The hacker’s mentality is like that of the painter who spends months on a portrait in order to produce a beautiful but imperfect likeness, marked with his own personal style, which few can replicate and people pay a lot for. The mathematical approach is to take a photo because someone figured out how to perfectly reproduce images on paper over a hundred years ago and I just want a picture, dammit, but the camera’s manual is in Lojban.
IMO, the mathematical approach is essentially always better for software; nearly every problem that the industry didn’t inflict upon itself was solved by some egghead last century. But there is a kind of joy in creating pointless difficulties at enormous cost in order to experience the satisfaction of overcoming them without recourse to others, I suppose.
I am a prolific note-taker, and I use vim. Many of these features and more are supported in vim with the vim-markdown plugin, which has support for markdown syntax highlighting and syntax highlighting in code blocks, and a hierarchical table of contents using the location list, which is my favorite feature. I have scripts and functions that implement some other features. The one important thing that vim necessarily lacks that is very useful for note-taking is the ability to render images and mathematical equations, which is why I still sometimes use Word.
This is a neat piece of software, but it would seem to me that the tools available on the command line - Unix or PowerShell - cover just about all the use cases, and importantly, are customizable, lightweight, and interoperable. For instance, I have scripts that use fzf and/or ripgrep to quickly search my notes directories and open notes for editing.
This is just me - it's definitely possible that I'm missing out on a better way of doing things, but I can't easily see the value, for a developer at least. Maybe folks just aren't that familiar with what can be done with common tools that already exist? Maybe it's because the CLI can be a pain to learn? I guess that's what a GUI note-taking app is for...
BTW, I'm not trying to be negative, just sharing my possibly idiosyncratic perspective.
One of the most mind-bending papers on this topic is William Cook’s On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisitedhttps://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf
“Object interfaces are essentially higher-order types, in the same sense that passing functions as values is higher-order. Any time an object is passed as a value, or returned as a value, the object-oriented program is passing functions as values and returning functions as values. The fact that the functions are collected into records and called methods is irrelevant. As a result, the typical object-oriented program makes far more use of higher-order values than many functional programs.“
"Clinically, trauma-exposed victims often experience acute insomnia, indicating that such insomnia might provide prophylactic benefits in reducing the development of posttraumatic stress disorder via extinction of the fear-magnifying effects of memory."
I found this book, which traces the surprisingly long and fascinating history of using immunotherapy to treat cancer up to the present day, well, fascinating:
My uncle died of a glioblastoma, and shortly after I read this book, I was myself diagnosed with cancer (treated conventionally, hopefully cured). Immunotherapies like mRNA vaccines seem to be our best hope for finding reliable, permanent cures for a lot of different cancers. I am sorry that for many of our loved ones, a cure will have come too late.
I don't think it is that difficult or expensive to control knotweed using modern methods, at least on a small scale. I started investigating this in order to control a persistent patch of knotweed at my parents' home, but unfortunately, the patch was cut down before I could implement what I think is the most safe and sustainable method, at least for isolated patches: stem-injection or hack-and-squirt with the herbicide imazapyr.
Imazapyr is slower-acting but more effective than other herbicides. As you can see in this study, which compared several herbicides applied with spraying, the imazapyr formulation performed worse than all others for up to 58 days, but after 333 days, the knotweed was 95% gone, better than any others, even the formulation that mixed imazapyr with glyphosate.
Here’s another study - 96% of imazapyr-treated trees were in the highest defoliation class vs. 62% for glyphosate:
Efficacy of ‘hack and squirt’ application of imazapyr, triclopyr, and glyphosate to control the invasive tree species Chinese tallowtree | US Forest Service Research and Development
"These results indicate that imazapyr can be used to eradicate Chinese tallowtree by ‘hack and squirt’ injection without short-term (12 months) damage to dominant live oak trees."
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Controlling Knotweed in the Pacific Northwest (this mentions stem injection using glyphosate)
"Although time-consuming, not only does this approach essentially eliminate drift, but Clark County (WA) Weed Management reports obtaining 100% control in one treatment by injecting 5 ml of 100% Aquamaster or Round Up Pro into each stem of a given clump. More than 20 patches were so treated"
"If 38 of 50 canes are injected, expect the twelve that were NOT injected to survive and reproduce. EACH CANE HAS ITS OWN SEPARATE RHIZOME SYSTEM. Even though the injection process is initially time consuming, it is more cost-effective than several trips to the same site for foliar applications made over years with minimum results."
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None of these studies mention the specific technique of using stem injection with imazapyr, which I think is likely to be the most effective method. Although I haven't yet tried imazapyr on knotweed myself, I used an extremely minimal amount to kill several different species of obnoxious shrubs.
I used it to kill:
- Japanese barberry
- Sumac
- Elm saplings
- Fox grape
All these had been growing from the base of the external walls of my parents' house and had been uncontrolled for decades despite (probably-not-frequent-enough) cutting.
The amount I used was maybe a fluid oz. in total for all of these, and that was probably overkill. I just cut a flap into the bark in such a way as to maximally expose the cambium, then applied a few drops and tied the flap closed with some string. I did this to some sumac suckers right in the middle of a bunch of my mother’s day lilies and my stepfather’s blueberries and they weren’t affected at all.
In the case of the sumac and others, it took a couple weeks before the plant was visibly wilting, but after a while, even untreated suckers several yards away died. The fox grape didn’t show signs of wilting at first, but was dead by the following spring (I treated in early July, which is actually less than optimal. Late summer is recommended because of the predominant direction of sap flow at that time - from the leaves to the roots)
I have a meat syringe which I plan to use to inject knotweed when the opportunity arises.
I think it's broadly considered acceptable because insulting your boss is an aggresive behavior directed at a colleague. Simply stating an opinion is not.
I think "these new patients" refers to patients who came to the clinic after a certain point in time, not with a certain quality. Google tells me that about 3/4 of children with (real) Tourette's are boys - so a sudden change to 1/2 indicates that this is a problem primarily affecting girls. In any case, the writing should have been clearer.
Instead of having a convection heater for my whole room, I taped a mylar blanket around my desk, under which I have a radiant heater which I can easily adjust.
A quote from the Discussion section:
"Most of the studies on line length report faster
reading with longer lines, and point to the number of
characters as the variable responsible for the differences, rather than physical line length (visual angle)."
The OP thinks that humans read thinner columns faster. Generally, this seems not to be the case, so maybe we should treat his main conclusion with some skepticism. In any case, it's probably best to refer to the scientific literature.
I was diagnosed with cancer recently while looking for software work in a new field and studying obsessively. I'll probably live, but the prospect that my life could be snuffed out without warning at any time made me ask myself whether I really want to spend my last days writing code at all. Now I'm now spending loads of time outdoors and fantasizing about cabins in the woods and changing careers.
I'd say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Maybe there is an argument for banning the opposition, but "They say evil stuff" doesn't seem like a good one to me. In adherence with Godwin's law, I'll point out that very few people actually read Mein Kampf. If more people had, it might not have been such a surprise when Hitler started doing exactly what he said he was going to do. If you want to succeed in suppressing the opposition, anything short of gulags and secret police, (which do work, but obviously have no place in a democracy), is just going to enrage them. History has shown that the best way to change minds is to expose the baddies, not to force them underground to conspire outside the public eye. I could be wrong, but to me it just seems like bad strategy.
Is it still the ethically right thing to do even if it results in more violence? In my opinion, as a practical matter, near absolute freedom speech is good policy because speech is a buffer between wanting to get your way and doing violence to get your way. An increasingly large swath of American society believes that not only is our democracy corrupt, but they can't say anything about it. What's left? It's not at all obvious to me that taking away someone's ability to effect change through their speech will reduce the likelihood of people coming to harm through violent conflict.
Now, free speech _can_ also be used to spread lies and incite violence, and maybe banning Trump before he had a chance to spread unsubstantiated claims about election fraud would have prevented this recent chaos, but it seems to me that doing it afterwards will increase the chances of violent conflict, at least in the near term. Moreover, the possibility that he might have eventually conceded or placated his supporters is now nil. So, as a consequentialist, I'm dubious of the notion that banning him can be justified on ethical grounds.
I've noticed this as well. Just the thought of being alone in a quiet forest with the sounds of the leaves rustling and the birds chirping, and the smell of the conifers puts me in a relaxed state of mind. I've noticed also that my mind almost reflexively anthropomorphizes the organisms around me, and I have a nebulous hypothesis as to why this is.
Consider this: those who become blind later in life often experience visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome). It seems like there is something like a vision module in the brain which, when under-stimulated, starts producing its own content.
Maybe we have a social module as well, which, when under-stimulated by social interaction, starts hallucinating that non-human objects and organisms have human sentiments, and we feel a sense of affiliation as we might toward a human. The happy difference is that there is never a risk of negative social feedback from trees, rocks, or chipmunks, in the same way that there is a low risk of negative social feedback from very young children or kindly old ladies, toward whom I at least also tend to feel a reflexive sense of affiliation.
Thus, the feeling of togetherness we experience in nature is a result of our hallucinating social agents that never give us negative social feedback.
Moreover, exercise and the outdoors make you feel energetic and refreshed for other reasons, and when you feel good, the threshold stimulus for affiliative feeling is certainly lower.
IMO, the mathematical approach is essentially always better for software; nearly every problem that the industry didn’t inflict upon itself was solved by some egghead last century. But there is a kind of joy in creating pointless difficulties at enormous cost in order to experience the satisfaction of overcoming them without recourse to others, I suppose.