Roman bank offering geo redundance is probably not what I was thinking about this morning.
"italia-south-1 was hit by a volcano yesterday, we are failing over to dalmatia-west-1 until issues are resolved. There may be some latency with obtaining coins today."
I run an authorization service that allows to log-in using magic links and we managed to solve this. First approach was for the link opening GET request to do not log the user in, but to include an HTML page with JavaScript that issued a POST request with a code from the link to log the user in. This worked well for a long time, because email scanners were fetching links from emails with GET requests but did not execute JavaScript on the fetched pages. Unfortunately, some time ago Microsoft tools indeed started to render the fetched pages and execute JavaScript on them which broke the links. What works now is to check if the link is open in the same browser that requested the link (you can use a cookie to do it) and only automatically login the user in these cases. If a link is open in a different browser, show an additional button ('Login as <email address>') that the user needs to click to finish the login action. MS tools render the login page but do not click buttons on it.
The issue that MS tools introduced is broader, because it affects also email confirmation flows during signups. This is less visible, because usually the scanners will confirm emails that the user would like to confirm anyway. But without additional protection steps, the users can be signed up for services that they didn't request and MS tools will automatically confirm such signups.
Well for monetization, take all of the below with a grain of salt because my books only pay for themselves right now. My primary work is programming, so I'm by no means making a living off my writing!
The common advice I hear that resonates with me is to write "the most to-market book of your heart". If your _primary_ goal is money, it may be worth writing in a genre you know makes lots of it.
That's romance. Romance sells. Personally, I wanted to write sci-fi, but I also wanted to sell, so I write sci-fi romance. You don't _have_ to write romance to make money. I hear Thrillers is another popular category. I'm confident you can make it in pretty much any genre you choose, some might just take longer.
Genre fiction often has quite well-defined reader expectations. The trick is to figure out what readers expect in your chosen genre and then write that. A good bet is reading in the genre. Find other books that are doing well (Amazon and other retailer top-100 categories are good for this) and use them as examples. Watch out for outliers in the top-100 lists, though. Some authors are just so popular that their books will sell even if they're off market. I bet if Ruby Dixon released an off-market book, she'd be a best seller regardless. So it might be good to focus on high-to-mid-list authors who are not _huge_ staples but nevertheless consistently sell well.
I recently read a book called "7 Figure Fiction" by T. Taylor who talks about the concept of "Universal Fantasies": things that make a reader _feel_ something acutely when they read it. In Narnia, the fantasy of stepping through a closet and into a completely new world just invokes something in you. Just the thought of it kind of gives me goosebumps! Portal fantasy readers want that scene that makes them feel that. In sports romance, _something_ about having the main character wearing their love interest's jersey invokes an acute positive feeling in a reader of that genre. I bet if you read a bunch of sports romances, most of them will have that kind of scene. For the craft side, learning to recognize and put in those kinds of "Universal Fantasy" scenes can be helpful.
Then there's the marketing, which I suck at but which is unfortunately very important. One of the first things you'd want to do is start a newsletter. You can write a short "reader magnet" (can just be a short story or novella), sign up for BookFunnel, and use it to collect email addresses of potential readers. If you don't go with a reader magnet, you should _at least_ write something like a bonus scene that you offer readers at the back of your first book in exchange for a signup to your NL.
Once you do decide your genre and work out the technicalities of KU vs wide etc, before publishing you probably want to give away advance review copies of your book. Readers are more likely to click on your book if it has a star rating, so having early reviews of your new release can be very helpful. There are places that can help with this (Booksirens, Booksprout, etc), and you can also build a private ARC team (using something like your newsletter, or joining relevant FB groups where you can invite people to sign up for free early review copies).
If you listen to podcasts, there are _lots_ of author podcasts out there. One that I really liked is Six Figure Authors. They are on an indefinite hiatus now, but have a huge back catalogue of great episodes. The highlight of the podcast for me was Lindsay Buroker, a very prolific author who writes high fantasy and sci-fi. I think she dabbles in romance as well, but that wasn't her primary genre.
Yes, it's limiting, but that's because anything outside of that definition of life would be purely speculative. On the other hand, we not only have an example model of how life can work, but reason to believe that other forms of life may be similar. Both carbon and oxygen have relatively unique traits that make advanced life possible without extreme inefficiency or spontaneous combustion.
Why isn't there life that relies on other gases like fluorine chlorine to perform oxidization? Besides the fact that oxygen is presently far more abundant than those other gases, oxygen (specifically dioxygen or O2) has very interesting and important characteristics; it has a highly energetic double-bond that's easier to break apart than other similar molecules, and it has both a stable state (triplet ground) and a highly reactive state (singlet). Without getting into the weeds, this has to do with the quantum property of the "spin" of its electrons. Life, including the human body, uses some neat tricks to be able to transport oxygen and switch it to be highly reactive where it's needed, particularly in the Krebs/TCA cycle. If oxygen didn't have both a stable and a reactive state (while being the same molecule!), it would either be a less effective oxidizer or be too reactive to be safely transported biologically, let alone to be exposed to. So there's reason to search for life in parts of the universe we know to have oxygen – it's really an amazing molecule.
Carbon might be more replaceable than oxygen (IMO), but even it so far seems to have the most advantages to life in contrast to other molecules, from what I understand. I'm sure someone will correct me on this (which I absolutely welcome!), but carbon is advantageous for life because it is almost an opposite of oxygen; it will accept multiple bonds with other molecules but doesn't need those bonds so badly that it needs to steal electrons from other molecules (oxidization) or go out of its way to lend its electrons, causing a redox reaction. It's a chill ass molecule that's really good for being a building block for far more complicated molecules.
Now let's talk about water. It's actually a really good solvent and can dissolve a wide range of substances, thus making it effective as a carrier of many things. Water is a polar molecule due to the way it has an oxygen end and a hydrogen end (think of the way an H20 molecule is normally represented as being triangular), which allows it to interact with other polar molecules (including other water molecules) and reject nonpolar molecules. At the same time, it's capable of interacting with some nonpolar molecules. By being polar, it forms hydrogen bonds with other molecules. These properties are important for things like the creation of proteins, for example. Water is also a side effect of organic chemistry; both respiration and the actual burning of organic material results in CO2 (and other carbon molecules) and water. Water stores heat very well, and temperature may be an inherently limiting factor to where organic life of any kind can thrive. Oh yeah, and it also has a neutral pH. Though it doesn't conduct electricity on its own, a solution of a water and an electrolyte allows it to conduct electricity. The ability to create balances of electrolytes is another critical use of water in organic life.
I'm missing a bunch of things, but the picture I'm trying to paint for you is that molecules such as water, carbon, and oxygen, aren't simply replaceable in the only example of life that we know of. Their role isn't by mere happenstance, but because they have inherent advantages over their alternatives.
Searching for life elsewhere in the universe is an expensive endeavor. While we shouldn't be close-minded to other models of life, searching for life similar to our own is simply more efficient from a logical perspective. It would be one thing if Earth was the only object circling a star that has these important molecules, but we know that it's not.
Something to consider is just how similar life is on our own planet. We like to think of some animals like octopuses as "alien", and while they are indeed strange in many ways, they still share properties with other animals. Take for instance the fact that octopuses have two eyes, just like other animals; in fact, the vast majority of animals have two eyes. Even spiders, which have more than two eyes, usually have eyes arranged in two rows, and many spiders have two eyes that are more dominant than the others. Eyes have evolved multiple times independently in the tree of life. While it's an interesting idea that extraterrestrials might have multiple eyes, there's reason to believe that, if we were to meet extraterrestrials that evolved on a similar planet to Earth, they would feature two eyes. Although we might not completely understand why evolutionary pressure hasn't widely promoted more than two eyes, it still appears to have an inherent advantage. This same line of thinking is why scientists have focused on searching for life similar to our own; there are properties to our form of life that are based on environments and traits that have inherent advantages. The evidence suggests that the way our life has arranged itself isn't merely a jumbling of various things that happen to function together.
I highly recommend getting into classical literature. It is incredible and beyond conception — I had a light scattering in my education, but only later and recently have I discovered how incredible it can be.
Suggested Reading for beginners:
* Life of Pythagoras, by Iamblichus
* The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Numenia (specifically, translation by Robert Graves)
* Life of Alexander by Plutarch
* Education of Cyrus by Xenophon
* Parmenides by Plato
Also, I have found SHWEP.net to be invaluable for a gentle yet rigorous guide through many classics, though it takes an esoteric bent (which I love)
For anyone who is upset with the performance of their dishwasher there is a really really easy thing to try.
First, replace your pods with a box of powder detergent, then add some detergent to the prewash cup on your dishwasher in addition to the normal dispenser. If your dishwasher doesn't have one you can just put some on the door before you close the washer. This gives your dishwasher detergent to work with on two of its cycles rather than just one and in my experience it makes all the difference on really difficult dishes.
The pods are effectively identical to the powder detergent but at a huge cost premium and don't give you the ability to adjust your amount of detergent to match the water hardness in your area which can result in a film on your clean dishes.
Alternatively you can test this by just throwing an extra pod in the bottom of the dishwasher to start with. If it works well then you can consider switching to powder to save costs.
If the Santa Clause is null and void in your belief system, other Clauses, including the Presents Clause, remain in force to the fullest extent possible.
The thing is that it is a pretty easy to solve problem. Print advance copies with a QR code that contains a link to the publisher's site with a GUID in the params. The publisher would have a page, authenticated with the GUID, with authenticated links to private review pages. This allows for knowing the person had the advance copy. Just that line will kill 95% of review bombing. You can also use the publisher side to collect analytics on books before retail.
Why am I telling you this? It's a not-half-bad B2B startup one could MVP over a week or so and your first publisher could get you in the door with the review sites who would love to have verified reviews.
To build in the brewing part, before it was replaced by hops, it was the plant that gave its name "Bilsenkraut" to the city of Pilsen. So not just occasionally used, but significant enough that places where named for it
This article was from 2015 and debunked at the time. Both "starring" and "hollow heart" are known conditions in homegrown watermelons. This is what an under-pollinated watermelon looks like if you grow it yourself in non-ideal conditions: https://imgur.com/gallery/YPojgFh/ - watermelon flowers should be pollinated at least 8 times(!) per flower to grow a proper watermelon [1].
While not an expert, a quick search suggests that "starring" happens when the watermelon isn't exposed to enough pollen. "Hollow heart" may be due to excess water or nitrogen (though probably also pollen[2]). Both combinations seem possible and as a casual gardener I'm not even sure they're distinct. Commercial watermelon operations control for this. Google "starring watermelon" for dozens of examples.
As Reddit later pointed out other contemporaneous examples of watermelons look fairly modern: https://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv
edit: Apologies for not seeing Vox later issued a bad correction to the original article at the end. Reddit was divided into three camps saying these watermelon's were under-watered, under-pollinated, or underripe. The "correction" only addressed the "underripe" claim. Vox states Stanchi's watermelons are not underripe - while technically true - they don't address that they are not under-pollinated or under-watered.
[3] The more "webbing" a watermelon it has the more it was pollinated, the sweeter it is. That and more watermelon tips here: https://imgur.com/gallery/SN8jl
It's used in parts of Latin America by thieves to rob people. They become delirious and detached from reality and will do whatever the thieves want.
Circe also used it in the Odyssey to turn Odysseus's men into pigs. Odysseus prevented succumbing to Circe's poison by taking galantamine from the flowers of Galanthus nivalis, which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. Galantamine counteracts the effects of anticholinergics by inhibiting the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine.
> The Haber process,[1] also called the Haber–Bosch process, is an artificial nitrogen fixation process and is the main industrial procedure for the production of ammonia today.
> Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber–Bosch process.[59] Thus, the Haber process serves as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018.[60]
This story has been going around the world for 50 years, and in different variations. According to some sources, the first time it appeared in a publication in USA in 1958, in the professional magazine "Meat and Game" of the California Associations of Game Producers (proven fact). The authenticity of the story, however, is questionable.
The FAA has at its disposal a unique device for measuring the strength of aircraft windshields, in case of a collision with birds at high speed (which happens not so rarely). This device is a powerful pneumatic cannon that shoots a chicken carcass into the windshield of an airplane at a speed approaching the cruising speed of a civilian aircraft (for jet aircraft, this is approx. 800 km/h, for piston engines in the 1950s this figure was probably smaller, maybe 400-500 km/h). According to the theory, if the glass can withstand a collision with a chicken at such a speed, then it should all the more withstand a real collision with a bird in flight.
A certain British engineering company developing high-speed trains borrowed this gun from the FAA to test the strength of the windshield of its
a new high-speed train. The cannon was brought to England, installed at the landfill, loaded with a chicken carcass and fired at the prototype train.
The result exceeded all expectations: the chicken broke through the glass, broke the back of the driver's seat and got stuck in the back wall of the car. The British sent test results to FAA and asked them if they had done everything correctly and if the gun was hitting too hard. After studying the description and consequences of the test, the answer was sent by telegram immediately: "Next time, defrost the chicken."
Former PR & Ad agency owner here. Better to release on Thursday if you care about external impact. Better to release on Friday if you are concerned with internal impact.
Something many in business don't understand is Friday is the start of the weekend news cycle. If whatever bed news happens is released on Friday, and it is juicy, it will end up kicking around on weekend news shows, Sunday talk shows, Sunday print newspapers (which still matter in some large markets), and as a bonus, will cycle into the next week's news via follow ups. The reason to release on Friday is simple: you have the weekend to communicate with your key managers and do internal damage control (even if that is just keeping the team productive). For some CEOs, you turn off the phone, and go hit the Yacht for the weekend and hide. If you release bad news on Thursday, you'll potentially have less coverage, but have to be very adroit with your internal communication with employees. For CEOs that can't handle bad news, Thursday releases are really bad...
If you ever come to London I would highly recommend a visit to that area[1]. take the district line to "Temple" and walk into temple court. This is a set of interconnecting pretty courtyards surrounded by buildings used as offices for lawyers working at the nearby high court. These courtyards have a feel similar to an Oxford/Cambridge college and have been used as settings for "Harry Potter" and other films (to give you a flavour). As you wander through, eventually you will come across a statue of two knights on the back of a single horse, symbol of the templars[2]. Next to this is the Temple Church[3], with its distinctive round medieval tower where the templars themselves are buried. This is a lovely place to listen to concerts etc. I used to deliberately get the tube to temple every day so I could walk through this area to work because it's really lovely.
Kind of a fun hybrid where AI is clearly dominant in an established solar system, but it ends up being impossible to miniaturize the enormous supply chain necessary to fabricate microprocessors, so to colonize a new solar system it actually ends up being necessary to send self-replicating carbon-based humans who will then bootstrap the industrial supply chain necessary for AGI.
(repeat ad infinitum for the rest of the galaxy, humans live only on the frontier)
* Isak's vision of his family picnicking at the end of Wild Strawberries (1957), where a man finds peace in his journey through the memories of his life
* Hidetora walking out his burning castle in Ran (1985) amid a battle amid his two eldest sons for supremacy, his plan to divide his kingdom among his three children having come to a disastrous end - a man realizing his children (and humanity in general) are more horrible than his naive dreams of unity could sustain.
* Two scenes in The Cranes Are Flying (1957): a montage of Veronika's beloved dying in battle (he falls as his soul seems to ascend bc the camera angle) while she goes about her life; Veronika finding out Boris is dead for sure at the train station, giving the flowers intended for Boris to the returning men and their families, and then she sees the cranes above Moscow - hope and renewal.
* In I am Cuba (1964): a martyred revolutionary, a student, is carried through Havana as the whole city stops what they're doing to honor him, solemnly, cigar-factory workers and all.
* In Andrei Rublev (1966), there's an extended sequence where a bellmaker's young son agrees to pour a bell for a local lord. You see the entire process of making the mould and pouring the metal. It has a town-fair atmosphere. But at the end, there's tremendous pressure on the young bellmaker to have the bell ring properly and have no cracks. And it does. The protagonist, the lapsed monk Andrei Rublev, regains his faith, seeing the result of the young bellmaker's hope. (I've shared this a few times on this website.)
* At the end of L'Ecclise (1962), the two lovers decide to meet the next day but they don't. Instead, we see thirty shots of the empty city - a devastating way to get to the heart of loneliness and lack of connection in modern life.
Fresh garlic contains alliin (two Ls, two Is) and alliinase. Cutting or crushing garlic mixes the two, which starts a chemical reaction that turns them into allicin. Allicin has an incredibly powerful flavor--it's overwhelming, even. Jarred garlic has lots of allicin and there's not really anything you can do to prevent it. To prevent the chemical reaction, you prevent the alliin and alliinase from mixing, and to do that, you keep the garlic whole. I honestly don't think that choosing a different brand or different method of preparation is going to get you any advantages here, this is just how garlic works.
This chemical reaction explains why every method of preparing garlic tastes different. If you use a sharp knife and cut garlic into thin slices, you'll get less allicin and once you cook the garlic, it will be more sweet. The sharp knife doesn't crush as much of the garlic's cell walls. If you crush garlic in a press, the chemical reaction happens at just about maximum speed, and you get a very pungent garlic flavor.
This chemical reaction evolved as a defense mechanism against animals who would eat the garlic bulb. Bulbs in the same family--onions, garlic, shallots, scallions, etc--basically engage in chemical warfare. Humans (and certain other animals) have a number of adaptations which allow use to eat these foods anyway.
For side projects intended to generate income, base it on market research.
- Ensure there's demand. Go on google and type in your problem or solution, are there a lot of results and ads? If yes, there is demand. If the top results are poorly made blogs with only adsense for monetization, there might be a problem. If there are literally no competitors, drop the idea immediately.
- No moat. For solos your priorities are inverted to VCs, pick a market that's easy to attack with lots of competitors where you can be the 50th. Ideally the market is somewhat niche, so it will be overlooked by larger companies.
- It's hard to compete with big companies as one person, but you can turn weakness into strength by offering a product that is simpler and easier to use (ie. fewer features) unbundle instead of bundle.
Totally with you there. "Useless use of cat" is usually good practice, not bad.
It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the front what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass it through a pipeline. There is no need to read ahead to find out what the source material is.
It's safer - "cat" is a read-only operation, once you've written that command up-front there is no longer a risk of overwriting the original file with a typo in the rest of the pipeline.
It's simpler to construct and nicely orthogonal to the rest of the pipeline - you can write the "cat" and then season the rest to taste (as you suggested).
I will occasionally remove cat from a very heavily-used loop, but as a default style it's fine.
> and something I found peculiar is that pretty much all of them seem to be using hard drugs and consume excessive amounts of alcohol on the regular.
Former barkeeper here. The thing is, hospitality in general is an incredibly stressful job, it's not just limited to restaurants, but anything involving hostels, hotels, motels, restaurants, bars, discos or event venues:
- the wages usually suck, although the post-covid crunch has seemed to improve the situation.
- a lot of employers outsource the operational risk on their staff by having customers tip them instead of providing an actual living wage.
- in low-class places, the clientele is just trashy (think needles in the urinals or regular brawls levels of trashy). In higher-class places, the clientele is incredibly entitled. Think of "Karen complaining at Walmart" memes, make it 100x worse, and you get the expectations that customers have. Both can be incredibly exhausting.
- the employment conditions suck, many places are horribly understaffed, shift lengths are insane and breaks are rare. And in places where the designated smoking space for employees and customers is the same, customers usually seem to think that it is okay to order a beer while you're still out for a smoke.
- related to the two above points is anything involving alcohol. Many venues don't have dedicated security, which means you are the one who now either has to drag out a confrontational drunk moron, call the police or keep a crowd of people smoking outside quiet enough that the neighbors don't call the police on you. Not fun.
- anything with gambling present always has the associated side effects: thieves, robbers, people who lost their money and now want to trade their last possessions in the vain hope of winning the jackpot, or people who react aggressively to being out of money. Personally, I've been stolen from, I've been robbed, I've been offered anything from likely-stolen phones over marijuana to blowjobs, and I've seen someone bash in the screen of a one-armed bandit with his head, requiring an EMT and police.
- the equipment is often enough horribly complex (artisanal coffee machines), incredibly brittle to operate or requires excessive amounts of deep cleaning simply to keep it somewhat healthy (McDonald's ice makers). Unfortunately, customers aren't really accepting when stuff is broken down. They want their McFlurry. Like, right now. And they'll scream as long as they want until they get their McFlurry. And you're not allowed to kick these entitled arseholes out.
- moments of actual appreciation (beyond a tip) both by managers and customers are rare. For people who require external validation for their mental health, they are in for a hard time.
- managers are reluctant to give their poorly paid staff the power to eject people from the premises out of a fear of bad Google/Yelp/FB reviews. The results are Karen-meme people.
- Places with kitchens... oh well, these are a nightmare in itself. Everyone is shouting all the time, the machinery is loud, the cooking processes create a lot of noise, heat and smells, the ventilation is more often than not a joke which makes all the issues worse, you have a hard time moving around because everything is cramped, half the machines aren't really designed to be ergonomical, and a lot of stuff is inherently dangerous (sharp knives, pans, fryers, freezers, gas flames).
- The working hours can be a real kick in the nuts. Basically you work when everyone else does not: late in the evening, on weekends, on public holidays, at night. And unlike police, utilities, public transport or EMTs your average hospitality job is not unionized, which means employers get away with a lot of insanities: double shifts, day-evening-night-day-evening-night rotations that completely wreck with your sleep schedule, manipulated time sheets to avoid trouble when the authorities come to inspect, no healthcare or other benefits...
The result of all that stress is that people have to cope with it. And most do that by drugs. Some like me smoke, some drink, some use cocaine or similar stuff simply to have enough energy to make it through the shift. And some turn to sex, the industry is fucking like rabbits.
"italia-south-1 was hit by a volcano yesterday, we are failing over to dalmatia-west-1 until issues are resolved. There may be some latency with obtaining coins today."