+1, but i figured it out in an hour. Langchain seemed like a ridiculous overcomplication of what would otherwise be basic python. Has been off to the races since I decided not to use it.
I think "reading the manual" can be be interpreted not just in the literal sense of whether there's an actual manual, but also in the metaphorical sense, to make sure we're considering easily available sources of information. Great advice.
The code is the best manual you'll every get in my experience. There's no substitute when working on a codebase.
When I'm introduced to a codebase I'll be doing significant work on, I'll often spend hours at a time just reading the code. Start at main() and skim until you get a feel for the overall architecture, then go figure out whatever subsystems seem mysterious to you. Rinse and repeat. Makes a huge difference when making changes, because that requires reading code anyway, and you'll have a much better idea of what code to read/change.
Imo reading gets you nowhere and is inefficient. Key piece is to add some form of self explanation or diagram to map the overall picture, since it takes a lot of repetition to understand the code flow but only hours to come up with a data flow diagram and revisit/update when needed. Even faster when someone on the team has already done it.
Maybe its just me but plain text does nothing for me so i convert it into visual elements.
Code also has the advantage of not getting out of date with what the application actually does. Invariably, documentation outside the code base often rots over time until it reaches a point it's outright misleading.
One scenario where I find external wikis better is when a change encompasses multiple components and you want to present an overarching view to the user + want to refer across sections. This can be managed via something like github pages for each component but the cross referring across multiple repos adds more friction. Plus to present the overall view, something like a synthetic "doc-repo" will be needed that has landing pages that connect the component-level pages. Or we can have a wiki that does the integration by refering to component level github pages but at that point why not just do the whole thing in wiki much more conveniently.
My experience is that it basically comes down to developer discipline. A disciplined developer will update the docs regardless of whether the docs are part of repo or external and vice versa.
love to see this stuff, reacting to users in the world's #1 accidental entry point to programming. I wish they did this 20 years ago when i was neck deep in Excel daily!
That's a great and positive way to look at vaping. Every time I hear about "medical marijuana" I think about the probable link to schizophrenia, which will likely dwarf the pot economy in both direct and indirect costs.
-- edited to add citations --
Spent about 10 seconds finding these using Brave search. For folks who can't resist snarky comments, you have to admit it's strange that this is not at least acknowledged amidst a state-by-state push for legalization.
>> "There is now reasonable evidence from longitudinal studies that regular cannabis use predicts an increased risk of schizophrenia and of reporting psychotic symptoms. These relationships have persisted after controlling for confounding variables such as personal characteristics and other drug use. The relationships did not seem to be explained by cannabis being used to self-medicate symptoms of psychosis."
>> "The results from these longitudinal analyses show the proportion of cases of schizophrenia associated with cannabis use disorder has increased 3- to 4-fold during the past 2 decades, which is expected given previously described increases in the use and potency of cannabis."
So where's the schizophrenia epidemic among pot-smoking hippies? It's had like 50 years to surface, man.
In all seriousness, there are a number of cohorts where this should be showing up with some regularity. Can you point me towards any of them?
All the hippies I know are still out there hippie-ing and living their lives, going to Dead shows, and so on. And, from my experience, they seem to be an unusually vigorous group for being so old.
I feel like there's some selection bias. Your friends who you know years ago but fell off the grids are the ones who are most likely to be experiencing mental health issues.
FWIW, the homeless encampments and chop shops by me have plenty of people in the ~50 y/o pot smoking hippie demographic. The local paper even did a profile on a dude named Coconut who is 56 years old and has been following the Grateful Dead/Dead & Co. on all their tours since 1992. He was just killing time until their tour came around later this month.
They committed suicide. The suicide rate has been steadily rising in the 44-64 bracket. Or they are reclusive conspiracy theorists. That's my experience at least. I know a (shrinking) number of people I would definitely say are gripped by cannabis psychosis. There's no way it's not a real thing.
> Every time I hear about "medical marijuana" I think about the probable link to schizophrenia
Have you considered that perhaps schizophrenics seek out drugs? Something like 70-90% of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes. Do cigarettes cause schizophrenia, or do schizophrenics seek out cigarettes?
It is very immature research when you compare it with the designer drugs that go through the federal FDA process, where there are multiple phases of clinical trials all for a single use case. And then all the side effects that are found in a controlled study are listed on the side of the packaging.
The state process is completely absent of any research, and the community is relying on anecdotes for an infinite set of use cases. Side effects listed, if any, are based on the same anecdotes. I’ll give that an F for Failure. I’m not for putting dealers or users in prison, I can acknowledge that the consumer protection is absent.
How would the fda go about testing the convergent effects of all the different chemicals when the ratios shift significantly and the means of consuming them change what actual chemicals reach which parts of the body? Distill/synthesize each one, mix them in every permutation, and dose representative patients in every possible way?
By applying the boot to your neck, overdoses are reduced by 50%. Getting an accredited healthcare professional to tell you the boot is good for you reduces it a further 25%.
They would study a single consumption method as a solution for a specific ailment. All side effects would be documented and told to researchers or consumers.
>We have evidence suggesting that cannabis use, primarily THC in cannabis, in genetically predisposed or at-risk populations, leads to earlier diagnosis of psychosis/schizophrenia. This tells us that THC in cannabis has a small causative effect on schizophrenia.
A small effect on people who were already at risk. The sky is hardly falling with legalization.
Emphasis mine. This seems interesting to me. Earlier diagnosis is not more diagnosis. It could just mean that due to illegality, these people got into contact with mental health professionals earlier than they would have otherwise. Also getting the diagnosis earlier. But not being more schizophrenic.
I'm generally pro-legalization, but if marijuana is shown to make people schizophrenic who would otherwise not become schizophrenic, it's a big deal. It has severely affected their lives and those around them. Tobacco doesn't give everyone lung cancer after all, some are more at-risk than others. Quantitatively determining that risk, doing cost-benefit, etc, is important, but I don't think this should be dismissed out of hand as immaterial.
> The relation between cannabis and schizophrenia needs further investigation. We need more case-control studies and clinical trials with a larger population to get conclusive data.
From the current data, we can conclude that the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) component of cannabis can be the main culprit causing psychosis and schizophrenia in the at-risk population. THC can also be the one exacerbating symptoms and causing an adverse prognosis in already diagnosed patients.
It is a well-known fact that many of the abuse substances cause psychosis, which is a part of the schizophrenia spectrum; cannabis is one [9]
Nevertheless, the fact remains that schizophrenia and psychosis walk hand in hand alongside with cannabis use. Cannabis has many strains with different ratios of components. The ratio of THC and CBD is the most important psychotomimetic property of any cannabis strain [14]. When a healthy person uses cannabis, he experiences relaxation, euphoria, and a decrease in anxiety and boredom. However, they might also have some undesirable effects like paranoia, grandiosity, agitation, hallucination, cognitive impairment, disorganized thinking and behavior, and depersonalization [17]. People predisposed to the development of psychotic illness are more vulnerable to the psychotomimetic effects of cannabis, more specifically, THC [16,17].
Per se cannabis does not cause schizophrenia or psychosis. However, we have longitudinal data supporting the causal link between cannabis and psychosis [18].
i love brave, it has transformed search for me, and the results remind me of what Google felt like decades ago. I find stuff on brave that i never would find on google or duck duck go. For example, trying to buy some thuja "green giants" (a kind of tree for landscaping) uncovered dozens of mom and pop operations nationwide, plus the insights from their local websites, that are typically buried under 5 layers of SEO garbage on google.
I think it's ridiculous to force healthy college students to get a covid vaccine, and 100x to mandate a booster. Curious if this becomes a flag or 100x downvote, but at some point we have to face reality - covid just isn't that severe for young folks, and the vaccines offer temporary protection that simply doesn't make sense for low risk groups.
I'm going to second that. Since switching off Google a couple years ago I have had fewer and fewer "failed" searches which required me to go back to Google to try the search.
The more people who use Brave Search (they own their own index), the better it will become. And right now I'd say it's orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others.
Right now, DDG gives me the best search results of anything that I've tried. I know people who don't get the same quality results from it as I do, though.
I'm 100% convinced that the difference comes down to how searches are formulated. At least, the people who I know that experience poor quality searches seem to enter their queries as natural-language questions rather than search terms.
In my experience Brave is better than DDG for tech topics. But DDG so far is noticeably better for non-english content and image search, so I still use it as a fallback.
> orders of magnitude better than DDG and the others
used brave as my daily search engine for a couple of months and I must say this was not the case for me. Results for global EN topics were indeed better than ddg/bing in some cases (nowhere near an order of magnitude better, though), but results for any non-EN or local queries (think searching for major websites running for 15 yrs) were extremely poor in most cases.
Well that's a good point. I only speak English so I speak for my language. On the point of Brave vs DDG I think my main point is that Brave has its own index and DDG is based on ... Bing? ... I'm not sure. At any rate I don't think there's a comparison there.
I made an earnest effort to switch to Brave, but I'm back with Google for almost all searches because 1100ms+ result page loads are simply unworkable here.
I'm sticking it out, but I find that I have to fall back to Google on 1 out of 10 searches. Mostly technical ones.
But what really annoys me (and maybe I'm doing something wrong) is that one page of (slow) results is not enough. I understand that Google's 1,000,000+ results is also not necessary. But I often need more than 20. Come to think of it, I rarely need pages 2 and beyond when using Google. So maybe that's saying something about the quality of the Brave results? They're just not as good.
stay positive! all DS skills will be transferable to normal SWE, the best SWE are all multi-language and strong SQL never goes to waste, lastly - many of the best SWE would be even stronger with some DS competencies, so keep at it and I suspect you'll wind up in a pretty awesome place.
