n8henrie (u/n8henrie)

n8henrie commented on BehindTheMedspeak: A Spinal Tap bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/2... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

mitjam · 5 days ago

I had one and they Let me walk the next day to other diagnostics, had about 6 months severe headaches afterwards which only were bearable when lying down flat. Glad it went away, finally. If I remember correcly you should stay in bed for 48h after the procedure.

n8henrie · 5 days ago

Yes, the possibility of severe and prolonged headaches are part of my consent for this procedure. That said, I'm usually only performing the procedure to help exclude (or confirm) a medical condition with risk of permanent disability or death, so it can be a tough decision at times.

n8henrie commented on BehindTheMedspeak: A Spinal Tap bookofjoe2.blogspot.com/2... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

Goofy_Coyote · 5 days ago

Had one of these a few weeks ago.

Just putting it here in case anyone has to do it (I hope no one ever needs it): it is NOT painful at all.

I was told “it’s like a grenade explodes in your spine” by a (stupid) friend, it caused me to refuse to do it for the first time, which if I went through with it, things would’ve been very different for me, I would’ve been diagnosed days faster.

Again, it’s NOT painful at all, they use Lidocaine, you’ll feel way less than when they draw blood from your arm.

If it’s needed, don’t hesitate.

n8henrie · 5 days ago

Love that you had a good experience. I perform these procedures semi-regularly, and in some cases they can be painful (even with lidocaine). Most people tolerate them very well though, I usually compare it to the pain of an IV stick, which most people have already tolerated, but which can also cause some people a surprising amount of distress.

n8henrie commented on A brief history of Time Machine (2024) eclecticlight.co/2024/09/... · Posted by u/firloop

stuxnet79 · a month ago

As a recent Linux to MacOS convert, I have been eyeing Time Machine as a simple backup solution. From reading the comments here it sounds like this is a far-fetched idealistic goal which is disappointing.

This seems to have not always been the case so where did things go wrong with Time Machine? Was there a particular MacOS release that broke everything?

Also what is really the gold standard in terms of backups? On Linux land I never had a great system. All I did was manually copy my drive every 6 months to a few external disks using clonezilla and gparted. This was tedious and not very user friendly.

Recently I learned of ZFS with its CoW approach and support for snapshots & it has piqued my interest. However while it may be a strictly superior way of doing backups its still not very user friendly. I have to budget time to learn it, set it up and of course its absolutely hopeless to expect my non-technical friends/family to figure it out.

Ultimately I'm seeking a tool that has good enough UI / UX that even my non-technical friends & family can use but supports incremental backups / snapshots along with detecting + auto correcting data corruption issues.

Does such a thing exist? Who are the big contenders in this space?

n8henrie · a month ago

Use Time Machine over SMB to a ZFS-backed drive. Works great, even remotely. See my longer comment elsewhere in this thread.

n8henrie commented on A brief history of Time Machine (2024) eclecticlight.co/2024/09/... · Posted by u/firloop

codeulike · a month ago

Whenever I've tried to use Time Machine over the network, to a NAS or even to another Mac, it craps out after a few months and says the backups are invalid and asks to start again from scratch.

Advice seems to be 'only use it with external drives' and then every time you plug the drive in it wants the password.

n8henrie · a month ago

For the last several years I've very happily used it over SMB to ZFS (with autosnaps) for this very reason, and wrote an AppleScript to automatically "verify" it every week or so.

Once or twice a year it gives a verify error (i imagine this is because a plug gets pulled halfway through a backup on one side or the other), and I just have to go find the last verified date, zfs rollback, and then re-verify. Afterwards it picks up where I left off, and the historical backups are preserved.

Wish it didn't require this extra effort in the first place, but much better than having to nuke and pave every time.

Even better, it's working great over Tailscale so I can even use it remotely. Only big hiccup I ran into was figuring out some ZFS setting about quota vs refquota (something like that) to have the Time Machine's (artificial) space limit match the ZFS quota so that Time Machine would prune the oldest backups appropriately (otherwise the ZFS snapshots took up an unpredictable amount of space and Time Machine would unexpectedly get out of space errors before hitting its space limit).

n8henrie commented on Narco-sub carrying 1.7 tonnes of cocaine seized in Atlantic bbc.com/news/articles/cm2... · Posted by u/tartoran

ta9000 · a month ago

Tell that to the thousands of parents that lose a kid each year. This trash has to stop making it into the US.

n8henrie · a month ago

To cocaine? By "lose a kid" I assume you mean death and not some euphemism for addiction.

n8henrie commented on Nix Derivation Madness fzakaria.com/2025/10/29/n... · Posted by u/birdculture

jbstack · 2 months ago

Well, there's Guix as an alternative if you want a similar concept but different implementation philosophy. For me the major disadvantage of Guix is lack of package availability compared to Nix.

n8henrie · a month ago

I really wish Guix worked on macOS. Nix-Darwin and home-manager have been game changers -- sharing much config and tooling between my Mac, arch, and nixos machines has been a blessing.

n8henrie commented on How I'm using Helix editor rushter.com/blog/helix-ed... · Posted by u/f311a

ramon156 · 2 months ago

For people who use helix and want a TUI, why choose this over neovim? I like the defaults in helix until I don't, and then have to change stuff.

For people who use helix and want the full IDE experience, why not Zed, or maye even VSC/JetBraind IDE (come to think of it, how's fleet doing?).

If i need something simple I fall back to nvim, and if I'm missing features I sometimes boot up WebStorm (or if a colleague wants to navigate through something)

n8henrie · 2 months ago

I do a ton of work on low-power devices over SSH. Helix launches almost instantly; neovim with a similar level of functionality (via plugins) has considerably more startup lag and considerably more maintenance cost (config / plugin updates). I also know enough rust to try to help fix bugs but don't know any C family languages; I have a strong preference to use open-source projects written in languages I know.

EDIT: for context I'm a hobbyist who use n/vim for 12 years or so before switching to helix for the last couple of years. There are several things about nvim behavior that I still miss quite a bit and still feel more natural, but the instant startup of helix vs a second or two for nvim configured to a similar level of functional makes it totally worthwhile for me.

n8henrie commented on It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead nytimes.com/2025/10/05/we... · Posted by u/wallflower

FireBeyond · 2 months ago

> Sepsis is hard to spot.

What? It's simple enough that it's taught to EMTs with ~160 hours of education (I'm a paramedic and EMS instructor and evaluator):

Temperature <96.8 or >100.4

Heart rate >90

Respiratory rate >20

WBC count > 12000

Add confirmed or suspected source of infection. Simplified, each additional match increases the suspicion.

The issue, as described later, is not that it's hard to spot, or the SIRS criteria tool didn't flag it, it's that the doctor didn't do their job or document correctly.

"VS were ordered and not taken"? What kind of ER is this?

n8henrie · 2 months ago

My most recent septic patient had literally zero SIRS criteria, and I strongly did not suspect a bacterial source of infection. Isolated hypotension, nothing else. Said she felt great and asked to go home To date she's grown out GPCs on 8/10 blood cultures. Sepsis actually is hard. Also, it sounds like a bacterial source was not suspected in this case (and was validated by the cultures being negative and the autopsy), so AFAICT this was not sepsis.

n8henrie commented on Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high worksinprogress.news/p/wh... · Posted by u/bensouthwood

cogman10 · 3 months ago

Doesn't most of the stuff a radiologist does get double checked anyways by the doctor that orders the scan in the first place? I guess not a more typical screening scan like a mammogram. However, for anything else like a CT, MRI, Xray, etc. I expect the doctor/NP that ordered it in the first place will want to take a look at the image itself and not just the report on the image.

n8henrie · 3 months ago

As an ER doc I look at a lot of my own studies, because I'm often using my interpretation to guide real-time management (making decisions that can't wait for a radiologist). I've gotten much better over time, and I would speculate that I'm one of the better doctors in my small hospital at reading my own X-rays, CTs, and ultrasounds.

I am nowhere near as good as our worst radiologist (who is, frankly... not great). It's not even close.

n8henrie commented on Myocardial infarction may be an infectious disease tuni.fi/en/news/myocardia... · Posted by u/DaveZale

thor-rodrigues · 3 months ago

Anecdotally, I had a myocardial infarction at 23, and I was honestly surprised to learn that it wasn’t already well known that infectious diseases could trigger such events.

Up until that point, I’d never had any heart-related issues, nor does anyone in my family. Just two days before being admitted to the hospital with a suspected heart attack, I came down with food poisoning. It wasn’t pleasant, of course, but I thought it was nothing unusual—something a couple of days of rest and hydration would normally resolve.

Since my bloodwork at the hospital matched the expected results for a heart attack, and I underwent surgery, the doctors understandably focused on treating the immediate problem rather than identifying the underlying cause (I’m eternally grateful to the team and staff at St. Vincentius-Kliniken. I truly don’t think I’d be here without them).

That said, I’m glad to see this area receiving more attention. Hopefully, it will lead to further studies and the development of better strategies for prevention and treatment.

n8henrie · 3 months ago

Can you clarify -- if you're comfortable sharing additional details -- did you have an "occlusion MI" heart attack, involving balloons / stents in the cath lab?

Most people assume that "heart attack" is a distinct clinical entity, but the majority (~80%) of elevated troponin levels are not exactly what comes to mind when people say "heart attack," but will often be described to patients as a heart attack (sometimes out of ignorance and others out of convenience, as the actual explanation for what is going on takes a lot more time and effort).