jlos

It is just as difficult to learn how communicate technical material to peers and lay audiences as it is to learn the technical material itself.

Before becoming a dev I spent almost a decade training and involved in Christian ministry, a surprisingly technical field. It's hammered into your head you need to balance technical excellence and impactful communication to lay-audiences. You can't sacrifice either. I don't think devs are given that perspective.

Some observations I've had - 'Dev in a cave' do exist though, are more prevalent in software/engineering that elsewhere. They aren't the majority, but you will interact with them if you interact with developers/engineers. - Computer science and engineerings curriculums absolutely do not prioritize good communication. Even if devs come from informal backgrounds, they are in the same boat of needing to learn how to communicate technical material. - Even if most devs understand communication is important, they don't seem to appreciate how much work it takes, and are not likely aware of the ways to develop those skills. - The only real exceptions I've found to the above are people like myself who've come into development from some humanities discipline (philosophy, history, english, etc).

Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and maybe a bit of German is the baseline for a theologian worth their salt. Include with that a working knowledge of history (Greco-Roman, Ancient Near Eastern, Mediaval, Reformation/Renaissance era, and Modern), philsophy, linguistics, and literature. These are of course extras on top of the primary area of study in biblical studies, systematic theology, pastoral theology, and historical theology.

Anything that helps you identify your values so you can align your habits and routines with them:

- Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl (existential psychologist and holocaust survivor - some principles of finding meaning in life's circumstances from someone who went through a concentration camp)

- 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson (Despite the politicized figure he became, the book is more about finding meaning in adopting responsibility with each rule being an example of how to do so)

- Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck by Mark Mason (light hearted self help, but some nice principles in it)

- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (a little dated, but contains some nice aphorisms. Audible has a really great version read by Richard Armitage, the guy who played Thorin in the Hobbtit)

- Give the New Testament a shot (not everyone's cup of tea, but several billion have found it helpful in finding a meaningful life so its probably worth a shot)

Also, don't neglect audio books! I've found going for walkins while listening to these kind of books a great way to relax and reflect.

Healthy lifestyle you enjoy is the true path to sustainably healthy weight and it requires only 2 things: 1. Physical activities that are fun with people you enjoy being around. - There is at least 1 sport you enjoy (try racket sports or climbing if you don't like team sports) - Play with other people. You'll be pumped to see your friends and have fun, just like when you were a kid - 'No pain no gain' is BS unless your training to be an athlete.

2. Healthy diet you enjoy - Find about 6-8 healthy meals you enjoy eating regularly - Fad diets are mostly BS (same BS as 'no pain no gain') - Shouldn't feel like your dieting.

3. Emotional Issues are often the biggest blocker - Emotional struggles easily attach themselves to eating habits. - Unhelpful attitudes about yourself also keep people back from trying new activities. I.e. thinking people will judge you for trying a new sport/going to the gym.

I think this is just one example of the continued erosion of private space. We see innocuous examples in social media platforms where day to day life becomes performance, pornography where the intimate becomes a public display, twitter where otherwise passing thoughts become matters of public record, and now where private financial support of political causes can be openly used against someone.

Agree work is important; A bad job can really suck the life out of you like nothing else, totally true. I'm definitely not advocating staying in jobs you hate!

>> A well-balanced life can only be achieved with a satisfactory job that is meaningful.

I partially agree but add the bigger question is *what is meaningful*? No job is inherently meaningful. A BS job might be fine for a time if it fulfills a bigger goal. A great job could be pointless if you have no direction in your life.

>> You don't want to tell your grandchildren that what you did in this world is make people click more ads, regardless of how juicy the tech was at that time.

I see what your getting at, but I still think it's a framing problem. Seeing "what you did in the world" as the outcome of your job is exactly what I mean by placing too much existential weight on your job. I'm fine telling my grandkids I slung ads if it satisfied my goal of intellectual development and funded the lifestyle I wanted for myself and my family

A meaningful job is only a part of building a meaningful life. The questions your asking may be a sign your placing too much existential weight on a job instead of actively working to have a meaningful life in every aspect.

Are you actively building meaningful relationships, maintaining the old ones and seeking out new ones? Are you involved in communities around shared values? Do you invest in personal goals outside your career (hobbies, music, art, etc)? Are you challenging yourself physically in some sport or activity your passionate about?

Work is a big part of the picture, but if you are focused on growing intellectually, socially, spiritually, and physically (whatever those may look like to you) a job takes a much smaller role.

I think you misunderstood. A Random acceptance above an achievable standard (e.g average marks of 80%) would reduce racial disparities. It doesn't matter what races are the top performers, it just matters how many people can achieve the base standard.

One of the best ideas I've heard for college admissions is the following:

- Small percentage (10-20%) based purely on performance (either academic or athletic)

- All other admitted applications drawn randomly from a pool who achieve a base score on SAT's.

With the following benefits:

- Student population reflective of national demographics due to random sampling.

- Elimination of bias and discrimination endemic to these institutions history

- Could even mark our 5% for "legacy" status students to keep the elite donors happy.

- Motivation for students: anyone who can achieve a baseline has a real chance of attending an elite university

My working theory for the growth in the religiously unaffiliated is that they demographic of people who would have been nominal religious attendees a few decades ago. The number of people who attend church weekly (i.e. those with strong religious affiliation) has been basically static for a while now [0]. You could say that there is a difference between those with "weak" religious affiliation and those with "weekly" religious affiliation ;)

I think this migration to no religious affiliation is probably due (or accelerated) by the internet. Sociologists of Religion such as Peter Berger suggest that a group of people holding a particular worldview create a social structure for the plausibility of the beliefs that underly the worldview. Exposure to more groups means you have more choice, and in fact must chose, between worldviews. The internet opens up a much larger number of plausibility structures which will be the most enticing to those with loose religious affiliation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance

So after a couple years of the money gun from federal governments to keep companies afloat, a record number of them are cashing out at what they must think is the top?

Am I wrong in being completely cynical in thinking that our governments spent two years shoveling money (paid for by us through inflation and taxes) to these people?

I think Typora has far and away the best document editing experience of all the note software out there, but I wonder if they have released a paid 1.0 too late. Document editing is only a part of maintaining a system of notes and there are so many competitors in this market compared to just a few years ago. And with Obsidian soon to release their live preview I don't know how competitive Typora with such a small feature set.

That said, I hope Typora does well. No matter what I'm using for notes, I always find myself preferring to use Typora's editor because its design is so clean and usable. Its a perfect example of "Do one thing well". This one-time, $15 purchase (instead of a never-ending subscription) also feels in line with what has been nothing but a great user experience in the several years I've used Typora.

Also, don't really care its closed source since all the files are local markdown. I also suspect the community of people only using open source note taking software isn't large enough to keep a developer sufficiently well paid to continue working on a project.

Good luck retiring in most major Canadian cities if you don't already own real estate there.

I'm not familiar with Kriss or Tao Lin, but First Things, while predominantly Catholic, is ecumenical. They have regular columns from protestants, Jews, Muslims, and even Peter Thiel. I've found they will print some authors from outside their normal milieu if they offer some insight that would benefit the high brow literary conservatism that characterizes the magazine.

Ah that's correct. Thanks for the clarification.

I met one of the individuals responsible for introducing the heavy tax on cigarettes in the province of Alberta. He said it was fairly simple, The province needed more money and from the data they found that cigarette prices were inelastic. I.e. people will continue smoking even if prices went up. From an economics perspective those are the items you want to tax because taxing elastic items leads to what's known as dead weight, a type of economic inefficiency.

He also said that the province typically brought in more money from cigarettes, liquor, and gambling them from oil and gas revenues, which was pretty shocking considering what a staple that is for government revenue in that province.

The other argument in its favor he brought up was that these people are increasing the overall cost to the Healthcare system, and the sin taxes are a way I'm dealing with that.

I'm surprised no one mentioned Lea Verou's "CSS Secrets" [0]. Most books I've read will give some depth at how aspects of CSS work, or recommend a best practice, but Verou's work is the only one I've seen that sees using CSS as an engineering solution. The book is a collection of problems, e.g. "how to add multiple borders?", And the shows different ways to solve the problem given the available CSS. Each solution discussed trade-offs, constraints, etc.

It will go the farthest in teaching you how to think about CSS

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/css-secrets/97814493727...

Just watched an interesting presentation by Shanna Swan, who has a book out on this exact topic[0]. I haven't looked into the veracity of her claims but basically her argument is as follows:

TL;DR - its chemicals in the environment, particularly those that disrupt hormone production in utero.

- Sperm count and testerone levels having been falling at a rate of about ~1% per year. This also coincides with cases of miscarriage and erectile disfunction rising at a rate of about ~1% per year.

- This suggests something is affecting the human reproductive system.

- Three possible factors could include genetics (not likely since the change is too rapid to be evolutionary), lifestyle (certainly a factor), and but also potentially environmental

- Hormonal disruption from environmental chemicals has the most lasting effect when children are in utero, particularly any chemicals altering testosterone production. Testosterone is important because, biologically, female is the default. In the absence of sufficient levels of testosterone in utero, male children will have underdeveloped masculine traits (biologically, not psychologically).

- One measure of underdeveloped masculine traits is anogenital distance (look it up, but not at work if your really curious). Phthalates is one class of chemical that has been demostrated in rats to disrupt in utero testosterone production and reduce anogenital distance. There is growing evidence this also occurs in humans.

- Phthalates are used extensively in a number of products, including food products (basically anything with soft plastic)

- Other classes of chemicals exist which also disrupt hormone function. These hormone disruptors have an even more pronounced effect when combined together.

[0] https://youtu.be/Uo-kSxHNSDQ

While there are obviously genuine environmental concerns, Calgary's decline seems to me a combination of two major forces. First and foremost is economic opposition from the US, who went from the largest consumer of Canadian oil to its largest competitor in the past 10 years. Second, political polarities in Canada that tend to favor concentrating political and economic power along the cities of the St Lawrence instead of Alberta. It would probably be too much to say that the Eastern provinces want Alberta to do poorly, but given the Liberals an d the NDP simply hold no seats in Alberta, there is no incentive to defend its provincial interests (in comparison to say a Quebec company like Bombardier).

However at the moment maybe it's for the better, you don't need to be in the 1% of income earners to buy a house in Calgary.

Within healthy communities the need for meaningful human interaction is spread out among the community and not placed solely on your spouse. Therefore, I suggest a large driver of marital loneliness arises because marriage is not capable, on its own, of solving loneliness. Loneliness roughly means a lack of meaningful relationships. Communities offer the opportunities for various levels of connection from close friends to casual acquaintances while connecting all the individuals to each other (i.e. you have your close friends but everyone also knows each other). Furthermore, healthy communities create a dynamic environment where new relationships form spontaneously as the individuals grow and change (e.g. the former acquaintance marries your sister and now you become close friends, you have a kid and get to know the other parents in the community better, etc).

In this way, communities and marriage form a symbiotic relationship. Stable marriages become the bedrock of a community, as family provide the most stable structure for the community. However, strong communities also provide a dynamism and support that reduce the burden on marriage to provide a fulfilling life to those within it.

However, meaningful communities have been almost entirely eroded by the acids of modern life: increased mobility (communities, like all relationships, require time), car reliant infrastructure, declining religious participation, and economies built on individual consumption all make it harder to build, find, and belong to communities. And with the decline of communities, the sense of belonging and meaning that once was spread out over a largely stable group now falls to a single individual - your spouse.

In fact, one could argue that the increase in marital breakdown observed during the 20th century is itself a second-order effect of the breakdown of communities in that same time frame. Even the liberalization of the divorce laws could, arguably, be framed as a response to a trend already in motion rather than kickstarting it from out of nowhere.

So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I actually enjoy YouTube's recommendation algorithm, though I do make an effort to point it in the right direction. One example is guitar players: I'm an active guitarist, I've been for years, but as I got older the discovery phase of music dropped off. However I found YouTube constantly recommends amazing, phenomenal guitar players who almost immediately move into my list favorites. But some of these guitars only have a few thousand subscribers , there's very little chance I would have ever found them without youtube, and almost certainly no chance they would ever have an audience without this recommendation algorithm

FYI its "hoi polloi":

- Hos is the Greek definitive article (i.e. "the")

- Pollos is a Greek word, most generally, meaning "many'

- They are used with the nominative plural ('oi' ending)

- In Greek, the article delclines with the noun so "hos" -> "hoi"

Chiastic structures are one of the most common forms of Hebrew Poetry. In fact, a chiasm is really a subset of a parallelism, which is what Hebrew poetry is primarily based on(English poetry, by contrast, is primarily based on meter).

The same person to first identify parallelism as a distinguishing feature of Hebrew poetry was Robert Lowth. Perhaps most interestingly, Lowth's works on English grammar are also responsible for a lot of the supposed rules in English that we dont apply [0](e.g. never end a sentence with a preposition, unless you have to)

[0[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowth

Should've gotten some Canadian lawyers involved in GPL. Due to the combined heritage of English and French (Quebec) Canada has both Civil law (French) and Common Law (English).

Low intensity, high volume works so well in so many arenas. As a former guitar teacher this is what I would recommend to students, especially the younger kids:

- pick the same time everyday.

- just start by playing for 5-10 minutes. Don't do any more.

- As the weeks progress and the habit is solid, add 5-7 more minutes.

So kid who plays 8min/day x 7 days/ week gets an hour each week, as opposed to the kid who does 25 minutes once or twice and gets bored. Then, when the kids habits are up to 25 minutes a day, they are getting 3 hours a week.

It's not just the sugar, it's the sugar in combination with other ingredients. Even the example you gave the fat is 10x as high and obviously has no fibre.

The nutrient density of fruits is magnitudes higher than sweets.

And water mass matters as it contributes to satiety vs grams of food consumed.

Revenue neutral is a campaign slogan and nothing close to the policies that are typically put forward. I'm not saying there is no such thing as revenue neutral carbon tax, but when the rubber hits the road, revenue neutral on the campaign trail becomes a normal tax with a few token rebates.

In the higher up the income distribution the percentage of a person's income spent on consumption decreases, as highest earners typically put their money into wealth generating assets. So a smaller percentage of their income is actually taxed.

If you make 30k a year, you are spending everything you make on essentials. They're for the full amount of your earnings will be taxed by any consumption tax. If you make 300K a year, even if you spend 2/3 of it on consumption you are still being taxed at a lower rate.

There is simply no simple way to address Climate Change like there was with CFC's in the 90s.

- 1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic leadership accountable neither to its people or the global community.

- 70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all emissions is electricity and heat, and another 15% is construction + manufacturing.

- Even if every mode of transportation was fully electric supplied by 100% nuclear supplied electricity, global emissions would only drop by 15%. (i.e. transportation only accounts for 15% of global emissions).

Have you stopped heating/cooling your house? Moved to a small apartment? Stopped driving a car?

Carbon taxes will also meet friction because:

1. They are actually regressive income taxes. The bottom 90% of the income distribution spend most of their wealth on necessary consumption (food, rent, getting to work).

2. Most of the goods taxes (electricity, heat, transportation) are inelastic. People may chose to purchase less consumer items, eat less meat, but they are still going to heat their homes and drive to work.

I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of "people are just not willing to do the obviously right solution because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything either.

Are you sure it's your accent and not your command of the language? Your comment has several grammatical errors, lacks common English idioms, and has some ambiguities that make it difficult to understand.

> also get fluent speaking english because during internship at the end thats only feedback i got

As an example, I'm not sure if your saying that you do speak fluently or don't here.

The hard truth before I offer reassurance, I would have a very hard time working with someone who wrote a message like the one you typed above.

Reassuringly, you can definitely improve your grammar with some classes. I've seen people go from far worse then your writing to totally fluent. Good luck!

The is basically Durkheims conclusion: suicide is the outcome of sociological, rather than psychological, forces. [0] There is an argument that a lot of the mass shootings are actually better classified as a type of suicide under this model as well [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(Durkheim_book)

[1] https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/08/mass-shoo...

Our culture offers very little in the way of making life meaningful, especially for those who suffer. I don't diminish the suffering of the people who's life no longer feels worth it. In fact, many people's lives are truly unhappy. But an unhappy life can still be a meaningful one.

Further I would argue the antihuman sentiment offer by your argument that giving life is selfish only further contributes to the problem.