1. Depends on the person. 2. Depends also on the kind of environment they have at home. (e.g., living with kids in small apartments is a distraction, etc.) 3. Do not underestimate how much people can slack off in the office.

Definitely agree with point#3, people tend to underestimate how much time is slacked off in office.

Different ways of erosion leave different kinds of traces. The ones in the Sphinx enclosure are indicative of water (more specifically - rainfall) erosion.

Latvian here.

You are right about the taxes in the Baltic countries - in all three you can get ~20% effective tax (minor differences between the countries). And they are really similar otherwise.

Most people in a similar situation to yours pick Estonia. It is the most focused one on tech, supporting startups, and overall the most developed one (relatively speaking). Also seems to be the most expensive of the three.

Lithuania has the most business-oriented culture in my experience. Otherwise a nice and chill place.

Latvia is maybe not the best in the above regards (though, not too far off either), but I would say it has the most stuff going on and things to do overall.

I've been doing intermittent fasting for years now, on a not-so-typical schedule: first meal late in the day (5PM-ish) and the second (final) one within a couple of hours.

What I love:

* Total mental clarity during the first half of the day, can focus fully on work or life responsibilities without a single thought about food.

* Freedom to not have to organize the day around food (making choices, planning logistics, "wasting" time). Pays off big time when traveling.

* Never inconvenienced or slip into grumpy mode when for whatever reason I don't get food.

* Eating a lot of high-quality home-cooked food - as I love cooking (when I have time) and I don't depend on eating out / ordering food / quick-prep meals as much.

* Bonus: great ROI of the occasional first alcoholic drink of the day (on a more or less empty stomach). Not a health advice!

I find it amazing how much experiences vary. I think a large part of it may be what you eat when you do eat, and also the quantity. Portion sizes seem to vary drastically.

If I fast, I generally get moody and all I can focus on is food. A lot of friends fast for religious reasons too, and the overwhelming majority of them get cranky instead of more productive and able to focus.

I think the key is simply letting your body get used to fasting. If you only do it occasionally but usually eat at all the socially "normal" times then of course you're going to be cranky and hungry when you decide to suddenly deprive your body of what it is accustomed to. Eventually, with consistent intermittent fasting, that will change.

I find that if you eat or drink anything with calories between waking up and breaking your fast your body switches mode and wants food. Even a black coffee is risky. Maybe something about ketosis.

I do the same lol, it's great isnt it! I also make an effort to cook my "big meal" myself which is also a great habbit! I use my "lunch break" to go to walk to my local market and pick up ingredients.

The elevator in our apartment building has a touch-button(?) panel.

Guess what happens during the cold season when you you've got your gloves on? Yep, absolutely nothing! (bonus f.u. points if you are carrying stuff and cannot easily take the gloves off)

Luckily have a fully analogue car so I'm maintaining my sanity somewhat.

You guys don't have capacitive gloves so you can use your phone while wearing them?

Those often become sporadic or just stop working, and gloves for actually-cold weather are too thick or multi-material to have that feature.

Also, the people making the warmer gloves are more interested in keeping hands warm than in adding such features.

> - Related: be sure to understand the difference between transaction vs explicit locking, a lot of people assume too much from transaction and it will eventually breaks in prod.

I recently went from:

  * somewhat understanding the concept of transactions and combining that with a bunch of manual locking to ensure data integrity in our web-app;

to:

  * realizing how powerful modern Postgres actually is and delegating integrity concerns to it via the right configs (e.g., applying "serializable" isolation level), and removing the manual locks.

So I'm curious what situations are there that should make me reconsider controlling locks manually instead of blindly trusting Postgres capabilities.

Just FYI if you didn’t already know this:

  Any transaction which is run at a transaction isolation   level other than SERIALIZABLE will not be affected by SSI. If you want to enforce business rules through SSI, all transactions should be run at the SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation level, and that should probably be set as the default.

Given that running everything at SERIALIZABLE probably isn’t practical for you, I think it’s more clear code wise to use explicit locks. That way, you can grep for what queries are related synchronization wise, vs. SERIALIZABLE being implicit.

Continuing with the FYIs:

Explicit locks can mean just calling LOCK TABLE account_balances IN SHARE ROW EXCLUSIVE MODE; early in the transaction and then doing SELECT ... FOR UPDATE; or similar configurations to enforce business rules where it matters.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-lock.html

I think, in the using Postgres as a queue scenario, it's not fixing the problem that two processes can read the same row at the same time thus both executing the process.

If you manually SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED LIMIT 1, then the second process will be forced to select the next task without waiting for the lock.

This is awesome! Does anyone have a collection of similar kinds of fun questions?

Getting confused over holes has been a fun past time in academic philosophy for the past few decades, so trawling through the SEP for interesting topics can't hurt.

Thanks! Referring to "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy" I suppose? (:

Absolutely this!

As a long-time remote worker I also noticed (especially in early 2020) that a significant portion of people were struggling simply because they assumed they can continue doing things _exactly_ like at the office, only at home.

No, it's a considerably different setup, and you (and your team) have to adjust your processes accordingly:

• Slack is not a (chit)chat. Be precise about what you want and provide enough context to the reader. Small niceties are important, but reduce the overall fluff.

• Pay attention to how you structure your messages / exchanges. Take advantage of the formatting features. Make your messages easily digestible. Small things add up over time.

• Take notes / write documentation more than before.

• Embrace tools that you didn't need previously (for communication, brainstorming, whiteboarding).

I believe work in a remote setting is generally more productive if done well.

P.S. Not trying to dismiss the highly extroverted folk who _need_ human contact to feel normal day-to-day. I believe that's a separate topic entirely.

We absolutely need low-stakes mechanisms to discover potential causalities to research further.

What we need to stop is put unreasonable emphasis on association studies (i.e., interpret the results incorrectly).

Less discussed but similarly controlling of your life are all the nasty visual tricks apps and services use to grab your attention (bright red notification bubbles) or to annoy you into submission (so you download their mobile app or upgrade to pro).

I've gone the extra mile and set my phone to be entirely in grayscale, and have never been happier.

(Doable on Android at least, look under "Developer Settings")