I smoked for roughly 30 years and was not in very good shape when I gave up eight years ago - that improved rather a lot.
The problem is that nicotine is not the only addictive substance involved. If it was then you could chew gum, wear patches or whatever and off you go. There is an extremely complicated set of chemicals involved in fag smoke. There is also the habit effect and other complications.
In the end I think that boring old will power is the only way and any trick or tool or whatever that you can deploy to bolster that is how you give up.
My initial plan was to vape but I soon found that unsatisfying and it looked to me like trying to substitute one habit with another.
Once I started stopping, I didn't want to stop! It was extremely hard but I always reminded myself that I had got so far and that that time would be wasted if I had to start again. I followed doubled up time periods - one day, two days, 1/2 a week, a week, a fortnight, a month, two months ("cripes, this might work") and so on.
A mental tool I developed was a couple of mantras: "I don't want to smell" and "I don't want to die". Whenever I felt the cravings I repeated those to myself and I have no idea why but it did work for a while at a time. Gradually the need tailed off (say around two years)
I remember having quite vivid dreams where I would "crack" and start smoking again. I had to do quite a lot of mental verification to prove to myself that it was just a dream. At one point I even smelt my clothes to prove to myself it was all a dream.
We are all different and there is no right or wrong way to quit. One thing we can all agree on is it is hard, very hard but not impossible. Pick a strategy that might work for you and be prepared to change it but please do have a go. It really is worth it.
I'm 55 (UK) and recall the '70s. Loads of people were hardened chain smokers, including my Dad back then and on through to the early noughties. Chain smoking was not an exception at all but it was a dying habit and did trail away. I can remember filling cups with fags for parties to intersperse with the nibbles - you could reach for a handful of crisps or light up or both at the same time. They looked lovely next to the pineapple and cheese hedgehog (you'll have to look that one up!)
He'd go through something like 80 Embassy back then, a day. He gave up in 1984ish and is still trundling along. His Dad died at age 60 of lung cancer.
I gave up about eight years ago after 30 odd years at roughly 20 a day. I definitely did some damage and will eventually have to find out how much. I don't have a near permanent cough and at least five major bouts of 'flu per year anymore. I did have a short bout of Covid in 2021 and I suspect it might have been really nasty if I was still a smoker then.
There was a rumour/some basic statistics that smokers were at more risk in bad cases of Covid but nevertheless were proportionally less likely to have heavy Covid.
But not in America? I mean, we have our little smoker subculture with at least some semblance of etiquette and shibboleths, and the protocols for bumming a cig (ideally, ask to buy one instead, whereupon the other party should just give you one, unless they're nearly out), and so on. We had ashtrays at the ends of the aisles in the grocery store, and restaurant hostesses asking us "smoking or non?" and bringing us ashtrays. People at work grumbling about smokers getting extra breaks all the time, and the smokers for their part having to hike to the smoking area (or enclosure, even). Common memories of the strange experience of being sent to the corner store at a one-digit age to buy a pack for someone. I'm sure that's not all there is to it but I can't think of anything else at the moment. Anyway, what are we missing? I think I sound a little bit defensive about whether America has a significant smoking culture, but I'm just curious.
for what its worth, I was amazed when I moved from the UK to denmark that young people smoked in denmark. For me it was a thing for old people, mostly due to the price I suspect. It just wasn't cool - although vaping has changed both of these since I left, by my understanding
Ye is really Þe (Þ = thorn) and it seems that printers, back in the day, used y instead, probably to save money. So it was probably considered old school when printing became popular and wasn't worth getting excited about.
Agricola means farmer in Latin, is that an incidental? You mention Lutherian, so perhaps an affectation.
The early printing presses in Britain were imported from the continent where the letter thorn was not used, so they didn’t have a thorn letter. The printers used either y or “th” (which was also already being used by scribes in place of thorn in parts of the country anyway) to replace thorn depending on how much space they had. Y followed by a superscript e was common way to print “the” when space was very limited.
"letters" for printing are just small metal blocks with the letter in reverse on them - a blacksmith and the up and coming new artisans could have put some together, with some effort.
The thing about the printing press is not the technology involved, which is pretty simple, it is the ideas involved. Once you have seen the process, it becomes obvious.
The press itself would have been imported, probably a bit more than once and then copied mercilessly.
I think that thorn's days were numbered already and y was simply used in print to save a couple of pennies.
Perhaps someone more invested in this would be able to look at the incidence of thorn in English handwritten text and printed text.
Another recent oddity is the letter r. My parents (so think born: early 1940s) were still writing r as a backwards and downwards curved squiggle, within a word. As a leading letter it would look like r or R.
For good measure, let's take a unique oddity: naïve - note the double dot over the i. It's a French word and let's face it, that thing is almost certainly a British affectation.
I own a copy of "Usage and abusage" and I probably ought to throw it into a fire 8)
Yes, I know what ye is :) Similarly, the "olde Finnish" is usually not exactly historically accurate.
Agricola was born Mikael Olofsson/Olavinpoika, i.e. a simple patronymic surname. He assumed the Latin name when he started studies in a Latin school [1] in Viborg/Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia). He became interested in the Reformation and Renaissance humanism; later, as an ordained priest, he was sent to Wittenberg and studied directly under Luther himself. He was instrumental in executing the Reformation on the Finnish side of Sweden (then just a Swedish province; Finland as a political or geographical entity didn't really exist yet). Among other deeds, he translated the New Testament to Finnish from Luther's German translation (and besides the whole orthography, had to invent lots of new words in the process).
English isn't the only language that uses the Roman alphabet (which I'm pretty sure is named after the first two Hebrew letters and not old Greek).
English is not Hungarian, where each sound has a glyph with a diacritic to adjust to taste (sorry: sound). Well, it sort of does and I recall a Hungarian telling me that. However, I recall noting street names in Budapest and asking about one or two and it turns out that spelling with adjustments (glyh plus diacritcs) breaks down a bit. I'm not enough of an expert but I suspect Hungarian is quite as mad as any other language, at the periphery.
Its also rather moot as to when "English" actually arose. I think we can allow roots, in all sorts of, not places ... but times! As this article mentions, we have lost the letters wynn and thorne from English.
When you see the words "Ye olde shoppe" (often in the Gothic black letter typeface) note that the Y is actually the letter thorne and ye is pronounced the or thee. It is unlikely that anyone will actually notice!
Hungarian doesn't have that many letters with diacritic (only 9: á, é, í, ó, ú, ö , ü, ő and ű), they use digraphs (cs, sz,. ..) for some sounds. Maybe they meant Czech (15: á, é, í, ó, ú, ů, ý, č, š, ž, ř, ď, ť, ň, ě)? or Slovak (18: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ŕ, ĺ, č, š, ž, dž, ď, ť, ň, ľ, ô, ä)
English generally does not use formal sound change notation because the sound is already within the word when it is spoken, written or whatever.
My mother (born and died: Devon, England, UK, 1942-1997) could make herself sound almost incomprehensible to me, one of her own sons by speaking in the Devonian of her childhood.
Language is constantly moving and changing. You will almost certainly have your parents whining that you speak in ... tongues. When I say you ... I mean you!
Gaelic only has 18 letters (and W isn't one of them) but the vowels have diacritics - grave accents - that mark them as being longer.
This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.
Some of the letter combinations (at least in Irish) can be represented by another Roman letter. Like mh can be represented by v. One short showing how funny this can be is: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EBnFqRKZ7A
Also in Irish Gaelic they use the acute accent rather than grave accent - both languages used to use both of them, for slightly different lengths of long vowels, but we got rid of that in the early 80s.
The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.
One of our customers decided to go for off site backups with us - they had been a customer for 15 odd years for other services. Backups are not our core business, its one of the services and I got around to setting them up sooner rather than later.
Two weeks later they had a fire in one of their huge printing machines which caused quite a lot of direct damage due to heat and rendered a lot of equipment broken due to smoke/fumes. It was also, as it turns out, a week before the first COVID 19 lockdown in the UK.
Their backups landed on a XFS file system with reflinks enabled. I cloned their repo and fired up NFS with their VMs running on our gear. It took me another hour to spin up another OpenVPN server (CA etc) for them to use and sort out a few other details (coffee doesn't brew itself).
They ran via VPN out of our data centre for most of the pandemic.
That was an utter triumph but I also have some rather less triumphant stories about backups and lack thereof. Let's skip over those 8)
Try running a business on that basis - where do the restores come from? 8)
We charge our customers for backup storage by volume and that includes an annual demonstration of recovery. We fire up some or all of their systems on our gear in isolation and show that they are reasonably functional.
Your teacher's comment is riffing on the well trod lines of: "heights don't kill people, it's depths that kill people", which is all about perspective. This is is not related to "guns don't kill people ..." which is about agency.
It is true that very few people proactively care about backups. It’s like flossing. People know they’re supposed to do it, but in the moment it feels like a waste of time and energy, when there are more important things to do.
When data is lost, or decay takes over, the value can skyrocket. Depending on what is lost, someone may be willing to pay 100x when they would have spent on backup in order to get their data back, this is why data recovery services can basically charge whatever they want.
My assumption is the Venn diagram between people who pass the marshmallow test, and those who proactively backup their systems, has a lot of overlap.
Running a business on that basis would look like the white(ish)-hat version of ransomware. "Oh, your data is gone? How much is it really worth to you?"
I suspect it was done old school: Written by Stephen and passed to a LLM to fill in all those links and other garnish and then passed back for final polish by Stephen. That's how I do my write ups (but generally without the LLM bit for shorter efforts).
This is a long write up, and I'm sure it will have been assisted, but in the right way, and not a sloppy way.
I've dropped several commas before conjunctions, soz!
FWIW the .NET 10 release also had 2 occurrences of "real" in literally the first paragraph.
I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the smell? Is that all you have to contribute?
I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.
I noticed that audio quality begins degrading above 100% (at least if the media is already at high volume), so it really is a useful concept. I'm unsure what Linux distro I'm recalling this from, but it was useful on my little old netbook from college
The software has to start clipping the audio above "100%", but I use it regularly in say, VLC, because I might want the volume slightly higher without increasing my whole system volume just to hear a quiet section. I rarely notice any degradation at 150%.
A jack is a flag flown from a jackstaff, wot is found at the back of a ship or boat.
The UK flag is called the Union Flag (it's a flag and it is a union of various flags and possibly nations too!) but let's face it, given how many people think its called the Union Jack, it doesn't really matter.
If your flag pole at home is somewhat canted then I think you can call it a jackstaff, with a similar justification to the Royal Navy managing to designate their shore bases as ships. For example just up the road is HMS Heron (His Majesty's Ship: Heron).
The Union Flag/Jack is only the flag of the UK by convention and not law. It's a bit wooley, just like our Constitution but it still all works.
My point is that whilst I do enjoy this encoding scheme and it is jolly clever, reality is way more complicated. The UK's flag is pretty complicated but not alone. I'm pretty sure several flags have tassels, which I suppose strays into the coat of arms territory.
I enjoyed that the Union Flag just gets its own 'preset' - the fact that it's still presiding over a large handful of others makes it a very efficient decision compared to trying to tease out all the necessary shapes to reconstruct it.
I'll admit, I was hoping for some geometric approximations for countries like Brazil, though.
This scheme is OK but not OK. You note the Brazil flag and that's a great example along with the likes of the UK and the US too.
The Brazilian flag is nominally "quite" simple: Green with a yellow/gold parallelogram/rhombus with a blue circle ... then there is the white band and stars. Absolute nightmare to classify.
I thought the UK flag was a bit of a challenge and I remember an art class 50 odd years ago, trying to paint the bloody thing. Little did I know at the time about how Aussies and Kiwi worriers and co would fare! Won't someone think of Hawaiians: their state flag is not something you depict for a quick laugh!
I suppose the US flag is arguably the hardest to depict: Those stars would take ages to draw/paint/dribble. I imagine kids get a box of stars to stick on their depictions in art classes in the US.
What's really hard, together with the quantity of them is that they're white! I haven't actually seen many star stickers used, but agree that's a great idea.
Often, when the Flag's depicted in kids' art, paints or paint pens are used, since 'negative space' stars would take forever to do with a blue marker or pencil but is quicker to paint on top of blue. And there's a great deal of artistic license used in terms of their size and color. Or on a small flag, just a lot of tiny white dots!
The Union flag is a bit of a pain! Notice how there are thick and thin white stripes. When I was a lad, it was a given that in an emergency you would fly your flag upside down.
50 odd years later, I note that hardly any Brit owns or has ever owned a Union flag. Not only that but how many people would know if it is upside down!
The right way up is thick white stripe on the top edge, nearest to the pole.
My Union Jack (in SVG) is coded to reflect the union of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I live in Scotland where it is commonly known that the English flag is plastered over the Scottish Saltire, and they don't even get the same colour blue in each.
There are different aspect ratios too, plus there is the 'jack'. I don't care for AI but I do like SVG to be human readable to some extent, although I do like oklch colours, which are not something I consider 'human readable'.
Here I have the Scottish flag, the English one, a 'GB' flag which slaps one on top of the other with those Irish extras, to make a UK 'Jack' that waves badly because SVG filters are not something I am good at.
Here is the Union Jack from the article. Concise and surprisingly human readable (I could draw this with felt tip pens on graph paper).
One problem though. The Union Jack is not symmetrical. This is tantamount to spelling someone's name incorrectly, and could be taken the wrong way, much like how some Americans would be offended if there weren't all the stars or stripes depicted.
There are some optimisations to be made, if concision rather than human readable is the ultimate goal. For example, x1="0" y1="0" is not needed, the use of a 1 x 1 viewBox means not using integers, even a 2 x 1 viewBox remedies that.
For 'human readable', if something is mirrored, the code should reflect that, with 'use' and transform 'scale(-1, 1)'. More groups could be used to contain elements that share the same colour or stroke.
In my 'hand coded' GB flag the weird offset-symmetry of the Northern Ireland 'red diagonals' is explained in SVG.
I am not that keen on CSS in SVG, however, for colours, I could be using CSS variables.
I suppose the obvious question is: Are you actively profiting from Adsense?
If yes, then ... you are profiting from ... that shite. You must be OK with that and it does sound like you are actively complicit with it, despite your protestations.
If you really think that Adsense is awful and might damage your brand then dump it and don't whine on HN!
OK, that's probably a bit unfair because you are dealing with a monopoly with no recourse to arbitration. That's your real problem.
Ah shit, that one word does change the whole meaning of the sentence. Well, at least we brought attention to it over the course of four comments instead of this just being the first response lol
Classic example of victim blaming. Not the company generating the ad, not the company approving it, but the person who is trying to block it, and then ACTUALLY did stop using Adsense.
The problem is that nicotine is not the only addictive substance involved. If it was then you could chew gum, wear patches or whatever and off you go. There is an extremely complicated set of chemicals involved in fag smoke. There is also the habit effect and other complications.
In the end I think that boring old will power is the only way and any trick or tool or whatever that you can deploy to bolster that is how you give up.
My initial plan was to vape but I soon found that unsatisfying and it looked to me like trying to substitute one habit with another.
Once I started stopping, I didn't want to stop! It was extremely hard but I always reminded myself that I had got so far and that that time would be wasted if I had to start again. I followed doubled up time periods - one day, two days, 1/2 a week, a week, a fortnight, a month, two months ("cripes, this might work") and so on.
A mental tool I developed was a couple of mantras: "I don't want to smell" and "I don't want to die". Whenever I felt the cravings I repeated those to myself and I have no idea why but it did work for a while at a time. Gradually the need tailed off (say around two years)
I remember having quite vivid dreams where I would "crack" and start smoking again. I had to do quite a lot of mental verification to prove to myself that it was just a dream. At one point I even smelt my clothes to prove to myself it was all a dream.
We are all different and there is no right or wrong way to quit. One thing we can all agree on is it is hard, very hard but not impossible. Pick a strategy that might work for you and be prepared to change it but please do have a go. It really is worth it.
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