simonsaysso's comments

Been nerd sniped recently so am working on a Rust version of markdownlint-cli2. I'm tired of having a node dependency in my projects and this seems like a constrained enough problem space that I'll actually get around to doing it.

10-15 hours is NUTS. I do mine by hand every year and I can get them done in about 3 hours. I would say my taxes are nontrivial thought certainly not super complicated (no K1s)

This has been my primary objection with Go, as well. I wonder if it's just a lack of practice and that I'd eventually git gud, but I find it so hard to flow through code to get a general idea of what's going on. It's basically impossible to use code "paragraphs" to separate logical groupings of functionality because of the `if err != nil` blocks, and leads to a very choppy reading experience. With any non-trivial logic, I've found Go to be detrimental to my understanding of what's going on.

I did a similar experiment on myself. For songs I knew very well on good headphones, I could reliably distinguish up to 320 kbps on MP3 and 256 kbps AAC from the lossless copy. For songs I didn’t know as well, 128 kbps AAC was usually transparent.

My takeaway from the experience was that the bitrate didn’t really matter above 128 Kbps AAC. This was me paying super close attention and trying to find flaws in the encoding, not actually listening to music. I periodically rerun the test in myself as I get better equipment (laptop DACs are quite good now, for example) and get similar results. Age will be a limiting factor soon as it takes my hearing.

Ha, and I’m the opposite in a different direction. I _hate_ positive feedback. What motivates me is failure and a fear of failure. I go out of my way to downplay accomplishments but will talk your ear off about how and why I failed or almost failed or knew about a failure condition.

Maybe the actual takeaway is to figure out what kind of feedback a child responds best to and use that most of the time. You know, paying attention to the kid.

I would agree in principle, but from experience it seems people are less interested in the energy of the city as they age and acquire more things, and prioritize building their own space around them instead of utilizing the city around them.

The great appeal of San Francisco is that you don’t have to think about what you’re going to wear at least 300 days of the year. If you’re outdoorsy at all it’s very hard to go to the rest of the US and feel trapped inside. Unfortunately for me, family moved there after I moved to be close on the west coast, so I get to experience that 2 weeks every year.

I would also dispute “no natural disasters”. There are serious winter events in those regions (and crazy floods depending on where you are in the Midwest) that happen basically yearly.

I don’t think any part of the world is without significant tradeoffs, you just have to find the ones that matter to you.

I was lucky enough to dive Alexey and his mother 15 or so years ago.

I was terrified of swimming in open water so only joined the group for a deep dive once and my memories are mostly people talking and laughing on the boat, but I remember feeling crazy when people talked about air control. What do you mean I have to exhale into my mask at a certain depth? And I should inhale it back as I’m coming up? I need to take _too big_ of a breath on the surface so I can distribute it as the pressure increases?

With just a little coaching from Alexey’s mother and some encouragement from my family, a high school kid who couldn’t hold his breathe for much more than a minute spent almost 2 minutes underwater and dove to 19 meters on his first day.

I’m still terrified of deep water, but I gained a respect for the “weird” sports out there. It’s often a bunch of people just trying to have fun, and sometimes they turn out to be really, really good at what they do.

You are using gender to mean both sex and gender. You are assigned a biological sex by… biology. You get to choose your own gender.

The sunk cost fallacy is real.

Most important to me when I started tinkering with him was the speed/feature tradeoff, and portability. I was working on 7 machines at one point doing pretty quick edits of config files and Python scripts, so launch speed and availability across different environments drive me to vim.

Now there are alternatives, but back in 2015 these were all in their infancy. And now I _know_ vim and it keep adding more features. The incremental cost of adding language server support is much less than the cost of learning how to move around VSCode, so my (neo)vim config keeps growing slowly but surely

I tried this once when I was little, but dip tends to go bad pretty quickly so you need even more dip to cover up the older dip and soon you've spent all your money on dip but no one wants your old dip

We’re told that you need to squat with a vertical spine and vertical shins. Even high school kids figure out that’s impossible to do.

I’m in full alignment with the article: squatting is just about balance in the end: how can you keep your center of gravity over mid foot as you bring your hips below (or near) your knees and back up again. You might find cues that help you find a good, repeatable position (break at the hips, stay tall, weight back, drop into your ankles, knees out, etc), but that’s personal to you. If you squat a lot, you’ll find the positions that knock you off balance, or bother your hips, or cause strain on your ankles, or whatever, and learn to avoid them with cues that help you find the groove where nothing hurts.

Both my parents went to graduate school. One of them loved the academic setting and went through with the postdoc and then found a tenure track job, the other decided it wasn't for them. I talked to them recently and the one still teaching said they would never choose that path if they were coming out of college now.

It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it. Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper. My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!! And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No institution will fight for you because your career doesn't matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not anticipating the issues.

The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...

Not the other person, but I miss Gradle every time I use something else. It feels like the correct tradeoff of complexity and power. The Bazel family always felt unapproachable, and things in the Python or Rust universe basically require a makefile or other orchestrator to make sure tasks are ordered correctly.

What do you find missing from the Java tooling world? In my experience it’s been the best built out, and maybe overly so.

Q: Wasn’t ZZ an attempt to avoid the crazy ZBF2L algorithms and came after ZB? People understood the value of ZBLL (hell, even I wrote out all the speed-oriented algorithms for it) but everyone doubted the viability of ZBF2L, so they tried to find other ways of orienting edges. Or was ZZ around before and people just realized they could apply ZBLL to it?

For the code review step, sure, commit messages don't really matter unless your team reviews PRs commit-by-commit.

How many times do you actually change the default squashed message? If you write a series of garbage commit messages, I don't particularly trust that you'll write a very good squashed message, either. How many times do people skip updating the PR description with new information or features from comments? If your commit messages are good, the auto-squash message will be good and one will have a network dependency on GitHub to figure out what decisions went into that change.

In general I agree with your goal of a great commit log: 1 PR = 1 commit in the main branch. But I feel like GitHub is just the wrong tool to use if you want that. I used to use Gerrit, where commit messages _are_ your PR description. Sure, it makes you interact with git in some unfortunate ways, but the tradeoff is enforced commit cleanliness.

Might as well post my own crappy blog while I check out everyone else’s: simonsays.so

I'm a huge, huge fan of writing your own prompt. I've had too many people not actually understand what was being displayed to them by their latest and prettiest version of their prompt and have to walk them through it. The folks posting here are unlikely to be in this camp, but I've had people with their full working directory in the prompt running `pwd`. If you're not going to use the information from the prompt, don't include it.

A big problem I had at a former employer was that `git status` would take 2+ seconds to return (for various reasons) and the default oh-my-zsh prompt would parse the results of `git status` to display the repository. People thought it was normal to wait more than half a second to get a prompt back! I lost trust in 3rd party prompts from that experience, and while I have sunk at least a few hours into my own prompt, I know exactly how it works, what calls it's making, and where things go wrong (when they do).

1. Find someone to talk to. It might be a professional or it might be a parent. I had a great conversation with my dad when I had a tough time like you are. It won’t fix things immediately but it’ll start a habit of reaching out for support when you start to feel off.

2. Take a day off. No guilt, no thinking about what you should be doing. Don’t schedule anything for that day. I see too many people take “mental health” days and then panic to try to get all their appointments set up for that day.

3. Start forcing yourself to do little things. As someone else mentioned, force yourself into 5 minutes or just reading code. Force yourself to fully grok someone else’s pull request. I went an entire year forcing myself to push code for review every single workday because otherwise I felt like you’re describing yourself. It was brutal some days (“rewrite X class with streams api” was a common change), but it both kept me going and got me some respect from my colleagues.

I try to avoid snacking whenever possible but you always have to plan for at least one trip to the kitchen per day. I can’t tell if there’s some subtext in your question about “healthy” snacks, but that’s what you’re gonna get from me.

Bell peppers are an awesome snack. Just sweet enough to stop the craving and I never need more than one.

I boil 6 eggs whenever I’m out and leave then in a bowl in the fridge. I love boiled eggs but rarely have more than 1 at a time, and I’ll never take the time to boil a new one in the moment. Boiling 6 at once takes care of breakfast and snacks for a couple days.

15 almonds is about 100 calories. When I want something crunchy and savory I’ll eat that with a bit of salt.

Yogurt. Again, it’s one of my favorite snacks and 1 cup is a bit under 200 calories.

Stay hydrated. It’s amazing how often you’re actually slightly thirsty but feel like you need food. I keep a liter of water at my desk.

If I find myself hanging out in the kitchen for any longer than 1 item, I go for a walk or stretch for a few minutes. I need to physically distract myself to give my body the time to realize it just ate something.

When I absolutely need sugar, I try to reach for an apple but it often transforms into a handful of Mike and Ike’s.