mesoman

An yet, I've been on and off them for decades. No problem.

But many people have trouble and I am still at risk.

Benzos are miracle drugs for many including myself, but have to be taken carefully, and discontinued slowly (hyperbolic taper) if withdrawal symptoms are too bad.

SSRIs, SNRIs and I think buster do have withdrawal symptoms that can be as severe as benzos.

These medications are not "addictive." That requires improper use, and specifically, getting high with them.

But they definitely create "dependence," which is very different and comes with proper user of them.

The meds can change one's life for the better and do so for millions. But they have to be used to treat a problem, not to get high.

One point: there is a major difference between addiction and dependence. Addiction is about chasing a high, raising the dose as one builds tolerance.

Dependence is about having problems when quitting after using for a bit. It is an issue with proper use of benzos, antidepressants, etc. A person who is dependent on, say, Xanax may be just taking it regularly in a low dose. But when they quit, unpleasant symptoms can arise - beyond just a return of whatever they were being treated for. So quitting these often requires a long tapering process - see my post on "hyperbolic taper" above.

That person is not addicted, is not an addict, but rather is the usual responsible user of the medication.

What you describe is called physical dependence, which differs from addiction because it does not involve getting high, does not involve increasing doses to chase the feeling.

But it does mean you can't just stop cold turkey without risk of harm. This is true of benzos, and also many antidepressants (which are very different from benzos) and other psychiatric meds. Often a long period of tapering is required, with "hyperbolic" dosing reduction (each reduction is a small percentage of the previous dosage). This is called a "hyperbolic taper."

As an example, for some benzos, you drop the dosage by 5-10% reduction (from the previous dose, not the original) every 2 to 4 weeks. So D = D0*(1-X)^n where D0 is original dose, X is fraction reduced per period, N is the period number. This should be done under medical supervision.

The people who predict the weather are often damned smart and very experienced.

It's the problem that's hard.

Cloud formation is affected by cosmic ray flux. It's effectively random.

But the real problem is chaos - which says that even with perfect data, unless you also have computations with infinite precision and time/spatial/temperature/pressure/etc resolution, eventually you wind up far from reality.

The use of ensembles reduces the effect of chaos a bit, although they tend to smooth it out - so your broad pattern 12 days out might be more accurately forecast than without them, but the weather at your house may not be.

Iterative DL models tend to smooth it faster, according to a recent paper.

They partly broke hierarchical tags with the rewrite. If you have a tag hierarchy a.b.c and you put a note at a or b, it will not show up in the tag list. That ruined my main organizational tool.

And the limited depth of notebooks has always been just wrong, which is why I use hierarchical tags.

I went to Syncthing.net and they didn't mention iOS or Android.

Does it run on those?

What's the beef with Electron?

Apple may be upfront, but a couple of years ago they pretty much suddenly destroyed Progressive Web Apps by disallowing a whole bunch of modern, open standard browser capabilities, all in the name of preventing tracking.

A lot of developers were just crushed by that. Imagine having hundreds of thousands of dollars into developing an app when Apple just destroys the ability to do it.

When a big corporation has monopoly power (and Apple is very close to that - only one equally evil competitor in mobile space), they do bad things, often thinking they are doing good.

[caveat - there is so far an unofficial way to get around their "we will blow away your saved browser data" that was discussed by one of the webkit developers on the webkit blog. But since it isn't an official Apple doc - do we trust it?]

I was one developer who was burned. I was developing, as a volunteer, a web app for a very large volunteer organization. Boom... now it may not be possible, or if I use the work-around, it may be possible until it suddenly changes.

Standard Notes claims to, with a caveat that there may be a format it can't handle due to Evernote adding features.

A transfer-in from Evernote, either natively or through some third party utility, is a must. I'm not interested in writing something to parse .enex and put it into some other format (although .enex looks pretty easy to parse - it's xml with embedded BASE64 for some things like images).

It looks really, really interesting. But when you say it syncs super fast... is syncing initiated manually, or do you mean that changes on one device appear on another device quickly?

You can export your notes as HTML, or better, .enex files. The latter are XML, with embedded stuff encoded with base64.

I'm still a paying customer.

But I don't trust them and haven't since they made it difficult to export all of your notes. And, they damaged tag-based organization by changing to only list notes that are at the bottom of the tag hierarchy - not those in the middle.

And, they want to be the sole custodian my data, and I don't like a company with that attitude.

Having been involved with system design including large servers for 50 years, I don't trust the cloud. Yeah, the huge cloud providers are staffed by really smart people and it is very unlikely you'll lose your data there (although I sure wouldn't trust Google - they're nuts with their product management).

But a small staff Evernote, under pressure to please investors by somehow adding features that will let them compete in spaces already pretty full - no, I don't trust them to adequately use the cloud to keep my data secure.

I do frequent .enex backups of all my notes.

I haven't switched yet, because it's a pain. But I sure do backups frequently.

And if I see a good alternative (maybe in this thread), I'll jump on it.

As long as I don't have to do the sysadmin all the time (I'd forget - busy with other things, or I'd make some dumb mistake); and as long as it isn't a giant pain to install and build. And as long as it has clients for MacOS (including Apple ARM processors), Android and iOS... then I'll look.

Ideas sought.

The last time I did this search (2020), I didn't find one I liked.

As a co-founder, I'd say you can get wealthy or at least comfortable.

But, we started with two people. At some point we needed funding. That put us on a track of angel investors, VC's, and a cycle acquisition, buyback, funding, acquisition, buyback, etc.

As the techie guy, I found that tiring and distracting. When we changed from software as a product to SAAS, it got a lot less fun. When we grew to 2000 employees (mostly non-tech), the company was a pain.

So after 20 years (to the day), we sold it and moved on.

If you export it, you get XML, with embedded HTML in <CDATA TAGS, among other things. But the point is the same - it's not hard to parse. It also has base64 encoded images and pdf's. Don't know what else.

Public funding contributes basic research. Corporations contribute other things, like design for actual use and production, production tooling design, production tooling production, factory space and management, distribution management, warehousing, marketing (yes, you do need to spend money to market it in any economy). And by the way, all this results in paying wages and taxes which go back to the public.

Also, in many cases of publicly funded research, the resulting company is owned or partly owned by the researcher(s), which is one of the incentives for doing the research in the first place.

Utility patents cover that which is new and, in theory, non-obvious (although non-obvious is very poorly enforced based own personal experience). Those would include the "tweaks", which may not be as minor as you think, given the difference between the needs of a product that is to be mass produced, vs. a proof-of-concept laboratory device. Patents might also include the methods of production. Design patents cover the appearance and aesthetics, and are a different type of patent in the US.

As one who wrote (over 10 years ago, still improving it) and sells a weather app targeted at storm chasers, weather enthusiasts and spotters... I find the NWS data to be fragmented, often based on ancient computing standards (look at how NEXRAD data is formatted - it's binary for a 16-bit computer), and very hard to find documentation on.

Companies can add value by providing documented, consistent API's for data that, yes, is free from the government. NWS does not face the market incentives of a company, and it shows.

And yes, a bunch of companies take that data and hype it, but that's not particularly new - it precedes apps. I've long seen claims of forecast accuracy from private companies that are, well, absurd, given the limits chaos (and other issues) place on forecasting very far into the future.

The Big Data Project is a substantial improvement in terms of access, but the data itself is still in the legacy formats. Also, some data is not well suited for mobile access - it's in giant binary blobs (NEXRAD Level II) or requires multiple HTTP operations to acquire.

But... at least it's available and free (except for lighting).

I'm not talking about model data - I let others worry about that, and for personal use, I use sites like the excellent one from College of DuPage ( https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ ). I've watched friends in the research and operational community describe their frustration at the decision process that went into GFS modernization, and how it was frustrating to see ECMWF beat it out in forecast skill (I'm not up to date on where that stands now).

It's internal Aspergers, not just ADHD. Google seems to have no insight into its users.

That low contrast stuff is what bugs me. I often go out into rural areas. Try making out where the (white) minor roads are against the (almost white) background. Now, try that in bright sunlight!

A good mapping app would have different modes for this. Garmin GPS's are much more readable, which is one reason I recently bought one, even though GM in theory is better. GM is better at routing, but it is really hard to see the detail, which is dangerous if you are driving.