I know two people who have been taking the new monoclonal antibody treatment for it. One who was a bit further along when she started, and did not show any significant improvement. The one who started while she was still in the early stages has completely arrested her descent. She hasn't recovered much of what she already lost, but she's still able to live independently and enjoy life, and her mental acuity scores are (slightly) better than they were last year. That's a hell of a thing.
Completely arrested? I don't. But it appears to be arrested in ways that matter for mental acuity, for now. I've taken care of a parent with Alzheimer's, and helped several other caregivers over the years with their own family's journeys, and one thing I can tell you is that I have never, ever seen an actual halting of the progression for this long. The descent is usually a stairstep pattern, but the steps are on the matter of weeks to a month or two. My friend has been stable for a year.
This is all new. There is research hinting at Alzheimer's subtypes, some of which are more likely to respond than others. Even halting the decline is a huge potential breakthrough.
many people i know personally who, to this day deny covid was real, they personally knew people who died or were hospitalized and ventilated. yet they still deny it was real.
one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.
sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.
> the real culprit could simply be boiled down to a failure in classroom management and lack of enforcement against cell phones in class
I was a middle school and high school math and science teacher from 1994 through 2019. I watched the advent of internet in schools, then desktop computers in classrooms, and finally smartphones in students' hands.
I've lived a life of watching teachers and schools get blamed for not dealing better with society's issues. "Just teach kids how to use technology", "just ban phones", and "lock down irrelevant websites" is a pretty big ask when the entire industry is focused on getting kids to use these devices, apps, and sites as much as they possibly can.
It should make a single update with simple “update … set balance += amount where accoundId = id”. This will be atomic thanks to db engine itself.
Also add check constraint >= 0 for balance so it would never become negative even if you have thousands of simultaneous payments. If it becomes negative, it will throw, insert trigger will rethrow, no insert will happen, your backend code will catch it.
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That’s it: insert-trigger and check constraint.
No need for explicit locking, no stored procedures, no locks in you backend also, nada. Just a simple insert row. No matter the load and concurrent users it will work like magic. Blazingly fast too.
That’s why there is ACID in DBs.
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Shameless plug: learn your tool. Don’t approach Postgresql/Mssql/whathaveyousql like you’re a backend engineer. DB is not a txt file.
This is a good articulation of mlkjr's theology and dicipline around nonviolence, but I think its incomplete if you read it in isolation.
His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.
They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.
This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)
Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.
You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model
When I was working in the heart of conservative online media in West Palm Beach—nestled between Rush Limbaugh’s studio, Mar-a-Lago, and Newsmax—targeting Evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt, my salary (and the direction things eventually went) was being paid for by the Saudis. At the time, the propaganda was mostly “pro-oil” and “climate change is a hoax.” Around that same period, those same Saudis bought a 10% stake in Fox News and helped shape the narrative for millions of Christians who tune in and treat it like their main source of news.
So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Artifical limits, because they have 40 paid licenses that they can not use, because of a non-disclosed assignment limit that is NOT mentioned in the pricing page nor in the ToS.
Dockcase makes enclosures with a capacitor that hold ~5 or 10 seconds of charge, and on power loss sends whatever the “get ready for shut down NOW” signal is to the contained drives. This obviously doesn’t help with unsynced data that the OS had not sent to the drive yet. I use one for a ventoy install, an another for a windows to go install. Windows on a usb stick is finicky to get recognized as bootable sometimes (likely a combination of hardware and software), but otherwise works well when it’s up.
One thing to keep in mind is USB 3 ports often only output around 4.5 Watts, whereas some nvme m.2 drives want more than double that when writing. So it’s a good idea to choose a drive with lower active power requirements. The longer enclosures for dockcase have an extra usb-c port that more power can be supplied with
This is a reasonably common (sadly) methodology that many agencies utilize.
"We are not legally permitted to blanket surveil/ALPR entire neighborhoods/towns, etc. ...
... and we can't pay a private company to do this for us ...
... but nothing prevents us from paying a private company who is doing it already, to give us that data."
The line between the last two is blurry but also utilized - you can't put out an RFP for a company to capture such data that you're not permitted to, but if that company is doing it because it sees a/your market for it, then it's a free-for-all.
First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey.
Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users.
e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action.
Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3].
Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is.
Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit.
Note that I do not use auto_vacuum for DELETEs are uncommon in my workflows and I am fine with the trade-off and if I do need it I can always PRAGMA it.
defer_foreign_keys is useful if you understand the pros and cons of enabling it.
I fought insurance over this past summer after they declined covering a life saving surgery for my 6-year-old child at the last minute. We were in despair that my child's life was at risk each day we waited because of insurance incompetence.
ChatGPT literally guided me through the whole external appeal process, who to contact outside of normal channels to ask for help / apply pressure, researched questions I had, helped with wording on the appeals, and yes, helped keep me pushing forward at some of the darkest moments when I was grasping for anything, however small, to help keep the pressure up on the insurance company.
I didn't follow everything it suggested blindly. Definitely decided a few times to make decisions that differed from its advice partially or completely, and I sometimes ran suggested next steps by several close friends/family to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious. But the ideas/path ChatGPT suggested, the chasing down different scenarios to rule in/out them, and coaching me through this is what ultimately got movement on our case.
10 days post denial, I was able to get the procedure approved from these efforts.
21 days post denial and 7 days after the decision was reversed, we lucked into a surgery slot that opened up and my child got their life saving surgery. They have recovered and is in the best health of the past 18 months.
This maybe isn't leveling the playing field, at least not entirely. But it gave us a fighting chance on a short timeline and know where to best use our pressure. The hopeful part of me is that many others can use similar techniques to win.
Both are severely underused for sure. But it didn't help that for a long time open source MILP solvers were pretty mediocre.
HiGHS didn't exist, SCIP was "non-commercial", CBC was ok but they've been having development struggles for awhile, GLPK was never even remotely close to commercial offerings.
I think if something like Gurobi or Hexaly were open source, you'd see a lot more use since both their capabilities and performance are way ahead of the open source solutions, but it was the commercial revenue that made them possible in the first place.
Using CP-SAT from Google OR-Tools as a fake MILP solver by scaling the real variables is pretty funny though and works unreasonably well (specially if the problem is highly combinatorial since there's a SAT solver powering the whole thing)
SAT solvers are used _everywhere_. Your local public transport is likely scheduled with it. International trains are scheduled with it. Industrial automation is scheduled with it. Your parcel is likely not only scheduled with it, but even its placement on the ship is likely optimised with it. Hell, it's even used in the deep depths of cryptocurrencies, where the most optimal block composition is computed with it. Even your friendly local nuclear reactor may have had its failure probability computed with (a variation of) it. In other words, it's being used to make your life cheaper/better/safer/easier. Google a bit around, open your eyes Neo ;)
PS: Yes, I develop a propositional SAT solver that used to be SOTA [1]. I nowadays develop a propositional model counter (for computing probabilities), that is currently SOTA [2]
Good Points. The most important consideration from my experience having worked with more than 40 teams: "Code review is not the time for you to impose your personal taste on a colleague." There are always many acceptable ways how to solve a problem in software development, so if someone imposes his personal preference over that from a colleague this creates tension and a time sink for the team - don't make this a blocking review! This also plays a big role when developers obsess over code but lack the vision and experience to see that not everything will be a relevant factor for technical debt in the grand scheme for the business.
Recently, I asked Codex CLI to refactor some HTML files. It didn't literally copy and pasted snippets here and there as I would have done myself, it rewrote them from memory, removing comments in the process. There was a section with 40 successive <a href...> links with complex URLs.
A few days later, just before deployment to production, I wanted to double check all 40 links. First one worked. Second one worked. Third one worked. Fourth one worked. So far so good. Then I tried the last four. Perfect.
Just to be sure, I proceeded with the fifth one. 404. Huh. Weird. The domain was correct though and the URL seemed reasonable.
I tried the other 31 links. ALL of them 404ed. I was totally confused. The domain was always correct. It seemed highly suspicious that all websites would have had moved internal URLs at the same time. I didn't even remember that this part of the code had gone through an LLM.
Fortunately, I could retrieve the old URLs on old git commits. I checked the URLs carefully. The LLM had HALLUCINATED most of the path part of the URLs! Replacing things like domain.com/this-article-is-about-foobar-123456/ by domain.com/foobar-is-so-great-162543/...
These kinds of very subtle and silently introduced mistakes are quite dangerous. Be careful out there!
In the US, a business can refuse service to anyone, generally, as long as it isn’t because the person belongs to a protected class (e.g. you can’t ban all black people or all Jewish people). You could refuse to do business with someone because you didn’t like the way they looked at you, or because you were grumpy the day they came in.
Famously, for example, James Dolan bans all sorts of people he doesn’t like from Madison Square Garden and any of the other venues he owns. He notoriously bans all lawyers who work for any firm that sues him (which happens a lot). He even uses facial recognition to catch them, and kicks them out without refunding their tickets. People have tried to sue him for this (many of them are lawyers, after all!) and so far no one has won against him for it, so he keeps doing it.
I got a walkie talkie set as a Christmas present when I was 8. Which was kind of an evil thing to do given I had no siblings or friends to play with. One day I turned one set on and listened for a while and I thought I heard someone talking behind all the static noise. So I said something and was shocked to hear the voice talking back to me. Fast forward a few decades, next week is my wedding and that voice on the other side of the radio is my best man.
That is the point of a TPM. They're supposed to be the neutral third party that makes sure you're doing the work, and can explain to upper management why the work is not getting done. As such, they don't have any decision-making power on what the work is or how long it's going to take. Generally the manager and IC negotiate back and forth on what needs doing and on what schedule, they set their own deadlines based on the realities of the project, and then the TPM holds them to what they committed to.
Much of the reason the TPM job exists is simply so your manager can be an advocate rather than a nag. The nag job is offloaded to the TPM, but the TPM has no decision-making power, so you don't get perverse incentives where the manager burns all their relationship capital making you do your work, or sandbags the deadlines so they don't have to.
In many orgs TPMs are also in charge of goodies like fun events or device/swag distribution, as a way to offset the negative emotions that come from them basically being nags.
One thing I remember from my time in the CPU industry is that ESD damage can be cumulative and also can have a delayed effect. So just because you handle a device without precautions today, doesn't mean it won't fail at some time in the future as a result. That said, I've never used precautions in home/hobby projects.
Right. It is called holistic review. Originally invented to limit the number of Jewish people in top universities (not kidding)! Now being used to limit the number of Asians.
Elite-College Admissions Were Built to Protect Privilege
Private equity has been buying out HVAC companies in the US. The technician are forced to drive up sales. So instead of repairing something, they now recommend new equipment. I saw this difference in behavior at an HVAC company I used for a 10 years. The owners were retiring and the private equity bought them out. You really have to go by word of mouth and seek out the smaller companies.
Similar thing happened for Veterinary care clinics.
