goodells

Even decades after reunification, the socioeconomic differences between areas that used to be East and West Germany are still very apparent.

I would agree with this. Ancedotally, at least for the first 6 months until the fall of 2020, my team and its management were completely accepting of sub-par WFH setups and attitudes. We couldn't really blame the guy whose two young daughters screamed all day and tromped up and down the stairs next to his desk.

Now it's different - remote hires are expected to have a decent working environment (either at home or elsewhere at their own expense).

They likely do understand, but are just waiting for the extra federal unemployment benefits to end. The smart choice (from an employer's standpoint) would be to make it past September 6th without significantly increasing wages, then evaluate. If they give workers a higher wage now and it turns out to be unnecessary once the extra unemployment ends, it'll be pretty much impossible to take that back without replacing the entire staff at once.

I've been in both kinds of organizations. Without fail, every place that was like "organization B" (separate development and cloud teams) had some under-the-table workaround. The worst I think I ever saw was _every single customer's hosted environment_ had SSH access enabled with the same key, and it was shared between developers without much regard for security. A business worth hundreds of millions of dollars...

But of course they required two-factor authentication in O365, so it was SOX2 compliant.

This has been known and grudgingly tolerated by every team I’ve been on that uses Docker. Occasionally someone will get sick of it and introduce something like docker-sync [1], essentially just to rsync a directory instead of using a volume, then later someone else will find an issue with it and rip it out… usually on a 2-4 year cadence. It’s amazing this is still an issue for Docker Desktop on both Mac and Windows.

With their new nagging un-skippable updates, the future isn’t looking bright for this product.

[1] - http://docker-sync.io/

As a professional Elixir engineer who still hasn't embraced the whole LiveView thing, I'd emphasize that that particular aspect is entirely optional. You can write a traditional HTTP-only or templated HTML backend in Elixir with code that a Ruby on Rails developer wouldn't blink twice at.

I had no idea SQLite was so fluid with its column types - that's kind of alarming. I guess it's fine if you still have an ORM in between you and it, and this STRICT syntax is probably the most reasonable workaround, but it just seems like a band-aid on top of not following the sensible pattern of every other database engine.

I'm in the same situation in terms of tech debt against my personal infrastructure. I have plans to migrate my personal (currently Ubuntu) server to use Proxmox on top of selling the current machines & buying new non-Apple ones for this. The evening and weekend time is tight.

I can't wait until /child-safety 404s or redirects to /safety and there's a wall of marketing blurb (possibly only in Chinese at first) that explains how 'national security' concerns are reported to the CCP.

This has totally pushed me over the edge, though I'll admit I was oblivious to begin with. My plan is to replace the MacBooks with a Thinkpad P15 gen 2 running Ubuntu and replace the iPhone with something running Ubuntu Touch (Volla Phone, Fairphone, OnePlus One). Screw not having control.

I am an EMT and talk to a lot of nurses, PAs, and physicians in various circles. This wave is worse for a few reasons.

- Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients. They aren't victims here, they did this to themselves. Nobody can muster any more compassion, especially for these people. Patients and people at large, not even just the total-nutjob anti-vaxxers, are tired of restrictions. "Things are opened back up, I deserve to have a good time."

- Staffing shortages building over the pandemic are making nurses hate the hospital administrations even more than before. Many were furloughed or laid off 6-12 months ago, and are now asked to work mandatory overtime with ridiculously unsafe nurse:patient ratios.

- ... all while traveling contract nurses and providers are being utilized by the hospitals at a pay rate 3-4 times what staff are paid. Many nurses are leaving their jobs that pay $30/hour to take a traveling assignment at $90+/hour. These people are working side by side, there's disdain towards the travelers, but who cares they're making bank.

- The "healthcare heroes" messaging is so obviously just a scam and the healthcare staff are now almost 18 months into a kafkaesque, double-speak nightmare. Previously this was reserved for veterans, and of course they were similarly screwed.

It's all just been building up since the beginning of the pandemic - issues with skilled staffing are very real and happening across the country.

I don't know if it's necessarily the English language to blame here, but this reminds me of an experience I had while talking with one of the Chinese international students in college. He pronounced the first few syllables of the word "amazing" and "Amazon" the same as there aren't really any obvious pronunciation hints. It took a few minutes to sort out what he was actually trying to say and figure out where the confusion came from, even with the -ing suffix.

There's a difference between "everybody jay-walks so the police always have an excuse to pick you up" and violent crimes that the community as a whole notices go unpunished by repeat offenders.

We have the same DA-refuses-to-prosecute issue here in Madison, WI - except the issue is car theft by teens. The DA is an elected position. Our chief of police resigned last year because the police would arrest them and they'd be let out hours later on a signature bond. There are kids who have gotten arrested more than 10 times for the same thing - stealing cars and shoplifting - but either the DA is afraid of appearing racist or his office is so overworked it's impossible to be effective.

Society is running on auto-pilot with no enforcement of everyday laws, and sooner or later things are going to break down in a big way.

The fan wouldn’t be exchanging fresh air, it would be drawing it up from the ground. Radon gas is a product of decaying uranium underground. It usually gets into homes due to the “stack effect” where heated indoor air rises (in winter) and draws the gas up through the foundation. The parent commenter seems to be proposing a mechanism to do this in summer as well, just using a fan instead.

There’s also radon to consider… yikes!

This is the situation I'm in now - I attended the University of Wisconsin, loved the city enough to stick around Madison, and now have a great quality of life working remotely for a company where I'm the only employee in this timezone. There are other young people around, college sports, educational opportunities at the nearby technical college (starting night classes in their paramedic program this fall), and decent housing costs. The university facilitates a lot of this by opening up the student unions to alumni and paying members.

I like how the Wikipedia article about English Prime also _uses_ English Prime for the most part in its prose - not sure if the contributors or editors did that intentionally.

This is an interesting insight, but I don't think it's even close to telling the whole story of the pathophysiology of misophonia.

The researchers seem to focus mainly on the mouth and throat sounds that bother many people. It's probably the most relatable disgusting kind of sound that a lot of neurotypical people can sympathize with hating too. But newer research (like that from Dr. Zach Rosenthal and CMER at Duke [1]) is showing that the root of misophonia has something to do with trained aversive reactions, and that meshes a lot better with my own experience. It's very common for people with misophonia to develop more triggers over the course of their lives such as footsteps, doors closing, car engines, etc., and even for associated visual stimuli to cause similar triggers.

[1] - https://www.misophonia.duke.edu/content/research-overview

For me, even the size of the desk is directly correlated with success. The dorms in college were frustrating because there was barely enough room on the surface to lay down a large textbook and notebook next to it. When I look at desks for sale at IKEA and online, they still seem too small... do other people feel the same way? All of the tables I've used as desks since then have been marketed as "dining room tables to seat 6-8".

At face value, this sounds ridiculous. When I buy any device, what I am looking for is "available over LAN" and "HTTP API documented". It's either entirely documented and lovely, like Hue and LIFX. Or difficult and third-party like Nanoleaf. Or it's ridiculously impossible with deliberate Chinese cryptographic blockage and "Identity verification" at every turn, like Tuya. I'm happy to add a plugin or reverse-engineer an API if I need to. The latter I scorn at every turn. And my plugins are used by thousands of people every day, so hopefully the tide will turn.

Laptop microphones are obviously problematic, but boom mics have their own issues. None of my coworkers know how to position the microphone properly, so whenever one of them talks it's riddled with plosive whooshes of air whenever they make a "P" or "B" sound.

> It is a racemic compound with two stereoisomers, the (S)-(–)-isomer being five times as pharmacologically active as the (R)-(+)-isomer.[14]

I can't wait until 2041 when this is phased out and we get "esviloxazine" for $300+/month.

The issue specifically with the service animal is tough. I think people who benefit from legitimate service animals are seriously harmed by the people who claim their pet is a service animal so they can bring it with them. Anyone can buy a “service animal” vest on Amazon. And under the ADA, it’s basically illegal to even ask if it’s a legitimate service animal - you can ask “which tasks is it trained to perform?”

The drivers are in a tough spot given that they’ve probably had poorly trained pets in their cars that were passed off as service animals.

Sure, this isn't meant to make it impossible to shoot yourself in the foot design-wise if you intermingle fonts. It's more of a layout concern. If I change the font in an app or website, it _always_ leads to tweaking all the font sizes and adjusting vertical padding on things like buttons. All to get the baseline and vertical height at roughly the same spots between fonts. The author's proposal of a "cap height" (I don't like that term, though) would make that tweaking a thing of the past.

The problem seems to be that, should you want to change the font size or line height of text in a given font, it's currently difficult to get a consistent baseline and character size between different fonts. Having some default line height for a font is fine. Making it impossible to align the tops and bottoms of capital letters between different fonts in a sane way is not great.

I found the Slate Star Codex article about uric acid interesting [1]. The bit about this gene:

> About ten million years ago, the common ancestor of apes and humans got a mutation that broke uricase, causing uric acid levels to rise. The mutation spread very quickly, suggesting that evolution _really_ wanted primates to have lots of uric acid for some reason. Since discovering this, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly what that reason was, with most people thinking it’s probably an antioxidant or neuroprotectant or something else helpful if you’re trying to evolve giant brains.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/27/give-yourself-gout-for...

In agreement, several aspects of this website immediately made me brush off the project and whoever created it.

- GitHub star count in huge text at the top, seeking validation?

- Doesn't explain what the heck the project does, but "React Cosmos 5 in 21 tweets" ... I have to read a thread of tweets to understand what this is for?

- "Don't settle for localhost:3000" okay, demean the way that tons of us develop web based applications currently

Related to Xiaomi, the company is also doing some sketchy things in the smart home space under their brand "Aqara". I use HomeKit in my apartment and opted for Aqara branded wireless buttons and temp/humidity sensors because of the attractive hardware and good reviews. The devices require a wi-fi connected hub, not too strange for things that use Zigbee, so I gave that a go.

Well, on cursory examination, the Aqara/Xiaomi hub was talking to a bunch of Chinese servers constantly. I didn't dive too deep into what all they were actually for. When I blocked the device from phoning home with my router, all the connected devices stopped working! None of the buttons or sensors would work, the RGB light on the hub couldn't even be changed. As soon as it lost the ability to ping its servers in China, the thing actually started strobe light flashing blue. Re-enable the outside network access on it, starts working again. This was totally antithetical to why I use HomeKit in the first place, so I removed the hub and paired all the Aqara accessories with a generic open source Zigbee hub (ConBee II) and added it to HomeKit with HomeBridge.

In the future I plan to give brands more scrutiny before investing time/money in them and granting them unfettered access to my LAN...

My protocols for excited delirium say ketamine 100-200mg IV/IO or 200-400mg IM.

Maybe, and with FDNY where this pilot is being tested I don't know how the pay compares, but it'd still be a big shift in how EMS is presented from the very beginning to trainees.

I personally like EMS because even though it's not exactly _safe_, if someone is acting out the cops deal with them, and if something is on fire or spewing ethyl-bethyl-bad-stuff into the air, fire/HAZMAT deals with it. We're the smart people in the wee-woo box that primarily focus on patient care with our friends in law enforcement and fire close by.

My issue with it is that EMS and a "mental health professional" could easily get stuck in a situation with a violent, armed person and be at the mercy of police coming from a separate location to help in an emergency. Sure, the vast majority of patients are not like that, but it doesn't make sense to me to take the risk. In my experience, having police on scene but keeping their distance is fine and patients usually understand when we say they're not in trouble and anything they say to us is confidential. Some other services probably don't do it as well, especially since police get there faster most of the time.