John BS @johnabs@qoto.org

@barefootstache Well I've already got the momentum, I'm just gonna keep it going 😉

I've lost 15lbs (~7kg) in ~1.5 weeks from not being able to eat due to having my wisdom teeth pulled out and having some complications. I'll take it!

I've been trying to lose weight for a while, and being hungry is better than dry socket pain (literal agony 💀) or infection (potential agony 😂). If I keep it up until my holes are healed up as planned, I'll be able to buy those second hand tweed suits and jackets I've been eyeing for a while on eBay 🤤

@vicgrinberg The Dutch really excel at commuter bikes (and bikes in general), but I'm glad I got an ebike due to the hills in my area, as there's no way my prior beater bike's crappy gearing would let me get up the hills, but this makes it much more manageable.

And thank you very much for the well wishes! 😄

@vicgrinberg I just got a gazelle and I'm loving it! I've not been able to ride particularly far yet due to surgery issues, but I'll be riding it to and from work once the semester starts! Good job fellow bike buddy 💪 (bro? benefactor? pick an alliterative "b" word of your choice, lol)!

@freemo @trinsec @jimvernon

I more or less agree with freemo (with some big caveats), but I want to add some context and potential solutions:

Assume that each job has a set of requirements that we'll call {R}, and for each unique {R} there exists a real value produced when a person that meets those requirements is employed there, called V. Thus, for the set of all jobs {J} there exists the set of all requirements for all jobs {{R},{R},{R},...} and values produced {V}, and people are compensated for a portion of V they provide to the company by doing the work.

If we assume that requirements are correlated to someone's intelligence (again, *assume* is the key word), even if we also assume that jobs are distributed IDENTICALLY to the intelligence distribution, freemo has a point.

Namely, there may exist jobs with values of V that fall below the minimum wage, M. If this is the case, those jobs must be collected and extended such that their values V > M; however, this necessarily expands the set of requirements for these now hybridized jobs (or {R1}+{R2} => {R1+R2} for all jobs where V<M).

Thus, if the minimum wage is raised too high (or alternatively, there are too many applicants with insufficient requirements for the lower end of the requirements distribution), we risk creating a class of unemployable people as a vertical line moves left to right along the bell curve chopping the lower end off completely. A great example of this in the intelligence space was what the US discovered when they relaxed their IQ requirements when training soldiers for the Vietnam war, and why those IQ requirements were reinstated. Unfortunately, that means that 10%(not sure of the actual stat here, but I think it's close) of the populace in the US is "not fit for military duty", and in that case, there are vanishingly few jobs for which they will provide value and thus be employable.

Now, there are a lot of assumptions baked in here, and I don't think this outcome is the *right* one. There are a lot of screwy things going on right now with the asinine "'growth' at all costs" mentality (and the private equity firms that accompany it) currently plaguing our economy and as a result vulnerable people are marginalized. I am of the mind that "Welfare Capitalism" that was pioneered by early GE and other US companies can and should become the more popular method of economic growth and stability, as it was what provided the conditions of the 50s and 60s, and that everyone should be able to find work. With that being said, in our current economic environment, and without substantial changes to it, I have to reluctantly agree with freemo.

@trinsec Good to know: don't go to Belgium...except maybe for the waffles? 😂
We have a few of those steep hills here in central pIndiana, but not nearly as bad as certain places around the States.

@trinsec A few miles, probably not much by your standards, but if you've never biked in the Midwest US, you may not know those few miles tend to be harrowing 🙃

@trinsec Mine is also Gazelle! I only got the electronic version because I live pretty far from work and there are some icky hills and times when I'll have to keep up with cars because 'Murica...hence the jealousy 😑

@trinsec HEY! I just got a cool Dutch e-bike and I wanted you to be the first person I told (aside from my wife who okayed the purchase, and my mom who kept me on the phone while I drove out to pick it up...but they don't count lmao). ITS SO NICE, and now I'm even more jealous of your country. If you have any tips or tricks for your fancy Nederlander bikes, please lemme know, otherwise if this was weird, you can also tell me that and I'll stop 😂

@jradavenport Oh buddy, you've officially rustled my jimmies with this one.

The university claims to pay us X dollars which includes the so-called "tuition waiver"; however, we never see this money and STILL have to pay fees for tuition (it doesn't even cover all of it) even when I'm an in-state vs out-of-state student. Thus, in the past I was making "60k" as an out of state graduate student (take home pay was equivalent), whereas now I only make "26k" since I lived in the state for long enough to qualify, and yet I still have to pay the same out of pocket "tuition" fees as everyone else.

Secondly our health insurance is bloody atrocious which I suppose is a uniquely American problem, but still, you'd think a university with a multi-billion dollar endowment and nearly 50000 total students on campus could negotiate better plans.

But the best part, the absolute *best* part, was when they had the audacity to tell me that because of a registration error (which was not under my control) that the burar's office was going to claw back every red cent that they paid me and invalidate any insurance claims, despite not a single person informing me about the apparent credit discrepancy impacting my "full time student status" despite working well over the number of hours I would need to qualify in terms of credit hours. And, of course, this was the same year they accidentally fired me.

I value my education, and I appreciate my advisor and his funding of a majority of my work immensely, but the university money vacuum is a cancer on the ass of society and I want it fixed yesterday.

@zpartacoos If I may make a minor note that I've found helpful: you need not accept suffering, only pain. Pain is inevitable, suffering is a result from how we react to pain. This is a useful stoic principle, in my opinion.

You can do this, and if you're having issues with recurrent infections, particularly respiratory ones, I can recommend a HEPA/P100 PAPR. They're expensive, but you can build one yourself for cheap and look like daft punk when you go outside....which I can no longer find the video of, but it was on "the thought emporium" youtube channel/instagram. Look up DIY PAPR if you don't want to drop $1500 for one 😅

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody

Indeed, the thing is, a) I'll be a postdoc as I'm currently completing my PhD, but b) most academic papers and even courses are currently taught primarily in English, apparently. I'll still learn the language and check employment requirements, but since they require an IELTS score of 6 for students to attend, I suspect this will be the case. Additionally, it's always nice to have the token "native English speaker", as we're really good at proof-reading and editing papers (I know from experience in Taiwan, Korea, and from working with my non-native English speaking colleagues 😅 )

As for the niceness, even if people are reserved, that's fine as long as they're not outright mean or exclusionary, lol.

As for regulations, I wish we had more, lol. Though we may need to get another dog, although my wife works from home, so Freyja doesn't get too lonely :)

@freemo Back-in-time debugging (not really exclusive to AST based languages, but it apparently only exists in CL and maybe smalltalk), stickers for capturing output FROM THE EDITOR (without modifying the code itself directly), and semantic navigation are really only possible with AST based languages, unless you leverage tree-sitter as an intermediate which isn't always accurate.

All I'm saying is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0EZobdiJ4M

(Replace "still real" with "beautiful"...couldnt' find a better fitting meme 😅)

@freemo Please consider the following: sometimes function follows form, but aesthetics != form.

Take me for example: I'm not that pretty, but my wife still loves me because I get stuff done! Sometimes attraction ends up becoming an acquired taste...and I've made my peace with that 😭 😂 😂

@freemo Use Clojure with Datomic/Datalog (or if you want simpler, an isomorphic web framework may fit the bill)!

1. Clojure has plenty of full stack frameworks, and there are great resources I can link on recommendations (Macchiato is a great looking framework). Additionally, it's very easy to spin up on AWS, which makes it quite convenient.

2. Datomic/Datalog is a query language that allows querying based on "facts" and "rules", which can deduce new facts from known facts. Conveniently, many of the syntactic structures in datalog are highly sugarable and allow for compact queries, as compared to their SQL counterparts, though both database methods are (more or less) equivalent. I would seriously check this one out, even if you don't end up using it :3

3. You could also consider common lisp weblocks (or similar, there are others), which is an isomorphic web framework which makes a lot of things really nice and convenient both for writing and debugging! I personally plan on using this once my startup gets more off the ground and we get into the web dev phase, at least if I can get a few more devs on this in the mean time 😭

Anyway, that's my two (three?) cents, don't spend them all in one place 😂

@KorinnaAllhoff If you don't mind me asking:
a) What language did you use?
b) Did you use any linters/static analyzers?
c) (the long shot) would you consider a different language if it had a better debugger?

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody Well I'm glad to hear the people are nice (hopefully by American standards, lol)! My wife and I don't regularly eat out or get coffee (we tend to cook most of our meals, snacks, and coffee/tea etc) so I'm not super worried about that, but I've seen rent/mortgage prices as well as grocery prices be rather high, though I've only looked in the cities.

We're enamored with the trains especially, and I'm sort of hoping that if I get a job in the city that I can just commute via train, rather than needing to worry about the cost of living in the metropolitan areas. Do you happen to know if there's a difference between the population centers and the rural areas, as in America, or are prices fairly homogeneous across the country?

I'm still working on picking a language to learn (probably will pick german, as french is impossible for me to pronounce, and if I learn Italian my in-laws will never leave me alone, lol), but it's good to know that English is pretty popular.

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody We personally love the rain, if that's what you mean by poor weather. Do you have any opinions on Switzerland? There are a few universities there in my field of interest (in Zurich and Geneva), and it seems their train system is excellent, but I've yet to have the chance to visit Europe so I don't have any first hand experience (though we're planning on visiting soon since my wife just got her passport renewed!)

@Paulos_the_fog @glynmoody

If wanting to accommodate people that exist outside of the norm (e.g 95th percentile and up or 5th percentile and below) is equivalent to expecting everyone to behave abnormally, then I suppose you're right.

But those two things are not the same. To analogize my understanding of your point, it's like saying that advocating for handicapped parking spaces is the same as advocating for parking lot inflation where all buildings are circular with a single row of parking so everyone can park equally close. All I've been saying is that people should have accomodations available if needed, nothing more.

But regardless of your initial point, my wife and I are planning on moving to Europe once I finish my PhD specifically for public transportation and accessibility reasons because she cannot drive and I have to chauffeur her everywhere because the US isn't built for people like her. And we're willing to give up our very comfortable car (among other things) to do so.

I want to live in a place where she can move freely and go where she wants to safely rather than somewhere with the expectation that everyone must drive, but our public infrastructure/transportation is basically non-existent in most of the country, and unhygienic/poorly maintained in the rest of it.