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cbare | 2 months ago | on: Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?

My favorites that I read this year were:

- Playground by Richard Powers: the ocean reminds us that we, along with our obsessions and rivalries, are small - Orbital by Samantha Harvey: a book were not much happens, but a lot goes on below the surface - Hum by Helen Phillips: looks at an AI controlled near future through a different lens - Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow: sex, lies, and video games

cbare | 3 months ago | on: American Heart Association says melatonin may be linked to serious heart risks

It's very plausible that anxiety causes heart disease, anxiety causes insomnia, and insomnia leads people to use melatonin. Same with diphenhydramine, overactive inflammatory response causes allergies, allergic people take allergy meds, and too much inflammation contributes to dementia.

Association studies too easily get interpreted as X causes Y. Maybe that's true, but not necessarily.

cbare | 1 year ago | on: I'll think twice before using GitHub Actions again

Yeah, sounds like the problems are more due to monorepos rather than with GitHub actions. Seems like the pendulum always swings too far. Overdoing microservices results in redundant code and interservice spaghetti. Monorepos have their own set of issues. The only solution is to think carefully about a what size chunk of functionality you want to build, test, and deploy as a unit.

cbare | 1 year ago | on: Master suppression techniques

I found it quite worthwhile to ask GPT4o to give an english summary of the paper linked in the Wikipedia article, _Bekräftartekniker och motstrategier - sätt att bemöta maktstrukturer och förändra sociala klimat_, which translates to _Techniques of Suppression and Counterstrategies: Addressing Power Structures and Changing Social Climates_.

Recognizing and pushing back against the dark patterns of group dynamics is super important.

cbare | 1 year ago | on: The art of programming and why I won't use LLM

I also view coding as essentially creative.

Programming was mostly a hobby in the days of 8-bit PCs. It was a profession for some decades. Maybe it will be a hobby again in 5 years. Like gardening, sailing, fishing - professions at one time, now hobbies.

On the other hand, the arrival of futuristic capabilities like computers speaking human languages is what drew me to technology in the first place. Luckily, you can choose to look forward and backward. You don't have to pick only one.

cbare | 2 years ago | on: Selfish reasons to want more humans

I don't know what the optimal population is, but here are a couple of arguments against the "ever greater" thesis. Diminishing returns kicks in at some point. The economic value of human life is subject to supply and demand. Where there excess supply, life is cheap and not in a good way.

cbare | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Location based pay is killing my motivation, how do others handle it?

It will be interesting to see what happens, as the tools for remote/async work keep getting better, workers get better at doing it, and employers get more used to it. To the extent that distributed teams compete well with single-location teams, wages should tend to even out.

Looks to me like this is already happening for high-end skills. And once those PhDs and 10x folks blaze the trail, it'll get easier for the rest of us.

cbare | 3 years ago | on: Apple Music is the most buggy and annoying software I use

The desktop client is really buggy and reflects poorly on Apple. Some say, an all-you-can-eat buffet of a big chunk of all published music is just too good to be true and can't last. But, then wasn't that the promise? Too cheap to meter? To have at your fingertips the accumulated product of hundreds of years of culture, millions of hours of practice...

Currently streaming: JS Bach, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba, Sergei Istomin and Viviana Sofronitsky which I had to type 'cause you can't even cut-n-paste out that piece of junk.

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