> I'm still not entirely sure what was going on, but in Azure

FWIW, from someone who used to work on exactly this; neither did most of us :)

The org had fired^Wtold most of the network engineers to either interview for dev positions or leave. That left the rest of us with only dev experience to have to learn DC networking from scratch (without any mentors) while also building the infra to automate it, because, well software engineers should be able to learn network engineering overnight right?

I'll just say this, most of the devs I worked with had never coded before in a production environment, didn't know how to test their code (failing tests that would somehow pass in ways you'd think these were contest entries), and didn't even understand basic concepts in programming languages (I'm talking things like references vs values...).

On top of this, the tooling and infrastructure was so bad, even if you wanted to be productive you'd be fighting things like your build environment just randomly breaking after a git pull and having to reinstall visual studio or reformatting windows to fix it.

From what I've heard from people I still know on the inside, things haven't changed much (I'm very grateful for $MSFT though...)

Right, but I'd prefer not to have to do that if a comment cites multiple links that I want to queue for later.

This is one of my biggest pet-peeves. Whenever I have to help people debug performance issues with their machines it's almost always due to a bottleneck on their disk.

For my family members that have laptops with those shitty 5400rpm HDDs with 8MB read/write buffers - I can't blame them and just tell them to upgrade to an SSD. I've witnessed Windows update hogging 100% of the disk activity for 30+ minutes after reboot on these machines until they're actually usable...

But for my developer friends who I figure should know better, they never seem to think of looking into disk activity. It's almost always things like applications hanging/blocking on disk due to lots of different processes trying to read/write at the same time on an HDD or "small" RAM size causing constant thrashing on a disk due to memory being paged in and out of swap constantly.

I've been meaning to get around to basically plagiarizing this UI for a personal linux system monitoring tool.

I've tried a bunch of the popular linux disk/resource usage monitors but I find none are as flexible/nice to look at as Windows' Task Manager overview graphs and Resource Monitor. Any time I'm using a Windows system I will dedicate a monitor to just having Resource Monitor's disk usage tab open (although it can result in nontrivial CPU usage under certain disk access patterns).

I suffer from this too (only formally diagnosed with sleep apnea though) and found that 0.5mg of melatonin about 20-40mins before I want to go to sleep has helped me align my sleep cycle to a 24hr schedule. I also get a consistent 8hrs registered on my CPAP so it doesn't seem to interfere with my sleep quality/duration either.

I buy melatonin that comes in 1mg pressed/powder pill form and just bite it to split it in half and toss the other half back in the bottle.

I've been doing this for 2 years now and have never had to change the dose. At one point I even considered seeing if .25mg would be sufficient but depending on the brand sometimes the pill crumbles up too much so I stick with .5mg. I've used Nature's Bounty and Webber Naturals and both brands seem to work the same for me.

I really wish I had figured this trick out a lot earlier in life as it would've saved me from missing out on a lot of opportunities in my career.

(more detail about my experimentation below)

Before I discovered this I tried everything from reducing screen time before bed, cranking up night mode in flux/redshift, abandoning coffee/caffeine entirely, working out earlier in the day instead of evenings, etc. _Nothing_ worked for me - my brain would remain wide awake and I would have to stay up until 5-7am before I even began to feel tired (where I would have to wake up between 10-11am for work).

I had even tried melatonin before too but it was a 3mg pill and it would produce very erratic results in my sleep quality. I'd sometimes wake up drenched in sweat or wake up feeling very groggy for hours so I figured melatonin just wasn't for me. It wasn't until I came across some advice on /r/n24 or /r/dspd to try .5-1mg of melatonin that I decided to try again (IIRC it was a post about how doses >=2mg can actually result in melatonin overdose and result in the types of symptoms I was observing - TBH I didn't really bother verifying that info and just figured I'd try .5mg and see what happened as I was desperate for a solution).

And for the record, with this approach I haven't had to make any other modifications to my daily routine. I continue to lift heavy in the evenings and drink 1-2 cups of drip/espresso every day.

The only situations I've noticed where this trick falls apart for me are:

1) if I ever try to push past that 20-40min period where I start to get drowsy, it results in me being awake again. This rarely ever happens and I usually just end up sleeping about an hour later. I make sure to take the melatonin just before I begin flossing+brushing and get in bed right after

2) for some reason drinking a can of coke/pepsi in the evening will keep me wired awake all night. I've had cups of coffee in the evening rarely which never had the same effect, but coke/pepsi will...

Anyway, just thought I'd share since this made a huge difference in my life - maybe worth trying/experimenting.

Low doses of melatonin can be really helpful, especially if people have tried all the "sleep hygiene" steps and that's not working and they don't need a z drug yet.

One of the problems of melatonin is that in some countries it's sold as a supplement not a medication, so the regulation is much less strict.

The dosing varies so much, even in product labelled as 1 mg.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5263069/

> In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Erland and Saxena systematically analyzed the actual melatonin content (and presence of contaminants) in 31 melatonin supplements purchased from groceries and pharmacies in one city in Canada (before countrywide OTC use of it in Canada was banned). Their findings herald what may also be true in OTC melatonin supplements marketed in the United States. Melatonin content varied from an egregious −83% to +478% of labeled melatonin and 70% had melatonin concentration ≤ 10% of what was claimed. Worse yet, the content of melatonin between lots of the same product varied by as much as 465%.3

> The most variable sample was a chewable tablet (and most likely to be used by children). It contained almost 9 mg of melatonin when it was supposed to contain 1.5 mg and also exhibited the greatest variability between lots (465% difference). The lowest melatonin content was −83% compared to its labeled value in a capsule that also contained lavender, chamomile, and lemon balm. Capsules showed the greatest variability between lots. Liquid supplements surprisingly showed generally high to median stability with low lot-to-lot stability. The least variable products were those that contained the simplest mix of ingredients, generally oral or sublingual tablets with melatonin added to a filler of silica or cellulose derivatives and were the most reproducible. The last disturbing finding was more than a quarter of melatonin products contained serotonin, some at potentially significant doses. Serotonin is a breakdown product of melatonin metabolism but could have medicinal effects and should be taken without oversight. In short, there was no guarantee of the strength or purity of OTC melatonin.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Well, did you train at commercial gyms or powerlifting/weightlifting gyms? What if the lifters just happened to be on high volume blocks, or tapering for a meet whenever you visited?

Yeah this is mostly at commercial gyms and there are a lot more at powerlifting/weightlifting gyms for sure. But even there there aren't as many as you would expect. It's probably more common to bench 300, but never seen anyone do a 405 lbs squat atg even at a powerlifting gym.

Squatting atg is just not very common to start with.

Do you have a quick explanation or resource that explains why [1] is true?

Just curious as I've wanted to get better at being able to understanding assembly output by gcc/clang but don't think I've come across this advice explicitly before.

I should maybe rephrase [1] to: if you're deciding between two different ways of writing the same function for performance reasons, you should use the optimized assembly output to decide (or the same compiler flags as what you use in production). There can be big differences between the unoptimized and optimized code: https://godbolt.org/z/fszhjj.

Unoptimized assembly IS useful if you just want to learn or understand assembly itself.

I switched to KeePassXC because KeePassX had a bug where you could silently lose data if you made changes to the notes section of an entry and hit `Esc` without remembering to save.

KeePassX won't prompt you at all and silently drops all those changes, whereas KeePassXC will ask what to do.

KeePassXC also seems to immediately save changes upon adding new entries whereas KeePassX requires an explicit <ctrl-s>.

Can you provide more context re: "The recent reaction from Valve is telling, I think Gabe is fearful about the current state of affairs" ?

I think it's a reference to steam proton, a compatibility layer they built to run windows games on linux.

Microsoft could lock out 3rd party app stores like Steam, and already has on certain versions of Windows.

Valve is trying to protect themselves from irrelevancy, they have all their eggs in the Windows basket, while consoles and mobile are owned by companies that are massive comparatively.

From what I understood of OP's description of the process, it sounds a lot like the sort of awareness that's cultivated through long-term and consistent practice of meditation (implicitly or explicitly depending on the school of practice).

I noticed after a couple months of initially starting daily zazen practice (just 10-15 minutes every night), that I went from reacting in a way that was originally: event -> (usually 'extreme') reaction, to something more like: event -> stepping back/observing what would've originally been my reaction -> choosing to engage with it or not. After a year of practice, this new pattern of reacting basically became muscle memory and would happen _even when_ I sometimes wanted to strongly react to things (i.e. music/art/social situations with friends/etc ).

After about 4 or 5 years of consistent practice I caved into what I had even read was a common pitfall for most practitioners in thinking that I had "achieved" most of the "benefits" I could from meditation and just stopped practicing all together. It took about a year for most of these benefits to even start decaying, but after about that 2 year mark, my pattern of thought/reacting had almost entirely gone back to how it was before I had ever started practicing.

I'm thinking there has to be some happy medium where you have the ability to observe as well as engage, but I'm not sure what the original philosophies of the practice actually "advocate" for as I never really delved too deep into the literature on this.

I think this was actually one of the main reasons I stopped practicing, because I was wondering if my 'artistic side' was being 'dulled' by meditation. This is still a question I want answered and have been wondering if it may be worth doing a deeper dive into the literature/having a teacher guide me through the rest of this journey.

Thank you for your perspective!

Yeah, I've thought about meditation myself, but I don't really see how to effectively teach it, especially in a class-room (i.e. 1-to-many) - but maybe that's just because I've learned (well, tried to) meditation by myself, by reading, not from a teacher/mentor.

One other idea that crossed my mind, but it's far from fleshed out, is to teach people the exact same techniques that therapists use (i.e. "asking the right questions" to drill deeper in the direction towards understanding yourself), but with the purpose of using them on themselves. However, I've no idea if that's simply too much to learn, or if maybe "being a good therapist" comes only with "having a lot of life experience".