Ooh, thanks for this link. I’m not a podcast person, but I have a friend who would love this

I have a disability that gives me quite a lot of pain, and my 1-10 pain scale doesn’t actually go up to 10; I will never say I’m at a 10/10 pain, because that’s saying it’s the worst it could ever be, which is asking for trouble

Lmao

When I was a teenager, I promised myself that if nothing improved by the time I was 20, I would allow myself the escape of suicide — fuck anyone who would begrudge me that. The bar wasn’t “things have to be fully better”; there just needed to be a non-zero improvement to prove that improvement was possible.

Ironically, this pledge probably saved my life, because it meant that I could tell myself “not yet” when I was in a crisis and at risk of harming myself. Fortunately, by the time I had reached 20, I had experienced some fairly significant improvements, and whilst my mental health was still rocky, there were parts of me that genuinely wanted to live.

My post-20 life has been messy, because I literally never expected to get this far. It sort of feels like a bonus level in a video game. It’s pretty surreal.

Enough about me though, I want to hear a bit about you, if you’re willing to share. What’s something that gives you zest for life? Something that fuels the hope that I’m feeling from your comment?

I feel you. Having to grieve the person you could’ve been is one the tragedies of having been forced to survive rather than live. The most difficult part of healing is somehow forging a new life in which you can thrive.

That’s something that I’ve been struggling with lately. If I structure my life around who I am right now, then the result is a routine of misery where I don’t chase anything of joy. However, if I try to build a life for the person I would like to be, I find I don’t fit inside that world, and I crumble — demoralised by overambitious burnout. The tension between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be is a tightrope that I need to somehow balance on if I want to make progress.

Solidarity, friend. You deserve better than what you have had.

I can’t actually access the full paper (either via university access, or Anna’s Archive/sciDB), so I can’t comment on specifics, but their extended abstract mentions that that they used “Cox proportional hazards models, general linear regression, and Poisson regression models were applied to assess the associations between red meat intake and different cognitive outcomes.”

Speaking as a biochemist (i.e. someone well versed in reading scientific papers from the life sciences, but who does not have particular training or experience with the quite different context of clinical medicine research), it looks fairly legit, in that those statistical methods are typical of what I’d expect for something like this. That’s vague, but it passes the sniff test, I suppose.

I was initially dubious of the journal/research on the basis of being unable to access the paper (and not knowing anything of this journal), but I feel comfortable in dismissing those concerns after have a wee gander at the journal itself (it seems fairly prominent and well respected). Having not read the paper (nor being familiar with this specific area of research), I am far less able to judge the paper itself, but at least it’s not a case of dismissing the research outright because of the journal being sus.

Without knowing your background, it’s hard to gauge whether this explainer on some of the stats methods mentioned above would be appreciated, but here you go, just in case.

It has been translated into English (this translation is dated 2017)

However, far be it from me too discourage anyone from learning a language. After all, what better exemplifies the fallibility of translation than this story?

There is indeed! It’s one of the things that makes this such a humourous story

Edit: https://archive.org/details/powersofdarkness0000vald Here it is! Enjoy (even if one’s enjoyment is just in knowing that this exists)

Pectinase’ll dissolve the pith if you’re a particular kind of weird, lazy nerd

I’m more likely to have conversations. I tended to lurk pretty deep in threads on Reddit, or on niche hobby communities, but that vibe is much more available here.

There seems to be more good faith discussions here. I see more people apologising, or responding well to being called out. I realise this is largely a function of size of the site, and thus this nice energy is likely fleeting, but I am heartened by it nonetheless; people like us will always exist, and there will always be a place for us (even if we need to make it ourselves).

I’m reminded of something I saw recently where a guy had a mini old screen for typing, but an e-ink main screen. It was a DIY cyberdeck, and weird enough that I don’t think it’s useful for you or OP, but I figured you’d find it interesting to hear that your suggestion seems to be on the right track

(n.b. I am neither a rust, nor C developer so I am writing outside my own direct experience)

One of the arguments brought up on the kernel.org thread was that if there were changes to the C side of the API, how would this avoid breaking all the rust bindings? The reply to this was that like with any big change in the Linux kernel that affects multiple systems with multiple different teams involved, that it would require a coordinated and collaborative approach — i.e. it’s not like the rust side of things would only start working on responding to a breaking change once that change has broken the rust bindings. This response (and many of the responses to it) seemed reasonable to me.

However, in order for that collaboration to work, there are going to have to be C developers speaking to rust developers, because the rust developers who need to repair the bindings will need to understand some of what’s being proposed, and thus they’ll need to understand some level of C, and vice versa. So in practice, it seems nigh on impossible for the long term, ongoing maintenance of this code to be entirely a task for the rust devs (but I think this is taking an abnormally flexible reading of “maintenance” — communicating with other people is just part and parcel of working on such a huge project, imo)

Some people have an ideological opposition to there being two different programming languages in the Linux kernel full stop. This is part of why the main thing that rust has been used for so far are drivers, which are fairly self enclosed. Christoph Hellwig even used the word “cancer” to describe a slow creep towards a codebase of two languages. I get the sense that in his view, this change that’s being proposed could be the beginning of the end if it leads to continued prevalence of rust in Linux.

I haven’t written enough production code to have much of an opinion, but my impression is that people who are concerned are valid (because I do have more than enough experience with messy, fragmented codebases), but that their opposition is too strong. A framework that comes to mind is how risk assessments (like are done for scientific research) outline risks that often cannot be fully eliminated but can be reduced and mitigated via discussing them in the context of a risk assessment. Using rust in Linux at all hasn’t been a decision taken lightly, and further use of it would need ongoing participation from multiple relevant parties, but that’s just the price of progress sometimes.

I’ve been meaning to check out Addy.io for a while now, because you’re not the first person I’ve seen mentioning it in threads like this. Your comment was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I’ve finally gone and checked it out. Thanks for including a link in your comment; it helped reduce the activation energy of setting it up

To be fair, the ones that I often come across in my home are literally called “house spiders” (Eratigena atrica)

It’s a particular shade of paint. It’s widespread enough in the UK that multiple brands do their own version of Magnolia. It’s often what’s used when people don’t want to have to decide what colour to paint, or in council housing, and it’s increasingly common in private rentals.

People in this thread have made good suggestions about how you can be a tad more honest while also keeping things brief and polite. I found this surprisingly effective in making me feel less hollow, but something that really helped me was having friends who I could be completely honest with when they asked how I was doing.

You might not have friends like that. Certainly, I have found that when I’m tired and depressed is when I am most distant from would-be friends, and there have been times when I have effectively had to build up a support network from scratch (which is especially difficult when depressed). Or you may have friends who you hold at arm’s length because you don’t want to burden them with how you’re feeling. I may be projecting here, but when I have been depressed in the past, I end up feeling like I’m almost “infectious”, and I end up withdrawing. If you relate to this at all, try to resist the instinct to isolate. Try your best to put yourself in situations where you could meet people, such as if any hobbies you have had (or considered) have a social component to them. If you’re starting from nothing (which I’m assuming you are, given your aforementioned loneliness), a large chunk of forcing yourself to engage with things will feel like a chore, but in my experience, that’s the only way out (ideally paired with professional support, if available)

“Anyone else here feel like that? If so, how do y’all cope?”

My honest answer to that is either “I don’t know if I am coping”, or “solidarity”. My above response may sound like I’m relatively coping, but in many ways I’m not. The times when I feel like I’m most achieving what I need to in life are often the times I feel most exhausted. In a way, it would be nice if I could think of myself as struggling due to some innate brokenness, but there are so many people struggling in the same way we are that it’s abundantly clear that our material conditions are the problem. It’s depressing to see how many people feel the same as I do. But it doesn’t make me feel less alone, and that feeling is something I cling to. It’s something, at least.

When I read DeepSeek’s privacy policy, I was creeped out by the invasiveness of the keystrokes thing. Then I realised that ChatGPT is just as creepy, but less upfront about it, and DeepSeek’s relative transparencyn caused me to see them in a more favourable light

I haven’t seen any tutorials that include the training data. As you highlight, these would make for poor tutorials. If you know where there are more complete tutorials, I’d appreciate it if you could share them

I think there’s a subvariety of “paradox” which aren’t actually paradoxes, but we call them that because at some point, the name stuck

(n.b. I got here after OP deleted their comment, so I don’t have the context of what you were replying to. This is just a reply to you)

I felt a sad wistfulness upon reading your comment, because of how deeply I wish this were possible.

I’m reminded of an exhausting dinner in which a friend and I were trying to explain to his Dad why doctors and the like don’t work for free. It took us a while to figure out what he was actually saying, but in the end, we understood him to be arguing roughly: “It sure would be nice if people could work for free, because things like the NHS and other social safety nets only exist if people feel a duty to society, or their community. It sucks that selfish motivations seem to be guiding people’s decisions instead, and this isn’t their fault, but a product of them having to struggle to fulfill their basic living needs under capitalism. Maybe if we had a comprehensive, universal basic income, we would see more people able to exercise their duty to society”.

This memory sticks out to me because we spent most of that conversation exasperated and confused because it seemed like he was arguing that people should work for free, in the here and now. Your comment brings me back to that memory because I do believe that sufficiently robust social safety nets would lead to far more people doing work because they find it rewarding; I’m imagining a world where they still get paid, but the money is far less of a determining force in people’s decisions. It would be nice to be able to be an idealist like this, but we’re a long way off from that world