1,681 karma · joined September 20, 2019
This is all to say that randomly distributed failures are more tolerable than a relatively smaller number of concentrated failures. Human errors are rather nice by comparison because they're inconsistent in locality while still being otherwise predictable in macroscopic terms (e.g.: on any given day, there will always be far more rear-endings than head-on collisions). When it comes to machine networks, all it takes is one firmware update for both the type & locality of their failure modes to go into a wildly different direction.
It's probably related to GPT's more general sycophant inclinations. Acting like a doormat is apparently easier to teach than nuanced politeness -- much in the same way that repeating yourself ad nauseum is easier than intuiting specific points of emphasis.
1. Sex is a fundamentally asymmetrical power dynamic. For a conventional porn actress, it's frequently something that's done to you. These sex workers become passive actors in a transaction that directly taxes their mind & body, something very rare in other industries.
2. Sex work comes with a hefty opportunity cost. Any reputation you create for yourself in the sex industry becomes toxic once you leave -- and eventually you do have to leave it. It's a job that consumes all of your prime working & education years in exchange for little, if any, future opportunity.
3. Sex work is often, by far, the most lucrative job available to a young woman. Some young women simply have no other realistic choice to pay the bills. This in and of itself isn't a problem unique to sex work, however it does uniquely suck for sex workers because of the prior two issues. How do you stand up for yourself when the other party knows you can't walk away? How do you save for the future if you need the money today?
It's a pithy thought, but exactly what do I mean by that? Well... both things fundamentally exist within the interplay between labor, content, and the internet. We're forced to grapple with the yawning gap between abstract and economic value which the fundamental reproducibility of internet content implictly creates, not to mention the resulting potential for exploitation. This conflict forces us to reflect on unpleasant worldly realities -- how responsible is a consumer with finite resources for the fair treatment of those whose labors produce an infinite commodity?
Anecdotally speaking, whenever I personally go without medication, I am endlessly distracted by even the most basic urges (i.e.: hunger, exhaustion, arousal). Even being slightly peckish would leave me growing increasingly irritated and uncooperative. I've never smoked, but you wouldn't know that by looking at my unmedicated habits -- taking breaks every 20 minutes to satisfy some random urge before I inevitably start losing my head.
It's funny that you mention helmets, actually. For years when I was younger I could not afford a car, so I had to get by on a motorcycle. I worried about safety for years only to one day get plowed through, in broad daylight, at an intersection, by some fool trying to run a red light! Needless to say... they never noticed my hi-vis gear. There is no doubt in my mind that I would be dead today had I had not been wearing a helmet. If by some miracle I did survive, my face would have been completely scarred beyond recognition.
There is no moral to this anecdote of mine -- a helmet saved my life, but even I have to admit that helmets aren't always practical. I've long since moved somewhere where I never have any need to drive... yet even now I will occasionally rent one of those sidewalk scooters and zip around on a whim (usually without any helmet, naturally).
This is all to say that I agree with your stance that perfection is impossible. There's always more one could do, so we all have to draw our own lines somewhere that makes practical sense. It's why I'm very evidence-oriented when it comes to how we communicate about these things -- that's the only way to help others make informed decisions and avoid future regrets. On that day, it wasn't overly inconvenient to wear a helmet... so I wore it. This half-hearted choice is what ultimately saved my life.
I wish you luck in developing your course. Teaching is the highest calling that there is and I have trust in you to do it well. My (unsolicited) advice is to take an iteration-first strategy and allow the content to develop organically as you explore it with your pupils. In my own (limited) experience, teaching is not all that different from the scientific method -- it works best when starting from a position of being willing to accept any and outcomes.
Yes, investments often come in the form of obligations. Less than ten minutes each day is nevertheless cheap by self-care standards. Even by the standards of a person with pained teeth, they'd probably rather brush than undertake such a strict diet.
I'm aware that all of this must seem terribly condescending, so before I go on let me just say that I honestly have no issue with the solutions you've found to your problems -- even if I disagree with some of the logic that helped you arrive at them. Everything beyond this point will be my own attempts to straighten established facts from the rest for the benefit of other readers. Live well and go in peace, friend.
> If brushing your teeth means a world of pain then you do it out of obligation and it is not a happy experience
If gentle, careful brushing causes a world of pain... that is not normal and indeed a strong indicator of advanced oral disease. Once disease advances beyond a certain point, the only reliable solution becomes professional dental treatment.
> My point still stands though, there is a lot of money made from tooth related FUD and sugary food. I just wished a dentist had spilled the beans to me many decades ago that it really is simple to have excellent oral hygiene just be avoiding the added sugars, and, to a lesser extent, the processed food.
The vast majority of dentists do want people to be healthy. It's just human nature. The core issue is that most patients don't want to be lectured -- it's bad for repeat business, so dentists learn to stay quiet about such things unless asked. Yet another one of the many tragedies caused by the systemic monetization of healthcare and something which I think we should all be more insistent about fixing.
> By every metric I just find the situation very different, the gums have definitely 'grown back' and I am sure some tartar is now below the gumline.
That is most excellent and I am genuinely pleased to hear that you are in good health. It's important to note for others, however, that the capacity for gums to "grow back" in most cases is usually lackluster. The best way to fix receding gums is to prevent the recession before it occurs with regular care -- the next best thing to do is brush and floss (or water floss!) diligently, receive regular cleanings, and maintain the routine consistently for the rest of your life.
> Many common preservatives kill bacteria, or specific bacteria such as 'anything but yeast'. This makes sense for shelf life but I am not sure it helps with the gastrointestinal tract, which includes the mouth. There are good bacteria and then there is the one that lives off sucrose to make plaque. If you are eating standard issue bakery products then you are killing off the bad guys whilst giving the yeast=like strains that live off sucrose a free pass.
This is an incredible oversimplification. Salt -- for example -- is itself a powerful preservative and you certainly would kill most gut bacteria by ingesting a sufficiently large dose... though such a large dose would prove equally deadly to the host. Preservatives are not antibiotics, they work because they're concentrated in the food and get quickly rendered harmless once eaten thanks to diffusion (Yes, even in the mouth. You can thank your saliva.)
You are of course still correct to say that modern diets wreak havoc on gut fauna, but the cause is rooted in nutrition rather than poisoning. Fauna which are beneficial in a diverse gut can turn toxic in an environment with lower biodiversity -- something which is all too easy to cause with an unbalanced diet that systematically favors only a fraction of the extant species. Sugar-heavy diets are but one of many problematic cases in this respect.
> Incidentally, after I banished sugar from my home, I was reading the label of the toothpaste one day whilst brushing my teeth. And you will never guess what? Sugar. The cheek of it, putting sugar in toothpaste. That is perpetuating a problem that was being set out to be solved.
That's sad to hear and I'm sorry you've been failed like this. With that being said... I suspect that the incentives at play are not what you imply. The toothpaste manufacturer really has very little interest in the profits derived by whichever odd dentist happens to work on your teeth -- they probably just needed a cheap filler that didn't taste bad. None of this diminishes the evil caused by such greed, but we need to be clear-eyed about where the fault lies if we want to make things better.
> I cut coffee and dairy too, so it is not difficult or a challenge to put in the effort to get them really nice for when I am meeting someone. However, I no longer feel obligated to brush them twice a day lest they feel like they are falling out or 'covered in fur' the next morning.
I want to stress again to anyone reading this that brushing is the singlemost effective way to delay the development of calculus and thus prevent tooth decay. Even if you can't feel the plaque, it's still there and almost certainly forming new calculus.
As a side-note: you may be interested to hear that plain coffee is not particularly bad for your teeth. One should avoid drinking it before brushing because the acidity can temporarily soften enamel, but aside from that all you'd have to worry about are coffee stains. Tea is similarly safe and even has a gentler PH, making most brews safe to drink even before brushing.
> It is not rocket science but I did not feel that any of this was explained to me very clearly at school or on any TV science program
I agree. Knowledge of such things is woefully undertaught. Schools seem much too eager to abdicate the responsibility for such things to parents who themselves may have never been fully taught. It is for this reason that we must often rely on the expertise of other professionals to make up for our own shortcomings, even as we simultaneously seek knowledge on our own terms.
First: Calculus forms within hours of eating just about any meal. Sugars make this much worse, but to a certain extent it is unavoidable. Regular appointments with a hygienist will improve your long-term dental health regardless of diet, though the necessary frequency can be decreased in many cases with a good diet.
Second: Please don't stop brushing your teeth, especially if you want fewer dentist appointments. It's one of the cheapest and safest investments you can possibly make in your body. Just because you can't feel the plaque doesn't mean that it's not there.
Third: Added sugars are just really, terribly bad for you in general. I'm speaking now to those that don't care much about their teeth: you can do so much for your long-term health by simply checking for this one thing on labels. I know it's an odd concept to think of added sugars as being so much worse than "natural" sugars when they're fundamentally the same molecules, but it's true -- the differences in solubility/bioavailability have a very outsized impact.
With all of this being said, once you're an adult there's no longer any particularly viable pathways from the bloodstream to your outer teeth, so flouride in the body becomes mostly disconnected from flouride in the teeth (and vice versa). Flouride's effects on the body are less well understood, albeit only because we struggle to measure such apparently small effects on a general population.
- Person who destroys git history
- Person who hates destroying git history
- Person who knows how to recover "destroyed" history
- Person who knows how to truly destroy git history
pnpm lets you download packages to your computer -- a "manager", if you will. JSR gives you a centralized place to find packages at -- a "registry", if you will. We use different words because these two things are not interchangeable and it's not just a JS thing.
Circling back to the original discussion: I'd say that it's better to compare the past & non-past tenses of Japanese verbs:
- "Thank you" in the past tense ("ありがとうございました") conveys that you are thankful for acts already rendered and that you do not intend to impose further.
- "Thank you" in the non-past tense ("ありがとうございます") conveys that you are actively thankful, generally when the act in question is still in progress or otherwise not yet completely rendered.
This is a nuance that English renders trivial with a simple "Thank you", much like Japanese renders trivial the difference between a completed "look" and an incomplete "see".
Naturally, I almost immediately flunked out of the program. Who wouldn't quit something making them miserable when they didn't even want to do it in the first place? I was one of the lucky ones, actually... Many like-minded cohorts in my graduating class wasted years of time and money with nothing to show for it. They deserved adults who'd help pair them with the pathways that best suited their individual talents and risk tolerances -- not some blindly optimistic, cookiecutter college-for-all solution.
What about you, dear reader? Perhaps you're responsible for teenagers of your own... can you say with certainty that the adults in their lives have given them consistently honest and thorough conversations about the paths before them? I bet some parents would accuse me of being totally full of shit right about now... That's fine, I'm not some nostradomus bringing news of impending doom -- I only want the next generation to have things better than I did. If nothing else, it doesn't hurt to entertain the idea, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwNiZ_j_24
- Noun: 関係 [kankei] -- A noun which roughly means relations/involvement
- Component Kanji
--- 関: Semantically equates to "connection"
--- 係: Semantically equates to "participation"
- Verb: ない [nai] -- A foundational verb which inverts ある [aru]. ある is how you concretely indicate that something exists in a specific way. ない is how you concretely indicate that something exists NOT in that specific way.
So... putting it all together; the phrase is a grammatically complete utterance that more or less says "this is anything but material to that". Something which this rough translation fails to convey is the flexibility of the saying -- depending on context it can be used to communicate anything from "that's irrelevant" to... "none of my business" or even... "none of your concern"
As usual, it varies. Some outdoor environments can cause pollen/pinetar/birdpoop to accumulate and form a layer of weather-resistant plaque which slowly degrades the paint. Some indoor storage environments are open-air, which can lead to a stubborn buildup of oil/pollution/dust with a similarly negative impact.
Of course, there's also the general idea that, if you baby something, it'll last longer. Inspecting how the car looks on a semi-regular basis might lead one to noticing any number of issues -- a soft tire, a fluid leak, a faulty tail-light, etc. It's not a bad ritual to have if you rely on the good working function of such things.
With all of this being said, I don't exactly practice what I preach... Driving bores me and I'd rather pay someone else to do the associated maintenance even though I've been thoroughly taught how to do it myself. I very much belong to the "carwashes for thee and not for me" school of thought