It's seriously awesome that Narcan is now available widely. I'd love to see the price come down somewhat, though. I just checked the site for my local Walgreen's and a 2 pack is $35.
$35 on some level seems like a great deal for something that can save a life (or even 2!) - I just worry that for the crowd who really needs it the most, $35 might be tough to part with. (I realize that a lot of harm reduction programs hand it out for free, though).
Still, it's extremely encouraging to see that overdose rates are falling this much. I spent a little time a few months ago watching some of Andrew Callaghan's videos covering homelessness and open air drug markets and it's grim out there.
This strongly depends on your definition of proper. I'm currently working in great TS codebase, which was largely architected by one guy, who knows what he's doing and takes grug seriously. It's a really fun and productive project.
The previous project I was on involved a "monorepo" using Nx (which sucks, imo), and a crazily frustrating zeal for abstracting every detail so that any given file contains 4 lines and finding out what anything fucking does involves opening 19 files and testing how many things my aging ex-stoner brain can hold in short term memory before the plates stop spinning and I catch myself wishing I dug ditches for a living, because at least you know when the ditch is done and there's no failed-upward idiot trying to deduplicate every detail of the digging.
I spent several years in my early 20s as a daily smoker, but at some point in the last few years, I crossed some sort of line, and I seemingly can't smoke at all anymore without winding up anxious as hell. Ultimately this led to me just totally giving the stuff up, which isn't the worst outcome. I still miss certain aspects of it, but after consistently having bad experiences for a while, it seems that I'm just better off without it.
I don't really drink either, so my vices now are limited to vaping and a very occasional small dose of mushrooms.
100% agree. I think that the industry as a whole really optimized for the wrong thing for a very long time. It seems like in legal states, there's been a move towards more balanced strains (or at least, those have a niche in the market), but it seems like everyone was going for 30% THC by weight, and as little CBD as possible.
The "mids" I used to smoke back in my teenage years gave a better (read: more fun and relaxing) high than most of the "dank" weed I've smoked as an adult.
This is not my experience. I find that weed makes my mind wander randomly down all sorts of tracks. Sometimes this can be fun, interesting, and insightful, but it's certainly not a state that helps my already very poor focus.
I have one of Fender's Mustang amps, and one feature I really love is that it has a built in audio interface. It sits on my desk and is constantly plugged in to my machine, so if I'm ever noodling and want to start recording in GarageBand I can have a track going in like 30 seconds.
It's really nice to have an interface that doesn't require me to try to route audio through my computer. It just works exactly like a (slightly complicated) regular amp all the time, and behaves exactly the same while recording as it does when it's not.
It's got all kinds of built in amp sims and effects, but I play it on the same setting about 95% of the time (I've never been much for tone chasing). But it also has a built in looper, which I use all the time.
I really love the thing, great piece of hardware. It's got some warts but nothing I can't work around.
We have real, effective tools for dealing with substance abuse that don't involve a giant prison-industrial complex.
One of the major problems with prohibition is that it closes off a lot of the avenues we could otherwise use to reduce harm, while creating a black market and, in the case of the utterly senseless "War on Drugs," pushing tons of people into the criminal justice system and creating a massive industry for incarceration of low-level users.
After all this voluntarily created human misery, we've still got a crisis of opioid and other drug abuse in our society, and it's not clear that prohibition does much at all to reduce real rates of usage on the ground. A quick Google suggests that over 100,000 people died of overdoses in 2021.
What a goddamn victory for prohibition.
The decline of tobacco use is proof that there is a better way. It's just harder, takes longer, and, yes, despite the sneers of those who think they know better, has to respect individual liberty, personal responsibility, and freedom of choice.
This is one of the things that bothers me when it comes to prohibition - whether it's marijuana, vaping, or even more obviously harmful drugs like opioids.
Cigarettes are some of the best evidence we have that we don't need prohibition to change behavior. We actually are capable of using regulation, taxation, and education to help encourage people to make smart choices on a society-wide scale. It's rare, it takes decades, and boy oh boy do a lot of incentives have to align. But it can be done!
I mean, they do have food there. A $10 gift card would buy a decent breakfast sandwich and a basic coffee, I'm sure a homeless person would appreciate that. Not to mention an excuse to spend a while indoors.
I agree that the image is funny, but it's not the _worst _ way to give someone in need $10.
If there's any good that's coming from these videos and traps, I would hope that it's teaching the children involved a valuable lesson about the results of being a shitheel thief.
However, I am somewhat skeptical that this is the case. The odds of encountering a stunningly well engineered annoyance device when stealing are still pretty low, and while thieves aren't known for their competence with statistics, I think that logic is fairly low-hanging fruit.
With sadness, I have to imagine that for every case of a kid or thief being converted to the path of goodness by these boxes, there are just as many who will angrily continue what they're doing as a "fuck you" to those who would impose punishment on them - which seems to be a large part of the ethos that drives these kinds of thefts in the first place.
I agree that it's ultimately harmless, and well-deserved, for the thief in question. I find it sad that there are often children involved, but if any good comes of that, it may be that some kids will learn a lifelong lesson about the results of the behavior their parents are encouraging.
Still, as I said - it's the level of effort put into the punishment machines, and the extraction of entertainment value from the punishments, that gives me the odd feeling that something about these videos might cross a moral line.
To each their own, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from watching and enjoying the videos. For me personally, they give me more heartache than joy, so I stick to his other videos - despite the rampant exploitation of innocent squirrels ;)
The package thief videos are great from the engineering perspective, but always make me feel kind of bad. One of the things I find most distressing in that series is the kids who show up in the videos, participating in theft at the behest of their parents. Some of the conversations between those kids and their parents are extremely sad.
And look - steal a package off a porch, you deserve the ultimately harmless annoyance for sure. But even with that in mind, there's something kind of cruel about the level of effort that's put into the package traps. Once you've found a target that no one will defend, it's just fine to douse them in fart spray and glitter. People cheer because, well, fuck thieves, right?
I get it - I really do. But ultimately, it's fun at the expense of other humans and those videos have always left me feeling a bit gross.
Definitely true for me with my most recently acquired hobby of fishing, although I lean extremely heavily towards doing the thing. I had some experience from childhood but I first started "bass fishing" as a hobby last summer with a $20 Walmart rod combo. I watched plenty of YouTube and engaged in the time honored pasttime of filling a box with a bunch of plastic critters of questionable usefulness. After doing that for a a good chunk of the summer, I spent about $100 on a nicer rod and reel, and figured out the 3 or 4 lures I like to throw, and now I just do that about 95% of the time I fish.
Same way with my guitar - bought pedals, gear, etc for years in high school. Now I have one main guitar and play my amp on the same setting almost every time I play.
Also same deal with all my programming setup shit, I did vim/tmux, played with emacs, and now I almost always just use VSCode.
I guess my archetype is that I like to tinker and fuck around, but once I settle in to something that works for me, I largely lose interest in that, and just do whatever makes for the lowest friction to do the actual thing.
I recently switched to a refillable pod "mod," and plan to start tapering down by buying lower percentage vape liquid. Iirc there's two concentrations available in Juul pods, but let's be honest, they don't want you to quit. (Not that any other vape company does either, but the vape store model does allow a little more consumer control).
Vaping, I assume. I admit with some shame that after over a decade off cigarettes, I'm currently re-addicted to nicotine via vaping. Over the past 10 years or so, I would buy a pack of smokes every once in a while (like, maybe once a year), and enjoy smoking at a party or concert or whatever. I never had trouble stopping after a few and would usually throw the rest of the pack away, it was honestly just too inconvenient to keep up an addiction (not to mention that unless I was _really_ drinking, I would be all too keenly aware that, well, cigarettes are nasty).
Last time I was on vacation, and might have bought a pack of cigarettes, I decided "hey, why not try a Juul instead," and, the rest is history.
While I'm overall in favor of vapes and think that they're a valuable cessation device, the problem, for me, is that it's all to easy to vape while I work in my home office - no smell, no fire, etc. I think that makes it a lot easier to continually dose nicotine and really settle into addiction. Also, while I'm sure they're safer than cigarettes, I still have doubts that they're safe, and I can't help but think of the attitudes that used to prevail with regards to tobacco back in the 40s and 50s when I hear folks talking about how totally OK for your body vaping is.
I think you're being somewhat overly negative, but I definitely have some sympathy towards what you're saying.
I like mushrooms. I enjoy them recreationally a few times a year. I think there are benefits to be derived from their use. I think I've derived some of those benefits. But I also think, sometimes, it's just fucking fun to be high at a concert, and I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that in a responsible and safe manner.
I want to see us move in a less prohibition direction, and I think that legalizing psychedelics for therapy could be a boon for many people. But I would also like to live in a world where I can be trusted to consume an occasional dose of a non-addictive, naturally occurring substance without the whole thing being medicalized, regulated, and only allowed to happen with the guidance of a psychiatrist.
I sort of like the approach Ann Arbor took, where they're not illegal for personal possession and cultivation, but also not legal for sale. Seems like a decent balance for personal responsibility to me.
I truly understand the fear and caution around these substances. They require serious forethought and care to be used safely. But at the end of the day, I know I'm more than capable of that forethought and care and resent being told that I'm not allowed to grow a mushroom because psychedelics are scary.
I had something akin to a religious experience when I saw this for the first time, and reading the explanation blew my mind. One of the coolest things I've ever seen on the internet.
This is amazingly cool, I've been fascinated by mantis shrimps for a long time. I've been watching these on a loop for a while, the "latch" mechanism is really interesting to me, I've never seen something like that in biology before (not that I've got any real experience with biology, but still, how ingenious!)
The Name of the Wind I really enjoyed, but be warned - it's part of a trilogy, and the second book was released 12 years ago. News on the supposedly forthcoming third has been sparse, and it seems quite possible that the trilogy won't be finished.
Unsong is a very idiosyncratic web serial novel by Scott Alexander (the Slate Star Codex/ Astral Codex Ten guy). It's a weird mixture of religion, sci fi, fantasy, comedy, and probably some other genres too. It's among my favorite things I've read, but due to the weirdness might not be for everyone. Still I think most of the HN crowd would appreciate it, it's truly special in my opinion
$35 on some level seems like a great deal for something that can save a life (or even 2!) - I just worry that for the crowd who really needs it the most, $35 might be tough to part with. (I realize that a lot of harm reduction programs hand it out for free, though).
Still, it's extremely encouraging to see that overdose rates are falling this much. I spent a little time a few months ago watching some of Andrew Callaghan's videos covering homelessness and open air drug markets and it's grim out there.