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bykovich2

206 karma · joined May 11, 2017

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bykovich2··on Just own the damn robots
I didn't read this as an investment thesis. I don't think he's trying to prescribe an investment strategy.
bykovich2··on Is there an upside to having no social life?
> Doing nothing can be as equally energising as time out spent with people, and is in fact necessary in order to recharge, says Pedro Diaz, CEO of the Workplace Mental Health Institute in Sydney.

Hmm, who's this guy?

> Driven by an obsession for better outcomes in workplace mental health, Pedro Diaz founded The Workplace Mental Health Institute as a boutique educational resource for managers serious about creating immediate and sustainable changes for their organisation’s mental health.

What's a "boutique educational resource"? That's a phrase I've never in my days encountered.

This article is stating nothing but the obvious: that living by a calendar maniacally filled to bursting is not the road to happiness.

> "We find that people who are dual-centric tend to be healthier, do better at work and do better at home," says Galinsky [co-founder of the Families and Work Institute].

"Dual-centric" apparently means "not monomaniacal."

bykovich2··on Ask HN: Why do you keep coming back to Hacker News?
Weakness of will.
bykovich2··on Bitcoin has died 166 times, so far
> There can be 'unlimited growth' - as long as there is innovation.

How's that work, bud?

bykovich2··on Augmenting Human Potential with Omatum
> Life is a complicated symphony of events, it isn't easy to arrange a perfect solution on your own.

Implicit here is the assumption that there is a problem (life itself?) to which a solution can be arranged, and that "arranging a perfect solution" is a worthy aim.

Why does one need to seek a "solution" to a symphony?

bykovich2··on Friends Are Genetically Similar (2014)
One might go so far as to say that substance and sustenance of life dwells in those holes. I won't go so far, but someone (not me, of course) might.
bykovich2··on The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault
Not exactly: Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson did not, in fact, have sex. Tom rebuffed Mayella's advances, and Bob Ewell concocted a rape as retribution for Mayella's attraction to a black man. However, the book strongly implies that, at some earlier point, Bob Ewell himself had actually raped Mayella -- perhaps habitually. It's not lingered upon, but the implication, while brief, is difficult to oppose.
bykovich2··on Largest Bitcoin mixer, Bitmixer.io, closes down
If you run an online store that doesn't validate credit cards correctly you will become an API for fraudsters to check the validity of Visa numbers.
bykovich2··on Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness
Isn't this explicitly not a theory of consciousness?
bykovich2··on A Guide to Intermittent Fasting
"Calorie restriction is proven to help you live a longer life."

Flatly untrue. The article linked to "in proof" is about primate studies that suggest -- perhaps even strongly suggest -- that caloric restriction can slow the process of aging. This does not, however, rise to the level of proof, and certainly does not provide conclusive indication of what caloric restricters can expect more generally. The author is apparently willing to make this grandiose claim to a susceptible audience with nary a word about its limitations, which should set our alarm bells ringing.

If you want to calorically restrict, do it because you've thought long and hard about the consequences of a truly significant choice -- not because it's a tech industry fad.

bykovich2··on Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet
I believe the point was that selling a kid to pay for the others is a suggestion similarly (if not identically) indifferent to emotional realities as suggesting that a committedly-married couple get a divorce to change their tax status.
bykovich2··on Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet
How do you figure that "besides for housing, cost of living does not need to be particularly higher in SV than elsewhere"? While housing is undeniably the most wildly out-of-control expense in Silicon Valley, the rest of the essentials of life ain't cheap either.
bykovich2··on Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet
That's the point, dude.
bykovich2··on Cafeteria workers at Facebook struggle to make ends meet
The cost of living in the Bay Area is -- and I say this with no figuration -- frightening. It provokes genuine fear in me.
bykovich2··on I am the fifth dimension
The linked article is much, much better, much more nuanced and insightful, than the Wikipedia page.
bykovich2··on The Company Isn't a Family
You know how much players on professional sports teams make?
bykovich2··on Designing a Bottle
Does anyone still drink this stuff?
bykovich2··on Is it unethical to have kids in the era of climate change
Do you take David Benatar seriously?
bykovich2··on The Internet of Things – A Disaster
Funny, it seems increasingly apt to me.
bykovich2··on What libraries lost when they threw out the card catalog
When I was in college, my school was disposing of their card catalog by providing the cards as scratch paper for catalog numbers -- next to the computer terminals that had replaced them. I spirited dozens, maybe hundreds, of them out. I was particularly happy to have preserved some of the cards for the Asian languages collection, which had -- due, I presume, to the limitations of typewriters -- been written by hand.

I have them boxed up somewhere. They're not very interesting, all said, but I could certainly digitize them. I can't decide if that would be an insult or an enshrinement.

bykovich2··on 'Living Drug' That Fights Cancer by Harnessing Immune System Clears Key Hurdle
This is bonkers logic. It's wrong to coerce someone into providing the cure, but it's right to coerce someone out of forming a monopoly?
bykovich2··on 'Living Drug' That Fights Cancer by Harnessing Immune System Clears Key Hurdle
What is the selective pressure /for/ cancer-predisposing genes? And it's not as if most cancers act as a reproductive filter -- the majority of them emerge well after the onset of reproductive ability, drastically reducing, if not eliminating, their selective effect.
bykovich2··on An introduction to Stoic philosophy and resilience-building [video]
Well, a certain sort of therapy.

It's pretty insightful to connect the increased interest in stoicism to the boom-and-bust cycle. As the specter of a bust looms larger (hallucinatory or not), I can imagine that people who would be affected by the bust might find themselves seeking out ways of psychologically weathering the storm. Stoicism ain't it, in my book, but it certainly presents itself as if it were.

bykovich2··on An introduction to Stoic philosophy and resilience-building [video]
hahahahahaha
bykovich2··on An introduction to Stoic philosophy and resilience-building [video]
Is CBT seeing significantly increased interest amongst people in tech? I haven't noticed that, but I also haven't been looking.
bykovich2··on An introduction to Stoic philosophy and resilience-building [video]
Me.

It's actually Nietzsche -- "Beyond Good and Evil," Part 1, §9. I have very serious reservations about Nietzsche, but he doesn't pull his punches.

bykovich2··on An introduction to Stoic philosophy and resilience-building [video]
So you want to live “according to nature?” Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud is in this phrase! Imagine something like nature, profligate without measure, indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard, without mercy and justice, fertile and barren and uncertain at the same time, think of indifference itself as power – how could you live according to this indifference? Living – isn’t that wanting specifically to be something other than this nature? Isn’t living assessing, preferring, being unfair, being limited, wanting to be different? And assuming your imperative to “live according to nature” basically amounts to “living according to life” – well how could you not? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? – But in fact, something quite different is going on: while pretending with delight to read the canon of your law in nature, you want the opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to dictate and annex your morals and ideals onto nature – yes, nature itself –, you demand that it be nature “according to Stoa” and you want to make all existence exist in your own image alone – as a huge eternal glorification and universalization of Stoicism! For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to have a false, namely Stoic, view of nature, that you can no longer see it any other way, – and some abysmal piece of arrogance finally gives you the madhouse hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves – Stoicism is self-tyranny –, nature lets itself be tyrannized as well: because isn’t the Stoic a piece of nature? . . . But this is an old, eternal story: what happened back then with the Stoics still happens today, just as soon as a philosophy begins believing in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the causa prima.
bykovich2··on An introduction to Stoic philosophy and resilience-building [video]
Why, though? What has produced that effect?
bykovich2··on An introduction to Stoic philosophy and resilience-building [video]
Because being in tech is life-ruining and only can only be propped up by ascetic myth-making, lol.

I suspect stoicism also appeals strongly to a personality that enters tech at a disproportionate rate -- like bodybuilding, nootropics, hackathons and life-hacks, it presents rigid, rationalized mastery of the self as both desirable and achievable. I'm hesitant to attempt to characterize the personality order to which this so strongly appeals, but it seems observable.

bykovich2··on JSTOR have made 600 books open-access. Find a list of them here
Glad to see that JSTOR made open-access 600 books that will each be read by exactly three people who already have institutional subscriptions.
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