adepressedthrow

I'm stuck with several relatively new (2015, HD, run tvOS 16) Apple TVs that came from a government auction. They were used in a school, and were never removed from "Apple School Manager", their MDM system for schools. Apparently Apple can mark serials as part of a school or business's fleet, and upon setting up the device, it automatically is registered and pulls down the MDM profiles.

Only the school can remove them from the system, and although Apple's terms of service _require_ them to be in control of the device for it to be registered (i.e. not sold to a third party, me), I have been completely unable to convince the school to help me on the matter. Contacting Apple doesn't seem like much of an option either, as they don't even publicly post contact info for this kind of support.

You might want to play around with the encoding on your videos. On a Windows machine with a i7-8770k (and dedicated GPU) with Firefox latest, the page was spiking up to 100% GPU usage, causing the browsing experience to slow to a crawl. It may be related due to me having a Twitch stream up on a second display.

Probably a Firefox bug, but it's preventing me from looking at this landing page that every one else seems to like :P

I hadn't seen Amanda before. Bacularis looks like it might help with the complexity of setting up Backula. I might try that out.

It's hard to get the motivation to mess with these tools that have relatively little documentation/examples and are purely config file based.

I was able to purchase a LTO-7 library full of tapes a few years ago for basically nothing, and still haven't gotten around to using it. There seems to be very little in terms of free, automated software for managing the system and performing tasks such as backups. tar doesn't exactly cut it for hands-off usage.

The best I've found is using Veeam Backup & Replication, but it's Windows only and not great still.

This is a huge thing for me too. I got super burnt out because I care too much.

I hope you get better. I'm still struggling with it, a year after stopping work.

It's very useful information when you are never rested and constantly are trying to tweak variables to observe the impacts to your sleep. I've long since stopped relying on trackers, however, as nothing seemed to display any accuracy whatsoever. I manually record my perception of sleep every night.

This is commonly done at Lego conventions, though usually not too many people participate.

It seems that there are few options overall, but particularly few OSS options for doing offline storage and sync in native code (_without_ using JavaScript). The only thing I've encountered that really met those requirements (OSS, non-JS) was Couchbase, but it's really not a great experience, and requires complicated setup both for the binary and the server. Adding P2P or CRDT features is even more difficulty.

I'm very happy you found something that works for you. What method of ketamine treatment have you been taking? I just stopped after 2 months of troches, which didn't seem to bring significant, if any, benefit.

Interestingly, I found myself abnormally susceptible to the psychedelic effects. When taking ketamine orally, the expectation is that most of the medicine is absorbed while you hold the troch in your mouth for 30+ minutes. After a lot of experimentation, I found that I barely absorb any medicine through my mouth, but once I swallow it I absorb it very rapidly. This made it difficult to control the delivery speed, and likely hindered my treatment.

I haven't been dealing with depression for anywhere near as long as you, but I do speak from experience about how terrible it is to not find anything that works. I've gone through ~13 of the most commonly prescribed drugs for depression, anxiety, and sleep, and none brought any relief. I've now tried and failed out of ketamine, which I was really hopeful for. Now I'm just back to sitting around trying to get _any_ doctor to actually see me and maybe get tested for various neurodivergent conditions.

Your comment about FOSS is spot on. While I'm very aware that Google Sheets is not OSS, it felt much more amenable to me than Excel (and I'm sure Excel's online free version isn't particularly fantastic anyway, though it may be better than Sheets from what people are saying here).

> How exactly do you program without knowing the shape of your data in advance? You need to know your database columns, or your JSON schema, etc.

This was a bit overloaded in my opinion, as in spreadsheets world, "shape" includes the number of rows, hence my comments. I know that the column layout needs to be known.

> Were you using dynamic array formulae

I looked into it, but couldn't figure out how to handle them without introducing a massive amount of formula duplication. The best I could figure out how to do was to do a single large FILTER (which is dynamic array) and doing a fill down on my other transformation formulas from there. I blacked out the rows past the end of the FILTER using conditional formatting rules (which felt very stupid to do, but I couldn't find anything better).

> The skill ceiling is very high

I don't doubt you, but if you can't discover the functionality, it might as well not exist. Admittedly I was clearly using the inferior tool, but in my searching for solutions I much more readily found Google's documentation over Excel's.

I also realize I'm not in the position of being forced into a corner; as most of us on this forum could, I just wave my magic wand and write the software to solve my problems. I imagine those who don't have that ability available to them will do "crazier and crazier" things to figure out how to accomplish their work in Excel, and therefore will learn much better ways than I have in my little experience with it.

----

I was building a tool to track the completion of finding parts for a given Lego set. You enter the set ID, it pulls the parts list for that set (Rebrickable nicely offers their database as a set of CSVs https://rebrickable.com/downloads/) and formats it nicely for consumption.

Surely that's what lots of non-developer white collar workers use Excel for? I imagine there's orders of magnitude more people using Excel for data processing rather than Python or R. I'm well aware it's not the best tool for the job, but yet people are using it for purposes such as that. I wanted to learn more about that experience.

What do you mean by this? What am I "recording" as the bottom of the data set?

My point was that it is very hard to have a dynamic number of rows feed a proportionate dynamic number of rows. Scripting makes it much simpler, but at least with Google Sheet's scripting, the API seemed pretty lacking for that processing (in the very least, it's very slow, since it's running as a very constrained shared resource).

That's exactly what I did. Now separate out some columns and perform some additional transformation on that FILTERed data. Can you do it without repeating yourself (duplicating the FILTER statement, or any of the other transformations you need to do, besides just filling down a column). Can you perform these transformations only on the row height of the data, and not have extra rows with broken formulas?

I honestly wouldn't even be surprised if the functionality to do the above does exist, but for all of my searching I couldn't find it.

Your aside is exactly why I wanted to use a spreadsheet. It's the only tool that has that market penetration for non-programmers, and I wanted to see what made it tick. It seems like that may have backfired by not using Excel, however.

Interesting. It definitely seems like that would fix a lot of my issues, which prompts the question of why Google hasn't built this functionality

I certainly get that, but I'm primarily pointing out that as a non-layman from the software side, it doesn't seem like a particularly amazing tool. It certainly could be the case that it's extremely good for non-programmers, I was simply pointing out that I naively think it's not very well designed for those usecases.

I recently sat down and built something more complicated than simple accounting in a spreadsheet. It's what I considered to be a pretty typical usecase for a non-math related sheet; taking in several tables of data and selectively joining them. You enter an ID, press a button, and it finds all of the data related to that ID and presents it to you.

I was horrified to find that even with the supporting scripting capabilities, the entire paradigm revolves around knowing the shape of your data in advance. (I was using Google Sheets, but I don't think Excel would have been much different). For example, it is very non-intuitive to write a formula that retrieves all the rows in another sheet that match this rule, and once you do that, since it's a variable number of rows returned, it is difficult to then operate on that data without filling your formulas down for some indeterminate number of rows.

I realize most people don't have the luxury or skills, but I quickly realized that I could spin up a whole CRUD webapp for this problem faster than I, someone who understands indexing and windowing and such, could build it in a spreadsheet.

After this experience, I can't help but wonder if Excel and spreadsheets largely exist due to pre-existing knowledge about how to use them, or if this is _actually_ the best way for non-programming minded people to solve these problems.

What are you doing at this time (not meant as judgement or pressure)? I'm at a year (intentionally) unemployed, and I'm still not at the point where I feel like I can make meaningful progress on the projects I want to work on.

I can't really foresee a way that will get me going again, and I don't know that I really want to. I feel ashamed that my wife is now working, for less pay and objectively harder, when I could be making twice as much.

This is essentially me, though I'm not day trading and I'm not sure how much better I feel since quitting. I am young, but I spent all of my time up until a year ago doing the best I could to understand what makes good products and how to write great software. This has made me a de facto leader in any team I've joined, including straight out of college. Now I have the work experience to be "senior" (whatever that means), but I've never had the mentorship or fact checking that I think reaching such a position requires.

I still don't feel ready to find a job, but I have no idea how I will ever hold one. Leading is so wearing, and I'm already in such a delicate mental state.

I hope you find where you want to be. For me, I think I _need_ to be where I feel I'm bringing some positive benefit to the world, and I hope that at some point I can find a way to both build good OSS and make some money doing it.

While the overloading is annoying, database normalization actually has a strict definition that is not unlike the standard mathematical use; that is, to imply consistency (to make normal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

I would also point out that normalization within mathematics does not have a single concrete definition either, and it depends on your domain and desired property to stabilize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_(statistics)

How does this differ from MAMP, other than the fact that MAMP is quite old at this point?

> My two years at Google were spent perpetually stressed, acting as an unofficial PM, helping run meetings and document decisions while dealing with sometimes hostile colleagues.

This is the position I found myself in while working on a greenfield project for a FAANG company. Management structure either didn't exist (we didn't have a proper PM for nearly a year) or wasn't competent enough to take pressure off of the devs. It was so hard to fire bad hires and make good new ones that I was the _only_ dev contributing for a long time (then it became 2 devs, and he's still the only competent dev on the team to this day).

I think most of the time when you're in this scenario, the best option is just to quit. Most likely you as an individual won't make enough of a difference to fix the problems, and regardless, it's not worth your health. I eventually left and worked at a decent sized startup for ~8 months before completely burning out. I wasn't forced by a doctor to take leave, but I felt like I had no other choice, and I'm still not working a year later.

TL;DR: Be careful and cognizant of your brain and body. Don't try to run everything at your job, because it likely won't end up getting fixed and you'll just kill yourself.

It's amazing to me that there's so little in the OSS world about handwriting recognition. From an OCR perspective, I understand it's much harder than printed text, but there's not really anything for "online" handwriting recognition either (written on a screen/vectorized strokes). From my understanding online recognition should be easier than scanning printed text, and yet there aren't any tools out there that I can find.

> But what if the Devil came and offered to cure my depression, and the price was my right arm? That question is easy. I would say “sounds great, but what's the catch?” Depression is not something with upsides and downsides. It is a terrible illness, the blight of my life, the worst thing that has ever happened to me. It is neither an adorable character trait nor an annoyance to be managed with medical treatment. It is a severe chronic illness, one that is often fatal. In a good year it is kept in check by medical treatment but it is always lurking in the background and might reappear any morning. It is the Joker: perhaps today he is locked away in Arkham, but I am not safe, I am never safe, I am always wondering if this is the day he will escape and show up at my door to maim or kill me.

As a constant sufferer who's been dealing with a debilitating case for over a year now, I love the way the author framed depression. It perfectly describes my fear that if I ever get "better", it's only a local maxima, and I will never be freed of this curse. It's laughable to even think, given how I can suffer from day to day, but I'm honestly afraid of finding something that improves my condition, because of the unknown of how depression might still be lurking in the shadows. I still try (often not very hard), but that fear is there nonetheless.

I tried HIIT for a period of a few weeks, but ended up stopping it as my motivation decreased (both from the depression and towards the HIIT in general). I didn't notice any real improvements, but I probably didn't do it for a long enough period...

Thank you very much for your perspective. You've given me several things to process. I definitely do get stuck in loops; they've almost become invasive thoughts. I don't care to think them, but they are there anyway, and they won't leave me alone.

I don't know how to feel fulfilled either, and I think happiness in some way stems from that as well.

> The research into fasting and the gut biome over the past few/several years has been fascinating, mostly because it all boils down to rather simple mechanisms with hugely beneficial results. I do wish that the media would respect their readers enough to delve into the details, because the "maybe, maybe not" summaries aren't helpful.

It's so hard to find data that is useful enough to make intelligent decisions off of. I drink non-caffinated diet Coke nearly every day; is this actually causing my gut issues and possibly depression? The drink itself is one of the bright spots in my dull days, so stopping for an experiment is hard.

I'm not the greatest source of information given my own issues, but I _can_ confidently say that burnout can be really debilitating if you don't take care of it. I strongly recommend you take 3+ weeks off, preferably not writing code. If you can't swing the vacation, you can try for medical leave.

I've emailed. At very least, thank you for caring.

Interesting. I love Scott, but I didn't know there was a draft on ACX. The official page is on his website: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/ I'll have to see how the articles differ...

1. Yea. It was hard to find someone with availability period, and our insurance isn't very good. You're probably right that I should just pay out of pocket, but I'm honestly pretty convinced that I have an actual brain chemical issue, so I'm dubious of the benefits to therapy

2. I think I do a decent enough job at this. I don't necessarily eat the best food, but at least I'm eating some fruits and vegetables and not Doritos all of the time. I don't really exercise much, but at least I go on 30+ minute walks every other day or so. I probably sit in my chair to much, but I imagine most on HN do that...

What led you to getting better? How were you able to function in such suffering for 10 years? Not to turn it into talking about me again, but I'm increasingly worried that I've wasted a year and may waste many more to this nothingness, which is quite concerning. How do you look back on your 10 years and say "it's OK, I needed to go through that/I'm happy I'm better now"?

I went through the first several chapters of the book, but it didn't stick. I should try again; I see his work mentioned all over the place and how it helped people.