WhompingWindows

Food seeking behavior =/= thin males =/= thin citizens. Lot of weak linkages happening there.

Why existential dread? We're extremely lucky to be alive. That one sperm hit that one egg and we survived to now. That is extremely unlucky, each of us is one sperm out of hundreds of millions, so savor this existence!!

People don't read things thoroughly for good reason: there's too much shit to read. If we read things thoroughly, we'd all waste our lives reading terms of service, user agreements, and fine print, and never get anything of value accomplished. Internet search and ctrl+F are some of the most time-saving inventions are conceived.

The headline from HN: "Nuclear turn green" (why the typo?)

The actual headline: "Gas and Nuclear Turn Green as EU Parliament Approves New Taxonomy" (HN left out gas)

So gas is actually being considered "green" now, so calling it a "cleaner" fuel as you do is actually what they're doing.

Industrial Revolutions required many things that Frodo's world lacked:

1) Abundant and cheap coal (heat, steel making, steam engines, etc). We know this didn't exist, for why should Saruman rely on the comparatively bad fuel of green wood to power his engine of war?

2) International demand for goods via global trade networks. The societies are clearly fragmented with little interchange...polar opposite of Europe in the 1750-1900 period.

3) Abundant laborers and innovators to create necessary machines. England had a number of innovative entrepeneurs who needed steam engines to pump water out of the mine so the miners could get the coal that was slightly deeper.

4) Scientific progress on metals, machining, and scientific method. Starting with Francis Bacon, Newton, and others, England saw a very strong burst of scientific progress right before industrialization.

5) Governmental support of industry (e.g. tariffs/regs in USA/Germany). This one is perhaps the hardest to study, we don't know much about governmental policy in LotR, but it seems to be monarchical and/or authoritarian, maybe war-lord driven...not what you need for an economic-technological revolution.

LotR in Frodo's Day is a sparsely populated world that used to be grand. If the Elves and Numenorians of old, with all their splendor, didn't start a revolution, then how could the ghost-towns of men and elves?

I thought the distinction was: "white papers" are not necessarily peer-reviewed by an academic journal's editors; white papers tend to be internally-made documents within an organization, edited by that organization's members, for the purpose of knowledge/information.

Academic papers as a whole can include both "white papers" and "peer-reviewed journal articles" aka the "papers" that many think of. I would surely put a "white paper" onto my resume if I thought it was a great piece of work.

We store confidential code on Github. How do I know it hasn't been used in CoPilot?

I think the average person living in today's world has it way better than 99% of humans in history, it's easily the best time to be alive. Infant mortality, life expectancy, chances of dying to violence or starvation or preventable disease, all kinds of gruesome things have drastically declined over the course of history and civilization. When else was it possible for most healthy people to live to 70, to travel the world a few times, and to live in relative peace and harmony?

And entertainment, joy in the arts, categories of aesthetics have vastly improved as well. Look at art and film and music in the past five hundred years. Look at the works of Bach and anyone before him, he's clearly the greatest musician known in the world up to 1750, and since him in just 275 years, we've had hundreds of phenomenal musicians that outrank any before Bach. This is one mere slice of culture which is evidence of the vast improvement in human capability in modern times.

I didn't downvote you, however I think people may dislike the idea of one having their own pet hypothesis without linking serious evidence to back it up. Amyloid plaques have been heavily studied and may have some tangential but real link to Alzheimer's, it's a plaquey protein found in the brain along with Beta-Tau which is another protein I believe. I personally haven't heard of any fungi theory yet, the main ones I've heard were viral things, pollution, or perhaps some breakdown in the brain's ability to clean itself up over time. And why are certain individuals spared and not others? I know there are genes that predispose one to it, and there are early-onset cases which come on more often than others.

If it was anything obvious in the environment, I'd hope we'd know by now...but it may be something hard to measure in large epidemiological studies like a more rare pollutant or something we overlooked in creating large observational datasets?

Anyway, I'd encourage you to link the best studies you've found and that may help some to read them.

In northern New England, we see a lot of homes using heating oil and woodstoves. These create a lot of local emissions and can be expensive or use a lot of time/effort (woodstoves). Heat pumps that work especially well in cold climates would be a huge efficiency gain over oil, woodstoves, and electric resistive space heaters which are also commonly used as stop-gaps in the region.

Consider: ADHD reduces executive functions, which are like the "secretary" of the mind. This means they can not direct attention onto where they need to: work, school, onto family and friends, etc. Those with ADHD have less 3 friendships on average, due to less ability to hold their attention on others. As they age, they may find relief in drugs like cocaine, caffeine, nicotine, and THC, which may lead to more drug abuse than neurotypical people. They're more likely to commit suicide. These are evidence-backed conclusions from the literature, which I reviewed for my MS.

All of these problems then feed into depression and anxiety. Is that so hard to believe? Less friends, less success, more abuse of substances, it's a potentially rough life.

If so, look at these articles, which review the hard evidence and find there's very strong links between ADHD and depression, and anxiety: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990565/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6493806/

This is an old article, it's 15 years old which makes it ancient in the battery world. I have a Prius from that generation and mine doesn't have V2G. I can't find any numbers, how many Priuses actually have V2G capability?

Wow! Give yourself some credit, you're doing great friend, holding down all those systems, that's a very hard job!

From personal experience, I haven't written any libraries or frameworks and I'm definitely a like 40th-50th percentile coder at best. But I do have family, friends, hobbies, outdoor recreation, exercise, and meaningful contemplation in my life.

This means that though I'm not shreking code 24/7, I have all these wonderful things to recharge my batteries. When I do sit down at work for those 30-40 hours, I get what I need to done, not worrying if it's via stack overflow, copy-pasta, or any method.

And that's totally fine, you don't need to re-invent the wheel or be a wunderkind, just be yourself and take AMPLE time to do things you love outside of work.

Even if you think objectively, in this case, he's most likely underpaid and undervalued by the startup.

1. He's working much longer hours than he's paid for, probably for pie-in-the-sky options that 95% chance won't amount to a true pay-off for his hustle

2. He doesn't seem to have advocated for himself or his own happiness, he's going along with this burnout inducing program

3. He's clearly modest -- he's been coding for ~10 years and he's in his mid-20's. That is a highly employable situation in our field, he could easily get another job IMO.

Why should it be a right that we are bound to as modern citizens? I didn't sign off on the 2nd amendment, it was signed off on 250 years ago by a small group of pre-modern colonial elites. It originally was considered useful because colonists and local militias needed to be able to defend themselves from the British, and to not lose their means to hunt or protect themselves before police.

These days, we have autonomy in our own country, no British will invade us now. What is the purpose of keeping the full right to any gun ownership, if it's not a good thing for the nation? We didn't keep slavery when we realized it was wrong, how bad must it become before we say guns be restricted to use by qualified and safe individuals?

And the idea of "arms" as only guns is silly, there are restrictions on many sorts of weaponry, including guns, so there is not an absolute right for any citizen to have guns at any time already. There are already restrictions and they're neither enforced nor strong enough.

I think your equation isn't apt. Facebook likes run through personalized networks and are fed to users by privately curated algorithms which prioritize engagement and serving ads to benefit: Facebook.

In contrast, a pure democracy would be open questions and elections to any adult who is a citizen, without algorithms and corporate motivation interceding. This would theoretically benefit the aggregate voter: the citizens who vote.

What is a techno bush doof?

Shoutout to the greatest album released in the 2010's, Yo Yo Ma and Chris Thile's Goat Rodeo Session:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-31e8Nlujw

For a long time, a friend recorded TV shows and movies on multiple VCRs. I went to their house, it was literally stacks of video casettes on every wall surface, thousands of them. They even used to mail them back and forth to other countries in trades for other English content.

Nowadays, they digitized all of it onto 12 2 TB harddrives. They take a different one out every evening and organize and share, get more things, etc. While the cost may be comparable, the fact that they could regain their house walls was a huge boon.

I think every single field has complexified throughout history. Agriculture now has dozens of chemicals and large machinery. Woodworking now has advanced machinery and a handful of ways to do the same cuts. Music evolved from Gregorian Chant to Bach to Jazz. Software is no different, humans invent more tools and techniques in each field over time.

I don't think engineers are willingly screwing themselves. Does anyone here choose to adopt something they know will screw them over? We may be forced into decisions by higher-ups or by colleagues or associates, but those people generally have some reason behind their actions, they don't willfully screw engineers for fun.

The field as a whole, none of us individually can control where it goes. If your org sticks with proven older tech, it will do zero to prevent new frameworks from cropping up everywhere else. If you adopt any newer technology, you're now becoming a user, increasing its relevance, helping to test it and prove it, finding bugs and errors.

So no, "we" have not "screwed ourselves". It's simply human nature to complexify and add more tools over time.

Is it surprising that as the Minecraft generation gets older, some of them might think, why not build a huge underground base?

You're mathematically incorrect, unless you consider a typical worker saving 25% of their take-home "doing nothing".

A typical take-home for a month's work in US might be $3000. Cheaper rent could net you $300-$600 more, which is between 10-20% of your take-home. Not going to Starbucks every day, saving $5 a day let's say, works out to 5*30 = $150 bucks a month, a full 5% of the take-home pay.

Is 25% really nothing? Maybe you make so much money that $450 bucks a month isn't a big deal, but most people don't see the insidious nature of costly habits and how they're spending thousands per year on their quality of living.

Stop Drinking Calories. No alcohol, no soda, no fruit juice. This is by far the easiest way to lose weight.

Bonus: You don't need to eat what's in front of you. My family looks weirdly at me because I remove half the bread from a sandwich where the bread is too large. You don't have eat anything, you don't have to waste your caloric budget on "bad carbs".

I think your odd use of the exclamation mark is a great counter-example to your comment! After a long sentence with zero commas, here we have a punctuation mark! It doesn't exclaim, as in "Watch Out!" or "This is amazing!"! It's a questionable choice, it makes the reader think: why is this here? Is this writer casually throwing out punctuation that isn't needed?

That cognitive interruption, which I've kindly added multiple times to my first paragraph, is precisely what McCarthy says not to do in the very first bullet point of the article:

"Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can."

Well, he certainly had a ton of help from other people to ensure he wasn't taking shots in the dark most of the time. He copied most of his best ideas from other sources, and point-blank refused to acknowledge Woz and Apple 2, publicly denigrating their work when it would've been SO easy to just give them a quick shout-out.

I'd consider this, at best, waiting by the goal for the puck to be passed so he can flick it in behind the goalie, and then being good at raising his arms in triumph. Did Gretzky wait for the assist, or was his brilliance that he himself could make tremendous opportunities and then flick it in as well? At least "visionaries" like Elon and Bill Gates coded up solutions themselves when they needed to.

In a tech world with dozens of "amazing leaders", is it possible that some of them just got lucky? They took some shots in the dark, some got lucky, some got unlucky: can it be that simple?

If Steve Jobs was coming up today, could he have owned leetcode and tech interviews, would he have gotten a CS degree, could he have succeeded in a start-up today? Could many of us here in tech now have done what he did?

My point is: Maybe we don't have to fetishize individual people so much. Maybe the conditions around them, the timing of their career, the timing of their personal viewpoint, was simply a set of lucky circumstances. Maybe there exist a few hundred individuals in any given time with the potential, and it takes that last bit of random chance to make them the famous one over the others.

You'd have to stick with vegetables and fruits, but even then there's debate over what is truly healthy. Is corn healthy? Is wheat healthy? Are carrots healthy? They're all plants after all, however... All three are high in carbohydrates and would be considered "unhealthy" from a keto-perspective.

The best bet here: don't listen to one source of information. There are literally thousands of experts on diet, health, and nutrition, no one of them is totally correct. Find what you can tolerate, what you can stick to; eat mostly plants, and not too much.

Marijuana needs to be reclassified off of Schedule I Status in the USA, so it can be more thoroughly studied. Schedule I category shouldn't include recreational drugs like marijuana, which has no overdose possibility and has limited withdrawal side-effects. This wrong classification, going back to ignorant viewpoints of the early-mid 1900's, has heavily limited our scientific understanding of marijuana's effects on health and society.

Imagine if we weren't allowed to study alcohol freely, if we had to jump through a dozen hoops to become qualified to do one of the few alcohol studies. We might not have so much knowledge about alcohol's toxic effects, and we might not have the current picture of "Marijuana is slightly healthier than alcohol" if Marijuana had been as thoroughly studied.

I've been in data analysis for a few years -- grew from scientific research in SAS with zero VCS, into programming and data analysis in R and STATA, still no VCS for a while...eventually I was allowed to use Github after I left my restrictive hospital research space. No one ever sat me down and trained me on Git, though. I just heard repeatedly: if you're not using Git, you're missing out on a huge set of important software-creation tools, you shouldn't be coding without VCS.

Why did this happen? Imagine it's this data analysts' first year out of school, something like a crappy statistics program that only teaches SAS or base-R with no VCS. This young padawan needs to practice analysis in preparation for a work project. They grab some data and stash it in a folder where Git is tracking. They do their analysis practice, it's Friday afternoon, they get lazy, they don't look at what they're committing, and they click buttons in the GUI without much thought.

It's incompetence and laziness, not malice. These tools that allow us to share widely, not just GH but also social media broadly: these tools have great power that should be used with greater training, responsibility, and care.

There's a lot happening here, what a wide ranging post! Thanks for stimulating the mind.

I'd separate aging research from attempting to solve Alzheimers, PD, cancer, and other maladies. Cancer is ever-present, sorry to say but most people who read this have some small amount of latent cancer growing slowly. Maybe we will harness the immune system and new powerful drugs and techniques to remove cancer more and more effectively, until it becomes like infectious disease: a threat to all, but usually treat-able.

For aging research, however, we're in a different realm. Assuming someone didn't die from any common malady or old-age related ones, let's say they live to 105. What's likely to kill them then? Well, it could still be cancer, but it could also be solve-able issues like falling and breaking a hip (we could invent machines to prevent or lessen damage from falls). It could be cardiac events, strokes, things where the cardiovascular system has been through so many "duty cycles" that the parts reach their expiration date.

And this expiration date is where I think we'll struggle most. We need to make our hardware last much, much longer if we're to achieve immortality as biological-only entities. The valves of our heart, the vessels of our brain and heart, the operation of the lungs, the sensory organs, the kidneys and bowels: these parts need a lot of extra "lubrication" and "TLC" over our lifetimes if we're to get past the "Age Limit" which is probably around 120 years old.

I'd hesitate to put too much stock into aging research at present. It's in its infancy, and until it ages to maturity, it's going to be an over-hyped area for rich people to dabble in, but I doubt 99% of people living now will ever reach escape-velocity and reach immortality.