radiojosh

Your VaporView extension looks amazing! I can't even fathom how to get that far along in extension development.

Do you have any links or resources you could direct me toward that were more helpful than Microsoft's basic how-to pages for learning VS Code plugin development? I attempted to build a VS Code extension, but the attempt fizzled out. I managed to make some progress in creating the simplest of UI elements and populating them. I'm particularly interested in building a GUI-based editor of JSON / YAML where a user can select a value from a prepopulated dropdown menu, or validating a JSON / YAML file against a custom schema. Any help or advice you could provide would be appreciated!

Do you have any links or resources you could direct me toward that were more helpful than Microsoft's basic how-to pages for learning VS Code plugin development? I attempted to build a VS Code extension, but the attempt fizzled out. I managed to make some progress in creating the simplest of UI elements and populating them. I'm particularly interested in building a GUI-based editor of JSON / YAML where a user can select a value from a prepopulated dropdown menu, or validating a JSON / YAML file against a custom schema. Any help or advice you could provide would be appreciated!

I think one of the biggest problems is that psychiatrists have to step through a procession of different drugs in an order specified by insurance companies. Cheap to expensive, traditional to exotic. And the most traditional drugs at this point are SSRIs, which have very mixed evidence for their effectiveness.

After being dragged along through an endless series of different SSRIs, I finally found a psychiatrist who runs a genetic test prior to treatment. And wouldn't you know it, I have a gene that makes SSRIs ineffective if you're a Caucasian, and yes, I'm Caucasian.

The test also says that I'm an ideal candidate for methylphenidate, that I barely feel CBD, and I'll have a hard time with all but the most exotic antidepressants.

I worked at "The Only Sony Only" store in St. Louis when this TV came out. I delivered and installed equipment among other responsibilities. I might have delivered two of these particular units. I believe it was actually like 305 pounds.

This television had a couple of interesting traits. Sony flat Trinitrons were apparently the only true flat CRT televisions where both the outside AND inside of the tube were flat. This is why they were so heavy - the flat glass had to be thicker to withstand the vacuum inside.

It was a high definition television, but it was 4:3 aspect ratio. They sold a 34 inch CRT that was the only 16:9 CRT they offered at the time.

Additionally, the size of the 40 inch tube apparently left it extra vulnerable to stray magnetic fields. CRT screens all respond to magnets by producing rainbow colored distortions, but the 40 inch was extra sensitive. We delivered one to a house and turned it on only to find that the screen colors were distorted. I'm not sure how we figured it out, but we realized it was the proximity to the metal floor beam, so we moved the TV to another spot in the room and the color distortion went away.

For context, you could get an HD 65 inch rear projection wide screen television at the time that only weighed 265 pounds. I delivered both the 40 inch and the 65 inch up a flight of stairs. Those moving straps that hang from your forearms were not yet popular.

One of the best TED talks ever given, by VS Ramachandran - a video describing some of the fundamental mechanisms of the brain. This video was the first time I heard Bouba and Kiki, but there's so much more going on in this talk. It's wonderful.

As soon as the author talked about the zebra stripe scars on the daughter's arm, I knew it wasn't about just the phone. As soon as the author said that their daughter went from Pink Floyd to stereotypical duck lips and peace signs, I decided they were completely full of it.

In what way could you possibly interpret that writing as "strange"? That was an excellent, straightforward response.

This seems huge if you can do it. I'm guessing a company like Intuit pays top dollar for job candidates with a double major in finance and computer science.

That seemed rhetorical. I'm hoping it was intended ironically.

This has always been my concern about establishing a presence online. I've considered blogging about my experiences at work or the cool stuff that I've built and it feels impossible for me to know when I've crossed a legal boundary. How do I know for sure if I'm sharing proprietary stuff or confidential stuff. The lines of legality seem to get blurry real quick.

Yeah, the company I work for has millions of dollars tied up in Pure storage arrays. We evaluated Nutanix and I just stopped listening after they said they don't support external storage. Huge missed opportunity for them.

I think this might also be related to whether the kid grow up with parents they can trust and are able to explain the reasons behind "rules" to them.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Even if a parent's advice is sound, a child may not trust the source for other reasons. If the parent's own behavior defies their advice, if the parent is overbearing, if the parent's expectations are unreasonable, if the parent never listens to the child... Shitty parents can make it extremely unpleasant to do what is right. And we haven't even gotten to actual trauma. People often have difficulty functioning in society when fear and anxiety are a part of their everyday life because their parents were abusive. And the thing is, traumatized people might really want to do the right thing, but they can't and they don't know why.

It is my understanding that some people who don't exercise at all have a hard time controlling their appetites, and then when they introduce moderate exercise, they find it much easier to keep their eating in check. I think it's synergistic.

I think it's partially killing off perpetual ownership, but I think I heard they're also killing off a lot of individual SKUs. So you may not be able to get ESXi outside of a full vCloud Foundation subscription, which also includes NSX and Aria and a bunch of other stuff...

Where have your technology acquaintances gone instead? It seems like the entire Internet is declining in quality.

Probably as good at delivering shareholder value as anyone. Probably just didn't want to play ball when investors started asking him to strip out all the value to the customer and put the screws to the employees and purge anything and everything that might be mistaken for humanity and goodness. They love to do that shit and then pretend their new hollowed out strip mine is "lean".

That isn't NATs fault. That's a dynamically assigned IP address. You can pay for a static, or you can use Dynamic DNS to work around it. If you didn't have NAT, you'd have a static IP by default, but again, you'd be paying for all those extra IP addresses you need.

I don't understand your first point about firewalls, but port forwarding on a consumer router is no more difficult than opening a port on a firewall. Either one can be overcomplicated by a badly designed interface. See Uniquiti Edgerouter for an example.

I know gaming consoles can be a pain with NAT, but is that NAT's fault? That link you pasted about the Nintendo Switch is literally just an article about setting up port forwarding.

And that NAT slipstreaming issue is just a vulnerability caused by complicated protocols. Saying that a fundamental network technology is bad because its implementation is flawed doesn't make sense. I guess we should throw away x86-64 because Intel Skylake processors had side channel vulnerabilities.

How exactly does it break the spirit of the Internet? The spirit of the Internet is that we run out of IPv4 addresses and everyone who uses the Internet has to learn IPv6 and be an expert on firewalls?

I can't tell if you're being elitist because your defacto position is that everyone who uses the Internet has to be a cyber security expert, or if you're just being obtuse because a couple of Google searches will usually set you straight on setting up port forwarding through your router.

This is a terribly uninformed take.

ISPs charge for public IP addresses. Do you want to be charged for a large enough block of public IP addresses to cover every networked device in your house? Because that's what you get when you don't use NAT. And if it weren't for NAT, the Internet would be running out of IPv4 addresses (it already is, sort of), so you'd either deal with much higher prices for IPv4 addresses, or you'd have to learn IPv6, which is WAY harder than dealing with port forwarding through an IPv4 NAT.

Not to mention the premium you'd pay for a router with an actual firewall, and you had better make sure you understand the firewall. Port forwarding on a working router is generally a lot easier than a firewall.

If it was really impossible to set up inbound connections to your server, it was either a problem with the router or a problem with your ISP.

We still enjoy things even if we aren't ultimately the prime mover of our own actions.

And I think the argument for punishment as deterence falls down in a few ways:

1) Absence of punishment does not mean absence of consequences. I'm still in favor of incarceration for violent offenders to protect society, but I think that people should be treated with dignity and respect while inside. I think incarceration is deterrence enough.

2) Disenfranchisement plays a role in why people commit crimes. If they distrust or resent the system, punishment only serves to reinforce their perception that the system isn't designed to help them, so why should they help the system?

3) People need to be led by example. What example does it set when COs use violence to control or punish, or turn a blind eye to violence between inmates?

I always find it funny the way people see leadership and authority as license to put people in their place and punish those who do wrong, and then they are surprised when the subjects of said leadership aren't pleasant, peaceful people. People raise their kids to thank their parents, but then they never thank their children. They say things like "I'm not going to thank someone for doing their job" and then wonder why their kids never say "thank you". It's because they weren't leading by example, they were just barking orders.

The point is, punishment is almost always misguided, free will or no. It is a bad motivator and a bad example. The less charitable among us could still reason that "bad" people still "deserve" punishment, but realizing that we aren't ultimately in control of our own actions just underscores the point that nobody actually "deserves" anything other than understanding and compassion for being on a ride that none of us actually asked for.

I came to a very different conclusion on criminality in the absence of free will: compassion and understanding.

How often do children do shitty things, and then say "I don't know" when asked why they did it? I have personally had problems lashing out in anger and not even understanding why. Our brains put a lot of effort into keeping us away from painful thoughts and memories. All of that is to say that you don't have to invoke determinism or quantum mechanics to demonstrate that people aren't always consciously in control of their actions.

Some people are far more capable of compassion and forgiveness in the face of tragedy when they can see that a genuine accident occurred, or when they understand the generational trauma that laid the ground work for unthinkable choices. Why not take it one step further and recognize that we're all stuck on this involuntary ride and we all deserve a little grace because none of us could have chosen any differently?

Does this mean we expect the aggrieved to forgive the perpetrator? No. Does that mean we cease handing out jail sentences for dangerous crimes? No again. But if there is no free will in the choices we make, what's the point of punishing people? I get that people who hurt other people should feel remorse, and people who are dangerous should be isolated, but how can you say anyone deserves punishment when their actions are predetermined?

It feels like a lot of the author's arguments boil down to a refusal to acknowledge that no life is self-contained and that all life depends on its environment. "How can a tapeworm be alive if it can't exist without being inside someone's intestine"? Well, hardly anything lives outside the context in which it evolved.

How can a tapeworm be considered life if it can't live outside another lifeform? How can a human be considered life if it can't live outside an atmosphere oxygenated by plants? How can a tree be considered life if it can't live outside of soil full of bacteria and worms?

For all the author's time studying lifeforms, it seems odd that they see the interdependence of life as a stumbling block to its own existence.

That being said, I do think that the author is onto something. I think that people romanticize organic life because it is mysterious and complicated and some life forms do truly special things - some people go so far as to conflate life and sentience when trying to parse the meaning of it all.

So, let's cut through the nonsense and try to distill the central thesis of the article. The author claims that life isn't a thing because the qualities that jive with our intuitive sense of what is "alive" don't neatly conform to the boundaries of our categories and labels. On the other side of that same coin, some simple organisms that exist neatly within the boundaries of the label are reducible to their component parts just like our own inorganic inventions and there remains very little mystery about how they work and where's the magic in that? And since life isn't a thing or it is a thing sometimes but it's not very special, our anchor for judging the value and specialness of our own existence dissolves and OMG emotional crisis. Aren't they a brilliant and edgy thinker.

So here's what I think we should really take away from this:

Life in the colloquial sense is mysterious and awesome. There is no reason to limit our sense of wonder to biological life. I would say that doing so is actually limiting and harmful - people build relationships with inanimate things by anthropomorphizing them all the time. I wouldn't want to lose the unique emotional appreciation that arises from seeing "magical" things through an unscientific lens.

Life in the scientific sense is a label with defined boundaries, not always agreed upon, which can and will exclude "special" things because the universe is infinitely complex and labels and categories are limiting. Seeing life through a scientific lens also forces us to reckon with the notion that simply being scientifically recognized life is not enough to make one regard something with wonder and appreciation.

Indeed, if I understand the author's intent, I think they might agree that bacteria cleanly fit the definition of biological life and are nothing more than tiny complicated self-sustaining machines, which doesn't sound very special anymore. But I would argue that they are special. And since just being life in the scientific sense doesn't seem very special now that we've mastered complex things, we're going to have to parse out why they are special with a little more precision and intent.

Bacteria are special because those simple little machines form the basis of an enormous food web, because they shape our thoughts and emotions when they live in our guts, because they simultaneously make us sick and keep us healthy, because they are some of our most ancient ancestors.

Life at the colloquial macro level is special because it's mysterious and powerful and everywhere. Life at the scientific micro level is just a subset of all the wonderful complex things in the universe with which we enjoy special relationships. Colloquial life and scientific life are two different things that must be appreciated two different ways.

That was a great read, but there was one thing I didn't understand: Why would the regex string have "." twice in a row? What does ".." find that "." doesn't find? Does that just mean "at least two characters"?

Maybe they're counting "herbs and spices" as dimensions.

I am guessing that they can't actually mean 11 spacial dimensions. Are they saying something analogous to multi-dimensional data structures? Like these things exist in 3D space but they are akin to arrays of arrays?

I had a positively hilarious interaction when somebody with my name used my personal email address for their retirement fund provider. I received an invitation to a zoom meeting addressed to my personal email account and their work email account. So I went ahead and joined the meeting in progress.

I sat silently for a bit while the financial advisor finished his talking point. Then I spoke up. I don't remember exactly what I said but the other guy with my name sat there with a scared / dumbfounded expression on his face while the financial advisor calmly asked me to leave.

I told him I would leave as soon as they promised to remove my email address.

OR...now hear me out...the prices could be reasonable and a bunch of greedy executive middle-men who exploit the artists and other workers could take a smaller cut.

It is so validating to find out that I'm not the only one who has a problem with "processed foods". It feels so dumb that so much "wisdom" about the composition of our diet hinges on such a broad / vague / meaningless category. Life and the universe are endlessly complicated and taking shortcuts to understand it all by way of putting things in arbitrary boxes usually doesn't go so well.

Some people really don't have a lot of disposable income. Are you saying we should just stop thinking about making products accessible to those people? You seem to think that these rich "hobbyists" make up the entire population, but I'd bet there were at least ten families in the US who couldn't afford a computer for every "hobbyist" that bought one. What a bunch of elitist gate-keeping nonsense.

These low-cost SBCs are often viewed as a gateway product for introducing people to technology they wouldn't otherwise have access to - a system that could be a serviceable PC or launchpad for hobby electronics. The hobbyists you mention, apparently flush with cash and not a care in the world, aren't the people who need the price break. It's low income families with kids that need access to resources that might lead to a better future.

Not to mention that a Raspberry Pi is an embeddable system. It might be a small part of a much larger project, so even a low price might be hard to justify.

But no, let's keep making everything expensive so that computers and technology careers are only accessible to families that already have wealth. We, the Hobbyists of lore, can strut about the city square in our wearable devices and augmented reality headsets while the dirty street urchins scramble behind us, hoping for a fallen scrap, a loose semiconductor or relay they can take home to their families so they might afford little Timmy's leg surgery...