Incredible overview of Vim abbreviations, I kind of knew you could do things like this but seeing it in action was great. I've been wanting to try out Luasnip but I realize I can do a large amount of what it offers just with abbreviations!
I feel this. I have been burned over and over again as well. I desire to trust deeply and build real intimacy with friends and colleagues and lovers, and for many years I was very naive. I trusted anyone who told me they were trustworthy.
For me personally, it turned out I have autism (which I didn't realize until age 33), and understanding this helped me understand perhaps why I was being deceived so often.
Generally, I appreciated this article by Malcolm Ocean about his idea of a "Non-Naive Trust Dance". https://malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-t... He suggests that the optimal strategy for trust building is a slow building over time that acknowledges the distrust inherent to both parties rather than naively accepting people at face value.
It feels like I have failed in every way that is possible.
I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing.
During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all.
And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.
Sorry to hear you have suffered, happy to hear you've found peace with how life has treated you. I wouldn't say I'm a deeply spiritual person in any way, but I've seen many people around me find solace in spirituality when going through hardships. What did your path to spirituality or religion or however you'd like to call it look like? How do you look at the world now, or how would you describe what you practice?
Perhaps the most important event of my life was discovering I have autism at age 33. Many things that didn't make sense suddenly did. I pointed my hyperfocus inward to my own mind, at first because I had lost the ability to code and make a living, and wanted to heal my "coding injuries" as I had called them. I had become an atheist at age 20 and primarily had used psychology to try and figure out what was happening.
I studied Buddhism under a mentor and realized that many of the principles applied regardless of your beliefs about cosmology. The idea that all problems humans face can be summarized as "greed, ignorance, and aversion" was a useful frame. These helped me triangulate the ultimate source of my burnout to unmet family expectations that I had for many years tried to live up to but could not. Confronting my family about these expectations and taking responsibility for my own life was absolutely key in my healing.
These days I don't exactly have a set practice but I still live with my mentors. They started a syncretic monastery that welcomes all traditions, and observing the similarities and differences between worldviews has been quite eye opening. The most valuable practice I take from all this is a honed awareness of the root causes of suffering, and I've found that once the root cause is identified, it becomes possible to release it.
This is insightful, thank you for sharing your personal life so openly. How does one go about starting to study Buddhism? I feel like it's a recurring topic that I stumble upon every now and then, but beyond reading up about it myself, it feels a bit impenetrable. I'm already familiar with the general core ideas and such, but applying them seems well out of reach.
Seconding Daniel Ingram, my mentor says that Daniel Ingram's book "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" is a great introduction for a developer-minded person. I haven't actually read it so I can't comment on it, but I learned from someone who gained a lot about Buddhism from that book. Also happy to chat further over email.
It's interesting what hypotheticals, straw men really, that we project in our minds as we read. When he said "doing nothing" I pictured a literally homeless man drifting through life. Such people can certainly "afford" to do nothing. You presumably pictured something different. In any case neither of us is likely imagining what OP has actually lived.
Yes, my goal in sharing my story is not to garner pity but to give hope that it is possible to recover from even great loss and come out on the other side stronger. Blessings to everyone suffering right now.
I like Pelican. It's Python and has been around for forever so I don't have to roll my own. I realized after a while that I was rewriting Pelican for no particular benefit and the things I thought were limitations of the tool were just my inability to see how to interface with it.
There is no benefit whatsoever in me rolling my own tech unless it actually allows me to do something I can't do otherwise, and a lack of imagination has been my biggest limiting factor.
Once I saw this I also stopped trying to reimplement Django from scratch too. But, doing these custom and also abandoned own website rolling projects did teach me a lot about how Django and Pelican work!
Strongly agree. For me the mark of a useful framework is that is reduces the complexity of the task you are trying to do. If it increases the complexity of the task, it isn't the right tool for the job! Choosing the right level of abstraction is the most important part of software engineering.
If all you need is HTTP routing, then Flask is great, but every time I tried to use it for the kinds of things Django is great at (databasing, templating, forms), I had to effectively roll my own crappy version of Django. (Something something every sufficiently large C++ program has a poorly implemented version of LISP embedded into it.)
I saw this dramatically demonstrated by an enormous Flask installation that would have greatly benefited from a little imposed structure. I bounced hard from that gig after being shown the code because it was going to be a massive pain to understand the poorly designed abstractions. But it wasn't even the maintainer's fault - it was pretty good code but it had only been designed by one person, both the abstractions and the business logic. And the abstractions were leaky simply because abstractions are difficult to design.
The framework allows you to completely offload the architectural decisions underneath the framework to many person-years worth of design, bug squashing, and security fixes. How do I add headers to a request? Django has one opinionated way. Where do I put my database models? models.py and if you put them there you don't have to do any connection fiddling.
The ideal of a framework is that if you release attachment to how things you don't actually care about anyway are done, you get thousands of free high quality lines of code.
I have autism and only discovered it two years ago at age 33. I have been intensely researching it.
The book Neurotribes presents a very in-depth picture of the history of autism and the research and theories for the past century.
This is not saying that autism is not real, that it is not a thing to understand, or something that should not be researched. It is only saying that the idea that autism is On The Rise in a terrifying way, that it is something to be feared, is misguided.
As this article says, and as the book Neurotribes explores in depth, autism used to have much more strict criteria for diagnosis. Connor, the leading researcher of autism for much of the 20th century, was convinced autism should only cover the most severe cases, and he did not like the spectrum idea. As time went on and it was realized that many more persons may have some aspect of autism even if it isn't extremely severe led to the DSM making the criteria much looser. The authors of the DSM particularly noted that this may make it seem like the prevalence was increasing when in fact it was simply more widely diagnosed.
The reason for caution of using the term "autism epidemic" is that it spooked many parents into thinking there was a horrible plague afoot, and that it needed to be cured.
My current understanding of it in myself and wider society is that it has always been around, that those on the spectrum hold an important place in society, and that rather than finding a cure (if this is an epidemic) is more important than understanding autism and advocating for services to help those who have autistic children.
This absolutely does not seek to discredit the indeed heroic efforts many parents have gone to to support their children, in fact by being more precise about what is happening the hope is that autistics like myself can have even better outcomes.
I didn't want to engage someone apparently so angry in that direction, but since you took time to respond kindly and share you experience, I will add my comment too.
The centering of autism as being something happening to "the parents" and framing autistic children (or adults, for that matter) as being unable to form human connections or acquiring basic skills is something a large part of autistic people are pushing against.
The #actuallyautistic tag on social media is a good way to find autistic people's experiences regarding that matter.
Something I wish was more widely known is what is being studied as the "double empathy problem", which frames communication issues between autistic and non-autistic people as a two-way misunderstanding, rather than autistic people being handicapped or incapable of social communication.
I am skeptical that all of those people on Twitter are actually autistic and not just self-diagnosed.
Despite having a clinical definition and a defined diagnostic process, autism has become sort of an identity that people celebrate and use in a casual, colloquial way.
People have told me that I could have been diagnosed as autistic because of how I act as an adult, but I didn't have developmental delays. I had a pretty normal early childhood. So I don't identify as that.
So perhaps it's better for parents to leave the term "autism" for people who wish to self-identify that way, and using a different term to describe the thing that happens to their children. Too often they end up clashing over this word, and I don't think it's healthy or constructive for either side.
So maybe the authors of the paper were right, but not in the way they wanted to be.
As a self-diagnosed autistic (dodged a diagnosis as a kid, in hindsight quite good seeing how france in the 80ies had some pretty rough approaches to it) that came to that conclusion at age 40, believing for most of my adulthood I wasn't because "look how many friends I have", the reason people seem to "celebrate" it is that it finally gives context to a lifelong suffering and feeling of alienation.
It's not like it will make your life any easier, since accommodations are scarce to come by, an official diagnosis can come with significant discrimination, and if you made it this far, it doesn't feel like a great way to spend your resources. It however allows me to not only realize that my experiences are shared, but to finally be able to learn strategies and find therapists that are helpful, vs actually aggravating the situation (say, framing you as argumentative and arrogant or schizoid or whatever, when what is going is mostly a communication mismatch).
However, my nephew got diagnosed and it allowed him to find a school that accomodates his cognitive style. He's gone from puking every day and turning into a shell of himself to being back to the bright and happy kid that he is. While in some ways I'm sad I didn't have that opportunity, it makes me so happy to see that the field has made progress exactly by widening its diagnostic net.
> It's not like it will make your life any easier, since accommodations are scarce to come by, an official diagnosis can come with significant discrimination, and if you made it this far, it doesn't feel like a great way to spend your resources.
These reasons and others are why I do not believe the rise in autism is due to a change in diagnosis. There are very few incentives to getting a diagnosis and so many obstacles. It also doesn't take into account that many autistic children have their diagnosis dropped as adults.
Diagnosis criteria have definitely gotten broader, and plenty of adults go through with it (I probably will) just to not feel self-conscious about the "self-diagnosis" thing. There is a lot of upsides to framing yourself as autistic, as it makes navigating the world so much easier. These better diagnosis standards, along with better accomodations for autistic people (vs just brutally forcing them to conform) is what made life so much better for my nephew, for example.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts despite me clearly having my feathers ruffled a bit.
Do you mind sharing, if you were formally diagnosed with autism? And did you have any developmental delays as a child? If so, how did your parents deal with those?
Based on what I've seen from friends and family with autistic children, and how their lives and family dynamics diverge so drastically from the established well-trod tracks of parenthood traveled for centuries, looking incomprehensible to outsiders, I don't believe it's possible for the current rates of autism to have been constant throughout history. There would have been some similar phenomenon to autism parenting known to us (though not necessarily by that name).
Yes, I've heard him say in a few places in his videos that he gives his blessing to this fork and encourages its use over his own repo for that exact reason.
The cool thing about this is that it shows you can open source stuff and have people use it, but you don't have maintain the project.
At the same time, I hope it encourages folks to open source their code even if it isn't "ready for prime time" or what ever euphemism is for embarrassment.
I think the whole idea is cool! It doesn't have to be useful to be cool, in fact some of the coolest projects are eminently unuseful.
I think this is an awesome resume project. They've built an IDE (which is impressive by itself), and then they've got this whole parsing code from OCR thing on top that's not necessarily useful but man is it cool. The fact that it shows a good sense of humor is just icing on the cake.
Like, search and replace on pictures of code contained in PNG files... Just amazing.
That was essentially the goal with this in the end, I was able to talk to red hat developers about the actual IDE part, do a ton of research on the custom OCR, learn about the Google Assistant API, and a ton of more stuff.
I'm glad you enjoy the project, I dumped way more time than I probably should have in this silly thing, but it should pay off when I start looking for jobs in the field lol
Ah I am in no way trying to be dismissive - this is really cool by itself, and it feels like there may be applications of this that would be highly useful at the same time.
