How not to live your life
Are you Mad?

Public service announcement:

If you are very small sized, and eat very little, have very little/no hunger cues in your daily life, and are possibly a smoker as well = don't give eating advice to people trying to lose weight.

Eating once a day, or doing intermittent fasting, does not work for people who have more body weight, and experience hunger. You canno't fathom what that is like, so your advice will automatically sound really condecending.

Insane Advice

I saved this a long time ago because... well it is the perfect encapsulation of the internet.

cc:

What I Learned Photographing Boring Places via The Photographic Eye Shared

Linking Supernote and Obsidian

I remember some article telling how a company was constantly hitting AWS quotas, because their JSON payload, itself fitting into limits, was put into a string field inside another JSON object, used for communication between servers, therefore all quotes and backslashes were double-escaped as " and , increasing payload size.

String encoding is also the reason why, for example, serde (Rust de-/serialization library) can give you Cow<str> if you don't want extra allocations: when there are no character escapes, a reference to the original input can be passed, but in case we're doing "->" replacements, we need to copy this part of input anyway.
I don't say it's bad, that is how a text format works in common, not only JSON. But if you need to put some arbitrary data into objects, think twice, probably a binary format like , or even custom will be much more efficient for your task.

Also, text formats are basically not suitable for streaming, while loading a big object into RAM is a very bad idea. If it's an array, you can separate objects by newline instead of using JSON's . In other cases, search for a SAX-like library (or smth like "") for your programming language.

Now I won't give a specific example, but I'm sure there are developers doing this: encoding a file with base64 to send it inside a JSON request. Please, remember that b64 bloats payload approximately by 1.33x 1, so you should always either send a file with an additional HTTP request or use multipart form data type. Oh, or encode your objects with a binary format. Last two options are OK when you're working with small files and insist on doing everything in one request, otherwise upload data in different reqs in parallel.

1 formula for base64 string length is:
4 * ceil(originallength / 3)

Another example of "how definitely NOT to do" is Piped (privacy frontend for YouTube), on some API endpoints it provides a nextpage object, containing session info used to request the next page for a channel, a playlist, search results or comments, and the problem is that it's a JSON object put inside a string as explained above: "nextpage":""url":"https
Even funnier, there are body field inside this nextpage object that contains another JSON object, encoded in base64, so there are 3 layers of text format encoding.
And when a client requests the next page, the object is sent in GET querystring parameters, so it gets urlencoded (percent-encoded), resulting in 4 layers!! Idk why browsers don't reject its long ugly URLs.
Everything before querystring is excusable if the internal YT API itself requires such format for a context/session object. Invidious doesn't care about context at all and sends a clean request, if I got it right.

And the most stupid JSON usecase is JWT, I think. It encodes already-plaintext format with base64 (intended for converting binary data to ASCII text the same as in Piped, but we forgave it), moreover, it does this to 2 objects, and stores a token with such a big overhead in cookies.

By the way, want a JSON config in your software Take a look at that is much more convenient for writing by hand.



This weeks tools to better leadership

Fast, yet flexible the demands of your work are best served by modest expectations that unsubscribe from urgency and focus on specific impacts.

Two of the three home healthcare workers helping us let my father-in-law die at home are Black women. He's an asshole, and a fucking racist, whose favorite curse includes the n-bomb.

While I think he's unlikely to drop it in their presence, and very unlikely to call them that, I wouldn't put it past him. His cognitive decline makes that more difficult to assess reliably.

Do I give them a heads-up that it might happen, and encourage them to tell us about it, so we can at least make sure there are unpleasant consequences if he does

If you're Black, and willing to advise if my warning them could be a microagression, I'd be very grateful. Advice from others accepted, too, it just won't be nearly as valuable. Of course.

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE: So you're thinking about getting arrested on purpose

Okay -- looking for some / from the or people who understand kids better than me -- what age is appropriate for a kid to mow a lawn (e.g., a neighborhood kid looking to earn some $$ while someone is out of town for a short time)

is turning to for

NXT SZN

Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory:

In incident response, zeroing in on a single alert might help you track one bad actor but you might miss the bigger pattern.

Read more

So, I touched probably nightshade or similar (maybe eisenhut or similar, bit I think nightshade), and forgot to wash my hands before eating. With my hands of course. Yesterday. What could go wrong

pm me if you want, solicited advice, I am trying to find out if I just wait it out or call the medical Hotline. Obviously Super reluctant to do that.

I have fever, tingling in the mouth, extreme light sensitivity, light nausea, water retention (no peeing) and had in the small hours coming and going delirium like realist repetitive dreams I can't really wake up from.. These last seem to be gone now..

The last hour I felt better so I could do some research, change shirts and bedsheets, and function a bit in general, before I was just under the blankets shivering and dreading light and anything touching my skin.

Ibu and paracetamol don't seem to work as normal with fever. Just sweating and shivering in uneternal darkness.

When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting.
When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting.
When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit.
Now, good luck to you.


When creating a new feature I always start with writing out a document that contains all the details, edge cases and so on. And I'm almost always confident about the design until I look at it the next day and see ways to improve it. Only after a few days of "letting it cook" do I start implementing it.

And even after that I still use to ensure the design is valid.

Give yourself a treat, next time you fuck. Turn your consciousness away from coming and let your gaze wander.

NEW blog, in which I admit to a very embarrassing sexual fault, and explore the difference between coming and letting go.

Gorgeous art by

"I don't think non-ADHD people realize how absolutely special and important it is when they don't make fun of their ADHD friend/partner/family member when that person feels comfortable enough to unmask and fidget, stim, talk in our natural speech pattern, etc. Seriously. Masking is EXHAUSTING and if we trust you enough to be our real selves around you, being kind to us will make us treasure you forever."

3 Top Tips For Writing A Likeable Character In Your Script Or Novel

So, You Want To Write A Likeable Character A genuinely likeable character can be hard to achieve in your novel or screenplay. In the 2020s, most characters in books, TV shows and movies tend to be antiheroes. This is because


My measurements are literally in the middle of small/medium, to the point where I feel stuck with slightly too small/big items, depending on which one I pick.

T-shirt sizes as an example:

Meanwhile I'm at:

Best option I've found so far, is to use pins to tighten clothing where needed, but that doesn't always work :neocatmelt2:

I don't want to spend a fortune on clothes for custom fits either, so ... do I have to learn sewing now :neocatconfused:

"the best career advice I ever got was that every time you do well in your career you're going to get to choose between power and autonomy and you should always choose autonomy" - David Peirce - The Vergecast

I wonder what she meant

Hey Apple nerds (with complete respect):

Is there a way to configure macOS so that clicking an app icon with multiple windows only brings forward the last window with which I've interacted rather than all windows

If I'm in a Teams meeting and I have both the main window and meeting window shoved off to the right 1/3 of my ultrawide display, it always brings the main window over the meeting window. There's other annoyances this would solve as well.

-

"is it a problem to give my only "

Notes Of Encouragement

Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory:

When a friendship is deteriorating, there are often signs.

Posted into The Friendship Doctor

Benefits of Decline Chest Flys

The decline angle emphasizes the lower portion of the chest, which can be underdeveloped in standard flat or incline chest routines.

Flys allow a deep stretch at the bottom of the movement, which activates muscle fibers more fully compared to pressing exercises.

Be careful not to use too many all at once

Another thing I brought along to the show was these little zines I made with information on and - they're hand-written and crudely illustrated, so not the most accessible, but I wanted people to be able to take away something useful.

Not available digitally, but I'm glad people picked them up on the day!

Startup hiring is hard...

Founders / leaders often spend hours grilling a candidate trying to reduce risk, when they'd be better served providing as much context as possible and asking "what kind of engine or structure would you build with this"

Part of this is because people don't understand the limits of pattern matching it's almost always earlier and smaller than you think.

Cliffhangers

Dumbbell Alternating Chest Press

Key form tips for the Dumbbell Alternating Chest Press, which targets the chest (pectorals), triceps, and anterior deltoids while also challenging core stability.

Linking Supernote and Obsidian

This weeks tools to better leadership

Novel communications advances collective missions (untethered, trails, underground). Open platforms maintained, allow many small and mighty moves, building a persistence greater than any one individual.

is about having both a map and a compass, and knowing how to use them to traverse the domain you are working in.

With a compass you will keep direction.
With a map you will know the route to your destination.

tells of creating a health benchmark, example conversations, rubric, of AI alone outperforming AI+doctor in 2025 with decreasing costs Introducing HealthBench: An evaluation for AI systems and human health

When providing estimates, express them in minutes rather than hours. There's a significant difference between perceiving a task as taking 8 hours, which might seem reasonable, and recognizing it as 480 minutes. This method also helps breaking complex task into smaller tasks such as: setting up a project (15m) initializing the repository (10m), or informing the team about the repository (another 10m). Not only do you get more precise estimates, but it also results in a more detailed plan.

People often ask why inconsistency is an issue, and it took me a while to pin point it.
I think it's to do with trust. The more inconsistencies with a belief system, the more untrustworthy someone becomes. It applies to many things too.





Using video for Promotion tiktok videos





Insane Advice