The point the author is making seems to be against the consensus of other hand specialists (this is at least my perception, as someone who has an index finger issue and has asked specialists "can't I just cut it off?").
The author is basically (and provocatively) saying "Are you kidding me? You really think it's useful for people to continue to be burdened with non-functional appendages?" to his colleagues, and I think the humor is likely to get them to engage with his thesis rather than dismiss it off hand.
I have sent this to several doctor friends, and the writing style prompted them to send it to several more, so, I think it's quite likely that tone served the author's point.
I partially amputated (at the joint closest to the nail) my index finger a decade ago, and it’s been a huge impediment. This has motivated me to seek out some other opinions.
Sent it to some doctor friends and they are floored by the writing style as well.
It's hard for me to rationalise that a few cms off the index could be a huge impediment, so can you please share where you find yourself impaired the most? I imagine gripping things, like a glass, should be more or less unaffected.
It tingles all the time. There's a ton of "referred pain". It frequently feels like there is a dental drill going of in my face, when it's not painful, it's a a persistent nagging tickle, on my cheek/temple/around my eye.
It gets reynauds phenomena, my house is 68F 20C right now, but my finger is freezing/painful because of how cold it is, this happens pretty much any time I wash my hand, so even in the summer when there's a slight breeze I'm hiding my hand in my pocket for warmth.
When I bang it on things it really hurts, and like this paper says it's extended basically all the time when I'm trying to use my hand for other things.
When I use it to grab things, it feels really weird, so I've kind of trained myself to keep it out of the way. This paper says cut it off, which the few other orthopedists I've talked to have not advised, but at this point, it's been a decade, and seeing a doctor be like "dude, the thing that's only there to make your hand more precise, is actually making your hand way less precise and detracting from your quality of life, cut it off", is a perspective I'm happy to hear. I manage mostly alright, but it's been a decade of major annoyance at best.
This is really fascinating to me, because it explains some things.
I have a friend who crushed the tip of one of her fingers, but it wasn't amputated. She's described sensations very similar to yours, presumably from nerve damage. I never asked a bunch of questions about it, and now I wish I had after reading this post.
If it ever comes up in conversation again, may I share a link to your comment with her?
i dont have any nerve damage (that i know of) but if i touch along my ring or little finger near the knuckle, sometimes i feel a tickling sensation on my cheek next to my ear. kinda weird!
> i dont have any nerve damage (that i know of) but if i touch along my ring or little finger near the knuckle, sometimes i feel a tickling sensation on my cheek next to my ear. kinda weird!
That's funny. I think I can reproduce that.
Do you often use those knuckles to touch that area of your face? Might be that those nerves fire together so often, your brain strongly associates them. I have a habit of massaging that area of my face while thinking and slouching on my chair.
I lost the tip of my right thumb on a planer, but kept the joint. I experience similar phenomena. The worst thing is pushing a supermarket shopping cart on a rough surface, the vibrations it sends into my hand are intensely painful. Also iDevice touchscreens hate my nub.
Have you tried any of the neuroplasticity stuff for mitigating chronic pain?
I experience referred pain. I'm told my brain's intepretation is out of sync with the stimulation. Phantom limb syndrome is an example.
Swedish Hospital (Seattle WA) Pain Services clinic got me on the right path. https://www.swedish.org/services/pain-services For me, it was a 4 week course, 3 days/week. Learn (or relearn) meditation, breathing, the current best available science about pain, life skills, etc.
Maybe call them up to help find a clinic near you.
The curriculum seems like total bullshit. But it somehow worked, despite me thinking it wouldn't. I now do a daily regiment that's supposed to reprogram my brain. Including tai chi and HIIT. Seems to be working. A lot of initial progress (like clearing a plugged drain) and now slow and steady improvement. YMMV.
I'm sorry about your pain. Of all my chronic pains, the nerve stuff is by far the worst. So I can sympathize a bit. I hope you find some relief.
Gabapentin is what worked for me. I won't presume that the same answer is going to work for all of us, but I'm in agreement that there are a number of things that can be tried between "suffer through it" and "cut it off". Besides, if the amputation of the end of a nerve is causing so many problems, more amputation will just give you another cut of the nerve at a different point. I'm no doctor, but that sounds like it could backfire bigtime.
It's not just tree-sitter that makes zed feel snappy.
If you're using a reasonably fast language-server, which rust-analyzer apparently is (I didn't know this using vscode), the autocomplete & intentions feel instantaneous.
I think the team has learned a lot from previous editor implementations (they were the core team of atom that was notoriously slow), and so they've had an opportunity to do a lot of stuff right.
FWIW they also are the team that originally wrote tree-sitter.
The quickness feels more like it's in the core of the editor. I was shocked how much it impacted the editing experience when I tried it in early beta.
> If you're using a reasonably fast language-server, which rust-analyzer apparently is (I didn't know this using vscode)
Some more anecdata to back this up: initial workspace load in VScode I can watch RA tick through its progress. Clean and boot up Zed and the same process is so fast that it’s almost unbelievable.
I've been impressed with the C++ clangd language server snappiness in Zed compared to both CLion (my old favorite) and Emacs (apple of my eye for 2.5 yrs).
I always thought the major slowness was coming from clangd itself, so I'm surprised and impressed to see that Zed appears to be quicker on this front. I might be using Zed as a 'second opinion' editor because of this.
However, now I'm used to the infinite customizability and coziness of Emacs, it's going to be hard for me to move across to Zed permanently.
> The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women. Second, inequality in life expectancy increased over time.
> One such theory is that health and longevity are related to differences in medical care. The present analysis provides limited support for this theory. Life expectancy for low income individuals was not significantly correlated with measures of the quantity and quality of medical care provided, such as the fraction insured and measures of preventive care. The lack of a change in the mortality rates of individuals in the lowest income quartile (Figure 1) when they become eligible for Medicare coverage at the age of 65 years further supports the conclusion that a lack of access to care is not the primary reason that low-income individuals have shorter life expectancies.
That being true, I do doubt that a single obituary writer falls in the poorest 1% of individuals. If I were to take a guess, I think the average salary of a journalist who writes obituaries may fall in the top 25% of income. Does the gap in life expectancy continue to be that large if we compare the top 1% and the top 25%?
Unfortunate as that is it's not at all surprising. Comparing the median with the top 1% would be more interesting. The gap there is still quite significant:
(for 40 year old men, unadjusted by race):
100th inc. prct : ~ 88 years:
75th inc. prct : ~ 84
50th inc. prct : ~ 82.5
25th inc. prct : ~ 79
5th inc. prct : ~ 76
1st inc. prct : ~ 72.5
(had to infer the values visually from charts because I wasn't to find a table including all the groups...)
However (I assume the data is very limited though) there is almost no difference in life expectancy (for men or women) when your household income is above >$200k (back in 2014, so probably quite a bit higher now). So I don't think there are any efficient treatments available only for the ultra-rich, just being rich or upper-middle class should be enough to get access the best(ish) treatment there is.
For the bottom income quartile when comparing local areas: the % of people with not insurance, medicare spending per enrolled person and 30-day hospital mortality rate seem to have the highest correlation with life expectancy. Which all should be trivial to fix for a relatively extremely-rich country like the US...
Looking at the appendices one interesting point I noticed (assuming I understood it correctly) is that people at the 50th percentile are more likely to reach 77 years than those in the top 75th or 100th prcts. But after that point income seems to matter a whole lot more.
Another seemingly very weird correlation (page 43): higher inequality in local area seems to be correlated with lower life expectancy for all income quartiles except the bottom one (so basically poorer people tend to liver longer in high inequality areas even though the difference in years is not very big).
That's a very interesting study. I'm surprised the relationship is so linear through all the way through the income percentiles, aside from the very bottom few. I would have expected a relative plateau in the middle.
The faircloth amendment prohibits an increase in public housing stock. Granted amendments can be repealed, but “refusal” is a bit of an oversimplification in the public housing case, it’s literally banned.
How is that not exactly the kind of 'self-own' that I'm talking about? There's nothing technical or geographic that's stopping us here, it's literally just a law we ourselves passed to make the problem worse. The federal government could repeal it at any time but chooses not to.
Also, that's only for federal public housing IIRC, so cities/counties/states could still make their own public housing if they wanted to.
Is public housing the main driver of lower housing prices in comparable economies?
I would have guessed that the HUD being unable to build more housing isn't helping us, but isn't the main reason that prices are skyrocketing in urban areas.
Public housing is important, mostly because private housing growth contracts during economic slowdowns, and the delay in constructing new ones means an eventual crunch when the economy starts needing housing again. If the public housing pipeline is robust it can generate a more even supply.
> Is public housing the main driver of lower housing prices in comparable economies?
Most other Western countries seem to be suffering similar issues, with prices rising and various regulations making it hard to increase the supply of housing.
Vienna seems to be doing better as far as capital cities go, and it has a large amount of social/public housing.
That said, rents in Seoul and Tokyo are fairly reasonable given their size and national importance, and this seems to be because it's just a lot easier to make more housing.
Rent in Seoul is good, but price to income is pretty bad, worse than SF. For some reason South Korea's flavor of property investment prefers rental income (as opposed to China, where a lot of invested property is not even finished let alone sublet)
Vienna has a bit of an advantage in that it has been below its population peak for the past hundred years (since the peak was before WWI when it was an imperial capital)
It’s a prevention of increases above the existing levels that existed at the time of the Faircloth amendment. Pretty much all agencies are well below these levels in 2023.
Many people (especially from big tech backgrounds), treat interviews as "the time for the candidate to prove that they are good enough to work at my company". I, like you, prefer to use the time for collaborative problem solving to try and get as much signal as possible about whether it would be fruitful for us to work together, while also trying to figure out if we would want to work together.
The "is this person good enough for me" interview allows geniuses who are assholes through. I prefer to filter for good teammates.
The Lexus brand was created to sell Americans expensive Toyotas, because when they entered the market there was an inherent perception of Japanese cars as cheap.
Internationally a bunch of cars that have a Lexus badge in America have a Toyota badge on them.
They are complementary for me. The way my body recruited my lats when running hills taught me how to knit the top and bottom together when I squat. The mind-muscle that squats woke up in my hip flexors carried over to foot placement in ice skating.
My understanding is that any position for too long becomes un-ergonomic, and really our bodies crave variability. I do my most productive coding on my couch in a weird slouching position, but I try not to do it for too long. I'll frequently switch back to my desk, and then try and take as many calls as possibly walking around the neighborhood. I can't focus on code at a standing desk or sitting on a yoga ball or whatever other people prescribe, but if you can throw that into your mix go for it, but sitting on a yoga ball all day is probably as deleterious as doing anything else all day.
There are definitely different ways to use your body with different effects, but I think the problem is over use of any specific form.
I appreciate your attempt to help, but what works for your body may not work for others - I'm looking for general ergonomic principles backed up by sound scientific evidence.
I can't provide you with the scientific basic for correct elbow angles and back erectitude, but I will echo the GP's meta-suggestion of 'variety'. I've heard you're supposed to change position every 20 minutes, and stay no more than 2 hours in any position. Walk around, swing your arms. This is the first-order bit. Most other techniques and tools seem to be band-aids to help you tolerate longer stretches of time in a single position. Which, do what you gotta do. But changing it up is the most important thing.
The author is basically (and provocatively) saying "Are you kidding me? You really think it's useful for people to continue to be burdened with non-functional appendages?" to his colleagues, and I think the humor is likely to get them to engage with his thesis rather than dismiss it off hand.
I have sent this to several doctor friends, and the writing style prompted them to send it to several more, so, I think it's quite likely that tone served the author's point.