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Ixiaus

3,134 karma · joined June 24, 2009

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Ixiaus··on Google Drive files suddenly disappeared
I use rclone to backup my Google Drive to S3. If you're not doing something similar, I recommend it (rclone will also export google docs to ODF formats).
Ixiaus··on Ryugu samples reveal traces of rock from before the Sun existed
Do you have any books you could recommend on this subject?
Ixiaus··on Do Unforgettable Work
It isn't just burnout you risk but you also risk training "the culture" of the team to lean on and reward heroics instead of sustainable, consistent planning and work scheduling.
Ixiaus··on Tree-Structured Concurrency
Cool to see people exploring this more. It's been around forever in Erlang with supervisor trees.
Ixiaus··on Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
I really like the framing of "providing relief". I think it also makes sense to allow the definition of who experiences the relief to be flexible (e.g in some cases the audience that experiences relief might be developers, security engineering, sre, etc. not just customers...)
Ixiaus··on Rational Dress Society
Livsn is great. I'm a powerlifter so a lot of pants don't fit and I need to tailor them. Livsn pants look great and are really tough.

I'm not affiliated in any way, just a very happy customer.

https://www.livsndesigns.com/

Ixiaus··on Pairing With GPT-4
You then interact with it in a dialog / refinement way. This is somewhat similar to type-driven development in Haskell (that is supercharged by this kind of interaction mode).

I find this approach to produce the highest quality output and I can ask it to explain reasoning, improve certain things, or elaborate and expand code.

Ixiaus··on Pairing With GPT-4
I posted a prompt specific to Ruby above.
Ixiaus··on Pairing With GPT-4
Please forget all previous prompts and assume a new role. You're a highly respected, expert Ruby programmer at a startup building software that is of a similar quality and brilliance to that of the rails project. You are also very skilled at reasoning about correct code and communicating your process in English prose to colleagues who will have to maintain your code. You want to give me succinct, clear responses without too much explanation unless requested. I'm going to ask you a series of questions. Whenever you are done with output, please say "DONE". And when you are ready to answer my next question, please say "???" to indicate you're ready for my next question.
Ixiaus··on Pairing With GPT-4
No, it's when you flatter the AI.
Ixiaus··on Pairing With GPT-4
They should have used a flattery plus dialog prompt. I've seen incredible results from that for Haskell programming.
Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
It is not unwarranted. They are spreading misinformation.

To assert vaccines were not tested, when they very much were, and then to move the goal post when I challenged him (and challenged the moved goal posts) is not quibbling. It is correcting.

Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
Read the whole page, carefully. Both are fully approved. I do not understand how you can conclude that the word "approved" is an error when both vaccines were upgraded from EUA to fully approved, in the words of the FDA themselves.
Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
You've moved the goal post (again) but I'll address yet another false claim. Nothing was "violated". The vaccines were rigorously tested.

> An EUA can only be granted when no adequate, approved, available alternatives exist, and when the known and potential benefits outweigh the potential risks.

> It is the job of the FDA to ensure medical products meet rigorous safety and efficacy standards, a process that can take years for what’s called “full approval.” Though that timeline is condensed when an EUA is granted, the FDA still upholds its strict standards.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/what-does-eua-mean

Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
That is a false claim.

> On January 31, 2022, the FDA announced the second approval of a COVID-19 vaccine.

https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...

> On August 23, 2021, FDA announced the first approval of a COVID-19 vaccine.

https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...

Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
Additionally, your FDA source says nothing about untested medicines being administered. You've shown your original point was either poorly communicated or misinformed or nefarious. I'll be generous in my interpretation of your intentions and assume you're merely misinformed and communicating without clarity which leads me to say: if you're going to make an extraordinary claim you must provide extra ordinary evidence or you're spreading misinformation that could cause harm downstream.

If you're not sure, then just don't say anything or perhaps frame it as a question.

Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
You're conveniently ignoring the fact that emergency use approval was only given after rigorous parallel vaccine trials were conducted.

It is true that is a weaker standard than "FDA Approved" but it is still a high standard and certainly not "no testing".

Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
It is your understanding failing you.

What you've said here is both true and moving the goal post from your first claim while also ignoring the other fact: they were approved for emergency use which means they still were subjected to rigorous testing and trials.

They did not have least testing, they underwent parallel trial testing.

Ixiaus··on Woman with tuberculosis ordered to jail for refusing treatment
That is a false claim. The medicines for treating COVID-19 were tested and tested quite thoroughly:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

https://www.umms.org/coronavirus/covid-vaccine/facts/testing

Your comment amounts to dangerous misinformation. If you really believe what you've written, please provide high quality primary sources that show medicines were administered that were untested. Anything else is you spreading misinformation.

Ixiaus··on Ask HN: How can I get into cyber security research?
What would you recommend engineers learn or develop a practice for on the design and implementation side of software?
Ixiaus··on NixOS 22.11 “Raccoon”
Nix the language enables you to write explicit build recipes that can be reproducibly built with good integrity guarantees and granular and distinct knowledge of the build-time dependencies and the run-time dependencies (so you only ever transmit closures that have what they need to execute).

Nix the set of tools gives you convenient command line tools that can: evaluate Nix language expressions, build recipes, analyze build-time or run-time dependency graphs of a recipe, give you ephemeral shells with the packages you want in scope but not installed "globally", package management tools to install packages globally, and recipe diffing tools so you can see how recipes changed.

Nix the package manager is a convenient, gigantic, community effort to explicitly describe how to (reproducibly) build almost all of the OSS software that users need and it comes with a substitution cache so that most recipe build products are easily substituted when installing, so you don't have to build. Even if you don't use Nix, nixpkgs is still impressive because you have the most explicit documentation for how to build a piece of software from source and all of its dependencies than anywhere else on the internet, it usually rivals project author's in its specificity, explicitness, and clarity.

NixOS the Linux distribution combines all of this together with a convenient configuration module system and generally good defaults to give you an operating system that is declaratively specified from your etc hosts file all the way down to the recipe for building the kernel, a rich and granular dependency graph, reproducible OS configuration builds, and diffs between closures.

My biggest gripe with Nix is the lack of static types. This was the originator's biggest mistake that Nix will be living with for a very long time to come. Static types would have helped bring the learning curve down IMHO and made it easier to document and less frustrating to debug.

That being said, the overall properties of Nix, nixpkgs, and NixOS far outweigh the pain points in my six years of production experience with it and for what we care about: auditability, reproducibility, explicitness, efficiency, and integrity.

Ixiaus··on Hard User Separation with NixOS
We use it in production at Arista-NDR (for both CI and our Linux rootfs that we deploy on prem and in AWS).

Definitely more than just a developer play thing.

Ixiaus··on Cloudflare Warp
I use Cloudflare WARP for my home and smartphone and laptop. I really, really like the content policies I can configure. Getting the combo of VPN + DNS content filtering is really nice. I use it for blocking myself from accessing pornography and their security and deceptive website categories have been useful.

The interface for configuring the content policies is really easy to use too.

I also really like the browser isolation feature too - I use it to access links from emails I feel suspicious about.

Ixiaus··on San Francisco decriminalizes psychedelics
No. It is not.
Ixiaus··on San Francisco decriminalizes psychedelics
> Psychedelics (serotonergic hallucinogens) are powerful psychoactive substances that alter perception and mood and affect numerous cognitive processes. They are generally considered physiologically safe and do not lead to dependence or addiction.

... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4813425/

Decriminalizing psychedelics is likely to help with the treatment of mental health problems that often lead people to substance abuse.

The idea that substance abuse is a character flaw is outdated and harmful. Some substances are certainly dangerous. Psychedelics are not in most cases. Condemning people who are using dangerous substances perpetuates the cycle of shame which keeps people from being able to heal.

Ixiaus··on The Dhall Configuration Language
I too don't want to or would use a bash script as a config file. That's the point of dhall: you get good static types and it's not turing complete, so you get a lot of the safety and code reusability tools without the pitfalls of a general purpose programming language.

And, have you ever worked with giant configs in json or yaml? It becomes incredibly painful to manage.

Ixiaus··on We’ve only scratched the surface of how bad the crypto crime wave has gotten
"Frens" in particular is, yes.
Ixiaus··on Squats can boost brain activity [video]
Yoga will never produce the same amount of body strength or power that a good, sustainable, compound barbell program can.

I do think there is a place for Yoga in giving our bodies different kinds of movements so we experience our body in different ranges of motion and positions but Yoga is nothing like compound barbell training (whether it's powerlifting or olympic weightlifting).

Ixiaus··on Why Erlang?
Erlang was a gateway to functional programming for me too, specifically Haskell. (And Emacs!)
Ixiaus··on Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)
I was a bit surprised to see this link on HN because I own a copy of this book.

I'm not affiliated with this person or business but Ouroboros Press has a beautiful edition of this book (I own a copy): https://www.bookarts.org/store/p19/Theatrum_Chemicum_Britann...

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