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brooke2k

518 karma · joined January 2, 2022

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brooke2k··on LuaJIT Language Toolkit
what do you dislike about Lua?
brooke2k··on ChatGPT Pulse
"It has convinced a bunch of people to spend money" is also true of blockchain, so I don't know if that's a good argument to differentiate the two.
brooke2k··on Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)
Yes, that did unfortunately happen in the history of psychiatry. I am talking about modern American psychiatric practices (say, the last 10-20 years).

If the proposition here is that mental health disorders are fabricated maliciously in order to sell more medication or enforce some sort of social order, then I don't see how the very rare court-ordered enforcement of short-term stays at psychiatric institutions could be the mechanism for that.

The vast majority of people in the US who receive psychiatric care do so voluntarily, because they experience real symptoms that really affect their life, for which they need real treatment.

brooke2k··on Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)
A "disorder" is just a collection of symptoms that have been empirically shown to benefit from certain treatments. If someone doesn't think they have those symptoms then they can just not seek a diagnosis or treatment. Nobody is forcing a diagnosis on somebody who doesn't want it.
brooke2k··on Undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in DSM-5 (2024)
The DSM isn't about understanding how the brain works, it's about correlating sets of symptoms to treatments. If your issues are characterized by this broad set of symptoms, then likely you'll benefit from these sorts of treatments, and etc. We don't have a good understanding of how the brain works, but we're pretty confident that people with schizophrenia often benefit from antipsychotic medications.
brooke2k··on OCaml as my primary language
As with all languages, the syntax seems strange at first until you get used to it, at which point you hardly think about it.
brooke2k··on Face it: you're a crazy person
That's the point of the article though. They're saying that instead of trying to grit your teeth and push through something you hate to satisfy an arbitrary goal, you should find the thing that you're crazy for enjoying so much and pursue that, because doing it is what the vast majority of your life will actually be spent on
brooke2k··on How to Firefox
I use youtube a worrying amount, all through firefox (and I am also an ADHD 1000 tabs open person), and I have never had this experience across multiple computers.
brooke2k··on A list is a monad
Monads don't compose between different instances, but monad transformers do.
brooke2k··on A list is a monad
Wow, this is a great post, thank you for sharing. It echoes my thoughts exactly.
brooke2k··on A list is a monad
As far as monad tutorials go, this one seems quite good. I like the categorization of monads between "containers" and "recipes".

However, I personally think that monad tutorials tend to give people the wrong impression and leave them more confused than they were before, because they focus on the wrong thing.

A monad is not a complex concept, at all. IMO a more useful way to present the topic would be with one separate lesson for every common monad instance. Start with Maybe, then IO, then maybe State and List, and so on... because ultimately, every instance of a Monad works very differently. That's why the pattern is so useful in the first place, because it applies to so many places. (Note: this is a criticism of monad tutorials in general, not this one in particular, which seems to do a decent job on this front).

In my experience, people new to Haskell focus way too much on getting the "a-ha" moment for monads in general, when really you want a bunch of separate "a-ha" moments as you realize how each instance of a monad takes advantage of the pattern differently.

I also tend to think that monads are best demonstrated in Haskell rather than in other languages, if only because the notation is so much less clunky. That may just be me though. (EDIT: well, also because almost no other languages have typeclasses, so you have to approximate it with interfaces/traits/etc)

Also FYI: in part 2, the code examples have extra newlines in between every line, which makes it hard to read (I'm on firefox, if that matters).

brooke2k··on Rolling the ladder up behind us
Public regulation also course-corrects, it just does so through democracy rather than competition.

I would argue that democracy is a superior method in most instances, because its motives are driven by the motives of the population as a whole, whereas capitalist competition is ultimately driven by exactly one thing: profit for the capital owners.

Where we agree I think is in the assertion that United States government tends to run things very poorly. In my opinion, however, this is not because central planning is inherently bad, but because our democracy is very weak, and we allow politicians to be controlled by corporate interests rather than the interests of the people that they represent.

EDIT: Oh, and for the record I disagree with the take that the US healthcare system is bad because it has too much regulation - but that's an entirely separate discussion that I don't think is worth going into.

brooke2k··on Rolling the ladder up behind us
I feel this is a slightly disingenuous argument - mismanagement and poor planning can happen in both the public and private sectors. The US healthcare system is just one fantastic example of the private sector absolutely failing to deliver even a bare minimum standard of service. Gas lines are one thing - waiting fifteen hours in the emergency room to be seen, only to be charged thousands of dollars for some tylenol and a pat on the head is another.
brooke2k··on Estrogen: A Trip Report
I don't think it's an insensitive question at all. To answer - As a trans woman, interests/hobbies are not really a marker of gender that I feel is important to me. I would say the same is true of all my trans friends, although ofc that is not a representative sample, so take it with a grain of salt.

For me, in no particular order, these are the elements of sex/gender that I find important (and which were crucial for me to align during my transition):

* My body. This was perhaps the single most important one. Hormones worked wonders here, as well as growing out my hair, shaving, learning to take care of my skin, etc.

* Clothing/makeup went a long way towards making me feel better about myself. It takes a very long time and a lot of practice and skill-building to be "good" at fashion/makeup/etc, but it was worth it.

* My personality. This one is the hardest to describe. I can only say that when my body ran on testosterone, I was miserable, antisocial, arrogant, and annoying, and after switching over to estrogen, I am much happier, better at conversation, more empathetic, and by all reports much more likeable.

* My relationship to other women. It's hard to describe, but as I transitioned I became a lot closer to the women in my life, and grew apart slightly from the men in my life.

I think in part this emerges from the negative side of being a woman in society (being leered at/catcalled/harassed/stalked/patronized/discriminated against/etc). It leads women to stick together and trust each other more implicitly than men. So as a trans woman, gradually being welcomed into this "club" was very gender-affirming (although the negative stuff still sucks :/)

* Name and pronouns. At this point (~4 years) I pass enough in public that I am essentially never misgendered, but on the rare occasion I am, it certainly ruins my day. Pronouns matter more than cis people might think.

* Relationship to my family. Being called "daughter" by my parents, doing mom/daughter stuff with my mom, etc.

There are probably other factors that I'm not thinking of right now, but this is what comes to mind as I write this. And notably, my interests/hobbies aren't really included there. I do software development, I'm into skateboarding and punk music and videogames, I play dungeons and dragons. All "male-coded" hobbies for the most part, but I really just attribute that to the fact that I developed my hobbies as a kid, and as a kid I was a boy with friends who were boys and who did boyish stuff.

I personally don't find that that affects my perception of my gender at all. Hopefully this helps clear up your confusion! Let me know if there's anything I can clarify further.

brooke2k··on The Claude Bliss Attractor
it seems more likely to me that it's for the same reason that clicking the first link on wikipedia iteratively will almost always lead you to the page on Philosophy

since their conversation has no goal whatsoever it will generalize and generalize until it's as abstract and meaningless as possible

brooke2k··on Improving performance of original dav1d video decoder
I don't understand the vitriol this author seems to have towards rav1d/Rust. It's just a separate implementation of the project. Slower, faster, who cares? Getting so attached to "which language is faster" seems a tad dramatic.

But maybe I'm over-reading into what's actually friendly competition. The tone just seems oddly aggressive.

brooke2k··on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to do. I found that anything GPU-related was a nightmare of drivers and configuration which was a show-stopper for me. Now I just run arch/kde and that all works fine out of the box
brooke2k··on Perverse incentives of vibe coding
I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up.

Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it.

But any time I've tried to get AI services to help with bugfixing/feature development on a large, complex, potentially multi-language codebase, it's useless.

And those tasks are the ones that actually take up the majority of my time. On the occasion that I'm spinning a new thing up quickly, I don't really need an AI to do it for me -- I mean, that's the easy part!

Is there something I'm missing? Am I just not using it right? I keep seeing people talk about how addictive it is, how the productivity boost is insane, how all their code is now written by AI and then audited, and I just don't see how that's possible outside of really simple rote programming.

brooke2k··on Lazarus Release 4.0
I'm not necessarily advocating java, I think rust is def the best solution in most cases -- but java definitely has a significant performance edge on python. The JVM will never be quite as fast as native code, but it's very fast these days and it gets better every year. Certainly much, much faster than python on the average.
brooke2k··on Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++
I'm confused by this, because a panic is essentially an exception. They can be thrown and caught (although it's extremely discouraged to do so).

The only place where it would be different is if you explicitly set panics to abort instead of unwind, but that's not default behavior.

brooke2k··on C++26: more constexpr in the standard library
seeing the words "constexpr sorting" makes all the compile-time sirens go off in my head
brooke2k··on I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors
as someone who works in visual studio on c# every day of my life, I have the opposite opinion. it's awful
brooke2k··on A single line of code cost $8000
seconded -- tried to use tauri for a cross-platform app but the integrated webview on android is horrendous. had to rewrite basic things from scratch to work around those issues, at which point why am I even using a "cross-platform" framework?

I imagine if you stick to desktop the situation is less awful but still

brooke2k··on Firefox tab groups are here
I just don't close them, that's all. If I search something, I open a new tab. After hours or days, there's a lot of them, at which point I go "whoops," close all the windows, and start fresh.

Maybe that's not typical tab use though, idk

brooke2k··on Zlib-rs is faster than C
the point of saying "faster than C" isn't to make it a competition, it's to demonstrate that Rust is capable of hitting performance goals that previously one needed to use C/C++ for.
brooke2k··on Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least
brooke2k··on Godot 4.4
wow! this is a big release! I'm happy to see Godot doing so well, it's come so so far in the past few years
brooke2k··on Suckless.org: software that sucks less
notably they did this only a few weeks after the "unite the right" white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, which IIRC is where the whole tiki torch thing started
brooke2k··on Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose
Gender dysphoria is a potential cause of mental illness, not a mental illness in itself. If someone has a job they hate or an unhealthy relationship which is causing them to be severely depressed, the best treatment is simply to quit that job or that relationship and work towards something better.

It's just the same for transgender people. Growing up feeling that you're in the wrong body can cause a lot of mental distress, and the best and most universally effective option for fixing that distress is to simply transition to living as another gender.

Not all people who are transgender experience severe enough dysphoria to cause serious mental health issues, and yet they still decide to transition and report being happier afterwards. [1] However, many transgender people do experience distress over it, and a proportion of that population are even suicidal over it.

This is why I consider it to be a cause of mental illness, not a mental illness in and of itself. And it's important to note that, even for the group that experience suicidality, transitioning is still an effective treatment. [2] [3]

Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is not even close to universally effective for people who are depressed about being "flat-chested" or "ugly." Cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancement has been shown to have a much, much higher rate of regret than transgender surgeries. [4]

In short, the reason that gender-affirming care is considered a treatment for gender dysphoria, whereas breast enhancement and rhinoplasty are not considered treatments for body dysmorphia, is simply that the former is effective and the latter is not.

1. https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/transgender-people-gender-i...

2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10925986/

3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7869522/

4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38688814/

brooke2k··on Derivatives don't always act like fractions (2021)
they refer in the beginning to physics classes, and I had the same exact experience in university. diffeq was not a prereq and yet instead of explaining the derivation of these equations, our physics professor just handwaved and said "they're basically just fractions, don't think about it too much"
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