> The patient was shown two pictures: of a house in the winter time and of a chicken's claw. The pictures were positioned so they would exclusively be seen in only one visual field of the brain. The patient then chose the snow shovel with his left hand and his right hand chose the chicken's head. When the patient was asked why he had chosen the objects he had chosen, the answer he gave was "The chicken claw goes with the chicken head, and you need a snow shovel to clean out the chicken shed."
> The human brain's left hemisphere is primarily responsible for interpreting the meaning of the sensory input it receives from both fields; however, the patient's left hemisphere had no knowledge of the winter house. Because of this, the left hemisphere had to invent a logical reason for why the shovel was chosen.
And what I know with ADHD is that the incapacity to handle dumb meetings is just one definition of functioning. Maybe you don't need medication to clean yourself enough to prevent skin issues, prevent addiction to substances, compulsive criminal behavior, avoid hoarding behaviors, have a safe living space, have the capacity to maintain friendships/avoid loneliness, engage with social interactions in a mutually respectful manner etc. But most people I know with ADHD severely struggle with at least one of the above and I consider that functioning, not just holding down a job. My understanding is not on the level of "can you do bullshit work" but it is "can you clean your dishes before they stink" and "can you respond to being turned down by a girl without blowing up your life".
Back in the early '90s, I was a big fan of the C/C++ debugging library "electric fence" (written by Bruce Perens) - it was a malloc() implementation that used mmap() to set the pages of the returned buffer such that any writes in that region (and even read accesses!) caused a segfault to happen, and the program halts, so you can examine the stack. It was a godsend.
I just use stacked branches and work out of the top branch. When changes are solid -ish I move down a level in the stack and cherry pick isolated changes into small/focused commits. Then I put the entire stack in review with a doubly linked list references so the reviwer can walk up and down the stack to see the corpus of changes.
That way a 1000 line pr consisting of 25 commits can be landed as 5 dependant prs with a much more focused review.
It's not mentioned in this article, but Geoffrey West's book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies" give a fascinating and approachable overview of similar ideas.
One of the ideas presented is the "quantization" of the exponents observed in power laws relating various biometrics. E.g. it's known that the larger a species' average mass, the longer it lives, and that this relationship is expressed as a power law. What West found is that the exponents in many of these relationships are integer multiples of 1/4! This book, and West's research, uncover the origin of that phenomenon, relating it back to the efficient distribution of material throughout the organism (certain branching laws of cardiovascular networks, or phloem in plants, etc.)
It's not hard to see how that could apply to things like cities and companies as well.
Read code, read code, read code. You will get better.
When looking at a piece of code, keep asking questions like: what does this return, what are the side effects, what can go wrong, what happens if this goes wrong, where do we exit, can this get stuck, where do we close/save/commit this, what's the input, what if the input is wrong/missing, where are we checking if the input is OK, can this number underflow/overflow, etc
All these questions are there to complete the picture, so that instead of function calls and loops, you are looking at the graph of interconnected "things". It will become natural after some time.
It helps if you read the code with some interest, e.g. if you want to find a bug in an open source project that you have never seen the code for.
The General Journal really only works because accounting entries are immutable: corrections are always new entries. So it's not clear if "give corner cases a home" works everywhere.
But if the principle does work for your use case, it lets the rest of the system be as strict as you like!
I read the blog post. Then I thought "surely the eels in my local southern German lakes can't be from the sea". But sure enough, the European eel hatches close to the Bahamas.
I audibly wtf'ed multiple times while going down this rabbit hole. Thanks!
Demonstration of capability will get you hired, capability comes only through practice.
I built a hobby system for anonymously monitoring BitTorrent by scraping the DHT, in doing this, I learned how to build a little cluster, how to handle 30,000 writes a second (which I used Cassandra for - this was new to me at the time) then build simple analytics on it to measure demand for different media.
Then my interview was just talking about this system, how the data flowed, where it can be improved, how is redundancy handled, the system consisted of about 10 different microservices so I pulled the code up for each one and I showed them.
Interested in astronomy? Build a system to track every star/comet. Interested in weather? Do SOTA predictions, interested in geography? Process the open source global gravity maps, interested in trading? Build a data aggregator for a niche.
It doesn’t really matter that whatever you build “is the best in the world or not” - the fact that you build something, practiced scaling it with whatever limited resources you have, were disciplined to take it to completion, and didn’t get stuck down some rabbit hole endlessly re-architecting stuff that doesn’t matter, this is what they’re looking for - good judgement, discipline, experience.
Also attitude is important, like really, really important - some cynical ranter is not going to get hired over the “that’s cool I can do that!” person, even if the cynical ranter has greater engineering skills, genuine enthusiasm and genuine curiosity is infectious.
@author: I'm disappointed by all the negativity in the comments.
People are mocking you without even trying to understand what you did, why, and also the actual work that went in writing the article.
That's not everyday that someone takes the time to explain every layer of their Dockerfile.
Even if I would have went a different way, I found it interesting and it also forced me to dig deeper in uv, which I wrongly assumed I understood.
Thank you for writing it and please don't make the bad comments have any significant impact on you (maybe just put a big disclaimer in your intro next time so they'll find someone else to pick on)
I dealt with a little bit of what the article describes, the burden of too much leisure. I ended up getting a masters part time and another certification that ate up much of my 20s. But after that I still felt anxiety growing older. It was all just so meaningless. And every year I was less likely to ever have my career really take off so what the hell was the point? I'll be working until my 60s or moving to some random cheap country I have no connection to to live out the rest of my days.
This all changed once I had children. I'm surprised the article doesn't mention children at all. But I was in a kind of prolonged adolescence. You see this among many people without children. Just obsession about "addictive, sensationalist, forgettable entertainment and media", Disney World for adults, collectibles, anime, video games, all distractions.
Obviously children are not for everyone and I can only speak from personal experience. But having kids just cured that anxiety almost immediately. Not that I was not bored, but I kind of flipped things where time was on my side. Prior to kids, I felt anxiety growing older because I was just that much less likely to have some big breakthrough. And every year we get a little slower and less interested in things. Now every year my kids grow a bit and I know they got their best years ahead of them. And I get to experience all of that, win back some hard earned free time for personal interests, and overall have more interesting dinner conversations. But probably most importantly, you get to see what kind of people they're going to grow up to be.
This is just me of course. Some people might have the opposite experience, where they feel children are a prison. And plenty of people blow their lives up and abandon their families. But for me I couldn't imagine where I'd be without them.
These are the key findings from the UK research which was part of the reason we started banning phones in schools here in Denmark.
> our results indicate that there is an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation in schools that have introduced a mobile phone ban.
> Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present.
I believe OECD and Pisa results have also pointed towards banning as a net postive since their 2022 report.
I think it's fair to say that it's not a "black-and-white" thing. As the research points out, digital devices aren't the only factor in the equation. I believe OECD research has also found that using a digital device with a parent can be a benefit while using it alone will most certainly be a negative for children aged 2-6. I'm sure you can imagine why there might also be other factors that make a difference between parents who can spend time with their children and those who can't.
Aside from that there are also benefits from digital devices for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia. In most class-rooms this can be solved by computers + headphones, but for crafts people (I'm not sure what the English word for a school that teaches plumbers, carpenters etc. is), having a mobile phone in the workshop can often help a lot with insturctions, manuals and such.
So it's not clear cut, but over all, banning phones and smartwatches seem to be a great idea.
I wonder if it used to be that people largely weren’t on the same page, and didn’t know it. It’s not like people consult dictionaries to learn what slang means, or even usually ask somebody, and the definitions are related enough that responses usually don’t distinguish them. I’ve noticed it’s not uncommon online that a post’s likes are split between opposing interpretations, like agreeing with its politics vs seeing it as satire of politics one disagrees with.
The #1 resource needed for self-learning is motivation, and for many people it's a lot more difficult to come by than money. What you're paying $50 a month is not information, but a system that encourages you to keep doing it
I truly appreciate people sharing their dotfiles, I learned so much about vim and zsh just by reading other people's configuration alone (and the occasional comments there).
Also, the quality of life improvements like `alias ..='cd ..'`, or mapping `l` such that it either opens a pager or lists a dir, depending on the argument. I'd never come up with those, and they're beyond useful.
The Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths article strikes again. In this telling, Person A is a geek (creator), Person B is a sociopath, and "regular customer at the bakery" is a MOP.
Yes, ants evolved from wasps, and it's really not that surprising if you take a close look at a typical ant and a typical wasp, pretty much the only difference are wings and coloring. There also exist wingless wasps, and some of them are black and really quite indistinguishable from ants by non-entomologist. And that's after over 100 million years since the ants diverged from the wasps! Talk about a successful evolutionary design. Your closest relative from 100 million years ago was a little vaguely rat-like thing. (Edit to answer your specific question: the ancestor of ants and wasps obviously was winged and flying, since both families still have at least some winged members).
As a sibling has already pointed out ants do fly during "nuptial flight", and then discard their wings... wings would only be a hindrance for their largely underground lifestyle. Also ants have retained the stinger which also functions as an ovipositor (egg layer), and some species still use it for defense and pack a wallop of a poison, right up there with some of the of the worst wasps. Google "bullet ant" for some good stuff. Other ants just bite, and the burning you feel is from their saliva which consists mostly of an acid named after ants: fourmic acid (ant is "formica" in latin).
Edit to add one more random factoid that will surprise a lot of people: termites are not related to ants at all, and they evolved from... (drumroll)... cockroaches! It's rather harder to see the resemblance, except for their diet... both are capable of digesting (with help from endosymbiotic microbes) pure cellulose. And while termites don't really resemble ants either, parallel evolution has chosen the same strategy of retaining the wings for the fertile individuals who go on a nuptial flight and then discard their wings and try to found new colonies.
Having spent some time working on aging research before transitioning to biotech, this paper genuinely excited me in a way that few studies have recently. The longevity field is littered with compounds that work beautifully in vitro but fail spectacularly in vivo - seeing psilocybin deliver both cellular lifespan extension AND improved survival in aged mice is remarkable.
What strikes me most is the mechanistic plausibility. The SIRT1 upregulation, reduced oxidative stress, and telomere preservation they observed align perfectly with what we know about successful aging interventions. When I was working on senescence research, we’d get compounds that would extend cellular lifespan by targeting one pathway, but they’d often have off-target effects that negated benefits in whole organisms.
The dosing strategy here is particularly clever - starting with 5mg/kg for acclimation, then monthly 15mg/kg treatments. That mirrors what we’re seeing in clinical trials for depression, but applied to aging. I remember being skeptical when colleagues first suggested psychedelics might have systemic anti-aging effects beyond their neurological benefits, but the serotonin receptor distribution throughout the body makes this increasingly plausible.
The survival curve (80% vs 50%) is the kind of effect size that gets my attention. In aging research, we’re usually thrilled with 10-20% lifespan extension. But starting treatment at 19 months (equivalent to 60-65 human years) makes this especially compelling - most aging interventions need to start early in life to be effective.
My main concern is the limited exploration of potential downsides. Delayed senescence can be a double-edged sword - those cells that keep proliferating longer might accumulate DNA damage that wasn’t detected in their short-term assays. We need much longer studies to understand cancer risk.
Still, given psilocybin’s remarkable safety profile and the FDA’s breakthrough therapy designation, this opens fascinating possibilities for combining psychedelic therapy with longevity medicine. Imagine treating both the psychological burden of aging and its biological mechanisms simultaneously.
I had a bad time with Cursor. I use Claude Code inside of VS: Code. You don't necessarily need Max, but you can spend a lot of money very quickly on API tokens, so I'd recommend to anyone trying, start with the $20/month one, no need to spend a ton of money just to try something out.
There is a skill gap, like, I think of it like vim: at first it slows you down, but then as you learn it, you end up speeding up. So you may also find that it doesn't really vibe with the way you work, even if I am having a good time with it. I know people who are great engineers who still don't like this stuff, just like I know ones that do too.
"Oh no, my trees have been attacked by an unknown disease and they're all dead now! I guess we'll have to cut them down :'("
A well placed hole with a 1/2 inch drill bit, and 100% glyphosate does wonders to a tree. Make sure the hole is slanted downwards, so the glyphosate stays inside to be transported by the cambium.
I have a C library (I've also done a Python one in the past) that you load into the executable you want to debug. It activated based on an environment variable so normally I just permanently link it.
When it is loaded it will automatically talk to VSCode and tell it to start a debugger and attach to it & it waits for the debugger to attach.
End result is you just have to run your script with an environment variable set and it will automatically attach a nice GUI debugger to the process no matter how deeply buried in scripts and Makefiles it is.
I currently use this for debugging C++ libraries that are dynamically loaded into Questa (a commercial SystemVerilog simulator) that is started by a Python script running in some custom build system.
In the past I used it to debug Python code running in an interpreter launched by a C library loaded by Questa started by a Makefile started by a different Python interpreter that was launched by another Makefile. Yeah. It wasn't the only reason by a long shot but that company did not survive...
Nah, I never worked in advertising. For someone with an unusual name I share it with a number of colorful characters such as: another person who wrote papers on semiclassical mechanics, a bodybuilder from Toronto, a neurosurgeon with a hole in his head, and a motorcycle assassin from Quebec who tried turning Montreal into Belfast in the 1980s.
> The human brain's left hemisphere is primarily responsible for interpreting the meaning of the sensory input it receives from both fields; however, the patient's left hemisphere had no knowledge of the winter house. Because of this, the left hemisphere had to invent a logical reason for why the shovel was chosen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter