They/Them, agender-leaning scalie.

ADHD software developer with far too many hobbies/trades: AI, gamedev, webdev, programming language design, audio/video/data compression, software 3D, mass spectrometry, genomics.

Learning German (B2), Chinese (HSK 3-4ish), French (A2).

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. … Western companies have ‘legalized’ piracy in Russia.

    100% this.

    Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it’s excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.

    It’s inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.






  • I could just be further down the path due to lucky opportunities. 20 years ago I had no ambitions beyond game programming. It was only when I got a biology-related job that learning in my free time started displacing mindless entertainment. The whole field is one big nerd snipe - there are endless opportunities where you can advance the frontier of knowledge by combining a few existing ideas and working out the kinks. The more you read, the more opportunities you see. It’s thrilling. I don’t think I can go back to non-science work.

    I think the dopamine from constant learning also helps to keep my ADHD in check. If I start the weekend with some study, I’ll usually also get the housework done. If I start with a video game or TV show, I’ll probably spend the rest of the weekend stressing about my todo list and not getting anything done.


  • I honestly don’t know what that silence would be like. I’ve spent my programming career jumping between domains, becoming an expert then moving on to find a new challenge. Now I’m building AI stuff for medicine.

    In my down time I learn languages, watch videos about physics and math, and play puzzle games.

    My brain actually won’t let me stop. Boredom = pain.





  • ooo, I love this. It reminds me of how nice C#'s LINQ is…

    “Pipeline style” DB queries have some interesting advantages as well:

    • It’s straightforward to write efficient queries for DBs that don’t include a query optimizer stares at Datomic
    • You can split the pipeline into server-side and client-side steps when working with less capable DBs stares at most of NoSQL
    • It would be much easier to transition from a pipeline API to a non-text-based API so that our ORMs/query builders can directly talk to DBs without the overhead of generating and parsing SQL.

  • I still use Google for ~95% of my queries because I like real sources, comprehensive documentation, and not having to read a wall of text when a one-line answer would have sufficed.

    ChatGPT is a good replacement for Quora/Stack Exchange for explaining general knowledge stuff like other languages’ grammar and simple science, as well as finding authors/books/movies from descriptions when you’ve forgotten their names.

    Bard is… kinda dumb. I gave it a few chances, but it was nothing compared to ChatGPT’s free tier.