Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
I could also see myself in Mexico City since I already speak Spanish pretty fluently, and have far more friends who expatriated there, but I really wanted to learn Russian and Berlin has much better resources for foreign language instruction.
Comment · 4 years ago
I do love living in New Orleans, either this or Brooklyn are the only real cities for me here. I need to be able to walk to a grocery store. I'm privileged to have lived here for 6 years, and the only reason I recently got an old truck, was to evacuate in case of a hurricane, and we didn't even evacuate during ida. The sidewalks are torn to shit, the streets are full of holes. I'm quite certain that the streets are never fixed because they wouldn't have enough cops to keep people from driving drunk. The city hall sign has been broken for 4 years, the lights don't work in some of the letters and it just reads "ity all" at night. It's illegal to be fully nude in SF these days, but NOLA still has a fully naked bike ride. This place can feel like burning man or joshua tree, but with toilets and electricity. Except for during hurricanes, then its exactly like burning man. I went to the bar next door during ida to find a couple fucking at the bar and open bottles of lube softly lit up with a dark orange glow from the 3 candles that dimly lit my favorite bartenders face as he asked about whether my house got badly damaged or not. The architecture is very old and very unique, actually its very european and feels quite distinct from the architecture in boston/nyc. I don't know a single person in tech here, everyone has some sort of creative endeavor and makes money through a hodge podge of sources. I live next to a 24 hour gay bar, and across the street from a supermarket, next to a vet, and caddy corner from a pharmacy. I never have a reason to leave my block, and this neighborhood boasts the most dense concentration of trans/queer people I've ever encountered.

The city boasts a strong spiritual history, which I sense, causes people to come here to either flourish, or get spit out. There's not much in the way of hiking/mountains around here, and the most beautiful natural environments are in the swamp amongst the gators and pelicans dancing through the soft and grassy patches of muddy land dotting the waters edge. There are no other cities I really like visiting within an hour. It's a bright blue dot in a fire-red state. Car-jackings are up 550% over last year, and the particular circumstances by which someone killed someone with a machete at the gas-station down the street from my house, I'm sorry to say, were unsurprising.

Having said that, I can't live the rest of my life not having *lived* outside of the US. I'll be moving to Berlin at some point, because that's the closest city that felt like it feels here. The food is cheaper, you can find Indian food, and there are more languages spoken. The government there doesn't feel like some morally corrupted festering cesspool of civil indifference and political myopia. Despite everything I love about this place, and that I'm quite certain I'll retire here, I'm eager to GTFO while I still feel young, to experience what its like to feel young in a place more free than the farce I've been raised to believe. I have friends in Berlin, and though German is pretty hard to speak well, I'm up for the challenge.

Comment · 5 years ago
Seems the intent is to clearly separate commentary from code. I could see that being intentional, imagine cursive annotations on a printed document.
Comment · 5 years ago
I tried a few prompts that were misses, and there was one that it nailed on the head. Here's the prompt

> The pace of technological and social evolution, catalyzed by massively accelerating interconnection is causing our society to polarize faster than historically possible. This polarization is causing us to act more like animals, operating from places of defense and the desire to separate and exclude, rather than integrate and cooperate. It’s only by democratizing education and practicing radical aggregate self-awareness that we can continue to advance our civilization without turning against ourselves.

Here is the response. It blew me away. ----------

We are witnessing the end of “us versus them;” today a new reality, and one that challenges the traditional ways of thinking and living in an ever more global scale. It’s about time we began to acknowledge that we could not do this alone.

As for who or what is to blame for all this, we can only speculate at this point. There are some speculations:

What caused us to lose our capacity to focus and concentrate on improving our own lives and quality of life?

How will people react when their expectations for a better tomorrow seem to go up in smoke?

Is there a need and a possibility of co-optation/misundergradation (like the current wave of people in Silicon Valley) or brainwashing/social engineering (like the latest movements that happen throughout history)?

What’s the underlying reason for all this turbulence? What is the core of the problem before all this and where are its roots?

The answer to all these questions is that humanity is rapidly losing control of our own mental and emotional state and becoming vulnerable to psychological control by people and elements that appear to have a much more powerful, perhaps more complex and mysterious, set of influences that exist beyond normal societal control. We must break away from the confines of our own culture and consciousness for those influences to take root and influence us more and we should recognize that such influences often come from outside of our minds and it is within our power — both to fight back or just leave.

--------

Bravo. Not perfect for every domain, but a good tool nonetheless.

Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Git’s style of decentralization, still requires individual git servers no? Is there something like git, but based on magnet/torrent architecture?
Comment · 6 years ago
This advice will sound like a joke, but getting drunk in your target language goes a long way. I studied Spanish for years but didn't feel like I had it "in flow", and couldn't quite nail down feeling comfortable communicating. A blurry month of partying in Spain fixed that. Within that month, I noticed the largest improvements after nights I had gotten pretty wasted talking to people in Spanish at local bars. My theory is that when you drink, you stop speaking from your pre-frontal cortex. You are forced to make connections to the language from deeper parts of the brain. Same thing goes for experiencing strong emotions and situations in a target language. Of course, you have to have enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to communicate if you try, this practice just seems to make it "click" more.
Comment · 7 years ago
It wasn't euphoria. It was the realization that the finest intricate details embedded in the way I breathe, reflect my experiences, and my emotional connection to those details is strongly influenced by what I experienced when I was too young to remember. If anything, the way we breathed -- wouldn't cause hypoxia. Despite years of mindfulness meditation, in which I focused on my breath, that experience changed how I fundamentally relate to my breath.
Comment · 7 years ago
Holotropic breathing. Someone in my town offers workshops on Conscious Connected Breathing. I would have never thought that just breathing for an hour would fundamentally change my life, yet here I am. My relationship with deep seated trauma has been completely transformed. Technically the breathing was 2 hours, but it felt like 45 minutes. It feels like I now have access to a powerful drug, and an accessible way of asserting agency over my feelings and body.

This is one of those body upgrades that falls in the same category as Lasik. Tuning your core senses and ways of obtaining your needs tends to ripple throughout everything you experience and do. This breathing upgrade changed everything.

Comment · 7 years ago
Some say that New Orleans is so far behind, that it's ahead. Definitely true. The information systems in SF all feel like they were built in 2010. I've had a digital ID (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/la-wallet/id1386930269) for over a year now and it's so much more convenient when I lose my actual ID -- about 4x/year. The LA wallet has a verification system that anyone can use to verify anyone else's ID. I was in SF for blockchain week last week and I misplaced by physical ID on the way to the airport. I wanted to see a friend of mine perform at a bar in Berkeley and they wanted a physical ID. I ended up eating tasty Nepalese food next door and met up with my friends after the show because there's no digital ID in California. Once I got back to New Orleans, no-one ever batted an eye when I showed them my digital ID. I'm hoping the next step is issuing a public/private key along with the ID. It would come in handy for so many blockchainy/dapp possibilities.

I might be less ecstatic if I had a car and got pulled over and asked to show my ID. I wouldn't be comfortable handing my unlocked phone over to the state. I trust the internal walls of the mobile walled gardens more than I trust a cop.

Comment · 7 years ago
> IIRC only ~10% of prisoners are held in privately run prisons. It's kind of a red herring.

I disagree. Even if only 10% of prisoners are held in privately run prisons, the corporate leadership of those prisons has a disproportionate effect on policy-making for all people. CCA and GeoGroup are the largest recipients of federal contract award grants (for ICE), and they collectively make over 1bn / year from these contracts. They also sponsor legislation that _increases recidivism_ and makes it easier to put undocumented immigrants in their own jails. Just because a small % of the population is housed in private prisons, doesn't mean that private prison's have no impact on our society's relationship between profit and punishment.

Comment · 7 years ago
The OP glossed over managing styles and i18n between embedded JS apps and the host app. I'm not sure if there is a way to create strictly isolated CSS in pure server rendered applications without managing naming your own selectors manually. If you build tiny JS apps into your server rendered apps, you'll have to keep the styling for the JS app either in the main app, or bundle it into the embededded JS. If you bundle it into the embedded JS, you'll end up with two styling pipelines, which could make it more difficult to share variables and constants between the two, if you put the CSS rules for the embedded app in the host app, then you have to change the host app CSS for changes in the child app, which means the two might need to be in the same repo. This gets especially more difficult with advances in UI and interaction design which lean more heavily on state based animation. In those cases, we HAVE to have CSS related to animatable elements that are based on application state within the embedded JS application, then you'll really have an issue with having two pipelines. There are similar issues for i18n, asset bundling, accessibility auditing, and testing.

Given all the complexity of managing multiple pipelines for simple and complex pages, it seems to make sense to avoid that complexity by adopting a single pipeline that ensures browser compatibility, testing, i18n, accessibility and performance optimizations are consistently applied and centrally maintained.

Which might imply , if _any_ of your app requires complex presentation/interaction, it might be better to just build the entire app using the same framework.

Unfortunately, even if your app doesn't currently have complex functionality or interactions, doesn't mean you can guarantee it won't ever. Investors are known for pushing products to innovate, pivot, and adapt. Which implies that avoiding SPAs is a privilege for app developers and teams who have absolute control over their product and won't ever be forced to build more complex products.

The Op also doesn't address how having frontend dedicated ecosystems might affect hiring, or influence performance. I remember the days of having 20 instance variables set within a rails action and each of them being deeply coupled into the Erb template. Having a clear client server separation at least forces one to use an API, which can make caching easier by separating the caching of presentational and data elements. Also, the semantics of each server side templating language are quite different. E.g , slim vs liquid vs haml vs ejs. Using server side templates requires frontend developers to be much more versed in both templating languages and understanding the tiny bits of embedded server side code. I don't imagine too many front end folks jumping to learn scala, clojure or Haskell. However, if the client and server are separate than that means a scala shop can focus on the API and hire a frontend dev with no experience in the server side stack.

Comment · 7 years ago
“goof around”?
Comment · 8 years ago

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