notice maybe a couple of times a year that feels like rapidly cycling between being asleep and awake multiple times when I am waking up and I always feel much more awake the day it happens.

What I've found to fix leg cramping is skin rolling my legs (ideally every 6 months but takes maybe a couple of years to fully undo the effect). Lightly pinch some skin between your thumb and two fingers and walk it forward with the two fingers. If you need it it will feel "crunchy" in some spots rather than smooth. Ideally cover the full area at least twice at 90 degree angles (not necessarily all on one day and doesn't need to be perfect coverage, more is helpful if it still feels "crunchy"). Warning: while only mildly painful for me when doing it, after sleeping I wake up with quite sore legs which lasts two full days. Doing it every 6 months or so avoids this and is also when I start to occasionally get cramping again.

Eh, the real genius of Windows 11 that Linux lags behind is the seriously first rate emoji picker :).

That isn't what I ment, I should have said that the person who runs pkgsrc-wip helps submitters get the package correct (which can be more challenging than PKGBUILD since it is a more strict system and unless it is a Linux only package is more likely to need patches). Thinking about it more it isn't really the same as AUR since as I understand it packages without issues are likely to get into pkgsrc proper in most cases so it is mostly WIP as the name suggests (although not entirely as I recall, at least last time I used it). So you might be correct that there isn't really anything similar in the BSD world.

There is pkgsrc-wip which is similar but run by one person who does at least some checking up on new users. AUR is just gigantic in comparison; pkgsrc-wip has about as many total packages as AUR has updated in the past week.

https://www.pkgsrc.org/wip/

I agree that some things have a use and can do so without getting in the way, but I think as your example illustrates it is mostly to help new or infrequent users who aren't familiar with how the system works and often comes at the expense of regular users. Like mrob mentions (with a wonderful example), I usually want software to function like hand tools where I can just do a thing as quickly as I can do it and without unnecessary distractions. I've turned off cursor blink in my terminal and even though it isn't as bad in the browser I just turned it off in Firefox since you mentioned it (add a new preference ui.caretBlinkTime set to 0). Some of us do get more distracted by this kind of thing than others :/. Same with audio cues.

I do still like progress indicators when you might be waiting on a longer task (and when it actually indicates liveness, which too often it doesn't :( ).

Games I can sometimes appreciate the new user benefits and affecting the pace can sometimes have an artistic intent or relaxation effect that tools should not normally have. I have stopped playing games for excessive animations and will usually quickly (but not always immediately) disable anything that can be disabled. It is so common that I distinctly recall the free game Strange Adventures in Infinite Space intentially doing the opposite to great effect (it has been a bit but I think it was not only instant transitions but on mouse click instead of release).

https://rich.itch.io/strangeadventures

I remember this heavily commented post a few years ago:

Weird Al had 100 gigs of RAM

https://rubenerd.com/weird-al-had-100-gb-of-ram/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32734840

It seems like the current situation means that processes need to change in a major way somewhere (maybe everywhere) but this report (and the letter) seem to be focused on doing as little as possible to get their part of the system back to the way it was. With this many students it seems like larger structural changes like a remedial year should be considered or else quickly redesign the system in other ways like reducing the focus on directly attending university after high school.

Interesting article, although it does raise a few questions for me. I can see handwriting being uniquely important when learning to read but beyond that it would seem to just be suggesting that directly translating the same note taking to using a direct-mapped keyboard is a bad idea. But what about more complex input methods like for Chinese or a chording stenograph? Is there a distinct point where brain activity pops to wider activity? Do other computer based activities like correcting typos or non-computer activities like wiggling your finger to draw the shape of the first letter of each word engage more activity similar to handwriting? If needing a summary is the main difference, that seems like an easy thing to incorporate into digital note taking.

Learning to read I can see that handwriting directly relates but beyond that it seems like there must be more effective ways to engage with the material than just making the writing method more complex. I'd say the same about lectures; interacting with someone who understands the material can be quite valuable but spending a lot of time listening to the same thing that could be read can't be the most effective way to learn even if the complexity of the transmission does help some with memory. I hope this type of research goes beyond basic handwriting vs typing and looks into the effectiveness of additional ways of engaging with information.

For example, I like "don't guess" as a major principle of learning (per B.F. Skinner) to cultivate awareness of how reliable your memory is and avoid remembering incorrect answers as much as possible. The process of determining and looking up things that you aren't fairly certain about seems like something that could also engage wider brain activity and do so in a way that is more directly relevant to what you are learning.

Vatican II started a major and ongoing reconciliation process leading to things like the "Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification" (1999, quietly resolving the core issues of the reformation) and Pope Francis commemorating the 500th anniversary of the reformation at a Lutheran church in Sweden (2016):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Declaration_on_the_Doctr...

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/events/event.dir...

I think attitudes vary regionally and by congregation and an ecumenical focus doesn't necessarily translate to a positive perception of the pope but it can and not just all that recently.

Mullvad in particular has a page that lists the ISPs they use (in a few cases their own servers at a datacenter), although they don't list the datacenters (sometimes you can get this info from the ISPs).

https://mullvad.net/en/servers

They also have a document that lists some of their practices around the servers, such as not using shared servers:

https://mullvad.net/en/help/server-list

I noticed that the website of one of the two providers they use near me was over a decade out of date :/. DAITA is Mullvad's anti-traffic analysis framework, without it a single hop can likely be easily deanonymized by logging by a single party (it isn't clear if multihop uses fixed packet sizes between their servers).

Also eGPU. I have a tiny NUC-size system with decent internal GPU and a (physically much larger) game system with a slower CPU that idles at only a bit under twice the maximum power of the NUC. It would be handy to be able to just plug in an eGPU when needed. The power and cooling requirements of fancy GPUs are so much higher than that of CPUs that large cases designed around the CPU don't make much sense. Even the pysical stability of a large GPU in an ATX style case is not ideal.

I have multiple severe sleep disorders including non-24 and insomnia so it is hard to tell how my experiences match most people but hopefully this might help some. My sense is that when I sleep only a few hours then can't get back to sleep for at least three hours it means my body is interpreting the sleep as a siesta rather than night sleep (unless it is after sunrise). Non-delayed release melatonin makes this more likely for me. I don't think delayed release makes it less likely (at least not right away) but might at least not make it more likely and longer term it seems to help make it possible for me to sleep on a closer to fixed schedule. Magnesium is one of the few that helps me stay asleep though I suspect what might help you most is if you could take a nap earlier in the day. While most people these days already do this part I've found that caffeine in the morning makes it much less likely that I'll have this issue (I can't have caffeine in the afternoon or too much theobromine even in the morning multiple days in a row or I will have trouble sleeping; I imagine the helpful effect will be much less in people who are desensitized).

It sounds like you have a delayed circadian rhythm. The Circadian Sleep Disorders Network has some good info:

https://www.circadiansleepdisorders.org/

I don't agree with many of the suggestions in this article. Advancing your sleep schedule to try to shift your sleep earlier is particularly harmful and can trigger non-24. In my case, part of my body seems to be synchronized with light and part rotates around the clock leaving me rarely all that functional. It is a disabling condition. A somewhat delayed circadian rhythm seems to usually be much less disabling but may also cause similar trouble if severely delayed (many people don't have as much trouble with non-24 as I do, though I didn't have as much trouble for the first 15ish years either).

Waking up at the same time every day is another thing that can help stabilize the circadian rhythm (though I also think it is best to avoid alarm clocks most of the time). Going to sleep at the same time is less important; it is better to go to sleep early if you need more sleep than to sleep in.

I think it is best to avoid medication if possible. What I am using now seems to be working the best of anything I've tried but it has only been six months. At night I take 300mcg 6-hour delayed release melatonin, 250mg delayed release magnesium (though I think non-delayed may work just as well), 2.5mg baclofen (the small amount keeps it working with daily use and using it with magnesium works better than either alone), and 8-9mg diphenhydramine (not enough to help me get to sleep but just for the circadian effect, either 1/3 of a 25mg pill or 3.5mL of 12.5mg/5mL liquid). In the morning I usually drink some tea and take .5 tsp (2.5mL) D-ribose which seems to help quite a bit (I had previously tried it without noticing a positive effect but I think I may have only used it later in the day). In the US there seem to be many companies that package D-ribose but only one company that makes it.

All of that and only as an aside mentioning the best search engine for quality information: Google Scholar. Academics publish stuff about just about everything which is often open access and the search seems to include some blogs these days, not just formal journals.

Thanks, very interesting article! Also these two linked from that one:

National emergencies: Chadha wasn't the problem

https://prototypingpolitics.substack.com/p/national-emergenc...

Elizabeth Goiten (Brennan Center) testimony to a senate committee on May 22, 2024 (a nice summary of the general issue of executive use of emergencies)

[PDF] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Go...

I think it may also relate to chromatic adaptation. To be white it doesn't need to be any exact absolute color just the color our brain sets our white point to.

Not answering this question but I found an interesting short paper about how at sunset and sunrise the color gamut of shadows doesn't fully overlap with the direct illumination color gamut due to the differences in the paths the light takes:

Hubel. 2000. The Perception of Color at Dawn and Dusk.

https://library.imaging.org/admin/apis/public/api/ist/websit...

Here is a case study and discussion from a parathyroid surgeon:

https://www.devaboone.com/post/vitamin-d-part-2-shannon-s-st...

"There are people out there doing just fine on 5000 units of Vitamin D daily. I only see the ones who develop high calcium levels. But I see enough of them to know that this is not an exceptionally rare occurrence. I have been to lectures in which physicians have claimed that Vitamin D toxicity almost never occurs. In my experience, this is false. I have seen many cases of Vitamin D toxicity in people who were taking the recommended dose from an over-the-counter bottle.

Unfortunately, none of those patients were warned about the potential for Vitamin D to cause high calcium. They all believed that they were taking a supplement to improve health and that there was very little risk. Supplements don’t require prescriptions, and most do not have the warning labels that accompany medications. For Vitamin D, a steroid hormone, that may need to change."

Although I'm only interested in a few books on the list I find it a nicely done list: a good theme and a good amount of detail per book. I can't do as well but these are my favorites this year(ish):

* Fur Trade Nation by Carl Gawboy - a graphical history of the Ojibway nation between 1650 and 1850. Not a hard history with detailed discussion of evidence and possibilities but more of a grade school style overview of the history and really well done as that. I do better with text than most but I still think this style communication has a lot of advantages and should be used more.

* The Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich (historical fiction, starting at the end of the period Fur Trade Nation covers) - I've read the first three books and while they are aimed at children they have complex characters and themes (and also some cute animals and a focus on the kids). I read her book Tracks a couple of decades ago and liked it well enough to remember her name when I saw a few years ago that she has a bookstore in Minneapolis called Birchbark Books. Their online store has a great selection of books by indigenous authors.

* The Gift is in the Making Anishinaabeg stories retold by Leanne Simpson - Traditional stories retold with a few recent references. This one has a few ojibway terms but is in english while I also read Plums or Nuts by Larry Amik Smallwood and Michael Migizi Sullivan Sr. which is fully in ojibway as well as english and the stories there are more personal by the first author. They are chosen primarily for language learning reasons but they are also nice "slice of life" stories and I recommend it even if you aren't trying to learn ojibway.

* Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot - The author has a breakdown and writes about it. A really rough read but well writen and has a lot of love for such a tramatic story.

* Bringing Joy: A Local Literary Welcome - I heard about Fur Trade Nation when it was first published and not widely available so I got it from the publisher at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College and found this poetry collection and decided to try it even though I'm not usually into poetry. There were a couple that I will hopefully never forget and more that I enjoyed reading. I picked up What Book!? later thinking I'd try a bit more poetry but haven't enjoyed that one as much so far.

* A Space for the Unbound - Technically a game not a book but very story focused and in my opinion the best game story (by quite a bit) of any game I've played. Again some severe abuse depicted and also a lot of love.

You might be easier to track with it, but it is not hard to end up with a unique signature anyway. I can already be uniquely identified, so sending "Do Not Track" only has potential upsides. I have seen websites that claim to honor it so it seems to be doing something and I wish they wouldn't remove it.

I've read that in cave studies when isolated from any direct indication of time people will naturally sleep longer every other day like this. However, I have severe sleep issues that leave me disabled and the main issue seems to be that I have a non-24 hour circadian rhythm and can't sleep outside the rotating times but in some ways my body is still synchronized to the sun (I do much worse when awake at night). So I worry you could also potentially end up with severe circadian issues unless you are completely blind, although if you always wake up at the same time whenever you do sleep that would hopefully help prevent issues. Sleeping in late some days makes circadian issues more likely.

Taking more than 20 minutes to get to sleep is not that unusual as I understand it. I think 30 minutes minutes is quite common even in people who sleep fine. 4-5 hours is very short though. One of my parents also slept little and there is also dementia on that side of the family (I have some memory issues as well already). I don't know how much previous gnerations slept but I suspect there may be not so benign genetic short sleep issues as well. At least some issues may have susceptibility and a triggering event, with tech making the triggering event more likely. That would be another question about benign familial short sleep, if it increases the susceptibility to more severe issues.

The one I like to take at night is Life Extension 300mcg (.3mg) 6 hour timed release (they make a bunch of different ones), which is the closest to natural melatonin release of any supplemental melatonin I've seen, although it sounds like there is massive variation between people in how much makes it to the blood from a given dose. There are a couple of ways to use melatonin and for circadian use a small non-delayed dose earlier may be better (or use both):

https://circadiansleepdisorders.org/treatments.php#melatonin

I have had issues waking up more frequently when taking melatonin. It sounds like while not common this side effect is not that rare either. Based on my severe sleep issues (primarly circadian) I suspect that one part of "sleep issues" for many people is actualy waking up issues and that the detailed process around waking up has a bigger influence than is currently appreciated. I suspect one reason that melatonin is helpful is that it sets the stage for a better wake up, however if something causes this wake up procedure to start after not enough sleep it can be more difficult to get back to sleep. The delayed release seems to help quite a bit to limit the chance of this happening for me, although it does still happen at times. I'm not sure if melatonin is a particularly good option for staying asleep.

Unfortunately, there aren't particulary good options. Magnesium is the easiest and as effective as anything for me but unfortunately a high enough dose to be effective will also make me tired the next day. However, if your diet is low on magnesium then just increasing that some might help or possibly you won't have the issue with tiredness the next day. baclofen helps me but has issues and I certainly would not recommend it for your case.

A short (few minutes) nap mid day helps the circadian rhythm but longer naps can make it harder to stay asleep at night. If you nap for longer periods, multiple times, or later in the day that is the first thing I would suggest changing. I'm not sure what length causes more trouble but I think getting to sleep but staying asleep as briefly as you easily can is the ideal (though if you will naturally wake up after a bit longer that might be better than an alarm).

I also noticed covid made my already bad sleep worse when I had it (most likely covid, not confirmed by test; cold or flu usually give me better sleep for a day or two). However, I didn't notice any lasting issues (I still have severe sleep issues but it was just that first week of covid that they seemed to be different from usual). I wonder if it could be just your memory of how you sleep that changed after you noticed it due to the disruption. As long as you can easily get back to sleep and aren't staying awake for long it should not cause trouble and is not uncommon. If you feel rested there is nothing to fix while worrying about it or trying to change it could case worse trouble.

These are my thoughts anyway, hopefully something in there is helpful :).

Thanks for sharing! I have severe circadian issues: non-24, except that my body also still in some ways follows the sun and I do much worse when awake at night. I've noticed that other accounts I've read from people who do well with around 6 hours of sleep are similar to yours and feature highly regular sleep times. From the reading I've done it seems there are a number of hormones involved in both sleep and waking activity with strong circadian rhythms and I suspect that at any given time I have a mix of night and day hormones. Of course people can famously fool themselves easily that they are getting enough sleep when they aren't but based on my experience I could easily believe it to be a superpower to have everything unusually well synchronized and I fully agree with your doctor's advice.

I've looked into this before and unfortunately it is quite difficult to get good sound isolation and the answer is basically no. The really effective stuff is mass vinyl and as the name suggests it is quite heavy (and expensive). There are even some tents that musicians sometimes use for a few people to play together in a noisy environment that are hundreds of pounds without even being large enough for a bed. As I understand it, the mass is necessary for the best sound dampening. Also, once you get non-trivial sound dampening the way you let air in tends to be the easiest way for sound to get in. Even the heaviest cloth curtains would mostly help with any echos in your room rather than the initial sound itself. Maybe in some circumstances even minimal sound reduction would be helpful but you may also do a bunch of work and find it ends up making no difference.

Noise generators seem like the better way to start if you aren't using one already. I haven't tried many options but from the reviews I've seen fans are the best at this. In my experience ceiling fans do help quite a bit and there are some bedside noise generators that are fans but enclosed to limit the external air movement if the noise happens in colder weather. There are also some with speakers that play recorded fan noise, although beware of ones where the sample loops too quickly (I'm not sure what the best option to use your own recording would be). Unfortunately even getting to the point where you don't wake up (at least not enough to notice) may not fully remove the impact but it would still help quite a bit.

Why I couldn't guess but an example similar to the article that I tried does not immediately execute (version 5.2.37(1)-release) when indrected through a variable as you show although other aritmetic evaluation does still happen when indirected. You can echo "${num}" and it shows the passed string. If you change it to declare -i num ; num="${1}" then it does immediately execute.

Not a parent but I still agree that short games are great, 2-3 hours are great (or even a bit less, there is a reason for the standard 90 minute movie). 4-5 hours can be nice too ("chapter" divisions are helpful). Games are inexpensive and plentiful these days so a nice short game is great for everyone not just people with little time for playing games. (I guess I should say the flip side is that time spent with characters is one of the interesting things that games can use to good effect and bonus objectives that encourage you to explore details of the world can be nice too depending on the type of game and are easily skipped).

The best game settings have a scene to illustrate the effect of choices along with estimated(?) performance. Unfortunately I haven't seen that too often (mostly Falcom games that PH3 worked on). I agree that stating the impact on performance is quite helpful when settings need to be lowered. Usually they are ordered "best performance" to "nicest looking" so I set the last one and only fiddle with them if necessary (a smooth 12fps works great for me so luckily that isn't often).

Also, if you use a larger minimum font size often the text describing the thing you are supposed to select is under the image and unreadable. With hCaptcha it varies depending on the size of the popup window with the captcha and Google seems to reliably show just the top (barely enough to figure it out most of the time).

called a women's clinic, made an appointment, and paid for it myself

Planned Parenthood is great for this kind of thing in the US. I don't know what they charge but just checked and at least the one I've gone to in the past has it.

1) Sure it can happen and mistakes happen in any voting system. You can't tell who wins a close election until all the votes are counted, that is pretty much the definition of a close election. FPTP elections are also miscalled at times.

2) Anyone who cares to look at a heat map will need to learn how the new system works then will appreciate the additional information (the ballot could usefully also include approval information as a distinct aspect that doesn't affect results so that it is possible to determine how many voters like their representative, but I would say that approval voting does not communicate that).

3) Why do you think hand counting improves auditability? Being able to hand count does of course but actually doing the main count by hand doesn't seem to me like it would add anything. Not that I am opposed to hand counting, in that case you just wait for the ballots. As issues go it is way down the list from the other properties of the voting system in my opinion.

4) That one was 2018 or 2019 I think and an older one I saw was published in 2013 so yeah it sounds like this research is fairly recent and still being improved.

I don't see politics as a 0-sum game but people absolutely have fundamental differences where politics is the non-violent way to come to a resolution. These differences can be non-obvious if it isn't important to you and proportional representation gives a better chance that an elected representative will be able to understand and care about your issue (which increases the chance it can be solved easily if it isn't a contentious issue even if your favored representative doesn't otherwise have power). To put it another way, if the point of an election is to elect a represetative then proportional representation aims to give everyone representation within the practical limits of the number of representatives. Ideally, this would also make it easier for the representative to explain actual points of contention and tradeoffs (and basic stuff like what they are actually able to affect) to constituents and build general political competence, although I can't say that what I know of countries that use proportional representation is as promising as I would like on that. Ultimately a voting system alone can't do everything, representation isn't the only possible reason to ever have an election, and my personal ideal of how political resolution of differences can or should work involves a number of things quite different from currently common methods. Overall I see FPTP elections as more of a show to distract from behind the scenes power than a system designed to resolve differences peacefully and approval voting seems similar to me (in my opinion one of the most important things a voting method should try to do is limit the effect of strategic voting).