vajrapani666

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I could also see myself in Mexico City since I already speak Spanish pretty fluently, and have far more friends who expatriated there, but I really wanted to learn Russian and Berlin has much better resources for foreign language instruction.

vajrapani666

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I do love living in New Orleans, either this or Brooklyn are the only real cities for me here. I need to be able to walk to a grocery store. I'm privileged to have lived here for 6 years, and the only reason I recently got an old truck, was to evacuate in case of a hurricane, and we didn't even evacuate during ida. The sidewalks are torn to shit, the streets are full of holes. I'm quite certain that the streets are never fixed because they wouldn't have enough cops to keep people from driving drunk. The city hall sign has been broken for 4 years, the lights don't work in some of the letters and it just reads "ity all" at night. It's illegal to be fully nude in SF these days, but NOLA still has a fully naked bike ride. This place can feel like burning man or joshua tree, but with toilets and electricity. Except for during hurricanes, then its exactly like burning man. I went to the bar next door during ida to find a couple fucking at the bar and open bottles of lube softly lit up with a dark orange glow from the 3 candles that dimly lit my favorite bartenders face as he asked about whether my house got badly damaged or not. The architecture is very old and very unique, actually its very european and feels quite distinct from the architecture in boston/nyc. I don't know a single person in tech here, everyone has some sort of creative endeavor and makes money through a hodge podge of sources. I live next to a 24 hour gay bar, and across the street from a supermarket, next to a vet, and caddy corner from a pharmacy. I never have a reason to leave my block, and this neighborhood boasts the most dense concentration of trans/queer people I've ever encountered.

The city boasts a strong spiritual history, which I sense, causes people to come here to either flourish, or get spit out. There's not much in the way of hiking/mountains around here, and the most beautiful natural environments are in the swamp amongst the gators and pelicans dancing through the soft and grassy patches of muddy land dotting the waters edge. There are no other cities I really like visiting within an hour. It's a bright blue dot in a fire-red state. Car-jackings are up 550% over last year, and the particular circumstances by which someone killed someone with a machete at the gas-station down the street from my house, I'm sorry to say, were unsurprising.

Having said that, I can't live the rest of my life not having *lived* outside of the US. I'll be moving to Berlin at some point, because that's the closest city that felt like it feels here. The food is cheaper, you can find Indian food, and there are more languages spoken. The government there doesn't feel like some morally corrupted festering cesspool of civil indifference and political myopia. Despite everything I love about this place, and that I'm quite certain I'll retire here, I'm eager to GTFO while I still feel young, to experience what its like to feel young in a place more free than the farce I've been raised to believe. I have friends in Berlin, and though German is pretty hard to speak well, I'm up for the challenge.

vajrapani666

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Seems the intent is to clearly separate commentary from code. I could see that being intentional, imagine cursive annotations on a printed document.

vajrapani666

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I tried a few prompts that were misses, and there was one that it nailed on the head. Here's the prompt

> The pace of technological and social evolution, catalyzed by massively accelerating interconnection is causing our society to polarize faster than historically possible. This polarization is causing us to act more like animals, operating from places of defense and the desire to separate and exclude, rather than integrate and cooperate. It’s only by democratizing education and practicing radical aggregate self-awareness that we can continue to advance our civilization without turning against ourselves.

Here is the response. It blew me away. ----------

We are witnessing the end of “us versus them;” today a new reality, and one that challenges the traditional ways of thinking and living in an ever more global scale. It’s about time we began to acknowledge that we could not do this alone.

As for who or what is to blame for all this, we can only speculate at this point. There are some speculations:

What caused us to lose our capacity to focus and concentrate on improving our own lives and quality of life?

How will people react when their expectations for a better tomorrow seem to go up in smoke?

Is there a need and a possibility of co-optation/misundergradation (like the current wave of people in Silicon Valley) or brainwashing/social engineering (like the latest movements that happen throughout history)?

What’s the underlying reason for all this turbulence? What is the core of the problem before all this and where are its roots?

The answer to all these questions is that humanity is rapidly losing control of our own mental and emotional state and becoming vulnerable to psychological control by people and elements that appear to have a much more powerful, perhaps more complex and mysterious, set of influences that exist beyond normal societal control. We must break away from the confines of our own culture and consciousness for those influences to take root and influence us more and we should recognize that such influences often come from outside of our minds and it is within our power — both to fight back or just leave.

--------

Bravo. Not perfect for every domain, but a good tool nonetheless.

vajrapani666

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

I really work as a software engineer / designer so I can continue making music. Music is my life.

https://soundcloud.com/tastycode/shelter https://soundcloud.com/tastycode/shimmer https://soundcloud.com/tastycode/cycles https://soundcloud.com/tastycode/masks https://soundcloud.com/tastycode/hexed https://soundcloud.com/tastycode/outside

My first album dropped right as quarantine started last year, here it is on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2EV92anG93I9fhBObbFFJa?si=t_...

vajrapani666

vor 6 Jahrendiscuss

Git’s style of decentralization, still requires individual git servers no? Is there something like git, but based on magnet/torrent architecture?

vajrapani666

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

This advice will sound like a joke, but getting drunk in your target language goes a long way. I studied Spanish for years but didn't feel like I had it "in flow", and couldn't quite nail down feeling comfortable communicating. A blurry month of partying in Spain fixed that. Within that month, I noticed the largest improvements after nights I had gotten pretty wasted talking to people in Spanish at local bars. My theory is that when you drink, you stop speaking from your pre-frontal cortex. You are forced to make connections to the language from deeper parts of the brain. Same thing goes for experiencing strong emotions and situations in a target language. Of course, you have to have enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to communicate if you try, this practice just seems to make it "click" more.

vajrapani666

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

It wasn't euphoria. It was the realization that the finest intricate details embedded in the way I breathe, reflect my experiences, and my emotional connection to those details is strongly influenced by what I experienced when I was too young to remember. If anything, the way we breathed -- wouldn't cause hypoxia. Despite years of mindfulness meditation, in which I focused on my breath, that experience changed how I fundamentally relate to my breath.

vajrapani666

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Holotropic breathing. Someone in my town offers workshops on Conscious Connected Breathing. I would have never thought that just breathing for an hour would fundamentally change my life, yet here I am. My relationship with deep seated trauma has been completely transformed. Technically the breathing was 2 hours, but it felt like 45 minutes. It feels like I now have access to a powerful drug, and an accessible way of asserting agency over my feelings and body.

This is one of those body upgrades that falls in the same category as Lasik. Tuning your core senses and ways of obtaining your needs tends to ripple throughout everything you experience and do. This breathing upgrade changed everything.

vajrapani666

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Some say that New Orleans is so far behind, that it's ahead. Definitely true. The information systems in SF all feel like they were built in 2010. I've had a digital ID (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/la-wallet/id1386930269) for over a year now and it's so much more convenient when I lose my actual ID -- about 4x/year. The LA wallet has a verification system that anyone can use to verify anyone else's ID. I was in SF for blockchain week last week and I misplaced by physical ID on the way to the airport. I wanted to see a friend of mine perform at a bar in Berkeley and they wanted a physical ID. I ended up eating tasty Nepalese food next door and met up with my friends after the show because there's no digital ID in California. Once I got back to New Orleans, no-one ever batted an eye when I showed them my digital ID. I'm hoping the next step is issuing a public/private key along with the ID. It would come in handy for so many blockchainy/dapp possibilities.

I might be less ecstatic if I had a car and got pulled over and asked to show my ID. I wouldn't be comfortable handing my unlocked phone over to the state. I trust the internal walls of the mobile walled gardens more than I trust a cop.

vajrapani666

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

> IIRC only ~10% of prisoners are held in privately run prisons. It's kind of a red herring.

I disagree. Even if only 10% of prisoners are held in privately run prisons, the corporate leadership of those prisons has a disproportionate effect on policy-making for all people. CCA and GeoGroup are the largest recipients of federal contract award grants (for ICE), and they collectively make over 1bn / year from these contracts. They also sponsor legislation that _increases recidivism_ and makes it easier to put undocumented immigrants in their own jails. Just because a small % of the population is housed in private prisons, doesn't mean that private prison's have no impact on our society's relationship between profit and punishment.

vajrapani666

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

The OP glossed over managing styles and i18n between embedded JS apps and the host app. I'm not sure if there is a way to create strictly isolated CSS in pure server rendered applications without managing naming your own selectors manually. If you build tiny JS apps into your server rendered apps, you'll have to keep the styling for the JS app either in the main app, or bundle it into the embededded JS. If you bundle it into the embedded JS, you'll end up with two styling pipelines, which could make it more difficult to share variables and constants between the two, if you put the CSS rules for the embedded app in the host app, then you have to change the host app CSS for changes in the child app, which means the two might need to be in the same repo. This gets especially more difficult with advances in UI and interaction design which lean more heavily on state based animation. In those cases, we HAVE to have CSS related to animatable elements that are based on application state within the embedded JS application, then you'll really have an issue with having two pipelines. There are similar issues for i18n, asset bundling, accessibility auditing, and testing.

Given all the complexity of managing multiple pipelines for simple and complex pages, it seems to make sense to avoid that complexity by adopting a single pipeline that ensures browser compatibility, testing, i18n, accessibility and performance optimizations are consistently applied and centrally maintained.

Which might imply , if _any_ of your app requires complex presentation/interaction, it might be better to just build the entire app using the same framework.

Unfortunately, even if your app doesn't currently have complex functionality or interactions, doesn't mean you can guarantee it won't ever. Investors are known for pushing products to innovate, pivot, and adapt. Which implies that avoiding SPAs is a privilege for app developers and teams who have absolute control over their product and won't ever be forced to build more complex products.

The Op also doesn't address how having frontend dedicated ecosystems might affect hiring, or influence performance. I remember the days of having 20 instance variables set within a rails action and each of them being deeply coupled into the Erb template. Having a clear client server separation at least forces one to use an API, which can make caching easier by separating the caching of presentational and data elements. Also, the semantics of each server side templating language are quite different. E.g , slim vs liquid vs haml vs ejs. Using server side templates requires frontend developers to be much more versed in both templating languages and understanding the tiny bits of embedded server side code. I don't imagine too many front end folks jumping to learn scala, clojure or Haskell. However, if the client and server are separate than that means a scala shop can focus on the API and hire a frontend dev with no experience in the server side stack.

vajrapani666

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

“goof around”?

vajrapani666

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

You can use custom queries in metabase and parameterize them, for any parameter you can expose the parameter with a text field available when you embed the "question" anywhere.

https://hevodata.com/blog/postgresql-full-text-search-setup/

vajrapani666

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

I think Docker is very useful for beginning developers and for spinning up and trying out services quickly. The barrier for getting started with web development used to be so much higher, even for people on Mac OSX. To setup a rails development environment with a modern JS frontend, you'd have to setup xcode, mysql, redis, a node build pipeline, homebrew, and futz with system ruby vs rails-specific ruby. You'd have to setup all the above, without knowing what each part did, and barely being comfortable with bash vs terminal. Don't even get me started on how difficult it was for someone with a windows machine to get started with modern development.

Now novices can just install docker and type "docker-compose up". Even vagrant didn't make things that easy.

A few years ago, I wanted to try out Pentaho's BI platform. I spent hours configuring the JDK, Tomcat, installing all of Pentaho's dependencies, and struggling with configuration errors and outdated documentation.

Today, If I wanted to give Pentaho a spin, I could also just pull the docker image.

I see your point about most other use-cases for docker, but be careful when you make a blanket statement like "Docker considered harmful". It could be discouraging to those that docker has helped getting started with development and who do find it convenient for certain tasks.

vajrapani666

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Here's the guide I used to setup a cloud desktop on GCP http://timbot-inc.blogspot.com/2015/11/cloud-workstation-how...

vajrapani666

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

My battery started failing on my 2016 Macbook Pro. I took it in and Apple said it would take 5 days to fix. I found a loaner macbook, but didn't want to setup a whole development environment to use for just a week. So I used Google Cloud Platform with an Ubuntu 16.04 desktop with remote access over chrome remote desktop. It was ungodly fast, and just for fun I cranked it up to 8 cores. It's nice to know that if anything ever happens to my physical laptop, I can just power up my cloud instance and keep working without skipping a beat.

Linux was fantastic, except for two things.

1. Sketch. All the competitors aren't even close to being up-to-par, and it's become an industry standard. 2. Docker and permissions. I can't believe it was so much harder to deal with docker in Linux than MacOSX. I constantly struggled with docker creating files as root. Even when I explicitly defined the $UID or $USER for docker-compose, I would still see the docker image that ran a Rails instance create files owned by root in `log` and `tmp`.

I highly recommend trying out Ubuntu in the cloud to give Linux a trial run, you might be surprised by what you love and hate.

vajrapani666

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

One tip, is to keep re-using them as long as you can. We have non-biodegradable trashcan liners for our kitchen trash-can. It helps that we recycle, compost, and are vegan (so nothing particularly icky is in the trash). We can usually go 2-3 months on a single kitchen trash bag, they usually give out because the corners wear out and start to tear.

vajrapani666

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I started writing myself weekly letters. I would, in narrative form: tell myself what I really enjoyed; what was stressful; and what didn't work out. I came up with a list of affirmations and things to keep in mind for the coming week. I would treat the suggestions I came up with as "sudo me" and put in extra effort to abide by them.

Over the course of several months, this weekly process got me into a trajectory of positive self-improvement. I went vegan, started exercising regularly, began drinking tons of water every morning, started daily meditation, and put in place several behavioral controls around going out late at night.

The process was so successful, that I began doing something similar at the beginning of every month. I would lay out high level goals for the month, and list the major events I needed to prepare for. I would go over my overall level of happiness the previous month and identify trends from the weekly letters and come up with powerful ultimatums for the coming month.

The process worked so well, that when 2018 started, I spent 2 weeks going over the month-letters of the previous months and worked on distilling high-level intentions and affirmations for the coming year.

The biggest changes that have come out of this process are my focus on meditation and how I care for my body and mind. Through this process, I've identified my weaknesses in communication and self-care and flooded myself with resources and lectures to help me develop those skills.

Through this process, I've taken courses on REBT, NLP, NVC, and Public Speaking. I've focused on my written and verbal communication skills. It's now infinitely easier to speak to my co-workers, friends, partner and family. I'm not rushing around before events. I almost never feel stressed out, because I've went through taking-care of myself in advance.

TL;DR; Treating myself like a team has opened up a new way to pour energy into my personal growth.

Here's a list of the resources that have helped me grow in the last few months.

- _World Peace Diet_ by Will Tuttle

- _The Artist's Way_ by Julia Cameron

- Non Violent Communication (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LuPCAh9FCc)

- All of Shani Raja's courses on writing

  - Punctuation mastery

  - Secret sauce of great writing

  - Writing like a ninja

- Julian Treasure's courses on listening and speaking

- REBT by Libby Sery on Udemy

- Alinksky's _Rules for Radicals_

- Insight Timer

  - Meditations by Sarah Blondin

Edits: Punctuation, Resources

vajrapani666

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Having been a rails engineer for 12+ years, I can say I haven't used rails for front end work in about 5 years. In 2011 I started migrating front ends from erb to ERB heavily enhanced with angular, my frontends relied more and more on an API and slowly, the "@" instance variable assigment started to disappear from my controllers.

I'd say many shops have had a similar experience, and full stack development no longer depends on rails for frontend. Which means that the only rails jobs out there, are likely backend/API/distributed systems.

There was a time when I thought rails was out the door and node.js was in, and I converted several large rails codebases over to node.js/express. Looking back, I don't think the node.js community was strong enough, and even today I still miss Ruby's debugging ecosystem.

I once sat down to write a medium post a few years back on why rails is still the best choice for backends. I would cite the number of packages for sidekiq, the diversity of email handling libraries, and the multitude of packages to handle just about everything. I compared it to rust, and go. The only problem was, any time I tried to say "rails has this, X doesn't" Go had X.

Rails will stick around, but I'd recommend smart engineers diversify. Study modern node.js codebases (things have gotten much more manageable with await/async). Study Go. Also, check out actioncable, and start a new rails project with "rails new --webpack=react" and build something. Seems the rails team has embraced the modern world, which may make it one of the best cohesive ecosystems right now.

vajrapani666

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