Inclusivity and democratic governance of a project is a strike to you? Seems like perhaps your hat is showing...
Readit Newsajford commented on Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions resources.github.com/acti... · Posted by u/kevin-david
ajford commented on Aphantasia and Psychedelics psychedelirium.substack.c... · Posted by u/yenniejun111
My understanding is that most aphantasics (like myself) can still see images while dreaming—suggesting that dreaming uses a different network for visualization. I have vivid dreams most nights.
Shane Williams (an aphant) hosts a podcast where he interviews people using a set of questions designed to probe their inner sensory world. From it I’ve learned, for example, that some people can taste food when reading a menu, or have a conversation with a deceased loved one and actually hear their voice. One of his prompts is whether guests can place themselves inside a photo of a carnival (which he provides); many say they can smell the cotton candy or hear the chatter of the crowd.
It’s striking how little we really know about the variety of inner sensory experiences: Discovering Your Mind – Aphantasia and Beyond https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/discovering-your-mind-...
A favorite research paper compares brain activity in identical twin sisters, only one of whom is aphantasic: The Neural Underpinnings of Aphantasia: A Case Study of Identical Twins https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.23.614521v2
Interesting. I'm somewhere on the aphantasia spectrum, but I very rarely have vivid dreams. Most dreams I would describe it almost like remembering an audiobook instead of a movie.
But I do occasionally have a vivid dream, and though I can't be certain I could swear that I remember more vivid dreams as a child/early adolescent. But by the time I was entering college I rarely remember my dreams and the ones I do remember are like those I described above with little visualization.
It's really interesting to hear about how others perceive these sensory experiences.
ajford commented on Aphantasia and Psychedelics psychedelirium.substack.c... · Posted by u/yenniejun111
On the graph for aphantasia where it's words. I certainly dont imagine words. If I were to stretch the truth about seeing an apple, I maybe see an outline. Certainly no detail inside, like the relfection of light off the apple.
Psychedelics, like mushrooms, do nothing for me. Mushrooms, I've never had a high better than say a light buzz from alcohol, generally nothing. I never get the wavvy or beer goggles from alcohol. I could be absolutely smashed, drink a micky in a couple hours and still pass a field sobriety test; and im a cheap drunk. THC doesnt do much of anything. Opiates take alot; any amount of morphine and nothing. Still feel the pain. One time I had Dilaudid. That helped with the surgical pain maybe 50%; from intolerable to tolerable. Nothing though, no hallucinations or anything. Maybe at some peak I was feeling a wierd flush or wave feeling in my body but nothing significant.
I interpreted it as more of "concepts" and not the word floating in space. That's closer to how I would describe my experience. With effort I can kinda force a static visualization but for lack of a better explanation it feels almost like a wireframe pre-render. Sounds similar to how you describe it.
Dreaming feel reminiscent to what an Audiobook feels like when thinking about the dream after waking up.
ajford commented on Electromechanical reshaping offers safer eye surgery spectrum.ieee.org/electro... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Many acquaintances dating decades back to high school days have gone through LASIK.
They were lucky enough to be happy at first (not everybody is). Long term, they all regretted it.
The statistics agree. I would personally not consider LASIK.
LASIK is well known to only be a short to mid-term solution. The eyes age like the rest of you, and any correction will eventually be outpaced by the natural weakening of your ocular muscles to the point where you can no longer pull focus and require glasses. Further correction is possible, but from what I remember being told by my doctor and my own reading, the bounce-back from the surgery is rougher as you age.
I know a few folks from college who got it done and a bit over decade later they're going strong. My own surgery is just about hitting a decade (couple of months shy). That said, I have a family friend who had bladed LASIK done in their 50s (late 2000s) and their outcome was bad with total loss of sight in the affected eye. The result on their other eye was barely an improvement but plenty of scarring lead to halos and starbursts.
ajford commented on Electromechanical reshaping offers safer eye surgery spectrum.ieee.org/electro... · Posted by u/rbanffy
Glasses are annoying, and I’m not particularly risk averse, but unless I was completely blind or in excruciating pain, I can’t imagine any scenario in which I would elect to have someone cut, lase, or reshape my eyeball.
I elected for LASIK as my near-sighted prescription was severe enough that I could only see about 6-8 inches in front of my eyes without my glasses.
Also, I could only get my prescription filled in high-index lenses as the normal lenses would be too thick for nearly any glasses shop to order and grind. And had been that way for at least a decade by the time I opted for LASIK.
Poor control of my eye reflexes meant that even after over a year of trying I still couldn't reliably wear contacts, and was a highly stressful part of my day when I managed to get them on.
I had a family friend that went for LASIK very early on (late 2000s iirc) and had a horrible outcome losing sight in one eye, and a couple of friends in college that had amazing outcomes, so I had seen both sides. Ultimately, the LASIK operation was a very quick and pleasant operation for me, and the results were beyond my expectations. Nearly a decade later, my eyesight is still fine though I think I'm starting to see some blurring at middle distances that wasn't there a couple years ago. Did get some strong starbursts at night for a couple of years but I've either gotten used to them or they've faded.
After wearing glasses for around 20 years of my life, I love the freedom of no longer wearing them.
And tragically, nuclear propulsion at NASA has been aggressively singled out for the axe so humanity will be counting on more advanced countries to finish that research.
Was that the fossil fuel lobby's doing?
I always figured it was from Nuclear pearl-clutching and genuine fear about launch disasters. Especially after the various Apollo and shuttle disasters.
Though with how SpaceX has been blowing up rockets left and right, probably a good idea to not have nuclear materials launching until that's been resolved entirely.
Boca Chica beach is a mess now, I can only imagine what new Fallout installment we'd get if South Texas became irradiated from a failed launch.
ajford commented on Cloudflare to introduce pay-per-crawl for AI bots blog.cloudflare.com/intro... · Posted by u/scotchmi_st
As someone who has actually built working micro payments systems, this was of interest. Worth noting though that it's really just "document-ware" -- there's no code there[1], and their proposed protocol doesn't look like it was thought through to the point where it has all the pieces that would be needed.
[1] E.g. this file is empty: https://github.com/coinbase/x402/blob/main/package.json
> As someone who has actually built working micro payments systems
The Github repo clearly has Python and Typescript examples of both client and server (and in multiple frameworks), along with Go and Java reference implementations.
Maybe check the whole repo before calling something vaporware?
ajford commented on Elon Musk's DOGE Posts Classified Data on Its New Website huffpost.com/entry/elon-m... · Posted by u/f38zf5vdt
> No waste and fraud so far,
Really?
Yep. They claim all sorts of things, but there is no transparency or proof that any wastage or actual fraud was present.
It's all just ideological things that Project 2025/MAGA/Daddy Musk doesn't like. The CFPB is a perfect example. Musk wants to get into finance so he's gutting a department that only exists to protect consumers.
ajford commented on Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website 404media.co/anyone-can-pu... · Posted by u/mahkeiro
I’m pretty sure they aren’t stopping at just one thing?
Now do that 10,000 times and tell me what the total is per tax payer (noting that 40% of taxpayers don’t pay taxes).
I get $14,000 per tax payer, what do you get?
It's a damn shame the IRS funding is getting gutted and those billionaire 1% will be getting cuts anyways. Hard to go after those not paying when Daddy Trump and Daddy Musk cut the legs out from under the enforcement and audit folks.
So the question becomes: is $0.002/minute a good price for this. I have never run GitHub Actions, so I am going to assume that experience on other, similar, systems applies.
So if your job takes an hour to build and run though all tests (a bit on the long side, but I have some tests that run for days), then you are going to pay GitHub $.12 for that run. You are probably going to pay significantly more for the compute for running that (especially if you are running on multiple testers simultaneously). So this does not seem to be too bad.
This is probably going to push a lot of people to invest more in parallelizing their workloads, and/or putting them on faster machines in order to reduce the number of minutes they are billed for.
I should note that if you are doing something similar in AWS using SMS (Systems Management Service), that I found that if you are running small jobs on lots of system that the AWS charges can add up very quickly. I had to abandon a monitoring system idea I had for our fleet (~800 systems) because the per-hit cost of just a monitoring ping was $1.84 (I needed a small mount of data from an on-worker process). Running that every 10 minutes was going to be more than $250/day. Writing/running my own monitoring system was much cheaper.
I get being charged per-run, to recoup the infra cost, but what about my total runtime on my machine impacts what GH needs to spend to trigger my build?