archduck

Hell yeah. I bought the Milwaukee shop vac a few weeks ago. Didn't realize it comes without batteries... which come without a charger. But I couldn't be happier with it. We have a cat that will create mounds - tall mounds - of cat litter in front of the litterbox entrance. Just hurls it out the hole somehow into a big pile. I just empty out the big tray at the bottom of the shop vac, suck up the litter in a few seconds, and dump it right back into the box. It's quick, clean, and easier than trying to change a cat's behavior. And for cat barves, like when they eat too fast, I just take the filter out and vacuum that up no problem, and it's powerful enough that you can't even tell that anything happened on the rug. (It's always on a rug, never on the hardwood floor. Naturally.) It's a game changer for this cat owner.

I'm the same, for the most part. I worked at a small dev shop with two coworkers. One liked to put on classical music, and the other would often play whatever the hell kind of music Pat Metheny is, and while the richness of those particular genres appeared to _stimulate_ their ability to code heads-down, it rendered me pretty much useless. My attention would glom onto the scales and arpeggios of Vivaldi's Four Seasons or onto the weird proggy time signatures of the other stuff.

However, I have had much success with black metal bands that shriek (or whatever) in a foreign language. The fullness of the sound - blast beats, distorted guitars - just really does it for me for some reason. And I don't get distracted by the vocals because I don't understand e.g. Finnish (and with bands like Horna, it's probably better that way). It makes finding that flow state much easier, and I suspect it may be working as a fidget spinner does: a certain base level of constant but predictable sensory input soothes whatever it is in my brain that gets me antsy when engaging in an activity that requires a lot of energy expenditure without proportional immediate feedback. But as soon as you up the complexity of the music past a certain point, it swings all the way the other way and makes willful concentration pretty much impossible.

Yep. It's ADHD and its weirdness with the rewards system, for sure.

This calls to mind Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of _flow_. There’s too much of it to go into here, but this page illustrates how it happens and what it's like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

I posit that any activity which falls short of flow state will also cause energy drainage in kind. What distinguishes introverts and extraverts in a given social interaction, then, has to do with the degree to which they consider themselves challenged and how skillfully they think they are performing. High challenge + high ability = flow, which is an energizing state where you lose track of time. Mess with those parameters a bit and you get boredom and anxiety (along with shades of other things), which are draining states different in kind.

"SEO Expert Hired and Fired By Ashley Madison Turned on"

Hehe. Good catch. I doubt the use of "turned on" was intended to be funny here, given the source, but it sure does read like a satirical news headline.

Re: figuring things out, for me, it’s pretty rare that I’m able to resolve anything from _within_ the loop. It's only when I switch to another context and then switch back to it that I'm able to finally stop the looping. I can think of a few reasons why this works: there's evidence of brains doing "background processing" when asleep or occupied with something else, which I find especially fascinating. Sometimes I'm sure it's because there's something that would provide an "exit condition" if I could just see it, but there's some heuristic active in the present state that's causing that line of thinking to be skipped over and/or zapped of enough salience for the brain to consider it worth chewing on. Maybe in order to return to something the brain has to perform some sort of "bootstrapping" in order to "re-render" whatever ideational substance is involved, and somewhere in that bootstrapping process there's an exit condition that is absent from within the loop, I don't know.

I would also defend to the death that not all brain-loops are actually "resolvable" in any meaningful way. For example (stretching the meaning of “rumination” here), I have music going on in my head 24/7. Always. Most of the time they're in the form of short-ish loops, so they repeat a lot. This in and of itself isn’t so terrible - it can actually be really nice sometimes to "overhear" what's playing and join in, because I can help drive the musical procession forward, since the part of my thinking self that’s aware and has free will can focus on the music, innovate on what’s playing, lead the music around, change the song, etc. But unfortunately, the musical homunculus squatting in my head who's always awake is also never satisfied with a particular song coming to a close - try as I might to resolve a looping refrain by bringing the song to a close, the goddamn "Achy Breaky Heart" fanatic I never invited into my inner world in the first place just presses play again. Finishing the song does nothing! Here, there is no _resolution_; there is only _substitution_. At this point, if I don't just refuse to give up, I now find myself forced to trawl through my catalog of catchy songs to put on, so that the worst DJ ever, who has no ability to read the room, might hear what _I'm_ playing and decide to join _me_, before I can find any relief. It feels incredibly stupid when the current time is a very wide-awake 4am and it's at that point where you just have to say _fuck this, this isn't working, I'll never drift off to sleep with this asshole (yourself) playing this crap I didn't pick (well, actually, you did) on repeat_, so now you have to try to think of _other_ songs that get stuck in your head so that you can try playing them in your head to yourself until one of them "takes," in order to stop yourself from annoying the shit out of yourself and keeping yourself awake - all because you can't ask yourself to just stop (because you won't listen)! - but also (and this is my point here) because there's nothing that actually _resolves_ a musical "thought" in such a way that makes it "invalid," "irrelevant," "solved," etc. and thereby any less likely to just cue up again.

Oftentimes isn't not even a song - it's a jingle. A fucking jingle!!!

Similarly, I've had unresolvable brain-loops deriving from weed paranoia, where I _cannot_ reason with the lizard part of my brain in any way whatsoever. The only thing that works is distraction. This is main reason why weed is just not for me - I hate having to will myself to distraction because any sense of presence is too unsettling.

Logotherapy. See Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I totally forgot about Ad Nauseam! I used to use it instead of uBlock Origin (which, if I remember correctly, is what Ad Nauseam actually uses for its adblocking). Google banning it from their extensions marketplace only strengthened my loathing for Google and my resolve to use it. I don’t remember why I eventually stopped - probably the inconvenience. Now that I’m a Firefox user, I should pick that back up and give it a spin again. It was entertaining to see the visualization of all the ads it had clicked on.

I also used to use Chaff (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chaff/jgjhamliocfh...), which opens up a tab and browses on its own when the browser is idle and disappears when you start using it again. As with Ad Nauseam, the means of protecting privacy behind it is not anonymity, but rather obfuscation - muddifying your actual browsing behavior by flooding the data you leave behind with junk data (at which point it ceases to be data, I suppose). The problem with that extension was that I would sit back and wait for it to start browsing, and then I’d waste too much time watching it / customizing its behavior.

The book _Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest_, written by the authors who developed Ad Nauseam and TrackMeNot, has a great chapter on chaff (the obfuscation tactic, not the Chaff extension mentioned above).

Yeah, no. This is a non-starter. Restaurants have high price elasticity of demand - higher menu prices cause a significant fall in demand because there are alternatives to dining out (you can choose to eat at home for food, you can choose to see a movie for date night; even if you still decide to eat at the same restaurant after they jack up their prices, you can still make choices to lower your bill, such as not ordering drinks or appetizers).

Compare this to food you buy in the grocery store - you still need to buy food, even if food prices double overnight. You may buy less of it and pick cheaper brands, but your fundamental consumption habits will not change much.

Can confirm. I slipped up for a few seconds once while torrenting. My cease-and-desist letter from Sony was personally delivered to my door by the Hausmeister.

I recently encountered this interview with Frost, the drummer behind the black metal bands 1349 and Satyricon, in which he talks about his ritual prior to going on stage. It serves to clearly delineate the two contexts from each other, and once he's crossed over, he's in the mental space he needs to perform.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JF0bOF4hgrA

I found it both chuckleworthy and relatable at the same time. Here's one of the most technically skilled drummers who plays some of the most demanding and intense drumming there is - totally out of reach for most drummers (look up some drumming videos that feature him, it's insane) - showing his human, soft side. His ritual is yoga and putting on the corpsepaint. I like to imagine him putting on the corpsepaint first, then the yoga pants, then putting on an Enya playlist, etc.

His teaching at Cambridge often had minutes-long silences, in which the class just had to wait for him to conclude his thoughts and resume teaching. It was apparently agonizing for some of his students.

Especially since you probably didn't want to step on his toes by breaking the silence while he still held the floor - he was, after all, forced to retire from schoolteaching after beating one of his slower math students unconscious.

While writing the Tractatus in the trenches, even. Most people would be satisfied with a stream-of-consciousness brain dump, hoping that enough insights are contained within to justify one's work. Wittgenstein cooked it down to just seven terse statements and further terse sub-statements. And numbered them nicely. Who does that?

That's how I understand it. All I was saying was, state that the diamond is to be split, and whoever refuses and bows out first gets to keep the entire thing, as they would have demonstrated genuine concern for its welfare.

The scenario is obviously not the same - that's the joke. (Which apparently did not land.) The critical difference is: It's better to get part of the diamond than nothing at all. Thus, when any party is presented with the option to take part of it, their only sensible action is to take it. Either it's going to be split anyway, and no one would want to give away their share to the other scoundrels, or all parties are going to come together and refuse to allow it to be split - which leaves us back at the beginning.

The same cannot be said for babies. Who wants part of a baby? Not me

Decree that it be split equally among all invested parties, Judgment of Solomon style.

(Though in this case, they may end up having to follow through, i.e. cutting their baby into equal parts.)

They are using a type of logical inference called abduction: based upon one's observations of an unexplained phenomenon, one formulated a hypothesis as to why it is so.

> If whoever wrote this, would be actually good at critical thinking, they would have noticed, that there is no logical connection. Just because I am good at one thing, does not mean, I have to be bad at another thing.

The logical fallacies you are using here are ad hominem and the straw man argument.

> I think this article performs multiple leaps of logic and cites anonymous sources for its more serious allegations. For example it assumes an off handed anonymous glassdoor comment “if half the child porn allegations are true patreon is in trouble” to mean patreon as a company is aware of and endorses any child porn on its platform. It could instead just be someone who saw the same tiktok the article points to alleging child porn.

...and you just made it clear exactly at what point you stopped reading the article.

Germany does not have a single-payer system. Private insurance is an option if you're self-employed or make a high enough salary.

I'm certainly no fan of shutting people down for asking questions. I think we may be interpreting the context of the question differently though. The parent poster was recounting having worked as a math teacher, stressed out every day from the planning and grading demands of the job, working in excess of 12 hours per day, earning a salary low enough that colleagues without a spouse's income to help out had to work a second job - and who still has nightmares about being back in the classroom. And then moving on to a software job with double the salary and half the stress. I read it as saying teachers should be appreciated / paid more and the response as why are teachers still doing unnecessary grunt work, making lesson plans and grading papers? Isn't that dumb work that a software engineer could just solve for them?

(Also, following through on this, if such a solution - computers planning your lessons for you, so all you have to do is what the smart computer tells you to - were to become reality, the lack of teacher appreciation / salary, which was the main point of the parent comment, would not improve at all - it would likely get worse, with teachers getting paid less for fewer available jobs. The deskilling of labor would probably follow, reducing teacher roles to individual, specialized, repetitive tasks, since it saves an enormous amount of money if low-skilled workers can simply be swapped out if they don't work out.)

I don't believe this was a case of bullying at all. It was a light ribbing. It also aligned with an archetype (of being able to engineer our way out of human problems) that's especially salient for some people on here, yet totally lost on others. The contradiction is funny, too, because it's classic human folly. Whether or not the commenter is anything like that really doesn't figure into the calculus of how necessary or good this instance of another commenter's snarky side comment was: there are no material consequences, no damage to anyone's reputation (except for some votes), and no one was even the butt of a joke here - it was the idea of the smart engineer with the engineered solution to a human matter which doesn't need solving. That's what we're laughing about.

Regarding all the talk about ridicule, it was intended as a rebuttal to the idea that humor at someone's expense is _never_ appropriate. It is appropriate and even healthy for a society to be composed of individuals who can withstand a bit of a ribbing when they unwittingly find themselves representing human folly in one of its many forms, and who can stop and ask, why did that happen?, and potentially learn from it, if it came from a moment of lacking self-awareness, or if it was just bad luck (everyone - everyone - winds up in the crosshairs sometimes.)

Truly no ill will meant, just wanted to defend the social function of ridicule. It probably ended up being a lot more of a well, actually thing than I intended. Which I do get teased for sometimes.

Ridicule can absolutely produce resentment, no doubt about it. It can cause workplaces to become toxic, cause people to shut down (or worse: cause people to _learn_ to shut down), cause people to cope in unhealthy ways like projection, bullying, etc.

However, consider that _satire_ is, fundamentally, ridicule. And it's very public (or at least intended to be). Often satire is one of the only ways that unaccountable power can be brought to account, or institutions which have overstayed their utility can be mobilized against.

It really depends on who's the butt of the joke. On HackerNews, we're mostly anonymous as to our individual identities, but at the same time, any one of us could unwittingly end up playing the part of a public archetype, representing anything from a naive and harmless misconception all the way to a rotten, spiteful ideology that nihilistically boasts of its intent to destroy everything. Some of those ideas need to be challenged. And the people that amplify those ideas need to be challenged too. Bad faith and ill intent warrant ridicule, if not outright invective and contempt (not very often to this degree, but as a history enjoyer, I'll die on this hill). But sometimes even a genuine, bona fide contribution _ought_ to be ridiculed, if it stems from a misunderstanding which amplifies a terrible idea - especially if it's a terrible idea with actual supporters. In this case, the bad idea was _technocratic solutions to complex social problems._ The context is important too: it's HackerNews, which has some of the most brilliant minds, willing to share deep, detailed insights into complex, systemic problems, glomming onto some of the most simplistic, reductive tropes about human needs and behavior. It's a kind of paradoxical, radically individualistic groupthink, which, taken to its logical end (or even just considered half-seriously with a modicum of self-awareness), would smother the social and economic conditions for a healthy society. A small set of shallow, rote answers to complex human problems, coming from defenders of “second-order thinking.” It needs to be challenged in a way that an overclocked galaxy brain can't intellectually weasel its way out of.

It doesn't "suggest" that at all. Perhaps changes in pedagogy were necessary in order to adapt to a changing world.

Education isn't like the naive "encoding/decoding" model of communication, where the subject matter is simply "transmitted" from teacher to students. Even if the subject matter remains stable over time, many other things do not: changes in the media of communication, signal interference (say, from the average classroom size drastically increasing over time), all kinds of changes in the teachers and students themselves, changes in society's expectations of what constitutes success or failure (e.g. rote learning is now widely seen as having many shortcomings), changes in what students actually need to move forward (a career in the trades may well require a much lower standard of understanding in the age of the pocket calculator), ... this list could go on and on. Teaching is not a "solved problem" like that.

On the other hand, some contributions to a conversation are simply beyond the boundaries of common sense in such a way (blindingly obvious, unacceptable, dangerously naive, etc.) that ridicule is appropriate. Even if the contribution was made in good faith. Ridicule has numerous powerful social functions: it helps social groups self-govern, transmits knowledge from one generation to the next, enables social groups to circumscribe what is acceptable in a bottom-up way, and so on. Sometimes a little public skewering is exactly what's needed to give everyone something to think about. It's an online comment. Real names weren't used. There appears to be an overwhelming consensus as to the quality of the contribution (it's so light I can barely read it). No one's suffering any undue injury.

> The bridging of sociology, history and economics was somewhat rare back in the 80s and before. (Douglas North a notable exception, obviously not alone.)

So Karl Marx and Max Weber are just chopped liver?

Oh hell yes. Several times I've found my evening abruptly derailed by Admiral Cloudberg's true stories of plane crashes. It's a strange feeling, but fascinating and engrossing. The forensics of the accident sites, the failure analysis, the way the pilots are presented as humans making decisions in critical moments, often unaware of the factors which will determine their fate, and other times knowing their fate is sealed ... hazardous weather conditions, hubris, miscalculations, miscommunications, engineering failures which put them in a death trap, the brief instances of negligence, the systemic failures and oversights, the political contexts influencing people's expectations and behavior, ... All of it comes together, often in predictable ways, often in ridiculously unlikely ways, to bring about a catastrophe. Highly recommended.

For me, at least, “easily” is not the right word … it doesn’t really capture what the feeling is like.

Much more apt is Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow. (“While flowingly shifting and steering” sounds horrible, but it captures it.) Fertile ground for flow is when the highly challenging is met with the highly skillful. It then sort of commences and sustains itself on its own, without demanding any conscious intervention - although you may choose to observe yourself in a flow state, which may cause broad grinning.

I remember driving a stick in San Francisco during rush hour. Bumper to bumper traffic. The hills sloped a lot more than I had anticipated, upping the challenge, since a lapse on my part could have meant stalling out, or even worse, rolling back into the car behind me. I had to make a lot of use of the parking brake trick, i.e. engage when stopped, not releasing until the clutch hit the sweet spot - like, every few seconds. Probably in excess of 100 instances total, maybe more! I have no idea, I wasn’t counting, because the old ‘99 Honda Civic Si and I had become a single organism, fused together as one, all parts acting in concert, with full awareness and a singular focus. I was even carrying on a conversation with a person who was totally unaware! (Never caught the appeal of a stick shift.) If she had expressed that something was different about me in that moment, it wouldn’t have been that I seemed preoccupied or distracted - not at all, because I was feeling sharper, more animated, more present, and not daydreaming or speaking in showerthoughts as usual! I was alive as fuck, and it was thrilling.

I used to drive a taxi and play ukelele for carloads of drunks at the same time, but since it was an automatic Crown Vic, it always remained two distinguishable activities that had to be coordinated, so it was just a pain in the ass.

That stickwiggle has fused itself into the fiber of my being, so I’ll be right there with you.

The way this is written doesn't resemble non-humorous writing at all, so the irony fails. It's not funny. It's painfully unfunny.

I spent a decade overseas and ran into this lazy kind of humor a lot from British drunkards in Irish pubs that never learned the language of the country they were in. Oh, you don't understand irony because you're American! No, I get it, but it's not funny. Acting like you're being funny while you're saying something absurd isn't irony. This kind of humor is embarrassingly lazy and could only come from people who are so focused on themselves that they think humor means when they're trying to get a laugh. Fucking stupid.

How charming. Everybody loves having their language use corrected sarcastically.

But you should really read up on your English modifiers next time, because your point is based on a common vulgar-linguistic misconception. “Linux,” in this case, is plainly being used qualifyingly rather than classifyingly. It’s subsective, but ambiguous as to whether or not it’s intersective - but I think the answer to this is quite clear. Say we had to reformulate the noun phrase into a clause. Would we really come up with e.g. “The `cheat` command is Linux-specific” as the equivalent intended meaning? Or would it more likely be “The `cheat` command works on Linux”? The point is that the `cheat` command can be used in a Linux shell, not what scripting language it’s written in.

> Accuracy is not pedantic

This is the wrong attitude, my dude. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s probably intended to be light-hearted because it’s self-referential and self-contradictory (pragmatically, not semantically, as ironic humor does), but it’s still too close for comfort in this context. I know computer dudes who are like this for real. One graybeard almost had me saying fuck this when I was still starting out.

> No. That’s idiotic reasoning.

…

This is the impression I have from Wordpress as well. Some of the most basic features you would expect a blogging platform or a brochure site creator to have out of the box are conspicuously missing, and I strongly suspect the reason for their absence is NOT for the sake of keeping the base WP install small, but rather because there are paid plugins in the Wordpress Plugin Directory which fulfill those basic functions, thereby providing a marketplace to incentivize WP development, regardless of how basic the functionality that you're looking for is. There is indeed a vibrant WP marketplace as a consequence of this, but should I really have to install a 3rd party library to get simple modal windows? Regardless of how much popups suck, they're something that every commercial client asks for at some point, and instead of having a single way of doing it which is official, well-maintained, and trustworthy, you have to shop around and try out every mystery devshop's kneecapped freemium version, many of which pelt you with banner ads and/or conflict with another shitty-ass plugin! It's very much a developer-centric way of doing things. Fine, that's a worthy cause, especially since Wordpress is free; but more often than not, the best solution is to invest in one of the plugin "suites" which do more than one thing without interfering with other things. As much as I like composition and "do one thing and do it well," if you try to go down that path with Wordpress plugins, you're asking for it.

This ain’t pretty, but it works:

  [
    “foo”,
    ...(cond1 ? [bar] : []),
    ...(cond2 ? baz : []),
  ]

---

Edit: note to self: read the link before commenting.