Tobani's comments

I used https://learn.mangolanguages.com/ to get to something like ~b1/b2 in French after a year. I did a lesson or two every day, and did all of the review, pretty much much every day.

I spent 8 years in jr high - college studying German without having any real competency in German, it did however teach me something about learning another language.

Mango isn't gamified. Its basically a curated set of flashcards, and the lessons are essentially flashcards themed together. There are some extra explainers throw in that are helpful. I really enjoyed it.

On top of Mango as the primary lessons, I've been listening to podcasts, watching series in french, reading books, etc.

I didn't pay anything for mango, it was entirely funded by my local library so that was great.

I did full CS / Software Engineering curriculum. There was a lot that I taught myself because I was curious / passionate. I learned a lot about things not covered in classes. But the classes also taught the boring details of things like data structures that you can generally ignore until you hit some level of scale/success.

I've seen self-taught software engineers build great looking UIs and during the code review point out things like "data structure X" would work better. I get a response about "Premature Optimization," when in fact the right data structure would be less code and I have to show them.

I've also met self-taught engineers who read detailed research papers on topics on and sometimes made things perhaps more complicated than they ever needed to be.

passion & formal education definitely play interesting roles in what people produce.

They're different beasts.

JPEGS are great for photographs, where lossy compression is acceptable.

PNGs can have transparency and lossless compression, so they're great for things like rasterized vector graphics, UI-element parts of a web page, etc.

Yes, but then you've removed parent comments' assertion that everything should be done by the RDBMS. And you've changed the contract of the action.

I think this makes sense for applications applications that are just managing data maybe? But if your application needs to do things when you change that data (like call to a third party system)... Syncing is maybe not the solution. What happens when the total dataset is large, do you need to download 6gb of data every time you log in? Now you've blown up the quota on local storage. How do you make sure the appropriate data is downloaded or enough data? How do you prioritize the data you need NOW instead of waiting for that last byte of the 6gb to download?

It is like a useful tool, but not the only future.

Sure in an ideal world we don't need to worry about resources and everything is easy. There are very good reason why they are separated now. There have been systems like 4th dimension and K that combine them for decades. They're great for systems of a certain size. They do struggle once their workload is heavy enough, and seem to struggle to scale out. Being able to update my application without updating the storage engine reduces the risk. Having standardized backup solutions for my RDBMS means is a whole level of effort I don't have to worry about. Data storage can even be optimized without my application having to be updated.

In very simple systems that makes sense. But as soon as your validation requires talking to a third party, or you have side effects like sending emails you have to suddenly move all that logic back out. You end up with system that isn't very easy to iterate on.

I've definitely worked in places where "Move fast and break things" tended to focus on breaking things. There would be bugs that we didn't fix because "We can just fix the database when it happens." It would take 2hours to fix a bug that would cause of 10's of hours of weekly support request, but the focus would always be on building new features, of which 10% got any real usage.

That may be true, but this isn't exactly a new drug overall. It has been available as a diabetes treatment since about 2005. So we should have some longer-term data on the topic.

The article is from thehollywoodreporter, so it is expected to not go into great detail. There is real research around these lines and links between Alzheimers and insulin resistance. I'm not in the field to really be able to vet, but it seems more than pseudoscience. Here is some more research on the topic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2769828/

No but gender-reaffirming care could be. So some sort of hormonal treatment or even talk therapy.

Test results are already reported from testing equipment a value and expected range (to account for a specific machine/reagant's calibration). Notifying when out of range hardly seems like a AI, but it certainly might be marketed as such.

Maybe there is some nuance for things like a patient in for liver issues where their liver enzymes are expected to be abnormal, but identifying when it is abnormal for them.

How much do we know? Probably not as much as we might think we know.

Could it be caused by vaccinations? Probably not. There seem to be plenty of unvaccinated people with long covid. The politicization of things might make it hard to study in general. Many of the people who were not vaccinated will insist they just had the flu, or a bad cold and would have avoided any sort of official diagnosis.

Could vaccines have made it worse? This is probably even harder to answer definitivel

I ran a blogging SaaS platform for a while. I had some instructions for configuring a reverse proxy to serve the blog. There were instructions for most major web servers. One step was adding a custom header.

- Go to <link> and get your publisher ID - Add the following line to your config(replacing xxx-xxxx-xxxxx with your code from the previous step):

AddHeader X-Publisher-Id: xxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx;

We had a bunch of people leave the x's in and were confused why it wasn't working. So we made a blog that explained the misconfiguration, and replaced xxxx-xxxx-xxxxx in the documentations with that blog's ID. We got far fewer support requests after that.

I worked on a SaaS CMS. A major consumer PC manufacturer was a customer and their "Welcome to your PC" app would pull their news feed from our system. People would turn on their PC and they'd pull a little JSON. 100s of Thousands of request per day, no big deal. The manufacturer decided that they wanted the updates to show up for everybody at the same time on the hour. Serving 100k req/s for a minute is a much different problem to solve.

I worked for a Company that was a vendor for Lenovo. They had some sort of "News about Lenovo" app on all of their commercial grade machines. The content and translations were managed in our system and each computer would pull down the feed from our servers. It was decent traffic, but nothing crazy... Until they made a change and all of the sudden every machine was pulling every hour at zero minutes and zero seconds. We had one minute of DDoS every day at noon for about a week until that was mitigated.

I agree on python libraries. There are probably contextual/philosophical reasons why the dependency management works the way it does, but I also don't use it a ton so its not obvious to me. RubyGems with Bundler and Node with NPM/Yarn have pretty much just worked for me. Pip and pipenv just feel clunkier somehow and there seems to be more tweaking to get things working.

Or there was a much longer conversation with twists and turns and the author distilled it for the format.

I love my carbon steel pan.

I accidentally built out this feature at a company once and it totally saved our asses a week later.