Tallain

A small difference at small levels but one which obviously matters when it's shoved into countless foods without most people event realizing. It's not just in soda and candy; it's in bread, pasta, almost any processed food (crackers, ketchups and other sauces, canned fruit, applesauce, lunch meat, peanut butter, the list goes on) and many foods one might not considered processed.

It makes sense to try to eliminate it even though it's "only" a small difference. Might as well remove the difference at all and look out for things with no HFCS shoved in it for no reason.

I use Commander One (https://commander-one.com/) on MacOS as a Total Commander replacement and it's good enough.

There's also a free version with a few features restricted here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/commander-one-file-manager/id1...

For many writers and creative types I've read and talked to, the use of AI for pretty much any reason is equivalent to crossing the picket line.

When so many models are trained on illegally-obtained data (libgen, etc.) and provide profit without acknowledgement to the folks whose creative output made said profit possible in the first place, it feels really icky to put it lightly.

What's more, the creative process is about pulling something out from inside of you, examining your ideas and yourself, and maybe showing it to the world. Feedback from others, editors or readers or whatever, is a reciprocation of that. Or if you keep it to yourself, you've learned and grown anyway, and have honed your craft for the next time you try it.

What reward is there in computer mimicry? How does AI empower this process?

From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested. This isn't new, though. Ever since we started calling entertainment "content," you could see it coming. It's a struggle Hollywood's faced since the studio system, even before. We had the subversives in the Code era, the new wave people, the auteurs, and so on, all fighting that good fight against the business people who spoke only in dollars and cents. So it was, so it shall be.

I don't think there will be an AI takeover in creative writing, except for maybe a hiccup where slop content creators chase gold. Already a couple of romance writers accidentally published stories with prompts left in them and have instantly ruined their reputations forever. I think the people interested in reading what a machine wrote are the people interested in making the machine write. Everyone else wants something from a real human.

This is an alarmingly reductionist statement that I cannot believe is made in good faith. If it somehow is, it's based on an abundance of ignorance that only highlights the importance of education.

Are you genuinely arguing that LLM output is derivative, and human output is derivative, therefore they're equal? Why don't you pop that thesis into ChatGPT and see how it answers.

BART crime is up over the past decade. People don't avoid BART because of that headline with the chainsaw man. They avoid it because of everyday crime and violence.

I'm sure it's similar for many other metro transport options in the USA. California in particular has a rough go for many reasons.

It doesn't even have to be something bad or happen to you. One "my buddy had his bike stolen off the light rail" and several people will be turned off of ever trying to use it.

Had to look up what "BDFL" meant.

Even if the dude tries to paint the internet with Wordpress's brains, I'm confident I will have time (and the impetus, finally) to find an acceptable alternative for my workflow. I'm open to suggestions.

Also, as I mentioned to a sibling response, the upkeep really is not that much work. It's a personal blog and takes a grand total of three (maybe four) clicks to update every once in a while.

For the rest of my website I also just write raw HTML / CSS, and JS when needed. It's all static content and little toys, so no RSS need. It's nice to keep things simple when you can.

Thanks for the link :) I do think the blog I linked makes many of the same points I tried to make, so not really spam as it has actual content.

Again, we're talking about blogging, not business sites or SSR or CMS tooling. Very different needs with very different solutions.

I personally don't think it's that much work, and definitely not complicated, to keep my software up to date. And as a blog all I need to do is cache / throw behind a CDN and I'm golden. Nothing complex going on here. No headaches, no late nights, not even a wink of worry.

We're talking about blogging here, not business-critical website infrastructure. If my blog went down I wouldn't lose a sleepless night over it. I'd figure it out later.

If I were choosing a CMS or tech stack for a critical piece of infrastructure my requirements would be different and I might find some other tool.

Also, if all these were so much concern, I doubt so much of the web would run on Wordpress. Yes, you need to keep your install and plugins up to date. But you need to keep your toolchain up to date no matter what you use. Risk of breakage on update is a thing everywhere, not just Wordpress. I'm by no means a Wordpress fan, but it really is not as bad as it's painted.

I disagree, it's not overkill unless you make it overkill.

My update process is:

- Click a button to back up

- Click a button to update everything

- Open my blog to make sure it still looks normal

Definitely not onerous. To be fair I don't use many plugins, and my theme is very simple. I don't think a plain old blog doesn't need many plugins.

Sometimes I take a break from blogging. I don't want to have to read documentation on how my SSG works (either my own docs or docs on some website) to remember the script to generate the updates, or worry about deploying changes, or fiddling with updates that break my scripts, or anything like that. I do stuff like this for my day job.

I like my blogging experience to be focused on a single thing: writing.

This is pretty much how I play GTA V. I have a Self Radio playlist for a specific vibe. Hop in a random car and cruise around the city, get distracted by some event, cause a little mayhem and escape if I'm in the mood, and keep cruising. Like the Truck Simulator games, it's a good way to go for a drive without actually needing to go for a drive (so less exhausting, wasteful, and dangerous).

I'm reminded of the chart from this blog post: https://molodtsov.me/2023/02/how-to-start-your-blog-in-2023/

As I fell into the SSG pit I found I mostly wrote about and fooled around with the SSG itself, instead of all the things I originally planned on writing about and doing. So I threw away the SSG and installed Wordpress and stopped caring. It's been liberating.

If the goal is to tinker and write about the tinkering, that is fine. If you're not like me and the tinkering never gets in the way of the writing, that's also fine. But that wasn't me. I had to learn yet again that the best tool was the one that got out of my way and let me do what I came to do.

The last thing I need when I'm aiming to write is a chance to procrastinate.

Location: Thailand

Remote: Preferred, BKK acceptable

Technologies: C#, SQL, Python, Delphi, JavaScript/Typescript/etc.

Email: me@tallain.com

Senior backend engineer and integration specialist with 10 + years in .NET/C#, Azure, SQL Server, RabbitMQ, and Vue. I also have experience with Python and Delphi. I've worked on mission critical systems for fintech fraud prevention, public safety, and financial institutions; more recently I've been leading teams and slowly moving away from the world of individual contribution. Currently in Thailand (UTC+7) and fully remote, I’m looking for senior or lead roles -- or short, high‑urgency projects up to a year if you need a contractor who's good at cleaning up messes and stabilizing chaos.

Talk with your coworkers, send quick questions about code snippets, screen share and cowork or pair program or troubleshoot, have meetings, have sales calls, send updates that are a little less important than email would warrant.

If you're in-office you might do some of these less often. If you're fully remote and your org uses Teams, this is what goes on.

That also sounds super fun. I love it when things get hyper-specific like that. If you ever need a beta reader, let me know.

I use a mix of things. For a long time I used vim with some plugins to emulate iA Writer, along with vimwiki for general notes. Now I use Obsidian for notes (general stuff like character bios, tags, ways to track relationships, worldbuilding stuff).

I use iA Writer for a quick outline and first draft because it's simple and distraction-free, and I like its focus mode. Again this can be done with vim, I can send you my .vimrc if you're curious. I just wanted to support the company.

Once the first draft is done, I spin up Scrivener. I put in the notes from the outline into the corkboard view, then paste the draft. I read through it front to back and take notes, usually in iA where the outline was. Then I create a new version of each doc, one by one, and do line edits or rewrites where I see fit. Sometimes I rewrite something wholesale, or split it into multiple scenes, or delete completely.

Scrivener is very handy for this type of work, especially with the corkboard view, which lets you slide things around and see a story from a higher level than headlines or chapter / scene titles would.

I know Scrivener has a focus mode, but I use iA specifically to remove distractions. If I have Scrivener open, I'm tempted to fiddle with things in its UI, or try to take that high-level view too early. iA is for drafting because drafting is supposed to be a single-minded enterprise. There's no room for second thoughts and any loss of momentum kills a story for me.

Thank you so much! I'll put you on a list :)

I'm trying things a little differently right now, by plotting/writing, then revising in between the next set. Think spaced repetition for writing. Every story needs some drawer time before it's revised and edited. I anticipate a small anthology of sorts being ready by the end of the year.

If you go to the source of the data linked there -- cms.gov -- you'll see that this is only one side of the equation: health spending by product.

This explicitly does not include insurance costs.

Private health insurance costs are covered by "healthcare spending by major sources of funds" and reached 1.5 trillion, the same dollar amount as hospitals cost as a product group.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/highlights.pdf

A series of pulpy short stories, sort of a Dark Americana / weird fiction thing. Noir, magic, existential dread, horror. Warming up for a novel in a completely different genre but I wanted to iron out some of my own shortcomings and stretch some muscles before I write yet another 100k words on a project I'm unhappy with.

This is so great. I'm already envisioning all the ways I can put this to use. The only way I could think to improve it is a desktop app, and maybe some fusion with Heynote style features or keyboard shortcuts. This could be so great for short-term local notes or long form writing. Good job!

Exactly this. I (relatively recently) joined a team with a handful of developers all sort of doing things their own way. No docs, no shared practices, just individuals doing their own thing. After reviewing the code, submitted PRs with fixes, putting together docs for best practices, the entire team shifted their stance and started working closer together in terms of dev practices, coding styles, etc.

Not to say I got everyone to march to my drum -- the "best practices" was a shared effort. As you said, sometimes it just takes someone to call things out. We can do things better. Look at how things improve if you approach X problem in Y manner, or share Z code this way. Maybe the team was overwhelmed before and another voice is enough to tip the scales. If you don't try, you'll never know.

So I understand correctly, you're watching music videos in your car while you drive?

This is a video game history channel that usually goes a little more in-depth than that. Good production value, a soothing voice, and a nice ride through gaming's yesteryear -- often much better than others in the "genre" on YouTube

And then tacking on to another poster's "Thai test": there are multiple semi-canonical ways to transliterate Thai to English, and I can only imagine the landscape for Thai to other languages. Added to that, times of day can be referred to in several ways (1 PM could be, literally, "afternoon o'clock") and sometimes different words for the different "sections" of the day, e.g. 7 PM is "1 evening". Depending on your audience and intent. Lots of variation.

As an American, it's really eye-opening to learn other languages and cultures and apply that context to your work in software.

    Location: California, USA
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: C# (.NET, WPF, Blazor), SQL, Delphi, JavaScript, Typescript, Vue.js, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Argo CD, RabbitMQ
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonmgandy/
    Email: My username at gmail
    Resume: On request

I'm searching for a remote, full-time gig, contract is okay but not preferred. I have a lot of experience in a few different sectors, from finance to public safety to integrations and non-profits. I've won an award for being a top performer at a 2500+ person org, and have presented at conferences in front of 300 attendees. I like to think I'm good at what I do.

Every new wiki / knowledge management system I always compare against Confluence. I get the advantage of keeping your content in plaintext for portability but when I look back on how many times I've actually ported wiki content it's... maybe once? Most systems these days are handily capable of this, in any case.

Anyway, Confluence for all its flaw has so much power, is so much more pleasant to use, your business folks won't balk at it. As often as not, we have people from all parts of the company in there, reading and writing both, and it needs to be usable to people of all technical levels. Markdown wikis and their editors don't often meet this criterion, or they're missing on some key features (tables!!).

To me, Confluence's only real down side is that it's an Atlassian product. I wish I could find something to scratch the itch without feeling the need to buy into that whole ecosystem.

Sorry, just saw! I'm working on something very similar in a very niche space, also trying to take lessons learned and productize a more general solution / platform based on past experiences.

It's a steep cliff between one-off integrations and a general platform with workflow/trigger/action type functionality (assuming you do anything like that, since you mentioned Zapier).

In my experience the hardest part of a general solution is all of the one-off custom business logic that each client seems to have, even when integrating the same two systems. There's custom fields, which in one system could be represented as a special object and in another is just another column in a database. There's tons of if-else logic. Etc.

When doing something like field mapping, did you end up creating an internal/intermediary data model to map everything to, or did you end up creating System-A-to-System-B type mappings? How did you end up handling the special cases; is there a sort of scripting system for special and conditional logic or do you have something like a set of predefined transformations / conditionals that can be applied to the data? I'm sure a lot of this could be handled by a workflow/trigger/action system if one were willing and able to go fine-grained enough on the individual steps.

Other than that, what would you say your biggest hurdle has been in getting this thing off the ground and running smoothly without too much babysitting on each individual integration?

Sorry if this is too much or if I'm asking questions about your secret sauce, feel free to ignore, or email me at my username at gmail.

Very interested in learning more about this if you'd care to share.

Looks very cool from what I can see. Any plans to have an open / public API? For many associations past a certain size, an integration is going to become an inevitability (syncing member lists between systems is the most common, but also events, i.e. letting people register for an event on your site and then syncing to Zoom for automatic registration and email handling).

Congratulations, you missed the point of the comment while also being unnecessarily condescending! Another internet point!

The commenter remarked "we would never have heard of Philip Glass." Who among the laity would have heard of Philip Glass and the people you listed? I expect that Venn diagram is really two circles.