1lint (u/1lint) - Readit News

1lint commented on The brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside (2020) journals.sagepub.com/doi/... · Posted by u/optimalsolver

1lint · 2 years ago

I'm surprised by how much this publication reads like an advocacy piece for a specific viewpoint, rather than an objective review of existing literature. Just from reading the paper, it is clear that there are many experts in the field that take the opposing viewpoint that is being attacked in the paper, especially considering that their hypotheses have been published in widely circulated textbooks.

When it comes to research publications in general, I very much prefer to hear an objective, good faith presentation of the major viewpoints, with the author taking an opinionated but measured take in the conclusion as they review the overall weight of the literature. I'm sure there are issues with this "triune brain" model, but at a certain level every model is inaccurate; the real question is whether a model is useful in its framework, and the answer has a degree of subjectivity such that I do not think it is fair to categorically reject the perspectives of opposing experts in the field.

1lint commented on “Green smoothie cleanse” causing acute oxalate nephropathy pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2... · Posted by u/gardenfelder

1lint · 2 years ago

On a more general note, a human eating a vegetable is a predatorial relationship, and like any prey, the vegetable will evolve defenses against such predation. Obviously the vegetable can't run away, so it produces compounds that are harmful against its human predators. Artificial selection through farming may reduce the harmful compounds, but constitutes a small fraction of their relevant evolutionary history.

On the other hand, we have the opposite relationship with fruits. When our ancestors ate fruits, they played a pivotal role in facilitating the plant's reproductive fitness by dispersing the seeds, at times with the excellent complimentary fertilizer that is human excrement. In this case, the plant has an evolutionary incentive to produce more nutritious fruits to encourage such human consumption.

There are a lot of "vegetables" that are actually botanical fruits such cucumbers, zucchini, tomato, etc. (note they all contain seeds). They are much better alternatives than true vegetables (spinach/kale) for juicing if you are trying to avoid sugar or somehow don't like sweet juice.

It also doesn't sound right to me to refer to liquified vegetables as "juice", when I've long thought the term refers to the liquid produced from squeezing a fruit (not to mention liquified spinach/kale sounds a bit nasty)

1lint commented on New York City bans TikTok for government employees engadget.com/new-york-cit... · Posted by u/mikece

martin_a · 2 years ago

You wanna hear some horror stories from the field?

I need to do development regularly for our workflow systems. That includes a NodeJS based process, so npm has to work, I backup code to gitlab, need to use Postman/Insomnia to test APIs, whatever.

I don't have admin rights on my windows machine, because that's obviously unsafe. All the software on my machines is outdated, as I need to open a ticket for each and every update of VS Code and whatever I'm using and answering those tickets can take some time. Also I feel dumb doing that.

After "securing" the systems even more, IT changed the proxy server. npm didn't work from one day to another. They had to debug it for a week and finally gave up and just whitelisted it and whatnot. Will probably only survive until the next update.

gitlab doesn't work anymore, as basic auth is not supported by the proxy server anymore. I don't have the time (nor the rights - ha!) to fiddle around with that all day to get it working, so there's no versioning happening and "backups" or collaboration are based on local file systems or sending mails with the code attached, too.

My local environment of our workflow server can't connect to the app store to update the integrated apps. Something with the proxy, I don't know. So I'm developing against outdated versions of everything...

Want to connect to external APIs? Need to create a ticket so something besides Outlook and the browsers can connect to the outside world. Sometimes it doesn't work, so... you guessed it... make a firewall/proxy exception. Just takes a day or two.

Also updates in core infrastructure like proxy and firewall are not communicated. So you come into the office monday morning and everything is burning and nothing works anymore. "Yeah, we changed the proxy on Saturday..." Fuck it.

Final thing: One of my biggest projects is to provide a public API to create an easier onboarding experience and one standardized way to place orders with us... IT wanted to do it with their software partner, no other ways possible. We already had something ready we could have bought, deployed and customized in 3 weeks time. Now it's half a year later and the test version is ready. Endpoint URL looks like hell and _every single user_ needs to have his IP whitelisted to connect to the API. Even for the testing endpoints. For security reasons obviously. I'm just done with it.

edit: Yeah, slightly off-topic but had to vent somewhere. Thanks for your patience.

1lint · 2 years ago

I recall someone in a similar situation who was able to convince IT to whitelist a cloud VM for testing website deployments. In addition to the website, this VM also hosted a wireguard server running on ports that happen to be commonly used for databases.

1lint commented on How do we save water: Stop growing alfalfa in Imperial County desertsun.com/story/opini... · Posted by u/cute_boi

1lint · 2 years ago

I don't think this article raises an actual issue (if it even exists).

If we take up the author's call to action in the title and introduction to "stop growing alfalfa" (presumably by outlawing it), then the corporations that grew alfalfa would obviously just find some other crop/product through which to effectively export water, albeit less efficiently, in which case the preexisting problems still exist but are even worse.

The real question is why these farmers/corporations are using their water to grow crops in the first place, when they could presumably be selling their water to consumers at much higher retail rates.

An immediately obvious answer would be that the costs of transporting/distributing this water from the source to the consumer is greater than the profit margin, in which case there isn't even a problem to begin with.

If the issue is regulation restricting corporations from selling/distributing their water to consumers, then it should be an obvious win for the politicians to fix: their corporate lobbyists get more money selling water at higher rates, while their voters get to buy water at cheaper rates. Either way, the article doesn't even mention any regulations at issue.

1lint commented on Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging theatlantic.com/politics/... · Posted by u/slapshot

wk_end · 2 years ago

The problem of course is that it's not strictly about one's own body, in this case. "Bodily autonomy" doesn't cover the petty crimes addicts often commit to get money to buy drugs - the impossibility of biking anywhere knowing your vehicle is almost guaranteed to get stolen, the economic deserts created because businesses can't operate in certain areas due to theft and safety, the property damage that needs to be paid for over and over; the cost - of shelters, food banks, etc. - of supporting those who, in the depths of their addiction, can no longer support themselves; the public spaces damaged and deprived to others by the homeless encampments that flood parks and obstruct sidewalks; the danger of used needles lying around; the trauma experienced by people who have to see dead bodies littering the streets.

In an ideal world, I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves, of course, so as best to preserve bodily autonomy. I think you can make the case that the Oregon experiment is showing how in practice that doesn't happen.

1lint · 2 years ago

If the justification for criminalizing a drug is its propensity to cause societal damage, then by far the most important drug to ban is alcohol. Heroin addiction may promote theft and property damage, but that doesn't even come close to the mayhem, permanent injury and death caused by drunk driving accidents (as well as the social service costs of managing our country's subpopulation of alcoholics). Because alcohol remains legal, I believe less harmful drugs, including many if not all of the drugs decriminalized by Oregon, should be legal as well.

>> "I guess these things would all be prevented and/or prosecuted, rather than the drugs themselves" I agree with this statement. Criminalizing hard drug use simply because it is associated with behaviour causing societal damage is not only inconsistent with the legality of alcohol use, it is also a slippery slope to justifying far more insidious laws. For example, a similar justification could be used to criminalize violent tv shows/movies/video games if the government believes consumption of such media is associated with societal harm.

The obvious solution is to simply criminalize the acts, such as theft and property damage, that actually harm others/society, rather than indirect upstream actions such as drug use. This "Oregon experiment" involves far more than just decriminalizing drug use, but also (effectively) decriminalizing many other domains of crime such as retail theft, daylight robbery, urban camping, property damage, etc. not unlike what we have here in SF.

1lint commented on Can Chess, with Hexagons? [video] youtube.com/watch?v=bgR3y... · Posted by u/miiiiiike

1lint · 2 years ago

This brings back memories of first playing civ5, which used a hexagonal grid

1lint commented on Millions of GitHub repos likely vulnerable to RepoJacking, researchers say bleepingcomputer.com/news... · Posted by u/pyeri

1lint · 2 years ago

Another reason to include commit ids in the url when fetching files from external repos. I think you should do this anyways in case the external repo maintainer makes a change that silently breaks your build script

1lint commented on I have resigned from all roles in rustlang, effective immediately twitter.com/jntrnr/status... · Posted by u/DaNmarner

wk_end · 3 years ago

In no way defending the sloppy conference planning or how the former keynote speaker got screwed here, but...unless I'm missing something it seems pretty disproportionate to completely leave a community you've invested over seven years of your life in over sloppy conference planning, doesn't it? I feel like I'm missing something.

1lint · 3 years ago

I agree it seems like a disproportionate act to take given the situation as the author described it, but this certainly does seem like the kind of scenario that involves a lot of context that goes unmentioned.

One explanation for this sequence of events is that the conference planners had since found a new compelling topic reflective of the project's direction to be covered in a keynote speech, in which case the natural topic to replace is one that discusses a "possible"/hypothetical idea. I'm sure there was a better way for leadership to handle this, in particular around communicating their intentions, but this shortcoming seems much more likely a case of incompetence rather than malice towards the speaker, given the lack of information to support the latter.

1lint commented on That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve

yencabulator · 3 years ago

Not everyone, just the people whose pages display untrusted inputs. Which is a huge fraction of the modern web...

(The rest just have brittle websites that might break when someone uses certain punctuation for the first time.)

1lint · 3 years ago

Ah okay I see now you were referring to failure to sanitize inputs/outputs in the original comment. I don't know if this oversight occurs more often when using string templating, but I'm pretty sure this was already a problem long before string templating came into practice.