Clojurians Log v2

has anyone here gotten a $600 stimulus deposit ?

i'm gonna go cheap and get a $100 phone and use mint mobile, they have free tethering

geeeez someone nearby is exploding thousands of firecrackers

Our bank said the earliest possible date is Jan 4th (Monday) but it could be quite some time after that @codeperfect

I expect fireworks will start here in an hour or two... but we still have nearly six hours of it 😐

i need to get a nice chess set also

i hate to waste my tears on a paper chess board

someone is qouted as saying " if you want to destroy a young mans' future, teach him chess"

charles karuther mentioned that

with my post nomen beginning with "W" i am forced to the back of the line and baited with anticipatory illusions continually

@codeperfect Have you watched Queen's Gambit?

(since you mentioned chess)

@seancorfield i really like Anna Rudolfs' channel on youtube, she's like a real life person based on the character in that tv show ( ha!! that is backwards from a show based on a real person !!!)

oooooh, i just heard 8 shots from a .45 cal go off, happy almost newyear!

23:43 local time

ok, it is now 00:00 happy newyear and god bles you

is there a jewish new year designation ?

happy nagah leah !

lots of fireworks exploding into the future

i wish you all well

יָמִים נוֹרָאִים

Yamim Nora'im

Happy 2021!

wow, the treasury dept. put the $600 stimulus into my account this morning

Happy new year! Santa got me a piano keyboard and I’m starting to teach myself (I have a bit of classical guitar training so some things transfer). I wonder if anyone has any resources that might come handy for this sort of thing?

I hear technique is important (for preventing carpal tunnel), and if learned it can transfer for the kind of keyboarding we do

I can definitely see that. That’s probably the one thing that you really need a teacher for...

based on my experience with other instruments, it's much easier to learn the right way first, compared to unlearning the wrong way

> $600 stimulus Is this for Covid? Does everyone get this? Or is it only for people who have been affected by Covid? I'm in the UK and the support we got was the governmenet would pay your company to keep you employed (but furloughed), if you lost your job because of covid. And self employed people got to claim some amount of tax back (I'm not self employed so don't know details). Oh wait, I was able to claim tax relief for working from home due to the office being closed but it's something like a measly £2 a week. I;d be quite happy if the gov gave me £600!

everyone with an income below a specific amount for the year before

Aaah, is this going to be an ongoing thing ? or a one off?

do note that we have to pay an exorbidant fee for healthcare if unemployed, and many of us are newly unemployed

it's a two off (happened once before...)

yeah, healthcare in America seems absurdly expensive!

there have been no ongoing benefits and our safety net is basically nonexistent

(we have seen expanded unemployment benefits, and a subsidized loan program for businesses that was theoretically tied to not laying off employees...)

Who is making all the money off such an expensive healthcare system? Are your doctors / consultants etc all really well off? Or is it mostly insurance companies making all the money?

insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals

(on the administrative side of course)

AFAIK, US doctors make more than programmers

yes, they do

There is a fair amount of wasted effort that comes from managing all the overhead of billing.

On both provider and insurance side.

(but they also pay massive insurance costs (for malpractice insurance))

In the Netherlands doctors make more then programmers as well, but healthcare is still a lot cheaper than in the US.

@zeiglerr one person's "wasted effort" is another persons "entire industry"

attempts to reduce health care costs in the US are sunk by the insurance industry

Last time I was at doctors, docs appointment was £0, he sent me to hospital for x-rays, £0 then I got 2 prescriptions from pharmacists, also £0. Having to worry about paying for treatments / visits would be incredibly stressful.

@qmstuart the pattern for the US is that many (most?) people end up losing most of their life savings in the last few years of their lives

I should stop thinking about this, it gets me a bit agitated

it's probably the most broken part of the US political economy

@noisesmith what about student loans?

at least I can make the informed choice not to get a formal education

(which I did, it worked out well enough)

I guess I could make the informed choice to die of a preventable disease

You could also travel to a neighboring country to do treatments.

a better off-topic question, can anyone recommend a good laptop or desktop that comes pre-loaded with linux ? I've been looking at System76, but they seem awfully expensive.

@qmstuart I got my dell xps-13 preloaded with ubuntu as a purchase time option, dell has their own customized packages for their hardware

the xps13 versions of the last few years have horrible overheating problems

(compared to the 2016/17 era ones)

that really doesn't scale, especially when you look at how large our country is and how far most of as are from the Canadian border

oh, that's too bad, mine has been great

There are some cheaper System76s. I know the high spec laptops go up into the 2-3k range but I feel like the last time I looked they had one around 800usd

I had to send mine back (2019 version) cause I just couldn't get any work done as it kept hitting thermal limits and throttling the CPU to insanely low clock speeds

doing the same work my 2016 xps13 was perfectly ok

I have a dell xps from work (with windows 10), and its had to have the dell guy cvome out to repair something on it 3 times in 3 years

seems to be a common problem since late 2018

From what I hear about costs, it’s literally cheaper to travel though. If enough people do that, economy of scale should kick in, and all-medical flights would become even cheaper. And Mexico might also be a reasonable medical destination, I think.

having dell engineers come for repairs has been a horrible experience in the past few years :/ which is a massive shame as I've owned dell laptops for 10 years as the support used to be stellar

Yeah, one guy came out mid afternoon, by 6 the laptop was still in pieces, when he finally got it back together it wouldn't boot. Had to wait for a second guy to come out the following day and fix wahtever he had screwed up

At one point he was looking concerned like he couldn't find a piece, was looking on the floor and everything. I knew at that point it wasn't going well

I've even heard of people going to Cuba, they actually have a great system there

similar experience, took me almost 2 weeks to manage to arrange an engineer visit (and I was paying for next day on-site support), they managed to leave the laptop in a more broken state than before two times

ended up just sending the laptop back and bought a thinkpad instead.

loved my third gen x1 carbon.

only downside was it was a touch screen instead of a nice matte.

I've got a t495 and an e14 and they're both good machines

@qmstuart I know it's not what you've asked but you'll probably have more luck just buying a laptop known to be well supported on linux and just installing it on your own

Is a distro like Ubuntu a good bet to install without problems with missing hardware drivers etc?

yeah

my current PC is around 10 years and getting linux to work on it was a nightmare

it's nothing like the experience it used to be

main issue was the nvidia drivers for my ancient graphics card

I had some problems getting my nvidia card to work, but eventually it worked

(a new one)

until those were fixed / working, it kept hard freezing

also nowadays you can simply boot from the installer image and have a running system without putting anything on disk - if you boot up the installer and all your important hardware works you know there won't be an issue with the installed system

(except maybe a painful uefi / firmware experience depending...)

I went with Windows + WSL2 in the end - blasphemy I know, but even bozhidar is doing it now ;)

same

i've spent 10+ years on gentoo/arch, then the last year I switched to win10 + WSL2 🙃

that combo is seeming more and more enticing to me. i can live with windows if its just a window manager ha

https://blog.michielborkent.nl/2020/07/26/remote-wsl2-clojure/

anyone have any useful experience with powershell on linux ?

powershell is cool, but is it useful?

@codeperfect powershell is cool, but it doesn't have a lot of mindshare outside Windows itself

I've been an Apple customer since the early '90s and back then I used to run Tenon Intersystems "MachTen" unix on my Macs (alongside the O/S so it was like OS X, even on System 6). But I'm down to one last Apple system now -- my eight year old desktop -- and I switched from iPhone to Android this year and also bought a MS Surface Laptop 3 and I run Windows 10 (Insider) + WSL2/Ubuntu -- and that's a great Clojure dev env.

I tried Powershell but it's just not *nix -- and I've used flavors of unix since '79... -- and, frankly, even with the Clojure CLI on Powershell, you still run into all sorts of Windows-related restrictions and issues with tooling and libraries. Using Linux via WSL2 is just so much easier all round.

The clojure CLI should probably not have been migrated to powershell.

.bat is no party either, but hey you can do it in clojure itself :) (https://github.com/borkdude/deps.clj)

yep, the unix shell rules me, powershell doesn't really even hint at the 'grass being greener on the other side', the dark side

I'm looking for something programmable that can make a noise at regular intervals

sometimes i get nasty and use cider in emacs as my 'shell'

but that sound cannot be a "beep" or a "ding"

The ideas in powershell are cool, it's basically a shell-friendly scripting version on top of .NET and exchanging objects vs text

it needs to be a pronounced "bloop"

The only windows I use are the ones I look out of

i can boot up windows on this laptop, and sometimes i do, and i look at it and go "eh" and reboot

clojure on the jvm mostly covers my windows compatibility need

Im impressed that windows insiders is now stable enough to use as your main environment!

@codeperfect If you need shell scripting that works cross platform, you can also use babashka (#babashka) which supports a large subset of JVM Clojure (with libs included)

Saying that, I have bought myself a mac mini m1 for audio/video processing and that I'm enjoying.

@qmstuart I've been in the Insider program for six years I think. And I've almost always run the fast ring (now "dev" channel) builds. There was a run of builds back a few years in the summer that blue screened my old laptop pretty regularly but mostly it's been very, very stable really. I run a bunch of MS software on beta channels: Edge has been my main browser for years and I run the Canary channel build of that on both my Mac desktop and my Windows laptop, and a beta of Edge on my phone too.

(yeah, Insider since Feb 8th, 2015 -- nearly six years)

ordered a pizza, i like papajohns

may all of your wishes for 2021 be realized dear clojurians

my $600 stimulus balance is rapidly dwindling

i bought a vox fireflight atomic bomber on ebay for $180, i hope it gets shipped quickly

i need to atomic bomb some copde really quick

code is the word

i read that database queries are still a major factor in website compromises

wouldn't surprise me, seems like knowing SQL is a dark art nowadays.

https://use-the-index-luke.com/ gets you to 90% there

someone at work posted this from a local companies website

We couldn't have a new years eve party here because of our lockdowns. So I'm sitting in my apartment, on my own, drinking champagne. It's come to this.

That part is not that different here in the Netherlands. But that's more because as long as you have savings, you need to pay part of the expenses needed to care of you. Therefore it's much better to gift money before you need a lot of care.

A few things which make wsl a bummer is that windows will still just up and update on you without asking, file deletion hazards included, and that io is terrible. A strong machine shouldn't sound like a jet engine taking off when running Emacs in WSL. My work machine is Ubuntu and my next PC will be one as well. Whatever doesn't work I'll deal with or live without. Getting tired of windows honestly.

@ben.sless Good point about the updates, that's what annoys me most. I/O in WSL2 docker is better than I/O in macOS docker for me personally, but both aren't "native" linux. "Native" linux will always be better Docker-wise

Out of old habits I don't run stuff in docker if I can help it. The IO case I have seen was Emacs with CIDER and LSP. Was terribly slow and I feared the computer will catch fire. It was a new and powerful laptop.

• our baseline costs are much higher • people are denied care for lack of funds having savings or not does effect some supplemental / government supplied insurance, which do include some "means testing", and always includes large co-pay

in particular, our disability assistance is means tested, which means that people can lose their benefits if they accidently spend too little

(my girlfriend runs a home for intellectually disabled adults, because of their disability she has to ensure they spend their money every month, if their savings exceeds a $2000 balance their benefits are cancelled, which means they no longer have income to pay for her services)

which IMHO is a very perverse set of incentives which simultaneously encourages frivolous spending and enforces poverty

as I understand it the poor io performance is for anything in "linux world" trying to access the windows disk

I run Redis, Elastic Search, and Percona (MySQL) via Docker on WSL2 and it's acceptable for dev work. I run VS Code on Windows with the Remote-WSL2 extension and, aside from "reconnecting" hang ups when it wakes from sleep, it's been a pretty good experience.

I have "everything" on the WSL2 side, except VS Code, and I run VcXsrv (Xlaunch) so that I can spin up Reveal on WSL2.

Yes, in that respect it's a lot better here. Even the very poor get all necessary care.

I recommend this resource: https://fundamentals-of-piano-practice.readthedocs.io/chapter1/

I tried the same, it worked smooth but I was annoyed by VcXsrv shutdown anytime Windows went in sleeping mode or hibernation. I had to restart all running UI apps on WSL2. Maybe there is a fix for this, but I could not find it. Other than that java build with maven worked faster on WSL2 than Windows native.