If you drive in the FasTrak lanes without an account you pay the fee + $10 surcharge (for a first time violation), and it goes up on the second violation:
I'm having a hard time finding a citation but according to Google's AI summary if the second violation is unpaid they put a hold on your DMV registration, and the fine itself can be sent to a collection agency.
I agree empirically I see people driving through the lane without a tag (i.e., no number shows up in the overhead display), but maybe these are people with FasTrak accounts being lazy?
One annoying thing is I've tried to pay, but can't.
I spend about four to five months per year in the Bay Area, but have Canadian license plates. The website doesn't even let you enter a Canadian plate, or a foreign plate.
So I bought one of the transponders at Walgreens, and just leave it in the glove box because it has 20 bucks or something when you buy it.
But I can't check its status, don't know how much is left on it, have no idea what I'm paying, really sucks.
The other answers are great, but let me just add that C++ cannot be parsed with conventional LL/LALR/LR parsers, because the syntax is ambiguous and requires disambiguation via type checking (i.e., there may be multiple parse trees but at most one will type check).
There was some research on parsing C++ with GLR but I don't think it ever made it into production compilers.
Other, more sane languages with unambiguous grammars may still choose to hand-write their parsers for all the reasons mentioned in the sibling comments. However, I would note that, even when using a parsing library, almost every compiler in existence will use its own AST, and not reuse the parse tree generated by the parser library. That's something you would only ever do in a compiler class.
Also I wouldn't say that frontend/backend is an evolution of previous terminology, it's just that parsing is not considered an "interesting" problem by most of the community so the focus has moved elsewhere (from the AST design through optimization and code generation).
Note that depending on what parsing lib you use, it may produce nodes of your own custom AST type
Personally I love the (Rust) combo of logos for lexing, chumsky for parsing, and ariadne for error reporting. Chumsky has options for error recovery and good performance, ariadne is gorgeous (there is another alternative for Rust, miette, both are good).
The only thing chumsky is lacking is incremental parsing. There is a chumsky-inspired library for incremental parsing called incpa though
If you want something more conservative for error reporting, annotate-snippets is finally at parity with rustc's current custom renderer and will soon become the default for both rustc and cargo.
GLR C++ parsers were for a short time in use on production code at Mozilla, in refactoring tools: Oink (and it's fork, pork). Not quite sure what ended that, but I don't think it was any issue with parsing.
It's loud, there's an out if you need your code working right now, and when you finally act on the deprecation, if anyone complains, they don't really have legs to stand on.
Of course you can layer it with warnings as a first stage, but ultimately it's either this or remove the code outright (or never remove it and put up with whatever burden that imposes).
Love this idea, as it is already implemented in a $FAANG company tool. (used company wide by 80k+ SDEs). I got used to seeing these in the logs and terminal. So much that my brain now automatically ignores it from my view/seeing like it does for my nose.
It's because if you explain what's going on, you stop the action. And viewers/readers don't like that.
In fiction it's called an info dump. As an aspiring science fiction author, virtually every beta reader I've had has told me they don't like them. I want my fiction to make sense, but you have to be subtle about it. To avoid readers complaining, you have to figure out how to explain things to the reader without it being obvious that you're explaining things to the reader, or stopping the action to do it.
Movies are such a streamlined medium that usually this gets cut entirely. At least in books you can have appendices and such for readers who care.
> In fiction it's called an info dump. As an aspiring science fiction author, virtually every beta reader I've had has told me they don't like them. I want my fiction to make sense, but you have to be subtle about it. To avoid readers complaining, you have to figure out how to explain things to the reader without it being obvious that you're explaining things to the reader, or stopping the action to do it.
The whole "The audience wants to know, but they don't want to hear it" problem.
Usually solved by having characters do something that shows their character. If it's from the past, have a flashback, don't have a narration.
I would argue that it is the opposite. People expect an info dump and everything explained to them. I remember watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier (I think it was the last movie I watched in theatre) and pretty much everything was explained to the audience. Guy Richie has character intro screens like Street Fighter in his movies.
Even in movies where everything is explained e.g. in Blade where they will have a scene where someone explains how a weapon works, I've noticed in a recent viewing of the movie that people forgot the explanations of the gadgets he has. In Blade they have a James Bond / Q like conversation between the characters to say "this weapons does X against vampires" and sets the weapon for later on in the movie and people forgot about it.
I watched "The Mothman Prophecies" and quite a lot of the movie was up to interpretation and there was many small things in the film that you might overlook e.g. there is a scene in a mirror where the reflection in the mirror is out of sync with his movements, suggesting something supernatural is occurring and he hasn't realised it yet. While I love the movie, there is very few movies like that.
If you watch movies before the 90s. A huge number of movies will have characters communicate efficiently and often realistically.
Current movies have Reed-Solomon error correction (repetition of concepts, names and explanations) built in so the stream receiver (human watching movie while still holding smartphone in hand) can recover from missed data (scenes).
It's interesting, because old comic books have this as well. For decades (I'm not sure if they still do it) every issue of Wolverine would have some silly bit where Wolverine is talking to himself to remind the reader that the has an adamantium skeleton, razor-sharp claws, enhanced animal senses and an advanced healing factor which can heal from almost any wound. Every single issue, nearly without fail.
It's silly to the reader (and especially to an adult reader) but it's also obvious why this was present: the comic was meant for kids, and also Marvel never know when they might be getting a brand new reader who is totally unfamiliar with the character.
> It's silly to the reader (and especially to an adult reader) but it's also obvious why this was present: the comic was meant for kids, and also Marvel never know when they might be getting a brand new reader who is totally unfamiliar with the character.
The same was present in any serials such as Conan.
There is a description of Conan and where he comes from, how black his hair is, how manly he, how he is the "noble savage "etc. every story.
Conan is definitely not for children. It verges on erotica in many of the stories e.g. in one story there is a older woman whipping a younger teenage girl while tied up and it is made known to the reader the teenage girl is "young" with the implication that she is probably 14 or 15.
Also every Conan story typically ends up with him using sheer overwhelming aggression to defeat super natural entities and then escape with the girl.
I with there was more "King Conan" stuff. But it is a property that Hollywood doesn't really understand.
There is something about super healing that writers feel obligated to re-iterate to the audience. In Heroes, the Cheerleader was taking ludicrous amounts of damage to give everyone a reminder that she could regenerate quickly.
> People expect an info dump and everything explained to them. I remember watching Captain America
People don't have an expectation of that. The number one rule of movie making used to be "Show, don't tell".
With the rise of streaming this changed. People "watch" movies while chatting on their phones, doing home chores etc. A lot of movies in the streaming era spell everything out because people no longer watch the screens.
> People don't have an expectation of that. The number one rule of movie making used to be "Show, don't tell"
I am aware that it is supposed to be like that however around the 90s/2000s this changed.
> With the rise of streaming this changed. People "watch" movies while chatting on their phones, doing home chores etc. A lot of movies in the streaming era spell everything out because people no longer watch the screens.
This was in a movie theatre and this was still in the era where it was considered rude to be speaking on chatting on the phone in the cinema.
> Even in movies where everything is explained e.g. in Blade where they will have a scene where someone explains how a weapon works, I've noticed in a recent viewing of the movie that people forgot the explanations of the gadgets he has. In Blade they have a James Bond / Q like conversation between the characters to say "this weapons does X against vampires" and sets the weapon for later on in the movie and people forgot about it.
That’s because you’re seeing the rule of cool in action. The explanation itself makes the item interesting enough that the (2 seconds) setup gets the audience excited up watch a grenade blow a vampire’s head off.
If you go back and watch the first two seasons of HBO's Westworld, you will see Anthony Hopkins' character repeatedly doing exposition dumps out of his mouth. The difference is in how he does it, that he is in such complete command of his craft that he can work out exactly what the screenwriters intended without drawing any attention to it.
And Trekkies will remember the time Larry Niven wrote a screenplay for TAS and gave all the exposition dumps to Leonard Nimoy. See how nicely he handles it?
Once you develop an awareness of how SF screenplay writers do this, you can't unsee it.
Babylon 5 was particularly egregious, I was never a fan but I was puzzled that JMS had to do rely on it so heavily. It was like he created the character of Delenn just to be an exposition dumper and Mira Furlan faithfully did what was asked of her. Screenwriters also call this diegesis if the writer goes all the way and uses dialog to explicitly feed the narrative to the audience.
My favorite is Con Air (1997). As they're marching the prisoners onto the plane, a warden explains to a colleague who everyone is so we know just what a dangerous crowd the protag is in with/up against.
"That's So-and-so. Drug and weapons charges. Took out a squad of cops before he was finally arrested."
"That's Such-and-such. They call him The Butcher. He eats his victims after he murders them."
"That's the ringleader. Runs the whole drug trade along the entire west coast. Anybody crossing him has a death wish."
Then Nicolas Cage's character, the hero, comes out. He gives a toss of his luxurious hair (must've been smuggling Pantene in his "prison pocket"), everything goes slo-mo, and I swear to you, a beam of holy light falls on him like he's Simba from The Lion King.
> Then Nicolas Cage's character, the hero, comes out. He gives a toss of his luxurious hair (must've been smuggling Pantene in his "prison pocket"), everything goes slo-mo, and I swear to you, a beam of holy light falls on him like he's Simba from The Lion King.
Don't forget the scene near the end where he says to Bubba (I think at least that is his name), "I will show you that God exists", and in almost every other movie it is left upto interpretation whether God is really protecting/guiding the hero.
However in Conair, Cyrus shoots at him at point blank range and I think every bullet misses and/or grazes him. As he is walking through the plane to finally confront Cyrus there is a number of events that should kill him e.g a propeller flies through the fuselage and narrowly misses him and kills Jonny 23. There is really no other way to interpret it other than Nicolas Cage is very literally demonstrating that God exists.
The movie is not subtle about anything. It was the last "All American" action movie, where the hero beats everyone by just punching them harder and believing in Jesus. I quite like it.
Maybe some people like that. I have no idea how common this is, but if everything makes sense, I find that kind of boring. I like to have at least a little bit of ambiguity or mystery to chew on.
I really enjoyed the Mothman Prophecies (only watched it recently) because you were really never sure if the Characters involved weren't suffering from some sort of mental illness, or if things were just an unfortunate series of events. It also has a bunch of trippy visual effects in there that don't appear to be CGI.
My friend and I had a completely different interpretations of what happened in the final act. Well worth watching the movie.
Yep, I totally get it, and my initial observation was made when I was maybe 17 or so. Sometimes these topics do get put into movies, such as the sequence in Shazam where they test his newly-found powers -- but even that was played more for laughs and was really just an entertaining way to acknowledge that much of the audience probably never heard of Shazam.
If we succumbed to everyone's complaints we'd have a much more dumbed down version of everything. Consider if you had a concussion on the right temporal lobe and had hypergraphia as a symptom of the resultant temporal lobe epilepsy. I'd write everything I'd want to write regardless of who complains. Philip K. Dick was one such person.
It depends on what you care about. If you're writing purely for yourself, then by all means, go ahead and do so.
I've found there's a balance to be found in listening to others vs yourself. Usually, if multiple people give you the same feedback, there is some underlying symptom they are correctly diagnosing. But they may not have the correct diagnosis, or even be able to articulate the symptoms clearly. The real skill of an author/editor is in figuring out the true diagnosis and what to do about it.
In the communication example, this means rooting conflicts in the true personalities of the characters and/or their context, so that even if they sat down to have a deep chat, they still wouldn't agree. E.g., character A has an ulterior motive to see character B fail. Now you hint at that motive in a subtle way that telegraphs to readers that something is going on, without stopping the action for what would turn into a pedantic conversation. At least, that's what I'd do.
No, you need to be able to potray humans well enough to convey their motivations, goals, emotions, etc without explaining it. Anybody can explain a character, but that's not interesting to read.
The Matrix already has quite an info dump when he joins the real world that halts most of the momentum (on a re-watch, at least). I would not want even more of that.
To me it's interesting that (a) most people die of old age, and (b) the leading cause of death is essentially preventable (heart disease being highly lifestyle related) or else plausibly curable in the future (I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime).
That was very much not the case historically; you can Google numbers yourself but the percentage of childhood deaths prior to modern medicine was truly shocking.
It also seems to indicate that, with some thought and care, a meaningful impact (both at individual and societal levels) is possible by altering our lifestyles to be healthier.
>> I certainly hope we'll see progress on cancer in my lifetime).
Good news. You already have :).
Firstly, it's worth pointing out that "cancer" is not really 1 thing. There are lots of different conditions that are cancer, but they are different in many ways. For example lung cancer is pretty bad because your body needs lungs to function. Whereas say a melanoma on your foot is easier for your body to cope with (because your organs are all working.)
Some cancers are easily removed via surgery, some are not.
Likewise chemotherapy is a term covering a lot of different drugs and drug combinations. Advances in this space, matching doses, and drugs, to cancers have progressed enormously over the last couple decades. Some (although very much not all) cancers are now curable.
The most critical part of cancer survival is how early you catch it. But cancers are mostly asymptomatic so unless you "go looking" it's likely they'll be advanced before detection.
The biggest progress with cancer is thus regular screening. Especially for the most common ones. Prostate cancer for example is a simple blood test. How many of us are doing that every 6 months?
Cancer will always be with us. The causes are diverse, and often unexplainable. But we have made huge strides in early detection, as well as treatments. No doubt there will be more strides to come.
So let me be the first to turn your hope into reality :)
> the reality is quality of life at 90+ is a lot worse than in your 20s or 30s.
All my grandparents lived well into their 90s (mediterranean lifestyle + modern medicine), and all of them would’ve chosen euthanasia had it been an option (they phrased that in various ways - essentially something along the lines of “if God could bring me home now it’d be good”).
It’s been a sobering thing to experience and it leaves me hoping that if I’m ever in their position, that option will be available to me somehow.
While it's true that preventing cancer means you're likely to die in a few years of heart disease, and preventing heart disease means you're likely to die in a few years of cancer, solving both will add dramatically more than both effects combined to both life and healthspan.
Those really are the big two - as the graphs in the article show, the next biggest things are much smaller and much less likely to get you, which means you live a lot longer and healthier.
Standard engineering. You fix the thing that breaks the system first. Fix that, the next bug appears. Rinse, repeat.
You don’t think we have been doing this already? Car safety improved, general violence, death by food poisoning, etc. Now we have contacts, knee replacement surgery, meniscus surgery, widespread information on fitness for the elderly, etc.
You have many specialized fields slowly improving. The top focus changes as the previous top problems get solutions.
In general the problem is that when humans enter well into senescence, at some point your body just stops working altogether and it's at that point that basically anything that happens to you next will kill you. Or sometimes it will be nothing at all, and your heart will simply stop in your sleep one night.
This is why when somebody dies 'of old age' it's often not like you can just seem them slowly drifting away day by day. Rather they seem to be in perfectly good health, for their age at least, and then 2 weeks later, they're dead.
Conda doesn't do lock files. If you look into it, the best you can do is freeze your entire environment. Aside from this being an entirely manual process, and thus having all the issues that manual processes bring, this comes with a few issues:
1. If you edit any dependency, you resolve the environment from scratch. There is no way to update just one dependency.
2. Conda "lock" files are just the hashes of the all the packages you happened to get, and that means they're non-portable. If you move from x86 to ARM, or Mac to Linux, or CPU to GPU, you have to throw everything out and resolve.
Point (2) has an additional hidden cost: unless you go massively out of your way, all your platforms can end up on different versions. That's because solving every environment is a manual process and it's unlikely you're taking the time to run through 6+ different options all at once. So if different users solve the environments on different days from the same human-readable environment file, there's no reason to expect them to be in sync. They'll slowly diverge over time and you'll start to see breakage because the versions diverge.
P.S. if you do want a "uv for Conda packages", see Pixi [1], which has a lot of the benefits of uv (e.g., lock files) but works out of the box with Conda's package ecosystem.
If you're going to do this, why not generate Pandoc ASTs directly? You can do so from a number of languages and they support (by definition) a superset of any given markup's features, with blocks to call out directly for things you can only do in Latex.
I assume the original question is asking about programmatic document generation, in which case working with a real AST is probably also a productivity and reliability win as well.
Recently I was introduced to the distinction between anxiety and dread. Anxiety is, essentially, a form of fear. You fear a worst-case consequence that isn't actually that likely. If you put up with your anxiety and just go and do the thing (on average) you'll do just fine, or at least ok-ish. Over time your body learns that the anxious activity is ok and the anxiety is reduced.
Dread is different. Dread is the expectation of a bad situation. It's not a worst-case scenario, it's a typical scenario. If what you are experiencing is dread, then pushing yourself into that situation will confirm to your body that, yup, it really is as bad as you thought, and will amplify the dread rather than diminish it.
A classic example is that certain forms of neurodivergence create sensory overload in typical "social" environments. This is likely to result in dread rather than anxiety. Your body is literally telling you that this situation is problematic, and repeat exposure isn't going to improve anything.
In our modern culture the language of anxiety is widespread but the language of dread much less so, and I think that's unfortunate because a lot of advice centers around "just get over it", which works only if what you're experiencing is anxiety. Personally, learning about this gave me permission to do "social" activities on my own terms and stop worrying about what other people think "social" means; turns out the social anxiety I had was relatively minimal and what I was experiencing was mostly the dread from environments where social activities often occur.
I always joked that there’s nothing to fear about travel over plane. Nothing will fall, nothing will crash. The true horror is spending X hours without movement and a 2 day back pain afterwards.
Seems that I rarely experience anxiety but I do experience dread more often.
What you’re describing is my own self-developed strategy to deal with various stuff. Need to research dread topic more.
"Personally, learning about this gave me permission to do "social" activities on my own terms and stop worrying about what other people think "social" means;"
So much this.
To have your own terms is always OK. If you think about it, what people think "social" means is not even fixed. It certainly changes with your age and your environment but even the consensus in a society about it changes.
When I grew up it meant being in a deafening loud environment so much full smoke that you could barely breathe. Hated it, but only when I moved to the big city and started university I understood that I am not the only one. Nowadays the smoke is mostly gone and at least it has become accepted to wear hearing protection.
I think in many cases there is a negative reinforcing aspect to anxiety that needs to be addressed. For example, anxiety can trigger certain physical symptoms like sweating excessively, tension leading to e.g. reduced loudness and loss of voice, clumsiness. This can spiral down and eventually the anxiety can be almost entirely about those physical aspects.
This is just a different way of looking at it. What you do by addressing what you call dread is basically putting a halt to this feedback loop.
I was stuttering for my entire life, still dealing with it at 42. Kids in basic school gave me all kinds of abuse due to my speech. So I obviously developed social anxiety. The nastiest part about stuttering is, the more anxious you are, the more you stutter. I was given a lot of advice to just go to kids and talk. It only reinforced the anxiety and confirmed that if I really want to say something, it's impossible to say it. The only realistic solution came much later in life, when I realized I just can't give a fuck about whether people understand me. People who are interested will ask me again. People who are not, will just go away. That attitude lessened the problem, but didn't get rid of it completely. But it also requires me to give up on many things.
Thank you for passing this on. I've been circling the concept but haven't ever heard it pinned down. One often comes with the other so it's difficult to separate the two, but at the same time the strategies needed to overcome / deal with them are very distinct.
This makes some amount of sense to me, but what if you dread approaching people? how would you resolve this with still wanting to approach people/form relationships?
I'd try to find ways to stack everything else in your favor as much as possible. If X is difficult, you try to optimize Y, Z, etc. so that at least you're not coping with multiple adverse environmental factors at the same time.
For me personally, the best-case scenario seems to be intentionally scheduled, one-on-one interactions in "clean" environments (i.e., quiet, unscented, no smoke/incense, dressed casually for maximum comfort, etc.). The next best would be some sort of group setting with structured, intentional sharing (i.e., not just doing something together but explicitly organized for the purpose of sharing). It can be a bit hit or miss to find these, so it can take some iteration to figure out what actually works.
Otherwise, "escalating" (i.e., inviting someone into a deeper/more meaningful interaction) is a skill you can practice, but if you're dealing with the rest of it at the same time, you're basically playing with a handicap. So incrementalize your goals as much as possible, practice in small, regular intervals with sufficient breaks for recovery, and don't compare yourself to anyone else, no matter how tempting that might be.
Hope that helps, and feel free to contact me on Keybase (in profile) or email (run the Perl script on my website) if you want help brainstorming.
Although I will posit that physical exhaustion is typically more manageable, so that helps. There are certainly exceptions, but by and large in our modern, sedentary world, physical exertion can easily be limited to controlled environments where one is able to stop when they reach the point of exhaustion. It is unlikely that stepping outside means that you will have to outrun a lion, unable to pause else become lunch. Chances are these days you will only ever reach exhaustion if you purposefully push yourself to (e.g. hitting the gym). But if I have reason to worry that I am going to find myself in a situation where I cannot meaningfully rest when I reach my physical breaking point, absolutely the anxiety will be running hot.
Whereas social interaction can be harder to control. For example, reaching your social limit in the middle of the workday does not usually, for all practical purposes, enable you to remove yourself from the situation. You are expected to keep going until the end of the business day, no matter how you are feeling on the inside. Us techies might have enough individual work to slink away to, perhaps, but for many jobs there is no such luxury. Or you might come up against a Chatty Cathy who will continue pushing to keep the social engagement going even after you try to back away. There aren't all that many HN-esq situations in the real world where you can just magically pop in when you want to engage and then disappear as fast as you came. And where you might find something approximate, you are apt to find it much too limiting to be an exclusive social outlet.
There's definitely a "get over it" for dread and it's called stoicism (not an expert). Sometimes you have to do things whether you like it or not just to survive and "getting over it" will prevent you from dying.
Even if this was true for neurotypicals (which it isn't) it wouldn't be true for neurodivergent folk.
Can you hold a conversation next to a lawnmower? A jackhammer? A jet engine? At some point there's literally too much noise for you to communicate verbally anymore. That point is different for different people.
> Even if this was true for neurotypicals (which it isn't) it wouldn't be true for neurodivergent folk.
Interesting take, are you neurodivergent? "Masking" is basically a "get over it" approach that the parent talks about. It is exhausting, to the point that neurodivergent people wil preemptively bail out of situations if they don't feel up for it. Tools associated with stocism can be helpful for neurodivergent people when they're used to support their needs rather than diminish them, in my experience.
let's say you are very afraid of heights. let's also say that your toddler climbed out a window and is now playing on the edge of the roof. you're just going to watch, or worse, hide your eyes?
you replied to a comment that cited "survival", so to argue against it you need to also cite surviving, or not surviving in the case you bring up.
Eslaught didn't mention survival, so Noman-land's rebuttal doesn't cover all cases of dread. I'm more trying to help him understand than directly refute his misdirected point. The feeling of dread isn't about how you react to it, but rather that the typical outcome is negative.
I actually have pretty bad height vertigo. I can suppress it but it takes almost all my attention. In your hypothetical I expect I would suppress it and grab the child. This vertigo is anxiety, not dread; the outcome is almost always neutral or positive, not negative.
A scenario that might induce dread is being forced to jump off a 30ft ledge. Even if you know how to fall well there's still significant risk of injury, and either way it's going to hurt. Learning to fall better might help, but the more important thing is to _avoid that situation in the first place_.
Trying to just "get over it" with the neurodivergence example noticed is the kind of thing likely to result in a panic attack or other uncontrollable expression of emotion. It's not something you can change just by wanting it hard enough.
One thing I've always wondered is what fraction of c is actually realistically achievable with current technologies? (Maybe with scenarios for manned/unmanned spacecraft.)
Like are we at 0.1% or 0.01% or more orders of magnitude off?
The best speed for interstellar travel with technologies that current theory says should be within our reach can be achieved with a vehicle with a light sail pushed by a giant laser, that is powered by solar power. There is even a way to brake it when it reaches the target star. I forget what the predicted velocity was though.
This technology is basically the same as one that the Moties developed in the story, The Mote in God's Eye.
It slows down by releasing a large light sail in front of it, designed to reflect light back to a much smaller light sail behind it. The laser then pushes the large sail away, and as the sail goes it pushes the smaller sail (and ship) back. This leaves the ship at moderate speed relative to the new star, and a large sail traveling very, very quickly beyond it.
We do not yet have this technology. But we can show that it is plausible.
https://www.bayareafastrak.org/en/help/invoices-and-penaltie...
I'm having a hard time finding a citation but according to Google's AI summary if the second violation is unpaid they put a hold on your DMV registration, and the fine itself can be sent to a collection agency.
I agree empirically I see people driving through the lane without a tag (i.e., no number shows up in the overhead display), but maybe these are people with FasTrak accounts being lazy?