I never understood articles trying to put objective criteria on a system that’s as much a function of supply and demand as any inherent ability. Most companies have set percentages for titles and promotions, regardless of actual abilities.
That's a good point. I imagine this advice would be actively bad advice for building more complicated things (e.g. an IDE, perhaps a game, a turbotax alternative).
Part of the skill of engineering is knowing when you need to do upfront engineering and when you can just throw some code at the wall.
Eh, the more I think about it though the more I can think of times that "Going by my gut" when my brain and gut disagreed where my gut was wrong.
Like suppose you're talking to somebody over text and your gut says they're being an asshole, but your brain is rereading what they say and can't find anything specific to call out.
Which is correct?
Well, I've found that the gut is systematically unreliable in a number of situations... Are you in a bad mood for example? They say never go food shopping when you're hungry.
Not to say mind > gut, because that's just as stupid as saying gut > mind. The point is that there are dozens of variables (variables like mood) we need to learn in such evaluations, and generalizations can rarely be useful.
Obviously this is baseless speculation, but I sure do wonder if various psychological conditions that are so diverse and hard to pin down (i.e. 3 out of these 9 symptoms around attention, social behavior, or impulse control) are ultimately just going to be proven to be purely biological. And since genetics can only explain less than half of it, it sure seems that something messing with chemical signaling would be a reasonable explanation for the rest.
I've been speculating on industrial pollutants that act as endocrine disruptors for years now, and every so often some evidence emerges. People understandably don't like such mundane explanations when they've built large parts of their identity around the issues it may have caused them though.
You're idea is hardly novel. I've had plenty of people tell me this or that chemical caused me to be trans. I've also spent plenty of time researching possible biological causes of transness. I'm personally open to the idea that maybe there's a biological cause but I haven't found a convincing explanation yet.
The problem is that when I have conversations with people about soy turning me trans or social media turning me trans they are often trying to use that as a way to deny me any agency over my own life.
It's not so trivial as you're making it out it be. But at the same time I agree that if there's a chemical influence, I would not be surprised if it's occuring in utero.
Girls are born with all their eggs, and so a pregnant woman who is having a girl is also carrying half her grandchild.
Now, from what I’ve read before about stress, heavy stress like living in a war zone can produce so much cortisol than it affects the unborn child. Given this, I suspect this could also effect a soon to be born girl’s eggs too!
It's been shown that heavy stress in children can modify the glucocorticoid receptor gene which your brain uses for stress response. The study of this phenomenon is called Epigenetics. It's pretty intuitive once you go one layer deep: stress itself does not change your genome, but stress triggers a hormonal/chemical response which does.
Trans people have been around ages, same as gays and all that. Yet no gay gene discovered.
We know that a living being is just not only DNA, but also its environment; now on top of that add all the big complexity of human social behaviour and gender into it. I doubt they will find a "cause" to trans-ness.
I’m not saying there is evidence that it has the same root cause, or even that there are more trans people now than before (I haven’t seen the numbers), but kids are hitting puberty 2+ years earlier now, probably because of endocrine disruptors.
As a thought experiment, it seems hard to intentionally design a drug that changes what year puberty onset starts at without having some impact on LGBTQ+ prevalence.
There is a theory the gene that increased womens fecundity also turns men in the family gay, for a net positive increase in babies. 2024 Czech study apparently doesnt support it though.
> soy turning me trans or social media turning me trans
I agree is absolutely mind-numbingly naive.
However, I feel like there's only so many options for where sexuality and gender-identity can come from -- and if we know there's no god doing it, and we know it's not entirely learned (because of case studies of surgeons who assigned a gender to babies with ambiguous genitals), the remainder must be from the environment... and it just so happens that almost all of the body's signaling around gender, puberty, and development is chemicals in one form or another.
Combo of tricyclic antidepressant and amphetamines "turned me gayer and gayer" (and gave me the shitters) which reversed a few weeks after I stopped them. My Testosterone was stable throughout those months.
And I just remembered a girl I studied with whose ex-boyfriends turned gay or bisexual post-relationship. Pretty sure it was her gut bacteria.
Completely anecdotal, but I recently did a round of oral antibiotics and afterwards followed up with an expensive probiotic.
It was like $60 a bottle for a 1 month supply, but I was told that oral antibiotics can wreck your gut biome so I figured this was the ideal time to repair/replace the biome I have.
In the 6 weeks since then I've lost ~30 lbs (I am following a diet, of course, this has been wildly successful but intentional in the abstract) and I have more energy, sleep better, and have lost my baseline "snack late at night" urges. Physiologically I do not feel deprived of food, hungry, or tired all the time like I have with previous diets. I've also cut my caffeine intake to almost 1/3rd of its previous amount and I drink more water.
I am sure there's a lot going on beside that, so I am not blaming my progress on the 1 thing by itself, but that being said, it does seem highly coincidental and correlated.
Might be worth a deeper dive, blow out (mostly) healthy people's gut bacteria, replace it with very specific blends, accumulate the data on what changes happen or what people report happening in the 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months 1 year afterward.
They should look on the bright side: eliminating plastic exposure could be a great wellspring of identity. I mean to really avoid them you’d have to make all your food from raw unprocessed ingredients, and then there’s clothing, all the objects you interact with throughout the day, etc.
Edit: expanding a bit more on the idea. DIYing all the stuff you’d need to avoid plastics is a much bigger identity statement than neurodivergent. Tho saying I’ve been subtly poisoned is far less sexy than saying I’m neurodivergent.
Food. It’s food. We are only just beginning to understand the less obvious effects of the modern diet, including all the processing and additives. Much has not been explored, such as is if the abundance of various toxic chemicals at supposedly safe levels has a synergistic effect, for example the many endocrine disrupting compounds with diverse mechanisms. But over the past decade it has become pretty clear that the Gut-Brain relationship is extremely important, including in understanding psychopathology.
Another emerging idea is that much of the negative health trend that’s been progressing extra rapidly since the 90’s is the result of mitochondrial dysfunction, driven by the multifactored (ultraprocessed foods, icides and tives, sedentary lifestyle, the incessant toxin-boosted immune shocks throughout development, possibly even omnipresent modulated emf) assault on our biology. It makes a lot of sense, to me at least, that crippling the source of cellular energy would precipitate seemingly unrelated chronic pathologies. This last paragraph especially is still highly speculative and controversial.
From personal experience I can say a dietary change reduced systemic inflammation for me and had as much of an effect on recovery as medication treatment. The anti-inflammatory diet eliminates foods well-known to cause inflammation in a sizable portion of the population. Out gut micro-biome takes the pharmacokinetics of nutrition even deeper by introducing another layer of breakdown or secretion.
It’s trivial to find studies detailing lower-magnitude negative effects of the things mentioned, but in isolation. As far is I’m aware, the net impact on our biology of the dozens of environmental stressors we face remains to be studied.
That’s what the study concluded, how is it a lie? I don’t see where your first source says they prevent SIDS, it cites some studies that found no effect and one where “The authors concluded that these data support findings of past controlled studies showing that the temporal association between infant vaccination and SIDS is coincidental and not causal.”, so perhaps the reasoning about the findings in the paper I linked are off the mark, but what you linked does not show that the statistics are wrong.
I understand that, and I get that this study doesn’t show that 75% of ALL cases are within 7 days of a vaccination. They found that of mortality that occurred within 60 days post-vaccination, 75% happened within 7 days of a vaccination.
> They found that of mortality that occurred within 60 days post-vaccination,
Of mortality that occurred within 60 days post-vaccination and was reported to VAERS.
I suspect that the vast majority of SIDS deaths that happen a month after vaccination are not in the database.
Looking at the reportable events tables for VAERS, some vaccine-specific symptoms have longer reporting periods but generic symptoms like anaphylactic shock only have to be reported for a couple days.
I heard it’s even worse than this: I heard any app can access a list of wireless access point unique IDs your phone is near and that there is a database of enough of these to lookup your location regardless of settings.
Would love to hear confirmation from an iOS developer
Moreover, even if it was say 15% better than git (and I doubt it is), the overhead of moving a whole industry across VCs is billions of dollars of loss.
Every single engineer has to start over in their mastery experience by learning all the new quirks and issues, and all the tools, libraries, pipelines need to be rewritten.
IMO better to support the dominant tooling than invest in fracturing one of the few areas where engineers can agree on something for once (to everyone's benefit).
The upside with jujutsu though is that it's completely compatible with Git and you can work on the same repository with Jujutsu while your coworkers use Git.
This allows the people who want the 15% gain to have it, while not forcing anyone to do a costly migration.
I know people who really hate git because the UI is so awful, and it’s (theoretically) way more than a 15% gain for them. They’ll get to stop rubbing broken glass against their legs every day.
Git feels like solving puzzles everytime there are branches or collaboration made on a repo.
So every day. Most productive days are when I dont need to use git.
JJ is a workaround for git pains but the UX is not mature enough for replacing git yet.
Having distinct local working copies of same repo per git branch still works great, not stash needed, no conflicts or pain with local wip and drafts changes overwritten by pull.
No blocker for switching branches. No reset hard/soft whatever. And makes files comparisons easier and makes my git workflows easier.
I still feel vcs could be simpler and solved problem if more engineers care about the topic of vcs and generally speaking about the ux of their main tools instead of creating new TUI and plugins to workaround broken ones.
> Every single engineer has to start over in their mastery experience by learning all the new quirks and issues, and all the tools, libraries, pipelines need to be rewritten.
I was a git power user. I became comfortable enough with jj to replace git entirely in one day.
I guess then my thought is that whether it's one disorder or 4 or any number perhaps is best understood as a statistical question.
For example, if a parent exhibit autism symptom X (e.g. trouble understanding emotions), are there kids more likely to inherit symptom X, or ANY autism symptom.
If X is uniquely heritable, then perhaps it's best as multiple disorders. But if X leads equally likely to X, Y, or Z then it's better understood as one disorder.
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