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nsguyon The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape [video]

node.js and Netscape are about 20 years apart ;) I also don't remember an npm. newsgroup hierarchy. As a teenager during that time I recall some binary newsgroups though :)

nsguyon It's getting harder to die

Nice! In my experience small issues can escalate if left unchecked because you start compensating and your body also "learns" to do things the wrong way.

nsguyon It's getting harder to die

I'm a fair bit older than you... What you're saying is true but it's also worth mentioning your body has capabilities you're probably far from reaching. Most people your age can still exceed any physical accomplishment they've had in their lifetime if they really want to. E.g. they can play sports better than they ever had and they can achieve personal bests in any physical ability. If you were a top level professional athlete that's probably not true (though even professional athletes have longer careers than they used to) or if you've been a top 10 GM in chess than that's probably behind you too, but otherwise you're young!

I don't know what specific injuries you're suffering from but I've suffered from back pain and really improved my situation a lot. I'm physically stronger than I've ever been in my life. I've worked through some knee injuries. I've even recently improved my gum health (in a way someone said wasn't possible). It takes more work and more focus but our bodies are amazing machines and 37 ain't old.

nsguyon Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong

I would say your foundation should be the science and you can fine tune to your personal experience. If you're starting from personal experience you're just going to miss out on the wealth of pre-existing knowledge and are likely very far from optimal if not completely wasting your time. AKA reinventing the wheel.

This would be similar to going to the gym and trying to figure out what works for you for gaining strength or muscle mass while ignoring the research/existing knowledge. Very likely you'll get nowhere. The proper approach is to do the research, start from a well supported base, and then fine tune to your own body/requirements.

nsguyon Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong

The science supports that holding stretches longer helps. But it's hardly the best way to stretch vs. something like PNF. But sure, there's no downside other than taking more time and it's pretty standard in Yoga practices as well FWIW.

nsguyon Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong

I donno if you're suggesting I write a blog about stretching? ;)

I think Andrew Huberman did a podcast about this topic and he's usually pretty thorough. This summary seems good to me: https://www.hubermanlab.com/newsletter/stretching-protocols-...

nsguyon Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong

Yeah, that has been known for a while, I guess at least since the 1960's but given I've seen something similar in Yoga I'd guess way further back. The more important bit though is that there are actually much more effective methods, i.e. while (EDIT: "simple"/non-PNF) static stretching maybe has some place in your routine, depending on your goals, you generally shouldn't rely on them for improving your flexibility.

I practice Karate and it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the small amount of static stretching that's pretty common in many Karate warmup routines does almost nothing for your flexibility.

EDIT: It seems some people include PNF under the umbrella of "static stretches" vs. e.g. dynamic or ballistic. When I'm using the term I'm referring to "simple" static stretches. I think Tom Kurz calls those "static active" or something like that. EDIT2: or they're called isometric stretches in certain literature.

nsguyon Everything I Knew About Stretching Was Wrong

There is a wealth of science on stretching.

https://www.bradapp.com/docs/rec/stretching/ is (I think) an evolution of the "old" rec.stretching FAQ which was pretty good way back.

https://www.amazon.ca/Stretching-Scientifically-Guide-Flexib...

These are relatively old resources but worth reading and then updating.

At the risk of being harsh to the author, everything he knew about stretching was wrong ;)

nsguyon Slack to destroy >90d history of free communities

Maybe I'm not getting it but you're on a free plan, which only gives you 90d of history, but Slack has been keeping all your history, which you can't access but you have an issue with them deleting >1yr old history?

I'm pretty sure they've kept this history as an incentive for people to pay so they can gain access to it. Now they've decided the costs of maintaining history >1yr are larger than the value they get from maintaining it.

If being able to have this history is important enough to you then I guess you'll want to be on a paid plan. Slack doesn't provide a free plan out of the goodness of their heart, they provide it to get people to eventually become paying customers. It's a business.

nsguyon Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

Maybe it's a bit too strong. I do think there was a real problem with having medical professional in charge when their discipline and expertise were not the perfect match to the real world problems we were facing.

Their policies might have been based on "settled science" (e.g. research on respiratory diseases from the 70's) but I think that wasn't really the appropriate way to handle things as the pandemic developed. It might have been appropriate for day 1 but officials IMO lacked the ability to adapt to the changing reality.

The actual policies varied a lot between countries which is why I qualified my statement.

At the end of the day, you can be critical without being conspiratorial. I'm open to new information that supports the idea that the way health officials handled the pandemic was optimal but given that different jurisdiction gave conflicting advice so that seems counter evidence.

There are many specific examples that come to mind. If we can't critique the response then there's not going to be any learning. Experts and science are not perfect.

Again, point taken and maybe I'm a bit too strong, but that's what I'm trying to get at.

EDIT: i.e. I've no issue with people that are being critical after examining the evidence. These people are not conspiracy theorists and that process is a healthy part of making progress in science and policy. That's not the same thing as people saying Bill Gates put 4G chips in the vaccines or some other mysterious behind the scenes forces or conspiracies.

nsguyon Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

I agree public health officials in certain countries did a poor job. For the most part they were medical professionals who aren't necessarily experts (though some of them were and some countries had expert advisers to set policy). There were many unknowns and it wasn't clear what to optimize for.

Public health is tricky and you might be faced with various dilemmas getting people to potentially do something that might not be beneficial for them as individuals for the (supposed?) sake of the community. Supposedly one reason why masks were not recommended, despite their sort of obvious effect on respiratory diseases, was to prevent a run on masks that are needed by medical teams. Is this sort of white lie ok? Would telling the truth result in a higher toll for medical professionals? This isn't simple. What I mind more is the sort of doubling down on the obviously wrong advice when the shortages weren't there any more, which seems to be an ego thing.

I think the science was decent and there was access to most of it. There were real gaps in terms of where the virus was going to go and the new vaccines. What was lacking was not really science but rather common sense and maybe what we may call engineering. Science is too slow to react to emergencies.

Clearly the pandemic was a traumatic event for humanity with long term consequences, including erosion of trust.

nsguyon Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

9/11 deniers can tell you in great detail how it's impossible for airplanes to have brought down the towers and all sorts of other nonsense. The conspiracy theorists ignore the actual reality while making stuff up. It's not that the other people have never heard of stuff made up and would suddenly change their minds if they have. It's really about what version of reality explains the totality of known facts, and then ofcourse the evaluation of what's fact and what's not using some sort of standard or rational thought process.

What is true is that the sense of trust has been eroded.

nsguyon Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

This is partly why I said science isn't truth. Science evolves. And the virus evolved.

I don't recall any scientist promising Covid would be eradicated by the vaccines or that nobody would get sick. Even diseases for which really effective vaccines have been available for some time have not been eradicated. I'm pretty sure the scientific consensus at the time was not exactly "the spread would cease". There was some talk about herd immunity and what that means.

Another problem is that experts aren't always the greatest communicators and the science is hard to communicate.

nsguyon Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews

There isn't actually such a big difference between flat earthers and other conspiracy theories. The common theme is that it's the opposite of science or the scientific process.

Conspiracy theorists filter out anything that doesn't align with their theory and go to extremes to support their world views. E.g. flat earthers believe that all airline pilots are part of the conspiracy to hide the fact that the earth is flat. The scientific process, to contrast, would drive you to try and falsify your theory via experimentation, and the flat earth theory is so easily falsifiable.

If you look at vaccines, or climates, or 9/11, or those guys that believe nobody was killed in some massacre, they all use the same sort of logic (or shall we say non-logic). Despite overwhelming evidence they stick to their version of "reality", they never seek counter-evidence, they believe everyone but them is part of a ploy to hide the real reality from everyone. They don't trust experts or scientists.

It's not impossible to have conspiracies in the real world. But I'd say those are rare. The more people are involved the harder it is to keep a secret. There are also situations where the evidence isn't necessarily pointing overwhelmingly one way or another, and there is science that later gets refined or even overturned as more data/knowledge is acquired. Science isn't necessarily absolute truth, it's just the model that best explains the observable phenomena.

nsguyon Why not parse `ls` and what to do instead

OT ... I worked with Simson briefly ages ago. Smart dude. This book happened later and I've never seen it before. Small world I guess.

nsguyon Rheinmetall and Anduril join forces to develop C-sUAS system

I thought the Russians relied more on military gas powered drones (like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan-10 ) and were not using cheaper fpvs. Certainly in the earlier days there was a lot of footage of Ukranians dropping grenades and mortars via improvised drones and I think the Russians were more spotting with Orlans and then using artillery.

Most if not all the random videos I've seen of cheaper FPV drones were Ukraninian but that could totally be my social media bubble.

nsguyon Rheinmetall and Anduril join forces to develop C-sUAS system

Ukraine has been using improvised small FPV drones since Russia invaded pretty much. The Russians in contrast seem to have been using larger drones (like those supplied by Iran).

Hezbollah has been attacking Israel from Lebanon for many months now with small drones and the air defence systems like Iron Dome haven't been able to effectively deal with that. One recent example: https://www.timesofisrael.com/hezbollah-swarms-north-with-at...

There is a major effort right now in Israel to address that gap.

nsguyon The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets

When I visited Montreal I mostly walked and used their rental bicycle. I did take a few subway rides and being from Vancouver it didn't leave any specific impression on me one way or the other - I got where I needed to get to (some suburb).

The Skytrain to YVR is indeed very nice - built for the winter Olympics. Maybe not as "connected" as some European airports but quite convenient.

The problem with transit in Vancouver is that most of it is rays emanating from downtown, i.e. you have fairly decent (though IMO worse than most large European cities) transit if you need to get downtown but it's terrible useless if you need to get across. My work used to be 20 minutes drive time, >2 hours transit time.

Skytrain doesn't exactly cover the entire region, as you get further away from the downtown core the coverage gets much spottier until when you get far enough (but still part of metro Vancouver) it's non-existent.

There are certainly times when buses don't show up on time. I take transit these days to work and back and I would say something like 30% of the time the bus isn't on time. About 5% of the time the bus I'm supposed to take just never shows up.

nsguyon Let's write a video game from scratch like it's 1987

I was just listening to this podcast the other day: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/empire-of-the-sum/

It tells the story of how TI got into the calculator market and the domination it achieved in the US classrooms (+ other interesting tidbits).

nsguyon Nobody Is Starting from Scratch

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Like anything in software, the answer is "it depends.". Also starting from "scratch" can fun. And software is almost never from scratch anyways. Compilers, libraries etc.

nsguyon Software Friction

An electric motor is very different from an internal combustion engine. I'm not sure where you were going with the analogy but an electric motor does eliminate the need to lubricate that an internal combustion engine has (no valves, crankshaft, pistons, transmission etc.). Analogous somewhat to maybe a bad software architecture needing constant care vs. a better one that just works and eliminates a lot of that extra care.

I've learned about this term from the economics side rather than the military side. It's all the hidden factors that make things more expensive. Transaction costs. I do think this is a good analogy for "drag" in software development, something along the lines of "technical debt".

nsguyon Crossing the impossible FFI boundary, and my gradual descent into madness

A long time ago I worked on a project where we needed to distribute an in process COM object, so we moved it to DCOM, instantiated multiple instances, and that worked! All in all COM was a fairly pleasant technology. Not really that different than gRPC (e.g. idl vs. proto).

nsguyon Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

In religious circles it's not uncommon to prefix each and every writing with that. It's very generic sort of implying god is everywhere. So in writing, in that context, it has no real special significance other than to hint the writer is religious.

In some contexts Inshallah and "Bae Ezarat Hashem" could I guess have similar meanings. E.g. in the Wikipedia example: "I will visit my relatives in Riyadh this summer, God willing." it can be used exactly the same way.

nsguyon Intel pauses work on $25B Israel fab

Not sure why Taiwan is that much of a wedge, or Ukraine for that matter. Ukraine used to be under effective Russian control anyways up to fairly recent times and Putin being pissed off about the change that's partly behind the war. Naturally now the stakes are higher given the price of the war on all sides. Re: Taiwan China is determined to get it one way or another and it's going to be hard for the US to keep resisting that.

Support of Israel goes back to JFK.

It used to be strategically important during the cold war when the US and the Soviet Union were fighting for influence. Egypt and Syria e.g. were aligned with the soviets. Israel as one example, was testing ground for western weapons against soviet weapons. The US got a lot of information out of Israel about those weapons and how to defeat them.

Weapon technology is still something important today. Israel and the US collaborate on anti-missile systems and share the testing results those systems are getting in the field. That's just one example. Americans follow Israel's tunnel fighting tactics as well. Israel has always had more human intelligence in the area and also shares that with the US.

The middle east is still important today. I guess there's oil. And as we can see shipping. Saudi Arabia that used to align with American interests has been looking in other places, has always been a somewhat questionably ally, and the stability of its regime is always a question. Egypt has been sort trending a little back to Russia but for the time being put in place. It's also not the stablest place given the Muslim Brotherhood had control and the army took over. Turkey is also becoming less US oriented. And that's practically Europe.

The US under Obama has tried to reduce its involvement in the region which indirectly led to the civil war in Syria, to Iraq aligning with Iran, and other movements. Bin Laden was from the region and so is/was ISIS/ISIL. It feels like the US "disconnecting" from the region would be a destabilizing move felt everywhere and other parties like China or Russia would fill in the vacuum.

nsguyon Intel pauses work on $25B Israel fab

The link works for me. Maybe something with your browser?

I'll copy paste the beginning: "Israeli officials from the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), led by Maj. Gen. Ghasan Alyan, present the extent of aid being delivered to the Gaza Strip in daily reports distributed to government offices and other bodies around the world. "

"According to findings presented by UNRWA and the UN, the amount of aid counted by the organizations since the outbreak of the war and until June 5 totals 26,684 aid trucks entering Gaza. COGAT's records show 34,199 trucks. An in-depth investigation conducted by the COGAT's Humanitarian Information Center, headed by Lt. Col. (res.) Or Elrom, reveals the reasons behind the data discrepancies and significant differences regarding the extent of aid entering Gaza."

We're not going to be able to litigate this here. Israel's position is more or less that UNRWA is collaborating with Hamas to the point of active participation in the Oct 7th attacks. I think what is worth saying though is there are at least two versions of the story about how much aid is going into Gaza. It's also worth saying (EDIT: some of) the Israeli disclosures are part of a Supreme Court hearing into this so if someone in Israel is lying they're doing that under risk of perjury. The US is also keeping a close eye on Israel's promise to get more aid into Gaza.

EDIT: btw the original comments are now dead which is probably the right way for this thread to go.

nsguyon Intel pauses work on $25B Israel fab

The aid is tracked from the Israeli perspective here: https://govextra.gov.il/cogat/humanitarian-efforts/home/

This is a more recent news story from Israel:

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1itpzvrc

"The lie behind claims Israel is 'starving Gaza': UN data on Israeli aid to strip is unreliable"

Israeli perspective for sure.

Another by the way is there are active cases against the Israel government before the Israeli Supereme court on this matter.

Yet another by the way is that it's worth mentioning Egypt refused to let aid through the Rafah border crossing once Israel took the Palestinian side of it just because it refused to deal with Israel on this matter.

nsguyon Intel pauses work on $25B Israel fab

This is inevitably going to devolve into a flame war. But I'll try to give some interesting references.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-un-disagree...

Israel claims the UNRWA is not counting aid trucks going into Gaza from Israel resulting in a significant undercount of aid provided to Palestinian civilians during the war.

Another view from the Israeli side:

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/syns3cuk0

"Hamas slashes food prices as Gaza flooded with humanitarian aid"

And another perspective on the problems on the ground (people stealing and reselling food): https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/03/15/i...

No doubt the intense war fought with the presence of a large civilian population has an impact on the population.

nsguyon Intel pauses work on $25B Israel fab

Israel is tiny. Tel Aviv which is "much" farther has also been hit by rockets from Gaza. The longest range rockets I believe are 155 miles (Ayyash 250) which can reach any point in Israel (and fly over Israel into Lebanon). From Gaza to the northernmost tip of Israel is 135 miles. Israel is long and narrow, this is the "long" part.

nsguyon Intel pauses work on $25B Israel fab

Money is certainly part of it, the Israeli government tends to subsidize these sorts of initiatives. Costs would typically be lower vs. other options like Japan, Germany or the USA even without those subsidies.

Israel has a long history of semiconductor expertise. From Intel's first R&D office outside the US in 1974 to many others. Mellanox, Tower Semiconductors etc. There's a lot of know-how and expertise and Israel would typically be considered one of the top 10 (if not higher) countries in the world in this area.

https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/neal-notes/i...

https://www.diskmfr.com/unveiling-israeli-semiconductor-powe...

nsguyon Intel pauses work on $25B Israel fab

For those interested in some history around Intel's presence in Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dov_Frohman

Founded Intel's R&D center in Israel in 1974. That was the first Intel R&D center outside the US.