Dysfunctional media is a big one, dysfunctional families, the disintegration of the middle class, the rise of techbro culture where a whole generation suddenly had this expectation that you can and should be as wealthy as a doctor, with a fraction of the training or oversight.
That's difficult to say. Right now, my cohort is mainly other dads at my kids school, so we're all busy and kind of tired. I want to make friends, but it's hard to find people that are (1) available and (2) friendly. Full disclosure, I have insecurities too: I've got zero interest in trying to make friends in a group where I feel like I'll be judged or looked down upon for whatever. I still socialize, and I've learned a lot about socialization from my wife, but yeah, I realize that I've got a chip on my shoulder also.
I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that most men are too insecure to engage with each other meaningfully. This causes them to appear overly competitive, or uninterested. How many times have you spoken to another man that can't stop trying to one-up you, or cannot be bothered to ask you a single question? That's the majority of my interactions with other men.
On top of the things that we have zero control over, that do have an impact on our lives. DEI outrage killed a Girls in Tech summer program at our local children's museum. Similar cuts killed a lot of kids summer programs at our local library. Fewer summer programs at the public library and other institutions means thousands of extra dollars in extra camps we have to find and pay for over the summer so that we can sort of work during the day, between drop-offs and pick-ups.
Yeah same here. My dad has been talking about the End Times and the Mark of the Beast for 40 years now. Now, in addition to all that, it's Q-ANON and MAGA. Fun times. Liberal police are coming for your guns and your Bible, you heard it here first.
It really is insane. I deleted Instagram too, but so many other apps have the exact same formula, like YouTube and Reddit. All you can do is repeatedly delete these apps, and journal or read to keep them at bay. I bought a notebook for tricky Spanish verbs, and I've got another one for Jazz music theory. I am terrible at Spanish AND Jazz, but it helps me stay off my phone, and when I am doomscrolling, I make an effort to change course, look up something I'm really curious about and write it down. Hope that helps literally anyone.
I had a similar experience. I did some back of the envelope math and my wife suggested I run it through ChatGPT. After actually doing the math, I felt a lot better about my understanding of the problem and I just... don't trust an LLM to understand algebra. Yeah, they're awesome most of the time, but I don't want to trust it with something important, be wrong, and then have to explain to someone that I trusted the opinion of a couple of big matrices, over my own knowledge and experience, on a high school word problem.
I think this is cool because it's a debut "children's" book, by a woodcutter, in 1985. The illustrations are gorgeous, and creepy, in a late 80's, post-modern way. I love this.
I think of "context change" as multiple technologies and trends that chaotically converge into a critical mass of opportunity. It's easy to spot looking backwards, but impossible to predict. You're just the nth individual trying this new/old thing, and now the market supports it, and for a while things are great, until you overreach, you don't reach enough, you're legislated, a new technology comes out of nowhere, there's a pandemic, there's a tectonic shift in global markets, etc.
Listing the "most frequent chord" is a weird analysis, I'm more interested in the "most frequent key", or a transition matrix from one key to another, e.g., if I'm in F, what's the chance I go a fifth up to C, or a fourth down to Bb. Just telling me G is a popular chord doesn't do much.
I'm the sloppy person at home, but I hate seeing dirty dishes, so I do the dishes. I squeeze every bit of space out of the dishwasher. There is One Right Way to do it. That said, if someone throws dishes in there willy nilly, I couldn't care less, as long as it gets done. It's basically Postel's Law: be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send/do.
It is a very, very hard thing to wrap your head around, and life doesn't always give you time to process it before your savings run out. I had a hard time finding work this year and I invested in a (tech) career coach, Larry Jacobson, and he was an immense help. He told me things that were very hard to hear, and helped immensely.
Yeah, there's no way anything is going to happen to these guys. I'm saying that's a great suggestion, and one that everyone should be able to agree on.
But yeah, I agree with you. Nothing is going to happen. Just like no one at the top has been held to any kind of a standard at all since maybe Nixon. Who knows, if he had just stuck it out maybe he would have gotten off too.
Why shouldn't punishment or prosecution be suggested. I've worked with classified information, and I would have been held accountable for my actions, why shouldn't they? I'm tired of this Too Important To Have Consequences business. It defeats the whole purpose of having qualifications, and security, and rules of any kind.
I sometimes use notebooks mostly for taking notes, with a few code samples. In these cases, dealing with ipykernel and firing up a notebook is kind of a pain. Being able to open a "notebook" and make changes in vim sounds great.
NO THRU TRAFFIC has always stood out to me. I hadn't heard of the Simplified Spelling Board, but I'm interested in minimal subsets of languages, like Ogden's Basic English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English. I use a variation of this as a model when starting a new language, and it's been pretty fun and effective.
I've learned a lot. I wasn't aware of the RAE's efforts to tamp down and standardize spelling in Spanish. I think your alphanumerenglish is pretty cool.
I really thought there were only 5 irregular subjunctive verbs: dar, ir, ser, haber, estar, & saber. I've read a couple of novels in Spanish, and it just seems more regular. I guess that's just my opinion. Thanks for teaching me a few new things.
One more point: my kid is learning to read, and explaining words like "read", "read", "red", "lead", "lead", "led", "cough", "bough", "bow", "bow", "cow", "tow", "toe", etc., gets very old very quickly.
I dunno, it's not that bad. If you focus on learning the subjunctive through a set of rules, then it becomes very intimidating. If you focus on the fact that you use it to discuss wishes, desires, and opinions, then it's a lot simpler. The command form "uses" subjunctive patterns, because you're expressing a very strong desire that someone f-ing does something right now. If you say, "hey do you want me to go to the store later?" then "go to the store later" is in the subjunctive because I'm clarifying what another person wishes to be done. Describing that in a textbook is hard, but seeing it in the wild isn't that bad because you hear the command form all the time.
I don't know as much about language as you do, but hear me out. You can pretty much sound everything out. The irregular verbs aren't that bad; they're limited to THE highest frequency verbs that you'd expect, e.g., be, go, have, see, say, do, give, etc., and they're all irregular in fairly unsurprising ways, except for caber and andar. After about 20 irregular preterite verbs, there's three irregular imperfect verbs, and five irregular subjunctive verbs. Future and conditional tenses follow a similar pattern, and have about 20 irregulars between them. Compared to French and English, which borrows Germanic AND Latin patterns, that's NOT BAD.
I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.
TIL playing cards were printed with a blank reverse side that people used for scrap paper, lottery tickets, business cards, birth/death announcements, etc.