lux

Thank you. I’m definitely still very “in the valley” since it’s only been a few months, but I am in counselling which helps. And I’ve lost close friends to suicide and addiction in the past, so going through those before has helped me not feel quite so lost, at least knowing how to be gentler with myself this time.

I can only imagine such a loss based on my own, and from the many conversations I’ve had with my wife’s mum as well, trying to be the best supports we can for each other.

I would describe my wife similarly, it sounds like. Kind, value-driven, cared too much, was the biggest personality in the room but somehow always made people feel seen and heard. But also deeply troubled and hid a lot of it, even from me I’m discovering.

Sending love your way as well. I agree, platitudes or things like “they’re in a better place now” or “looking down on us” make me only feel worse, but genuine compassion does help feel like the weight isn’t on our shoulders alone, even for a little rest.

Thank you. It’s definitely the living definition of hell, a constant panic attack for a past you can’t change, but it’s also only been 3 months and I’m discovering resilience and supports I’m so thankful for.

I also decided to go visit one of our favourite places (Thailand) to get away for a bit, meet up with a friend, do some writing, and make some new memories here. It’s been really hard at points but definitely healing too.

Thank you

Sisyphean is the word I’ve come back to a lot myself since my wife took her life on November 6, 2024. Feeling like I’m now trying to live for both of us, grasping at ways of honouring her memory despite the incredible love we had being unable to “save” her, and somehow not at all myself anymore, but having to keep moving forward feels hopeless beyond belief.

I lost my dad suddenly just two months prior, and my grandma shortly before that, but the loss of your partner (and in this manner after she refused help and I watched helplessly as she spiralled in her last year) eclipses any grief or pain I had experienced before or could have even imagined.

But I wanted to show a little appreciation for the OP and others on here sharing their devastating losses. Knowing love inevitably turns into grief but that that is a more universal experience makes me feel a little less alone. Small blessings but at points like these, we take whatever morsels we can get.

Snarky comments I’m seeing here aside, this merits serious discussion. Does this affect software sales, in-app purchases, services? A lot of us with a lot hanging on the line right now.

I don't disagree with a lot of what he says here, but I feel like too many people in Silicon Valley are hyper-fixated on the conformity and enforcement coming from the left, while ignoring and even stoking the flames of anger and conformity on the right. Particularly his points on news, because much of the news is now heavily skewed to the right.

PG would do well to reflect similarly on the rise of the right wing equivalents and recognize that they're the ones actively stymying progress on many of the critical issues of our time.

I don't see much mention of secure environment variables. How are those treated?

Indeed. Search was working reliably for me for a while using gpt-4o via the API then yesterday suddenly stopped altogether right when I needed it. Hoping this fixes it soon.

The crazy thing to me is that since losing that weight people don't believe me and think I must be lying that I ever weighed more. I've even whipped out a photo once to prove it.

I gained about 50 lbs in my 20's by getting a sedentary job and eating poorly after moving out on my own. I spent a solid 2 years trying to lose weight by working out actively and lost nothing. When I changed my diet, I dropped it all over time and kept it off for the last 15+ years.

I tell people I know trying to lose weight to separate the ideas of exercise and diet, but few listen and most are quite resistant to the idea. To me, I think of exercise as maintaining a healthy heart, posture, etc. but keep it completely out of the picture for weight management.

The other side of this is motivation. If you don't see yourself losing weight from exercise, it demotivates you and that demotivation then carries into other areas like diet. So if you keep those separate, you won't make poor choices in your overall health as a result of feeling demotivated by the lack of results from exercise and you won't fall off the bandwagon so easily.

Sharing this for the community's take on whether it has potential or is just another non-viable option.

I make music and would be the main contact for several artists, but I'm not a label per se. Would I join separately for each, or will there be a way for each artist to be added under my account or on separate accounts? Thanks!

Oh nice! I gave a PechaKucha talk with the same title back in 2019[0]. Love the illustrated examples here.

One thing I touched on in my talk was the idea that code is an art form that expresses the values of the artist by making something new possible in the world. The artist is saying "this should be possible for people to do" and then makes it so. I think that's really cool.

[0] https://www.johnluxford.com/blog/code-as-art/

Thanks for sharing!

The endless drivel of recipe websites is another one, burying the actual recipe under an absolute mountain of slop.

Whipped up a quick PHP version for fun:

https://github.com/jbroadway/distinctelements

Artists had plenty of thriving platforms to get their music out digitally before Spotify came along. The difference is almost every one of them paid better or let you sell your music. Spotify has accounted for artist music revenues dropping by ~90% and has done almost nothing to help smaller artists that they weren’t already getting elsewhere. They grew in popularity due to offering listeners endless playlists. Sadly, Songza was killing it in this area too and could have been a serious Spotify competitor until Google bought it and ruined it almost overnight.

This isn’t per artist, it’s per song, which means an artist might put out an album and only the single gets widespread play and if the few thousand plays the rest receive all fall just under 1k they’d be discounted to unpaid plays. Remember, for smaller artists every dollar counts. Most have already seen their revenues from music drop by 90-95% since Spotify ate the industry, so why should they be so willing to accept that the first 1k plays are worth $0.00 and the next are only worth $0.003 or less.

This is also compounded by their refusal to adopt a user-centric payment model where the artists you actually listened to that month are the ones your money goes to. Look at comparisons others have published and you’ll see how their current model siphons money from smaller artists towards major label artists (I’m discretely typing this in bits from our local chamber orchestra’s AGM and can’t look up facts for you atm).

With this change, it ensures that even moving to a user-centric model they’ll still be able to underpay smaller artists. It’s not so alarming on its own, but it ensures they can continue to keep the status quo even if they give in to pressure and adopt a user-centric payment model by being able to not have to pay for much of their catalog.

"Rounding errors" like these always favour the larger players. It's a form of slowly extracting money that should have gone to smaller artists and instead gets funnelled into the pockets of major label artists who arguably don't need it, at the expense of smaller artists and especially niche genres that don't have the same mass appeal as pop music. That's a group that's severely lacking representation in the discussions around how to pay fairly.

Another way they're screwing smaller artists is next year they'll be requiring each song to have 1k streams _per year_ before qualifying for monetization. They estimate that'll steal another ~$40M/year from smaller artists to help line the pockets of majors. It's actually sickening to watch from the sidelines.

Is there anything like this for interacting with the various social networks? I'm mainly just interested in a common auth + posting interface.

It always blows my mind seeing a post like this on HN and the top comments nitpick whether such a tax is needed.

These people don't need defending and they don't need that much money (for comparison, this was posted on here the other day and really illustrates the disparity quite well: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/).

The reasons for taxing them (including a flat rate on their net worth which would be a terrible way to tax people in lower income brackets but could be a great way to level things off at the top end where avoidance is rampant) are many: funding climate change reversal, poverty, health, housing, medical research, the list goes on.

We don't need more pedants splitting hairs about how to more effectively use the existing tax revenues. That is a distraction. We should do that too, but we should absolutely tax the hell out of the billionaire class who have been taking more than their fair share from our resources for decades and living at the expense of all of our futures.

As a chronic fidgeter (practically drumming with my legs at times), I wonder how much of a difference that makes.

Also glad to be working in VR which makes me get up out of my chair a lot for testing.

This seems like an improvement over my current solution in that it can keep multiple projects open simultaneously and route to each of them, but does add more complexity to the setup.

I'm using Dnsmasq (https://thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html) to map anything at .lo to the currently running project, like so:

  brew install dnsmasq
  sh -c 'echo "address=/.lo/127.0.0.1\naddress=/.lo/::1\n" > /usr/local/etc/dnsmasq.conf'
  sudo mkdir -p /etc/resolver
  sudo sh -c 'echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1\n" > /etc/resolver/lo'
  sudo brew services start dnsmasq

Would love to expand on that to route to specific projects, but since it's working "well enough" I probably won't touch that for the foreseeable future.

Godot Engine is coming along nicely https://godotengine.org/

One thing that trips me up when I see this 4 quadrant structure for documentation is when to go with a tutorial and when to go with a how-to. Curious how others delineate between those.

I’ve been working with the Quest for a few years and the Quest Pro for a month or so, and honestly the weight of the original Quest bothered me substantially until I got the upgraded strap. Like instant headaches. The Pro hasn’t bothered me at all because of the different weight distribution.

The untethered form factor makes sense to me too since the cord gets really annoying at times on the Vive Pro, etc. With the controllers not losing tracking behind you like the Quest does, many pro uses are happily solved without the added PC rendering capabilities.

I think people reviewing these undervalue the other added capabilities, in particular the face and eye tracking. Many of us have been waiting a long time for those features in a decent form factor, whereas the Vive Pro Eye + its face tracking module were a total dud by comparison.

Let's gooo!

I would assume Unity has something in the works internally, but it looks like someone is creating a Nanite/Lumen equivalent for Unity here:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-unity-improver-nano-t...

As for Metahumans, Unity has started on an equivalent of that too:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/tutorial-pr...

Character Creator is also looking like they're stepping up their game to match Metahumans:

https://www.reallusion.com/character-creator/default.html

That said, I'd love to see these things come to Godot specifically, including performance on the level of Unity ECS/DOTS.

Dividing the people matches the Machiavellian goal of the government to preserve itself as the source of power, so you don't want a populace that could coalesce to overthrow you. Of course, that doesn't help the populace when said government becomes tyrannical in any way.

But I feel like Plato's cave metaphor would suggest that artists (music, TV, movies) are the best sock puppets we've got, and often don't even know they're doing it (e.g., the apathy towards deeper goals that immersion in pop culture cultivates).