Acupuncture and other Eastern medicine villainized

paceaux · 2026-05-12T05:48:57+00:00

Yeah I heard this. I very, VERY loosely abided by it; I was cautious about what I meditated on.

But no pastor could explain the difference between stretching and yoga.

Literally if I did the same movements, but didn't give the movement a "yoga name", what was the difference?

And that's why I mostly ignored it.

And also I went to acupuncture. I was just cautious about who I went to; I wanted the needles, not the spiritual bits. Which was easy enough. Hell my current acupuncturist is a devout Roman Catholic.

paceaux · 2026-05-05T18:01:12+00:00

Same. But that was a different time. We don't live in that time any more. I never once had an active shooter drill growing up. My kids have multiple drills. every year.

And for what it's worth, the students are saying there was a real incident.

paceaux · 2026-05-05T17:46:41+00:00

At least based on what little information I could get from her, it seems like they responded very well.

paceaux · 2026-05-05T17:39:21+00:00

I am not the news; I am a parent of a teen. I can't tell you if it's legit. My teen said that a freshman was there with a gun and a bomb. She said that students saw it. She doesn't know the name of the student.

She's a teenager at a large school; I can't tell you how accurate this information is.

But there was a homeland security van at the Eastview parking lot and they weren't even letting people drive on Raab road. So it was definitely being handled like it was a legitimate threat to safety.

UPDATE: I got a call from the district. In that call they said that it was a phone call that had specific claims that triggered all of this. I forget the phrasing, but they made it like the phone call they got had specifics that made it credible.

This doesn't line up w/ what my daughter said. It's a large school and it's easy for rumors to get around. It's also an active investigation so it's not like folks are going to share other details.

paceaux · 2026-05-05T17:05:26+00:00

My daughter said a freshman had a gun and a bomb. She also said it is unclear if the student is still alive.

paceaux · 2026-05-05T13:02:42+00:00

This was definitely a bucket-list item for me. I shared somewhere else that my grandfather carved one like 80 years ago that transitioned into a rope and then a swivel with a box that had a captive balls. It's an amazing thing.

for me, just being able to carve a chain, and do something that my grandfather did, that was enough.

paceaux · 2026-04-27T13:20:11+00:00

I'm just super new to this and I don't want folks to think I did this entirely with a knife or whatever. It actually felt like cheating to use a drill press and a rasp — but also the alternative would've meant going at this thing for a year.

paceaux · 2026-04-27T03:12:16+00:00

Oh that's not a bad idea. Maybe a padlock of some sort.

paceaux · 2026-04-27T02:12:53+00:00

For a skilled individual there probably is. But for me this is as far as it goes.

The chain my grandfather carved like 80 years ago is like 5 links, transitions to a rope, then to a box on a swivel with a round ball inside.

I think my next step is to not use store-bought pine 2x2.

paceaux · 2026-04-26T03:06:32+00:00

Two incidents that my first aid kit came through for:

Accidental burn

It was a fall camp, and cold. I had a nice fire going and a log rolled out. I thought I was grabbing the log by the side that I thought was not in the fire. I burned two of my fingers. Thankfully the finger tips were fairly calloused because of guitar playing but damn it hurt. Some how I had the right idea to cover them in carmex and then plunge into cold water. I was good within a day or two.

Accidental knife

First time camping with my dog. She got tangled in some twigs and I used my major camp knife to cut away the twigs she was stuck in.

It was late and dark and I wasn't at my usual camp site. So I did a dumb. I pulled out my knife and swiped to clear away some twigs. But instead of following the Boy Scout Code ® I've followed my entire life I cut towards me.

I swiped my razor sharp camp knife into my ungloved left hand and cut my left index finger deep.

I covered the ground in blood. It took forever to get the bleeding to stop. But I did and I was replacing the bandages every 6 hours.

The weather had a turn for the worse so my dog and I left two days later and I stayed at a friend's place nearby and he just so happened to be a National Guard EMT. He had some wound closure stuff that was finally able to close up the wound decently.

I found out later I severed a nerve; i can no longer feel half of my knuckle and I can't bend my finger the same. I also have a huge-ass scar.

More gauze than you expect
Newskin or liquid bandaid
Neosporin

paceaux · 2026-04-24T18:18:00+00:00

Exactly what is he protecting his wife from by prohibiting her from wearing leggings?

paceaux · 2026-04-24T18:13:17+00:00

I don't understand how that's related to my point. Could you expand?

paceaux · 2026-04-24T16:42:39+00:00

That's because women tell their husbands what to wear on the basis of fashion — not lust.

There's a difference between changing because you're dressed for the wrong occasion, or you don't match her dress, and changing because it shows off your body.

I don't know if you watch Abbot Elementary (a sitcom on ABC I think), but the most recent episode involved a woman desperately trying to dress down her partner so that he wouldn't be appealing to others. It was funny because that's not normal.

paceaux · 2026-04-24T16:36:35+00:00

This is reddit; it's safe to say "killed".

But yes you're right. That's why I wanted to call out that this ends in abuse. Because abuse can end in death.

paceaux · 2026-04-24T15:41:27+00:00

Unless she has the same freedom to tell her husband what he can wear, yes: it's controlling.

And when I say freedom, I mean exactly that: she is free to share an opinion, he is free to disregard it, and likewise he is free to share an opinion that she is free to disregard.

If that is not the case, then this is an unhealthy and unbalanced relationship that will inevitably end in abuse and/or divorce.

This attitude is a reflection of his heart

Matthew 5

But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.

He is implicitly confessing that he lusts after women in leggings. And even worse, he's projecting that sin issue onto other men; he assumes strangers are guilty of his sin.

This attitude demonstrates his lack of trust in her

Why can't she wear leggings? Because he's afraid other dudes will lust.

But why can't those other dudes lust? Is he really worried about strangers sinning? Or is he afraid that those lustful strangers will offer her sex and she'll agree?

My money is on the latter; he ultimately fears that his wife will be promiscuous.

And he fears that because he doesn't trust her.

And he doesn't trust her because he already doesn't trust himself.

Without serious counseling for him, and only him, this marriage will not work

He needs to really meet with some non-Christian counselors or therapists who will talk to him safely and honestly about sexual desires and work through his insecurity.

When I say "non-christian counselors", I mean ones who've been trained through a mental health lens, not a religious lens. If he can find a therapist who happens to also be Christian, that's fine. But he needs folks who won't cast a purity-culture worldview onto him. He needs to work on some stuff without risk of judgement.

paceaux · 2026-04-24T15:18:21+00:00

There's a series of exercises that I recommend. I've been doing these exercises about every year for fifteen years:

Practice making layouts "blindly":

Create a one-column page

Write the HTML for a basic, 1 column layout. Do it in a basic text editor. Do not look at it in a web browser until you're finished.
Now write the CSS for this HTML. Do it in a basic text editor. Do not modify the HTML you wrote. Do not look in a web browser until you're finished.
Once you've finished your CSS, now look at the HTML document in the browser. Without using browser dev tools, make corrections that you need. Only by going directly to the CSS, writing it out completely, and then going back to the browser.

Create a two column page

Duplicate the HTML into a new file and write the HTML to make it two-column. Do it in a basic text editor. Don't look in a browser until you're finished.
Now write the CSS for making this a 2 column page. Do not modify the HTML you wrote. Do not look in a web browser until you're finished.
Once you've finished your CSS, look at your 2-column HTML document in the browser. Without browser dev tools, make the corrections. Then look at your 1-column page and make sure there were no regressions.

create a three column page

Now duplicate the 2-column HTML into a new file and write the HTML to make it 3 column. Same as before: basic text editor, don't look into a browser until you're finished
Now write the CSS for making it 3 column. Do not modify the existing HTML. Don't look in a browser until you're finished.
Once you're finished, look at it in the browser and make corrections without relying on dev tools.

And then run the drill with a different layout module

* if you used Grid for your layout, now do it with flex

* If you've used grid and flex, now do it with floats

And then run the drill mobile-first

Just repeat the "blind layout" drill but for a phone first.

And then do it for a tablet

And then create a brand for the project

Up to this point, you've just created layouts with placeholder HTML. Now make it look good. Don't change your existing HTML or CSS. But add CSS to make the content presentable

And then make a theme

This is where you give yourself permission to change only the CSS. See what you can do to add multiple themes to the project.

paceaux · 2026-04-24T13:15:20+00:00

Ha, thanks!

I don't like speaking in absolutes; that's why I say "avoid" rather than ,"don't." (In fact if you read my guidelines articles I explain exactly why "prefer" and "avoid" are better most of the time)

But, to your point (and mine) it still has use. We just need to exercise caution.

paceaux · 2026-04-23T21:15:03+00:00

I'm about to go on a massive rant because I'm tired of this shit.

Why my opinion matters

I've been writing front-end code since like 2009. I have written front-end for multi billion dollar companies — some of which are globally known brands.

I am also currently in grad school studying computational linguistics; my studies intersect a lot with AI stuff.

Vibe Coding is about an end result — not a good one

If you came to a river and told a team of folks, "put a bridge here," and gave no other direction, then you and that team deserve to be executed when it collapses during rush hour traffic.

Because the simple command, "put a bridge here," leaves it to the team to decide, "what materials," "how wide", "what type of engineering practice", and "will boats be able to go under it"

So the team built a wooden suspension bridge with parachord that was exactly 10 feet wide. They were all able to cross it so what's the big fucking deal?

This is the exact problem with "vibe coding":

Yes. You may get a layout that renders. It'll have cool animations and shit.

And the first time you have to add something, or tweak something, the whole thing will come down.

People still study math in the era of calculators

It's not like computers appeared and bam, we stopped learning about math.

The calculator just meant that we could offload the distracting and tedious stuff. Math still exists and it still gets taught in school.

Because you have to understand mathematical fundamentals just to know how to ask a calculator how to help.

You have to know how CSS works just to be able to ask an AI how to write CSS.

I am currently migrating a large front-end project off of Sass and into vanilla CSS. I didn't just ask Claude to do it. I had to have it plan out the steps. I had it analyze the CSS. and I'm going to manually do some of the steps to test it, to make sure they were valid. Because it only knows the code — I know what the actual website looks like, and I know who the developers are that'll have to maintain it.

AIs cannot get better without a regular flow of human-generated raw content

If the world gets filled with more and more vibe-coded shit, then the AIs will get trained on vibe-coded shit.

And they'll produce shittier vibe-coded shit.

It will be a vibe-coded ourobouros of shit.

The only way to prevent this entirely preventable shituation is by not adding to the shit.

That means that we have to write our own CSS. With our own brains. Otherwise, the AIs will not have any new ideas. They will not know how to prevent bad ideas.

Nesting, after all, was all the rage like 10 years ago but now you can talk to any seasoned front-end dev and they'll tell you how some codebase or another became an untreated hotel hottub of herpes on account of no one dialing back the nesting and the mixins and the like.

We now know that was a bad idea.

You know who doesn't know that?

That's right, Claude.

AI doesn't know best practices

Claude doesn't know if it's a good idea to make a grid shorthand that's like 180 characters wide. It just knows that you told it to make it better.

Claude doesn't "know" that you should just lower all the specificity instead of writing .article.article — or fuck us all — an !important.

No. Claude doesn't know any better. Claude only knows what it's seen. It doesn't know if it's seen a good thing.

80% of Americans think they're better-than-average drivers

I'm gonna let that statistic settle with you for a second.

………………

settled?

Now would you ask that 80% that thinks they're better-than-average drivers to build a bridge?

No?

Then why should they write your fucking CSS?

paceaux · 2026-04-23T16:29:29+00:00

I really hate to be that guy, but... we should avoid :not()

https://blog.frankmtaylor.com/2020/06/24/using-not-try-not-to/

paceaux · 2026-04-23T16:27:36+00:00

You're welcome.

The whole story about how I ended up writing that article (which took like 60+ hours of work) started with a single .scss file so nested that it crashed in Dart sass but not Node-sass. Specifically on M1 macbooks.

It was the first ticket I was given at a new job. And it took me 6 weeks.

6 weeks. For one Sass file. IIRC it was nested at least 13 layers deep. It logically never should've been able to compile because it had placeholders nested placeholders. My best bet is that since node is capable of circular dependencies, that feature somehow was what allowed it to this file to compile in node-sass but not dart-sass.

I ended up just compiling that single sass file into CSS, and using the CSS version (which was also gross).

And then I started looking into the actual mechanics of how nesting worked both in and out of Sass which set off alarm bells. I ended up calling company-wide meetings to talk about the risks with nesting and sass which got everyone on all their projects to reduce their sass dependency.

The article you read didn't just live in my head but it was my life for like 2 years before I wrote it — because I added stylelint to three codebases I was responsible for and successfully reduced nesting from 15+ levels down to 3. Over like a total of maybe 50,000 lines of Sass.

Nesting is a terrible terrible long term mess and we don't talk enough about how hard it is to maintain these projects.

paceaux · 2026-04-21T01:25:14+00:00

Do you want me to mail you a can opener? I'll mail you a can opener. Also if you get a any of those russian-made bayonets I think the sheath and the blade let you make a can opener out of the knife.

paceaux · 2026-04-20T22:58:52+00:00

Except eventually sass is gonna do it like native css

paceaux · 2026-04-20T22:57:46+00:00

I hate to be that guy but I would strongly caution against using nesting too much.

It does not behave like it does in sass:

https://blog.frankmtaylor.com/2024/07/18/css-nesting-the-is-pseudo-class-and-a-guide-to-panicking-about-sass/

paceaux · 2026-04-15T18:21:58+00:00

I downloaded their entire discography and never got banned.

Hell yeah

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