It was hard to tell how he is doing and whether any of these treatments are working, but I sincerely hope for a good outcome for him. He has always seen like a genuinely good person. Cancer sucks.
I am nearing the end, depending on the refinements. The first two weeks I was regretting it, but adjusted quickly. Honestly for me the issue was more that I did not like the way my teeth feel with the trays out (and the rough field of the aligners on the teeth). The eating was not that big of a deal. I have a travel toothbrush and case I keep with me. It has been pretty easy.
Still looking forward to getting the stuff off my teeth.
Thank you, this is the one I recall from my youth (having them around the house). I did not realize there was another one with an almost identical name (this post).
Did we all have a Mandela moment that what we all thought was "The Farmer's Almanac" with the yellow cover actually has OLD in the title? And there is randomly this other farmer's almanac?
Looks like it’s not a case of a fork and but rather of different publishers all trying to serve a common need with a well understood formula. There used to be many almanacs, then there were two, now there is one.
In Italy, where I grew up, my grandparents used to read the Almanacco di Barbanera; the first edition came out in 1762. It is still around https://www.barbanera.it/
My daughter recently moved to Vancouver. I was in Seattle for a work trip so decided to take Amtrak to visit her for the weekend. This was my first real train travel. Overall, it was pretty good and probably is what I will do in the future in the same situation.
The train moved at a frustratingly slow speed (< 10 mph) for probably 30% of the trip, but aside from that I liked the more relaxed atmosphere of the travel and it was overall more comfortable.
The train itself was a bit bumpier than I expected and the wifi was not very good. Those things and the slow speed would mean I could not imagine taking a much longer trip than this one. With the extra time and hassle of dealing with an airport, this one balanced out as probably only being slightly slower travel but it was less expensive and more relaxed. If it were Seattle to San Francisco, as an example, the slowness would be too much for me. The comfort and amenities like wifi and food would have to be a lot better than they are.
I take the Cascades from Vancouver-Seattle semi-frequently for work. On the US side it can run decently fast, but the Canadian side is very slow and if you’re unlucky you can end up waiting for marine traffic at the Fraser river swing bridge for some time.
Still my preferred way to do the trip if the timing works as I can get stuff done whilst on the train. The WiFi is pretty bad - but if you have a cell plan that covers the US and Canada you’ll have coverage for all of the Canadian side, and a decent amount of the US side.
If someone in the US hasn't been in a position to take commuter rail with any frequency in a relatively small number of places--or maybe take Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor sometimes--it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that someone would never have been on anything beyond light rail (if that).
Probably referring to me? I live 2 hours from the closest airport. There are no trains near me. Barely any buses. And I am not counting trains within a city just taking a train to travel between cities.
I do not live that far from an Amtrak station but there is only one train a day, it takes forever, and does not go anywhere that I am typically traveling.
This is shocking and confusing. In the US if you watch HGTV and Mike Holmes, who works in Canada, all they do is talk about how great spray foam is and that is the gold standard. To the point I have had major FOMO for years because I do not have it.
Reading this article and the comments here ... I do not want to think, other than being glad it was too expensive to consider.
Foam is expensive, and thus for the same profit margin (expressed as a percent) there is more money. Foam thus puts a lot of money into shows like that for advertisement.
Closed cell foam is the best insulation - if it is installed correctly. You should want it as it is the best insulation. However the payoff is several decades vs much cheaper insulation and so most people find it isn't worth the costs.
In general, for most houses, putting in the most cheap insulation you can, and then investing in a heat pump is the most bang for the buck and better for the earth than the most foam you can and then using a much less efficient HVAC system (in a new house this is typically what code requires, but there are a lot of old houses with minimal insulation and a terrible furnace).
I have an interest in metal boats. I read a book written in the 1970s by a British author who went to the netherlands to get up-to-date on the best metal boatbuilding methods used by the world's experts. He enthusiastically championed sprayfoam insulation which was being used nearly universally by the dutch at the time. The boats that got sprayfoamed invariably had short useful lives and horrible corrosion problems. It is no longer considered a good insulation method in boatbuilding.
Yeah, reading this from the US, it looks weird. Our house is insulated using closed-cell spray foam installed in the late 1970's, and it has held up perfectly in the time since, in the generally wet and humid northeast U.S. We have continued using spray foam when we make additions and changes, both for consistency and because it seems to work very well.
Something this misses is that the mentality of OSS was just different before GitHub.
The thought from the original growth of OSS was that it would be more about the community than the code. So OSS would be a series of communities that would each have their own "identity" for their community. There were big OSS foundations like Apache and Eclipse. Sun had several like java.net, OpenOffice.org and netbeans.org. Gnome had their own place etc.
Like Sun, other enterprises like HP, Oracle and IBM were setting up their own communities for their projects and to collaborate with partners.
And then as the post touches on there were sites like SourceForge, Tigris.org, Google Code and Microsoft had something too (CodePlex?). These sites were places projects might spin up if they did not belong at one of the other foundations and wanted a place to host their code for free. Of these SourceForge was often used for distribution of binaries due to its vast mirror network and often that was all that was hosted there and the project was elsewhere.
Anyway, until GitHub sprang up and started to consolidate all the OSS in one place, I do not think anyone else was even really trying to do this. Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this. This change fueled the growth of OSS but it did kind of come at the cost of losing out on some of the community aspects that existed before in the mailing lists and forums of these other places. Now collaboration all happens in PR's and Issue and is often just between a small handful of people.
I think this is a good point, and also part of the larger trend of Internet activity moving to centralized providers. Users are now habituated to look for an existing platform to host their content, whether that's video (YouTube/Tiktok), blog posts (Medium/Substack), hot takes (X/Threads) or code (Github). It doesn't even occur to most people that there's another way to do it. They see these companies as just part of the public infrastructure of the Internet.
Because it’s so damn easy. I started contributing to OSS and creating repos on GitHub when I was 16. I was not able (or interested in) managing my own git server; I didn’t have any connections to Apache.org. Sure I could’ve emailed diffs to some mailing list, as I know many people have done for years, but GH is a vastly better experience.
Github was so accessible that it made possible what otherwise would not have been.
The escape path is to demote Github to merely an "officially supported mirror" of your project, with Issues and PRs elsewhere, but ...
The tar-pit I'm afraid of: How do you emigrate Github PR and Issue databases in some format that any of self-hosted Forgejo, or public Codeberg, Gitlab et al understand and can present to visitors?
I understand why companies do this but I sure don't like it. They often use Discourse, which I find to be a lot less readable than GitHub (the design follows what I call "duploification" -- the elements are all large and surrounded by too much whitespace!)
On top of that it's yet another site I have to sign up with if I want to interact with the community.
I'm also mindful of the risks of centralization. Discord and its lack of external archives is a prime example of how that can be harmful. I'm just not sure if that risk outweighs the costs and annoyances.
In the neon-lit, digitized colosseum of the 21st century, two titans lock horns, casting long shadows over the earth. Google and Microsoft, behemoths of the digital age, engaged in an eternal chess match played with human pawns and privacy as the stakes. This isn’t just business; it’s an odyssey through the looking glass of corporate megalomania, where every move they make reverberates through society’s fabric, weaving a web of control tighter than any Orwellian nightmare.
Google, with its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ mantra now a quaint echo from a bygone era, morphs the internet into its own playground. Each search, a breadcrumb trail, lures you deeper into its labyrinth, where your data is the prize – packaged, sold, and repackaged in an endless cycle of surveillance capitalism. The search engine that once promised to organize the world’s information now gatekeeps it, turning knowledge into a commodity, and in its wake, leaving a trail of monopolized markets, squashed innovation, and an eerie echo chamber where all roads lead back to Google.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, the once-dethroned king of the digital empire, reinvents itself under the guise of cloud computing and productivity, its tentacles stretching into every facet of our digital lives. From the operating systems that power our machines to the software that runs our day, Microsoft's empire is built on the sands of forced obsolescence and relentless upgrades, a Sisyphean cycle of consumption that drains wallets and wills alike. Beneath its benevolent surface of helping the world achieve more lies a strategy of dependence, locking society into a perpetual embrace with its ecosystem, stifling alternatives with the weight of its colossal footprint.
Together, Google and Microsoft architect a digital Panopticon, an invisible prison of convenience from which there seems no escape. Their decisions, cloaked in the doublespeak of innovation and progress, push society ever closer to a precipice where freedom is the currency, and autonomy a relic of the past. They peddle visions of a technocratic utopia, all the while drawing the noose of control tighter around the neck of democracy, commodifying our digital souls in the altar of the algorithm.
The moral is clear: in the shadow of giants, the quest for power blurs the line between benefactor and tyrant. As Google and Microsoft carve their names into the annals of history, the question remains – will society awaken from its digital stupor, or will we remain pawns in their grand game, a footnote in the epic saga of the corporate conquest of the digital frontier?
I don't know that this is true, but to even suggest that Microsoft is the component one vs Google really shows how much things have changed in the last 20 years...
Google was never benevolent, no for-profit business is. It was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't be evil" at face value, particularly for an almost completely advertising funded (i.e. highly motivated for enshittification) corporation.
> It was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't be evil" at face value
In my opinion a little bit more care must be taken here:
The "don't be evil" slogan was in my opinion both a blessing and a curse for Google: a blessing in that people initially trusted that Google does not intend to do something evil; a curse in the sense that when they started doing things that were considered "evil", it lead to a massive reputation damage for Google.
I recall that sourceforge gave you an SVN repo and an issue tracker, so it was kind of a hub for running your project. What made GitHub stand out was easy forking, and the pull request code review UI, and slick source history UI. A lot of this was aided by the technical innovation of using git and making git such a central piece.
Yup, this was it for me, GitHub was actually pleasant to use, to browse, PRs were easy, branching was easy, PRs with reviews/comments/etc were a brand new concept, especially as SourceForge and Google Code were hosted only on SVN which constantly fucked up/corrupted data in my experience
The closest thing to PRs that I knew was reviewboard, and that was a bolt on to SVN, not an actual proper integration
> Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this.
I would argue it's the other way around. Mercurial is a better source control system, and was a close contender with git back then. However, GitHub winning the hosting war and also being all in on git is what cemented git as the leader. Bitbucket was hosting both and with a more generous free plan, but they didn't win the social and UX fight so git became the de facto standard since that's what you used on the cool good new platform.
I felt like the kernel using git gave it a lot of credibility. I can't recall any big projects using Mercurial. Trust is especially important for a version control system.
The other thing this is missing is that SourceForge reviewed your project before giving you a place to host it. You also didn’t get a nice URL back when everyone was really focused on having nice URLs (right before GitHub). Those two factors are shallow, but they made a lot of friction that GitHub eliminated.
I think you're overselling it a little bit. At the time the community wasn't as large and it was much easier to "host your own" OSS site and distribute your software directly. There were plenty of important projects that served themselves in this way and didn't rely on a giant corporation's largess to be "hosted."
Also.. aggregators like freshmeat.net used to exist and did a huge amount of work patching these disparate communities and individual sites together into a single cohesive display of "open source."
The market GitHub created was Social Coding and the idea that there were network effects to be gained by having all OSS in one place. This is the same thing that makes it difficult today for OSS projects to move off GitHub. If anything, GitHub deemphasized the "D" in DVCS.
My point, since you replied to my post, was simply that prior to GitHub, none of the other sites for OSS were trying to achieve the same goal. The goal was to establish a specific OSS community for a set of projects. SourceForge was a bit of an outlier in that a lot of projects used their distribution network, if they were not part of a foundation like Apache or Eclipse that had extensive mirrors setup.
SourceForge was never the main development and collaboration site for any of the major efforts happening around OSS.
This is also my issue with pi-hole, I still use it but I lost the password. Every now and then I take a crack at getting back in so I can update it. I have been thinking of switching to NextDNS so I could have blocking everywhere.
Other than this problem, Pi-Hole has always been great
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