Fully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread.
The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on.
They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process.
This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate.
Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly.
I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships.
Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.
I think what many people are doing is looking for something that is fundamentally a higher dimensional object (dim>4) which casts a 4D spacetime shadow (our bodies) by shining a torch on _that_ shadow. Still doesn't allow for any satisfying direct observation.
This kind of dimensional analysis is part of the focus of my current research program.
I also had a similar issue with Cascade Bicycle Club - they chose to organize things via WhatsApp, and since I am (inexplicably) banned from opening a Meta account I was completely left out of the group and missed out on many rides/details that were only shared via WhatsApp.
When I tell people that this is even possible I get wide-eyed stares — as if they never contemplated that Meta could exercise their right to ban someone from the platform.
It's a huge problem and I have no idea how to fix it except talk about it and spread awareness. And I am not remotely interested in trying to work around the ban.
You bring up a good point. There is a general lack of awareness of how much power we're giving these monopolists. As a kid, in school I was thought to be weary of drugs, STDs, pimps and other threats. This should be added to the list. Yhis is a clear cut case where governments should start educating the people about this.
Zest is a virtual dermatology clinic that delivers care for chronic eczema and psoriasis with a level of satisfaction and patient outcomes that are unheard of in conventional dermatology. What makes Zest particularly exciting is its value-based health care business model, a topic worth researching all on its own!
We are looking to add an experienced Linux and web application wizard to our small and agile core engineering team. As part of the core team you will work across and become familiar with the entire stack, and the focus will be on maintaining the AWS infrastructre (orchestrated in Terraform). If you are excited at all by the idea of using nix in a professional environment, you are very strongly encouraged to apply. (We're also not 100% married to it and will make pragmatic decisions when necessary ;).)
You'll be working with me directly, and joining at at time where your voice will be extremely infuential to the future of engineering at the business. We have an _engineering-first_ approach to IT that should be a breath of fresh air to any veteran of the IT scene!
Because of data export restrictions and access to protected health records, all applicants must reside full time in the US. Please send a resume and cover letter directly to me: hn-hiring [at] [website domain] and make sure to mention HN in the subject line.
The domain is a brand new domain we've been switching to and we've hit a fun snafu with the DNS configuration recently - looks like some email got mixed up in that. It should be working now, or you can try the same email address at joinzest.com as well.
Hinge Health | Security Analyst | San Francisco, CA or Portland, OR | REMOTE (only during COVID-19 pandemic, FT remote possible) | https://www.hingehealth.com/careers
As a healthcare company providing pain relief and alternatives to surgical treatment for those with chronic musculoskeletal (joint) pain, we play a critical role during the pandemic to help people stay healthy, safe, and calm. We do this by delivering a mobile app, motion sensors, and a remote health coach with zero direct human interaction.
With physical therapy offices closing around the United States, we are quickly becoming one of very few options people have available for managing their chronic pain. Our interventions have been proven to keep people away from hospitals for surgery, and during these times that can be a life-saving intervention.
The whole organization is preparing to go to war with SARS-CoV-2 by doing whatever it takes to continue supporting those who are still healthy enough to exercise. Given that there are criminals already taking advantage of the pandemic, the job of securing our organization is more important than ever.
Our security analysts are instrumental in helping ensure we do right by our legal and contractual obligations, as well as protecting the actual security of our patients' data. If the two are ever at odds with each other, securing the data always takes priority without question. Security analysts also help us maintain our advanced secure-by-default and secure-by-design posture by providing expert guidance as we expand in IT and R&D.
We're looking for someone with serious technical chops, a sharp eye that never misses a single detail, excellent writing skills, and the kind of tenaciousness that means no resting on an incident until a true root cause is found.
If you're interested in applying, send an email to the following email address: anVsaWFuK2huMjAyMDAzQGhpbmdlaGVhbHRoLmNvbQ==
(I will not disclose the encoding method – consider this part of the screening process. Best of luck!)
Hinge Health | Security Analyst | San Francisco, CA or Portland, OR | REMOTE (only during COVID-19 pandemic, FT remote possible) | https://www.hingehealth.com/careers
As a healthcare company providing pain relief and alternatives to surgical treatment for those with chronic musculoskeletal (joint) pain, we play a critical role during the pandemic to help people stay healthy, safe, and calm. We do this by delivering a mobile app, motion sensors, and a remote health coach with zero direct human interaction.
With physical therapy offices closing around the United States, we are quickly becoming one of very few options people have available for managing their chronic pain. Our interventions have been proven to keep people away from hospitals for surgery, and during these times that can be a life-saving intervention.
The whole organization is preparing to go to war with SARS-CoV-2 by doing whatever it takes to continue supporting those who are still healthy enough to exercise. Given that there are criminals already taking advantage of the pandemic, the job of securing our organization is more important than ever.
Our security analysts are instrumental in helping ensure we do right by our legal and contractual obligations, as well as protecting the actual security of our patients' data. If the two are ever at odds with each other, securing the data always takes priority without question. Security analysts also help us maintain our advanced secure-by-default and secure-by-design posture by providing expert guidance as we expand in IT and R&D.
We're looking for someone with serious technical chops, a sharp eye that never misses a single detail, excellent writing skills, and the kind of tenaciousness that means no resting on an incident until a true root cause is found.
If you're interested in applying, send an email to the following email address: anVsaWFuK2huMjAyMDAzQGhpbmdlaGVhbHRoLmNvbQ==
(I will not disclose the encoding method – consider this part of the screening process. Best of luck!)
I'm 100% with you on this. One of my teams just spent 3 weeks ripping out all of that tedious (and error-prone!) resolver code that resulted from trying to use apollo-link-state for local state management and switching it all to redux instead.
It is insane how many silent failure modes the Apollo cache has. Performance and ability to estimate work (predictability) went through the roof since then. It's just way overcomplicating things to do state management this way - Apollo is a lovely GQL client otherwise.
I may do a write-up on this one day, as a cautionary tale. It boggles the mind that this is being pushed so hard as an ultimate solution to state management - nice in theory but awful in practice.
I'd love to read something about your experience. We are currently using Apollo for one of our newer projects. We've written Redux apps in the past and understand the tradeoffs and limitations that come with that approach. We really love the component-level declarative data-fetching of Apollo client, but were pretty hesitant around the apollo-link-state stuff.
How are you integrating GQL in your Redux code? Do you still use Apollo Query/Mutation components? Do you use Redux in lieu of the Apollo cache? How do you deal with the slight mismatch of denormalized GQL data with a normalized Redux store?
I understand the problem that the Apollo cache is solving, and I feel like I do a lot of low value handwritten code when I use Redux instead--but the visibility and transparency of Redux still feels worth it?
I think leaning too heavily into apollo-link-state is going to draw the same boilerplate complaints of Redux. The amount of client code generation needed, plus all the schema details bleeding into your code (__typename)... doesn't feel like we are at the "solution" yet.
Just a few of my rambling thoughts. Kudos to the Apollo team for continuing to push the community forward. These are hard problems and we won't solve them without people trying to innovate.
Hinge Health | San Francisco, CA | Onsite | Full-Time | Design, Software Engineering, Engineering Ops (DevOps)
Hinge Health is breaking new ground by re-defining what best practice means for musculoskeletal (MSK) health. We have incredible traction in the market, a clear hockey-stick growth curve, and a profound mission that (really!) changes lives on a daily basis.
With our current trajectory we're basically hiring across the board and currently building out our foundations of senior talent. (New grads are not good a fit for us just yet, but we plan to get there soon.)
This is not just a call for passionate software engineers, but also designers who understand that design goes far beyond just "visual design" or "UI". If you get both design and code we definitely will want to talk!
Technologies we use at Hinge include: Rails, React, React Native, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, Docker, ElasticSearch, InfluxDB, and currently evaluating use-cases for Elixir.
Our design tools include: AfterEffects, Sketch, Abstract, and Invision.
Send me an email if you want to start a career in next-gen healthcare: julian at hingehealth dot com
Hinge Health | San Francisco | ONSITE | Senior Mobile UI Engineer
We've got an exciting opportunity available for someone who's been itching to work on a production-grade React Native mobile application. This job is for you if:
- you think TypeScript is a leap forward and can't wait to use it in a professional context (no prior experience necessary!).
- React makes you look back on imperative UI programming as the "dark ages".
- despite all the above, you'd feel 100% comfortable writing a light web app in Vanilla JS.
- you love the idea of directly helping people, rather than mining them for data.
- compromising on user experience, letting users do the QA work, or other similar abuses of users' trust does not fly in your book.
This is not at all an entry level position, and our standard for a Senior Engineer title may be higher than what many people are used to. We'll be particularly looking for a track record of building user interfaces in a professional context – code samples and live demos are a big plus.
Email me directly with "Hello from HN" in the subject line to hear more about the position and to apply formally.
My email address (base64 encoded): anVsaWFuK2huQGhpbmdlaGVhbHRoLmNvbQ==
Yup. The network engineer in me would never recommend Ubiquiti for any scenario. Maybe it works for WISP because of the price point; I'd have to be convinced.
They run an embedded Mongo DB on their UniFi hardware that (at least in the deployment I've inherited) requires occasional direct interventions[1] to keep running. That's just one example of the many baffling/wrong things they do.
I know Mongo gets quite a bit of undeserved hate, but it really just doesn't seem suitable for this use case.
My IT MSP solely sells and supports unifi WAPs, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
We have dozens of WAPs under management across the city and state, and I've never seen any of the issues you guys are talking about. We don't have issues with database crashing or overheating. The wap controllers are configurable for automatic firmware updating, so I don't know what the issue is with patching. They definitely support wpa-e/radius because I've configured it and we use it in my my office.
A personal goal of mine is to buy a unifi wap and a modem (already have a router and firewall) and divorce from ISP equipment altogether. Then I can start posting on /r/homelab :)
> They definitely support wpa-e/radius because I've configured it and we use it in my my office.
Sure, and problems with RADIUS auth have been well documented. How much of the not seeing issues is simply a matter of users assuming your setup (or their phones or computers) is flakey? Issues with Mongo are also pretty well documented.
> The wap controllers are configurable for automatic firmware updating, so I don't know what the issue is with patching.
The issue with patching is that Ubnt is in a bad position. They're on their own completely to create and issue patches even for stock packages. That's just what happens when you distribute EOL'd software. So, sure, it's not that hard to apply patches* from Ubnt but it's a lot more work for Ubnt to generate these patches — and last I checked they were pretty well behind with the excuse of "there are no known exploits for ABC in the wild".
* Let's not forget the ER-X bootloader for which end users are entirely on their own. Ubnt has a patch but hasn't applied it to the devices they ship. It's just lazy and sloppy.
I have an office with a few of those and they are not great and do overheat. I am quite surprised you having been exposed to a great number of them never had an issue.
You have dozens of devices in what sounds like small locations across your state. I have 11k users online in North America and I would never trust Unifi for any part of my network. They have their place but enterprise is not one of them. SMB is not the same.
All parents and responses to my posts are probably right, and I'm probably wrong!
My experiences aren't wrong, of course, but it's an apples to oranges comparison. My IT MSP is only small to medium sized businesses (as I think all IT MSPs are since Enterprise level environments don't contract out it and hire their own department - this is an educated guess). We do very little Enterprise work and have no single client with more than 300 users.
However, I will defend my position and consumer grade ubiquitis on a (significant) technicality. Higher models beyond what my company sells are not cost effective. Buying higher grade waps at no less than double the price is more expensive than just running cables. If you WANT to make everyone get 200mbps wifi, you will pay for it, but that's a convenience you pay for, not a requirement. UAP-AC-Pros are perfectly capable of handing out up to 50mbps pipes to multiple endpoints without huge (or even medium) upfront capital investments, overheating or DB problems. In my opinion, just run cat6 lines. Itll be cheaper than spending thousands on Enterprise waps for only 30 people.
The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on.
They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process.
This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate.
Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly.
I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships.
Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.
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