pkghost

I'm curious about this, too. I love biking for the distance you can travel, the wind, the strength it builds, but I do have a distinct taste for walking, though I'd have to think about it more to have any ideas as to why.

P.S. a) It's easier to dawdle when you walk, to enjoy the particulars of the places you pass; biking is so fast by default that you have less time to savor details. b) Biking tends to be higher intensity exercise, which may actually take necessary energy away from mind-wandering; in fact, my mind wanders much less while biking than walking, so I'd guess this is the case, but maybe this isn't true for everyone. Moreover, biking forces external attention more regularly as you encounter pedestrians and traffic at a higher rate

Ah! When it comes to arguments, yes, I do agree that their supporting examples really ought to be true-to-life.

But I don't think that's quite what was going on here.

munificent was using a metaphor in service of his plea, his encouragement, his advice that you really ought to consider making regular efforts at what you care about. To me, that feels a lot less technical and a lot more human than an argument does.

The difference between metaphors and examples might be that the important part of a metaphor is how it functions in context, how it adds to the metaphrand[1], and the important part of an example is how it functions out of context.

To give an example of metaphor: many Native American tribes besides the Lemhi Shoshone have stories that claim Sacagawea as one of their own. The stories—themselves metaphors for tribal values—are, of course, wrong, but they serve an important instructional purpose, nonetheless, transmitting values and custom in a narrative that inspires. In that case, it seems less important that the children of these tribes are hearing something factually incorrect, and more important that they are inspired by and identify with the story.

To give an example of example: if you're making an argument in court, you have to reference examples of past rulings that support your position. The strength of your argument depends completely on the validity of your examples, as they occurred outside the current context.

If you think I'm full of hot air, you're right, but anyway here is a list of famous authors explaining how fiction is truer than the truth itself: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/27/famous-authors-on-t...

Thanks for coming to my TEDxHN talk.

1) Julian Jaynes, in the beginning of "The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", does a lovely segment on how we only learn via metaphor, and in which he develops the terms metaphier (commonly, the metaphor itself) and metaphrand (the thing being described by the metaphor).

It's more than harmful—prior to the latest common usage, toxic usually meant potentially lethal for sufficient dosage.

So, while it is indeed free of connotations of intent, it evokes disgust and, in fact, invites ostracism. If something is so dangerous that it can kill you, there's rarely much wisdom in attempting to talk it out of being lethal. Better to just remove it from your environment.

In any case, I agree that the word is tragically overworked. And don't we all know that overwork can be toxic.

And this is the great thing about threaded comments — everyone who wants to follow the pedantic branch of conversation can do so without derailing the others (though this ideal is frequently thwarted by bad UX).

Of course, it's nice when the pedants are self-aware, as is the case here, and acknowledge the pedantry of their tangent.

Normalize polite pedantry!

Part of it is the English-as-a-second-language vibe. "Privacy-first money tracker" feels very clumsy to me as a native speaker, and I have zero interest in giving my financial credentials to an open-source product that... I also have to pay for?

Bottom line: financial products require an incredibly high degree of trust for most people, and this feels very much like the work of a sincere developer working alone and without a lot of product design experience. All the little issues (copy, design, presentation, unknown solo developer) that would be forgivable in a product of any other kind become red flags and deal breakers when my finances are concerned.

I hope this is helpful feedback! Keep on building!

apologies for what is a typical beside-the-point-snipe, but is anyone else puzzled at the persistence of the [at] [dot] email dodge? surely spam scrapers added that one to their regexes eons ago

> Maybe it's a bug in our programming, who knows.

I think so. When things are really bad, getting even a little worse can be utterly catastrophic; making your problems loom larger when you're in a mess is probably an adaptive heuristic that forces people in bad but recoverable situations to behave very conservatively and maximize survival odds; however, in the extreme (e.g., chronic loneliness), that heuristic winds up compounding the problem by inhibiting the only kind of behavior that can rescue the situation, and yet the heuristic survives because it's adaptive in less extreme circumstances.

Beware the psychology of edge cases.

I do

You're still misunderstanding how the retirement trust works: selling shares does not imply a withdrawal, it just means that instead of owning stock, the retirement account now owns cash. Because selling is not a withdrawal, there is no withdrawal penalty, and no influence on the trustee's ability or willingness to sell.

"Pay us to train our ML systems that will ultimately put you out of a job!"

That's wrong. Holding something in an IRA doesn't prevent you from selling it, only from taking the proceeds and putting them in your personal checking. The proceeds continue to be property of the IRA/401k, and can be re-invested elsewhere, without incurring a taxable event.

You can day-trade in your self-directed 401k or IRA until you're broke or Thiel-level rich, and the IRS will never get involved.

I mostly agree with the top-level comment, here; ProPublica is losing a lot of credibility for their mildly misleading and black-and-white framing of these tax issues, and I'm someone who genuinely believes that wealth inequality is a problem that can and should be addressed by the state.

W/r/t a more descriptive name, I disagree—though until fairly recently I would have agreed.

I would guess that the desire for something more "descriptive" reflects the fact that you are not in the weeds with io_uring (et al), and as such a name that's tied to specifics of the terrain (io, urings) feels esoteric and unfamiliar.

However, to anyone who is an immediate consumer of io_uring or its compatriots, "io" obviously implies "syscall", but is better than "syscall", because it's more specific; since io_uring doens't do anything other than io-related syscalls (there are other kinds of syscalls), naming it "syscall_" would make it harder for its immediate audience to remember what it does.

Similarly, "uring" will be familiar to most of the immediate audience, and is better than "queue", because it also communicates some specific features (or performance characteristics? idk, I'm also not in the weeds) of the API that the more generic "_queue" would not.

So, while I agree that the name is mildly inscrutable to us distant onlookers, I think it's the right name, and indeed reflects a wise pattern in naming concepts in complex systems. The less ambiguity you introduce at each layer of indirection or reference, the better.

I recently did a toy project that has some files named in a similar fashion: `docker/cmd`, which is what the CMD directive in my Dockerfile points at, and `systemd/start`, which is what the ExecStart line of my systemd service file points at. They're mildly inscrutable if you're unfamiliar with either docker or systemd, as they don't really say much about what they do, but this is a naming pattern that I can port to just about any project, and at the same time stop spending energy remembering a unique name for the app's entry point, or the systemd script.

Some abstract observations:

  - naming for grokkability-a-first-glance is at odds with naming for utility-over-time; the former is necessarily more ambiguous
  - naming for utility over time seems like obviously the better default naming strategy; find a nice spot in your readme for onboarding metaphors and make sure the primary consumers of your name don't have to work harder than necessary to make sense of it
  - if you find a name inscrutable, perhaps you're just missing some context

While lobbyists write actual laws and work for the same companies + industry groups that fund the PACs, I find it difficult to agree with you.

I'll be proving the point that tmux is a batteries-not-included program with my solution to your "resurrect", but it's probably fine for (and unsurprising to) anyone who doesn't mind writing a few lines of bash:

I have a bash script by the name of .tmux inside of every workspace folder. Its contents are typically a single multiline tmux command that creates a new tmux session with all the screens and processes relevant to the project (usually: emacs, shell for git, ssh to staging + prod, prompts in various databases, and several entr-driven screens for automatically running migrations, tests, etc).

Separately, I have a shell function that runs every time I change directories that checks for the existence of said file, and then either runs the file, attaches to the existing tmux session associated with the folder, or does nothing (in the case that the shell is already in a tmux session).

In short, I setup my workspace once per project.

Again, I could not disagree more with your interpretation of what's happening here.

I'd recommend you, too, read the article I linked in the comment above. To characterize Wallace's words as an "argument", as if he were a lawyer in the court of being—as if such a thing exists—, is to employ cognitive decoupling, and to miss the point.

There's nothing wrong with C.D.—it's absolutely useful and necessary to have contexts in which words mean one thing and one thing only, but it's equally if not more necessary to have contexts in which that constraint does not hold, in which we are free to make meaning by use of metaphor and non-literal comparison. Indeed, it's the only way in which we can point to dimensions of experience that do not yet have names; it's how language evolves and expands, it's how technical domains come into existence.

I could not disagree more. Wallace's use of language here is instructive, poignant, and immensely useFUL.

I'll bet you're an engineer, data scientist, or other technical professional, not simply b/c you're here, but b/c your response to Wallace's use of ambiguity and multiple layers of meaning reveals as much about the nature of your own relationship with language, which I'd guess prefers that things should be clear, precise, and have singular meaning. (I'm certainly oversimplifying you, so apologies.)

Look into "cognitive decoupling", and you may find a dichotomy that illustrates some of your reaction to Wallace.

https://everythingstudies.com/2018/05/25/decoupling-revisite...

Does anyone know who reads content on Medium regularly? Or are there people/orgs you think of as credible publishing on the platform?

They've always been the TEDx of blogs in my mind: well-marketed, but of variable and unremarkable quality. I wonder if I'm missing something.

And then there are those statements that require a salt lick.

Relatable content!

Just get comfortable saying no without explaining yourself. The fact is that your calendar should not have public read-only permissions, which is the way you're behaving when you feel obligated to justify a declination of an invitation.

It's possible to say no for no reason at all without being rude or discouraging: "Thanks for the invite — can't tonight. Raincheck?". If you really like the person and want to develop more intimacy, you can be even more transparent, "I'd love to, but I'm over-socialized this week. Gonna chill tonight. Have fun!"

The fact is that we LOVE IT when others set and maintain healthy boundaries. It removes ambiguity from the relationship, which makes it easier to feel comfortable in. It also sets an example that the other can follow without fear of alienating you. There's also the side effect of giving people the impression that your presence is precious commodity, and should be valued—which it should be!

Being a well-connected introvert can be fun and easy ;P

This is how all life evolves. The bigger and grander the plans, in general, the harder and worse they fail. Communism and Brazilia spring to mind as examples. "Seeing Like A State" takes a look at the causes of failure patterns endemic to bureaucracy/government/planning. (Not saying we should give up on planning, but that we might learn to love and live with the idiosyncrasies introduced by iterative development in all domains.)

Good content.

I think you misunderstood? I meant: we understand one way in which sleep loss can kill sufficiently well that we don't need to describe its lethality as "oddly hard to explain". That doesn't mean there isn't more to learn about sleep, or other things about sleep that are, indeed, oddly hard to explain.

> Yet scientists have found it oddly hard to say exactly why sleep loss is lethal.

Barf. This kind of straw-manning is all too common in science journalism. IANAS but I know that normal metabolism generates free radicals (electron-greedy molecules), which then steal electrons from anything they touch, causing damage. If that damage isn't repaired regularly, then our basic metabolic pathways breakdown, and we die.

I'm sure there are mysteries to unpack beneath this, but why treat the reader to a moronic underrepresentation of the state of the art?

This might be pedantic of me, but conflating RLS and auth isn't a great look. RLS is a general purpose mechanism for constraining row operations, and auth has to do with usernames and passwords and session tokens.

I love entr! It's been part of literally every development environment I setup since I discovered it.

Re tmux: I have a function in my fish config (used to be zsh) that runs when I changed directories; if there is a `.tmux` script in the new directory, the function looks for a tmux session by the name of the directory, attaching if it exists, and, if it does not, creating a new session by running `.tmux`, which creates a handful of windows with my file watchers, build runners, container managers, etc etc. So all I have to do to boot up a project environment is move into the src directory, and poof — all the scripts that build source, run containers, and restart things on various config file changes get booted up immediately.

I (quixotically) rolled my own uptime monitor with curl and twilio's CLI, and then wrote a minimal jenkin's clone with a git hook, a little bit of bash, and systemd: github.com/cameron/push-to-systemd.

My current project also involves learning elm and postgraphile, which is shaping up to be a wonderful stack.

You can do this with your brain and a text file (for keeping track of counters and usernames). I've been managing my passwords this way for years.

Auth is about 15 lines in an SQL function exposed via the api w/postgraphile, plus whatever lines necessary to define your RLS policies and grants.

Downvoted for this:

> Equality of outcome forces people to do things that they may not have an interest in

What?! Equality of outcome, as I've encountered it, is always downstream of individual choice. That is, it's up to the hiring committee to enforce gender parity by selecting from available applicants, and not up to educators or policy-makers to force equal amounts of women to be in STEM. No one has ever, to my knowledge, made the argument the way you represented it (except, ironically, incels calling for mandated marriage).

I'd have taken you more seriously if you hadn't straw-manned the shit out of equality of outcome.

@harimau777 and theferalrobot regarding evolutionary timelines:

It appears we've been eating meat for about 2.5 million years. 12,000 years seems like the blink of an eye, relatively. Epigenetic research has definitely changed my notion of how rapidly we can adapt, but idk enough to have an opinion on how much we've changed in 12,000 years, or how much vegetarian momentum we managed to conserve over the 2.5 million years of carnivory.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/when-hum...