edraferi

Agree. This could be a useful way to expand the ecosystem that Keybase kick-started. We really need a modern alternative to the PGP ecosystem, and Keybase has been clear that they only want to do a subset of that.

Of course I also really like the client-facing stuff that Keybase has done. Roll out hasn't been perfect, but they provide a lot of useful, secure collaboration tools.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I’m glad you’ve found a fulfilling spiritual practice and community. I hope they are supporting you in this difficult time.

> I find it useful to consider the pre-baked objectives as a sort of rough draft I can push against, but more importantly, I've discarded the world view and taken the concrete. For Christianity, that's bread, wine, the holidays, the rhythm, the community, the directive to support charities generously.

That’s pretty interesting to me. I certainly agree that the rituals and community are the best part of organized religion. I’ve enjoyed them in the past and I miss them now. I actually considered returning to the church when I had a young family for exactly these reasons.

I just can’t untangle the practical from the philosophical. The community is great in and of itself, but it exists explicitly to advance a particular set of beliefs. It’s hard to take the community without the beliefs. At least, I haven’t been able to do it successfully. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I could have, but I would have felt like a fraud. I think that would limit my ability to integrate.

> This may also be worth thinking about with respect to healthy eating, exercise, etc. Don't get sucked into a cult, but if signing up for (now-virtual) CrossFit or Pilates classes, or following Starting Strength, gets you doing something, it's a concrete physical ritual that can stay with you even as you change :)

Absolutely. The principal applies to many places. Employers, even. Many start ups want you to drink the kool-ade, own the vision, play ping pong... you can opt out of that and just do the engineering and paycheck!

Very cool! Congratulations on your exceptionally clear-eyed approach to a major life challenge!

I’m sure this sounds sarcastic, but I’m genuinely impressed. It takes a lot of mental discipline to examine long term trends, make a correct projection, identify an appropriate course of action and then implement it even when its disruptive to your personal life.

I hope it worked well for you, and that you are living your best life despite your health challenges.

In my experience, religions are happy to hand out pre-baked sets of objectives. Live a life like X. Stay away from Y. Put your money in Z. If you have trouble deciding what direction you want to go, religion can point you somewhere and surround you with a community that will encourage you to keep moving that way.

For some people, that’s really valuable. You see this especially with people who’s prior independent experience didn’t work out very well. Maybe they grew up in an abusive home and want instructions on breaking the cycle and raising their family better. Maybe there was criminal behavior, substance abuse, relationship or career stagnation. For many people, a pre-packaged world view from Religion X can be a big step up from their prior experience, ESPECIALLY when it comes with a supportive community.

The problem, of course, is two fold.

First, life isn’t one-size-fits-all. Eventually the pre-packaged beliefs will be sub-optimal for your personal situation. The better religious communities are flexible enough to accommodate this. The uglier ones lock you down or cut you out.

Second, the pre-packaged beliefs usually assert their own universal and exclusive validity. Even if the one you pick happens to be correct about this, it encourages toxic behaviors that will isolate you from non-community members. And of course the claim is preposterous on its face; The interchangeability of religions undercuts their claims to universal truth.

So, to summarize: Religion is a reasonable place to get a default world view and community, especially if you’re existing beliefs/community aren’t serving you well. Long term they are suboptimal because they don’t adapt to your personal circumstances very well.

That is a wonderful idea. Managers are responsible for the performance of their teams. NOBODY wants to sandbag sleep numbers, so it'd be a decent comp metric.

Vectorization FTW

Yup!

Every time I see something like this, my thought process is:

“Cool, that could be useful for X”

“Hmm X is proprietary. I’m not typing into some random website.”

“Can I run this locally?”

“Nope, not natively. Is it worth my time to hack it?”

The FreeWrite is $550 US

https://getfreewrite.com/products/freewrite-smart-typewriter

See also: https://coder.com/

I expect 400k COVID-19 deaths in the US. Anything less than that is a major win. Anything less than the 2.2M is progress.

Yeah that would be pretty cool. I’d be interested to use that to implement phonetic distance scoring.

Good answer. Nice to see licensing issues taken seriously.

> What really matters though is to keep the raw number of confirmed cases low

Sure, as long as you mean "actually slow the spread of infections through responsible personal and social choices" and not "sandbag the numbers because it looks bad for you politically."

Assuming you're over-concentrated in equities, yeah. But if you're under-invested in equities, this would be a decent time to start getting more. No telling when the market will bottom out though, so as always be careful.

Culling collections intelligently promotes an archive to a library.

Just make it _as good_. Add legitimacy at the same level of convenience and you win.

How do you deliver end-to-end encryption in a federated architecture like that?

Paywall - what’s your point?

If you change your mind, this is a great way to get out on a race track with whatever you’re driving:

https://www.tracknightinamerica.com/

I agree. I want something like this that:

(1) is a native mobile/desktop app instead of web-first, because there’s no reason my most personal stuff should be available globally

(2) stores data in a REALLY open format like JSON or YAML, because I want maximum interoperability and minimum but rot

(3) synchronizes across devices using generic file sync tools like Dropbox, google drive, or One Drive, because all my other stuff is in there and they’re as secure as anything gets

(4) runs anywhere without administrator privileges or special run times, because I want to be able to use it at work

(5) federated the data store so I can have a single view into personal, professional and proprietary information, while storing and sharing them appropriately to the sensitivity of the data.

What’s your app? What have you tried?

Classic government accounting problem. People look free to managers, so more stuff gets brought in-house than it should.

Pretty good, depending on the tooling. I’m having good luck with https://webrecorder.io/ and their related open-source tools.

The article says they’d like to include BLIS in the benchmark, but nobody has written a good Numpy Conda package with BLIS hooks yet

Your bias link doesn’t appear to be correct.

I think your analysis is correct. Before jumping to the “US is a bully” narrative, one should consider:

- they whole problem here is that Hauwei and other state-sponsored Chinese firms are flooding the market with below-cost, compromising devices in order to give the Chinese government broad access to sensitive information [0]

- Hong Kong is dying under the Chinese boot [1]

- China is running concentration camps [2]

Our community isn’t used to thinking about open source software - or technology in general- in the context of geopolitics. We seem to agree IBM was wrong to help the Nazis manage the Haulocaust [3] but don’t apply that logic to China. Yet. Maybe our children will; that’s on us.

This is another skirmish in the long war around the Chinese Rise. America is by no means perfect, but I think we’ll miss Pax Americana when it’s gone. We need to search our souls and find our spines.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/17/18264283/huawei-security-...

[1] https://www.vox.com/2019/11/18/20970453/hong-kong-protests-2...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/fina...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Oh wow that’s super cool. I’ve been tracking Nix and NixOS for a while, but hadn’t heard of NixOps. Gonna did into that.

Seems like there’s some duplication where very similar emails are received close together. What do you consider a unique email? How do you duplicate?

Heh just wait for the Urban Warfare edition that adds mace dispensers above the windows...

The genius of Universal Paperclips [0] is that it teaches you the unintuitive ways that exponential systems work. Things seem to move very slowly, then they explode very very quickly. (Assuming that’s the paper clip game mentioned by GP!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips