Starcrunch

I'm glad to hear from someone else who's honest about their negative experience.

Psychedelics seem to somehow have simply amazing PR: plentiful testimonies of their life-changing abilities, encouraging us to try them, but very little acknowledgement of their dark side. The subculture is very quick to brush away anything that goes against the narrative of the "mind-opening wonder drugs that big pharma doesn't want you to know about."

My experiences with psilocybin over a few months started with awe and wonder and spiritual awakening (or what seemed to be at the time), and ended with horrifying lasting harm. Insomnia, constant vivid nightmares, sleep paralysis, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, tics, and all kinds of weirdness at the periphery of conscious experience that I can't really explain.

It feels like I flashed my brain's firmware with no way to undo it. I took all the precautions I thought I was supposed to. I wish someone had warned me.

> But I am terrified of the increasingly bleak looking future, and despite putting a lot of effort into conservation and living with as small a footprint as possible, I don't see much hope for our broken civilisation, much less our species

Yeah, I struggle with that too. At the same time, there is a huge amount of opportunity for average people to make an impact in whatever small sphere of influence we may have.

If I always frame my efforts in relation to the entirety of the world's social and environmental problems, of course those efforts are going to seem insignificant; but I think that's as misleading as, say, viewing my personal spending habits as inconsequential based on how much they impact the global economy. Small changes in your local community or social circle really do matter!

That's one reason I like platforms like iNaturalist: it's a good tool to encourage others to simply learn more about the living things around them, which is a significant step in nudging someone from indifference toward being an advocate for nature.

Sorry if that's not helpful, but I'd really like to encourage you to keep doing what you're doing, because it probably matters a lot more than you think it does (especially to all the creatures that live in and around your larger-than-average backyard!)

That's so cool! There are some really nice photos on your Flickr, and quite a few species in that Flora and Fauna album that I've never seen before.

I'm also active on iNaturalist, and maintain a python API client and some other open source tools for it: https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist

If you ever have the desire to put together some data visualizations, stats, automation, or anything else fun or useful with your iNat data, you're more than welcome to ping me for help on GitHub (jwcook) or on the iNat forums (jcook).

This sounds amazing. I'd be interested to hear more details about what "stewarding 50ha of Australian bush" entails. Do you work with a local conservation organization, and do you have any particular goals for restoration or management? Do you work on documenting the biodiveristy there? Is it home to any endemic or threatened species you're espeially interested in? Any photos you could share?

Good article! I agree with most of this, and in general I think these problems are exaggerated. I also can't deny that there's still plenty of room for improvement in python packaging and dependency management tooling. I notice this the most not in my own projects, but whenever I'm helping someone who's new to the language. I think it's worth paying attention to things that beginners find difficult, and it can be true that both: 1. There are some pitfalls here that are easy for beginners (and even experienced developers) to fall into, and 2. In online discussions, those problems are often portrayed as being much worse than they actually are.

Of the three categories of tools mentioned in the article, 'python version manager' is the only area where I find it easy to point to a single tool without thinking too hard about it: pyenv. It does one thing and does it quite well, and I can easily recommend it even to new developers.

On the other hand, for environment and dependency management:

> In the second case, use something modern that manages dependencies for you with minimal effort. I like poetry, but you do you.

Poetry is also my preferred tool for my own projects, but I've also seen enough ways it can go wrong that I hesitate to recommend it to beginners. I think a lot of people won't know what to do with advice like "Use something modern that manages dependencies for you with minimal effort," since "modern" and "minimal effort" are fairly subjective qualities that there isn't a clear consensus on.

Very cool breakdown! I imagine the engineer(s) who worked on the device's firmware would enjoy seeing this. There's probably some story about companion software that was intended to work with this but never made it to production. Or maybe there was some feature on the backlog for the ability to change the image palette after it's been saved, and the idea was scrapped at the last minute.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!