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ryangs commented on What if we made advertising illegal?   simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg
or_am_i · 9 months ago
What if we built a strong culture around actively avoiding advertising? What if we educated the general public about adverse effects of time after time giving up your attention, without getting anything in return besides a short lived dophamine kick? What if we showed how it's only in those moments of paying attention a person has a chance to exercise agency over their own life, and spending that scarce resource on doomscrolling is a catastrophic-group-mind-suicide, sadistically prolonged over the lifetime of an entire generation? That the illusion of community in the comments is just that, an illusion that dispels the moment the user clicks the dreaded "logout" button spitting them back into a gray heroine-withdrawal-like reality, isolated from their peers, all means of human connection monopolized by the attention sharecropping farms? That every moment a jingle on the radio captures your mind it's distracting you from something necessarily more important? That we are all in effect trapped in that externally-perpetuated procrastination loop, with all the neon-lit arrows pointing us further and further away from what truly matters -- our very lives?

Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!

ryangs · 9 months ago
While laudable, this seems significantly harder to implement than banning advertising. Not that either are particularly feasible policies but this one seems harder.
ryangs commented on Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)   blog.ecosia.org/trees-not... · Posted by u/erlend_sh
roughly · 9 months ago
There’s a thing we tend to do as engineers where we hear a thing and then start thinking through the implications and design, which is normal, but also we seem to assume we’re the only ones who’ve ever thought about it, and therefore our concerns must be unaddressed, and we’re brilliant, so clearly nobody’s ever thought of them before, so we’ve gotta share them. If you’d like to see this behavior in action, this is the thread for you.
ryangs · 9 months ago
Epistemic statuses are a great aid in sharing ideas without sounding overly confident.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bbtvDJtb6YwwWtJm7/...

ryangs commented on Postgres as a Graph Database: (Ab)Using PgRouting   supabase.com/blog/pgrouti... · Posted by u/michelpp
nrjames · 10 months ago
I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a “SQLite for graphs,” so to speak. Is there something about how they have to be stored that precludes an in-process solution with disk-based storage?
ryangs · 10 months ago
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/graph-types/ gives an interesting take on why we don't see a graph type as a primitive on more programming languages. Essentially boils down to graphs being very vague and depending on the topology of your graphs you are going to want different implementations for reasonable efficiency.

That said, there are graph databases.

ryangs commented on My Struggle with Doom Scrolling   allthatjazz.me/posts/doom... · Posted by u/saeedesmaili
guiambros · a year ago
> Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

OneSec [1] is the only one that worked for me. It's quick enough that I'm not tempted to disable it, yet annoying enough that makes me think twice if I really want to open app X for the third time today.

Also it's just a polite nudge, rather than a full block, or condescending messages saying "you've hit your time limit for today" (that make you feel bad and make you want to immediately disable the thing in the first place).

Wish parental controls were designed with the same principles.

[1] https://one-sec.app/

ryangs · a year ago
I like this. Testing the browser extension now and pretty happy with it (after tweaking so returning to a tab has a grace period). I was using StayFocused, which is okay, but too tempting to just disable it (and annoying if I need to access a blocked site for work purposes).
ryangs commented on A visual demo of Ruby's lazy enumerator   joyofrails.com/articles/s... · Posted by u/rossta
ryangs · a year ago
Java Streams and Kotlin Sequences provide similar iterator capabilities. Iterators are great for this lazy performance but can sometimes be difficult to debug. Especially if you are nesting many iterators, then extracting the underlying collection can be complicated. But necessary in many workflows.
ryangs commented on Getting to 2M users as a one woman dev team [video]   brightonruby.com/2024/get... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon
phildenhoff · a year ago
StoryGraph is an excellent tool and I continue to use it daily.

I’ve also found Hardcover.app, which I quite like. It has an API and a slightly more refined UI, but it’s clearly more than one person working on it.

Of course, if your focus is book clubs, Fable is likely the app for you

ryangs · a year ago
Excited to hear about Hardcover! I like StoryGraph but the lack of API frustrates me - I want to be able to sync back to my general notes store (Obsidian). Hopefully Hardcover works better with that.
ryangs commented on Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle   davidlattimore.github.io/... · Posted by u/tempaccount420
ryangs · a year ago
>Debug information tends to be large and linking it slows down linking quite considerably. If you’re like many developers and you generally use println for debugging and rarely or never use an actual debugger, then this is wasted time.

Interesting. Is this true? In my work (java/kotlin, primarily in app code on a server, occasional postgres or frontend js/react stuff), I'm almost always reaching for a debugger as an enormously more powerful tool than println debugging. My tests are essentially the println, and if they fail for any interesting reason I'll want the debugger.

ryangs commented on Notepad++ is 21 years old   learnhub.top/celebrating-... · Posted by u/thunderbong
kevinsync · a year ago
I continue to use Notepad++ despite having tried every other editor and IDE under the sun. This, of course, drives every person completely insane when I explain that my "IDE" is:

- Notepad++ for editing, pretty much stock, no plugins

- command line for git and grep (Console2 or Git Bash)

- File Explorer alongside Everything [0] for navigating files

- Beyond Compare [1] for visual diff/merge

- WinSCP/PuTTY for SFTP/SSH (usually to Linux)

- Synergy [2] for sharing keyboard and mouse between Windows and MacOS

I personally enjoy being in all 3 major OS's at the same time, and find it helpful to separate concerns to their respective applications/interfaces -- it helps me keep a mental geography of "where things are" and "what tool is used for which purpose", rather than being beholden to a IDE-dictated workflow or tool that's obscured behind specific UI patterns.

That said, I'll happily use Handbrake over command-line ffmpeg for a lot of things, so obscuring behind UI isn't always a bad thing.

Anyways, HUGE RESPECT to Notepad++!

[0] https://www.voidtools.com

[1] https://www.scootersoftware.com

[2] https://symless.com/synergy

ryangs · a year ago
What is your pattern for navigating to a function definition (as an example of a basic IDE operation that doesn't seem supported)? Grep?
ryangs commented on I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA    · Posted by u/proberts
ryangs · a year ago
What are some of the challenges involved with international hiring in a remote environment? I work at a fully remote startup with ~200 employees. We hire from a couple dozen countries but I know there are fairly significant barriers whenever we add a new one. What are some of those challenges? Are they getting more streamlined?
ryangs commented on Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough   quoteinvestigator.com/202... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
setgree · a year ago
The second chapter of Anne McCaffrey's 'Dragonflight', written in 1968, opens with: "F'lar, on bronze Mnementh's great neck, appeared first in the skies above the chief Hold of Fax, so-called Lord of the High Reaches."
ryangs · a year ago
I think proper nouns get a bit more of a pass in terms of purple prose.

u/ryangs

KarmaCake day137July 28, 2021View Original