I don't know about that, but there does appear to be a tradeoff between nutrition and fertility. When you eat less, you're less fertile. When you're less fertile, you live longer. A lot of what appears to allow us to live longer is lower rates of cancer, but the data I've seen there isn't rock solid and it isn't something I've dug deeply into. I only mention it because it's certainly studied and a question worth pursuing, with very interesting papers available if you look.
Something I read recently was about eunuchs living something like 25% longer than intact counterparts. However, the data was limited (15 each of eunuchs and intact as I recall). There were very few confounding factors, however. Really interesting stuff.
I tried using gleam for real work the other day and found myself really enjoying it. It's a cool language and surprisingly productive coming at it with no experience with OTP or the BEAM.
I know it's a me issue, but I got stumped by how inefficient it is to write code that handles linked lists in some cases. As far as I can tell, there's no built-in array or anything more convenient. I had to write a function to find items at indices, haha.
I looked through the docs and it seems like I'm not missing anything. I'm clearly too accustomed to web development
Fascinating. Not far from Alberta, here in Victoria BC I see rats on a very regular basis. They're all over the place. I used to live in a neighbourhood called Fernwood and had serious issues with rats infiltrating all parts of my home and shed. They'd create nests in strange places out of any kind of fibre they could find. I must have seen one per month at least while walking or riding my bike around, skittering across the road or between gardens. One time I got to see a hawk swoop down and grab one as it ran down the sidewalk.
A couple months ago I saw one making some hilarious vertical hops trying to grab onto the siding of my neighbour's townhouse in broad daylight. The city is covered in them.
Unfortunately it's very hospitable to the vast majority of smaller animals since it doesn't get very cold on the south end of the island and there's a fair amount of food available. Rats live comfortably outside of cities here, and you'll find them out in the woods where they can eat insects, seeds, nuts, berries, etc for most/all of the year.
British Columbia has banned rat poison since around 2021. At least anecdotally, the impact on the local rat population has been exactly what you'd expect.
It's difficult to assess one way or the other, but the impact of poisons on rat-eating animals was bordering catastrophic in some areas. Farms using rat poison would often have dead raptors nearby, for example. Hopefully the predators not dying from poisoning will have its own effect on the rat population. It might not be as significant as poison, but it's better that we have healthy predator populations rather than eventually little or none.
Alberta's advantage is being landlocked (and not a natural habitat for rats). They managed to keep the rats that arrived at the ports from encroaching inland.
Years and years ago I helped someone with a remote team (quite a while before remote was common) try to get his team to be more productive.
We'd sit and chat about the state of things, ups and downs since we last spoke, and try to figure out strategies to improve process and get things working more smoothly. For a few months virtually nothing changed despite all kinds of small efforts scattered around.
He was dealing with pretty insane stuff. Clearly competent developers were letting PRs languish for weeks. They weren't producing code to their own standards consistently. Designers were dumping deliverables last minute with no documentation or guidance for implementation. Just assets, hurriedly put together, with some palpable hope that they'd just get used and everyone would carry on without their involvement. There was no collaboration, very low communication, and hardly any cohesion across teams.
After a few months I came to realize that everyone was struggling in their role in some way or another, afraid to admit it, and unsure of how to catch up and keep up. Expectations of them were remarkably low, but no matter who fell behind they would eventually begin this oscillation between scrambling and vanishing.
I recommended that he let everyone know it's okay. We all fall behind, we've all got life going on, and having no deliverables happens. I suggested that the messaging would need to be sincere, clear, and personal in order for everyone to really believe that it was okay that they weren't performing well. After a week or so of figuring out how he wanted to address everyone about it, he did it over a group call and was a total human being about it, describing his own struggles, challenges with staying on task, his inability to program "well" due to his lack of training, and so on. It was great, and very sincere. He made it clear that he knew what was happening, but he wasn't upset and he wasn't pointing fingers.
The results were like night and day, though not immediate. Everyone gradually started explaining where they were. Maybe they had kid stuff in the way, got stuck getting a test to pass, didn't understand the problem well enough, no sleep, sick, etc. PRs got reviewed more often because there was less shame around letting them sit at all. Everything generally got better. Not perfect, but workable.
At the time that I recommended he do that, I felt a little bit insane. Like, what if this just permits everyone to be even worse? What if it comes off like it's a trap, and everyone gets even more paranoid and insecure? Am I just imagining everyone wants this because it's what I've wanted in the past?
Since then I consider it one of the most essential components of functioning teams. People can still be high performers in unsafe roles, but the team as a whole suffers for it, then the company does as well. Especially the company, over time.
I'm not an authority on the topic, but a somewhat similar concept to ECS is state charts, which I find far better suited to hardware.
Some might verbally assault me for calling these two things similar, but I mean that loosely. Someone who is new to both might notice that they compose systems which can communicate and respond to inputs, which is conceptually similar. State charts offer far more guarantees, consistency, reliability, and predictability though.
I suppose one is about propagating data (not state, specifically), the other is about state and state control. Both are hierarchical in a sense, but ECS doesn't place as much importance on hierarchy.
I have kids and I agree to an extent, but also believe the inverse as well.
I can see that my life has led to me maturing sufficiently to care for kids. I have the experiences, self awareness, instinctual impetus, and so on required in order to keep my kids alive (so far).
And yet I have arguments with my wife that make no sense. We disagree about things, and although we like to believe we're relatively competent, reasonable, well-meaning people, we are sometimes the opposite. We're not as much unlike our kids as social norms want to imply we should be. We grow through these things as well, it gets better, we learn some lessons, but these mishaps continue to occur. We forget to start dinner early enough, the kids get to sleep a bit late. I forget to charge my watch, miss its alarm, and wake late so the morning is rushed. All these little mistakes, and all you'd generally expect from a child (and possibly even reprimand them for).
At times my status as "mature adult" seems tenuous. I might tell my kids not to eat to many Christmas treats, then find myself eating several as I do the dishes. Whoops? I have to be careful that I don't convince myself I'm all that different from them, frankly. Yeah I've managed to keep things going so far (with the help of my wife), but some days it is a bit of a marvel that it all works. Not to be too self-deprecating, and I am joking slightly.
I'm also increasingly aware that the state of being anything at all—what it's like to be me—is eerily similar to how it felt decades ago. I have more resources to draw upon, which is very useful, but the mode of being hasn't shifted much in longer than I can remember (literally). I can only imagine that my kids are the same. The way they exist, how they feel moment to moment, the way they perceive the world, is not at all unlike it was for me and still is today.
I'm also constantly impressed with how intelligent my kids are, from early on. It isn't that they're super kids or anything. Given the right opportunities and resources though, kids are smart. They get stuff. They're constantly crunching through information and synthesizing things and making sense of the world. They're incapable of some decision-making and reasoning, without a doubt, but they deserve a lot of credit.
Perhaps the bottom line is: don't take being an adult too seriously. We aren't entirely different from our kids. We are still the kids we were, too. Just hardened by a bit of experience, shaped by countless mistakes, and well-rehearsed in making stuff up as we go.
Whoa. This feels like something someone would have made in Flash arbitrarily in their spare time some 20 years ago, in a really good way. Tons of loving details.
Agreed, I had to quit because of weird things like this. A little sad because the aesthetic drew me in right away and it was fun to start. Still, nice work, fun little break, hopefully they fix those issues and make it a little more fun
Something I read recently was about eunuchs living something like 25% longer than intact counterparts. However, the data was limited (15 each of eunuchs and intact as I recall). There were very few confounding factors, however. Really interesting stuff.
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