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nightspirit

99 karma · joined November 15, 2015

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nightspirit··on Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo
> If less than 25% of CS graduates are female, which is currently the case, it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women.

If Google is anything like Redacted, that's the case. Redacted pays monthly bonuses to their international offices for each woman on the office's payroll. I have two friends working at Redacted in a relatively cheap region and they say the bonuses are as high as their junior-level salaries - they can afford to hire a second junior developer for each junior woman they have. Your guess what happens. An upside is that this poses no threat to male developers so they don't complain and just have a chuckle when their mandatory diversity training explains how the company's policy improves performance by "tapping into the pool of female talent formerly overlooked due to systemic discrimination".

nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
The Great Firewall blocks porn so China probably isn't the country parent would use.
nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
I guess my original post wasn't very constructive. I wanted to say that seeing ads probably doesn't cause alcoholism, but OTOH, being unable to handle the thought that your precious snowflake could get to know about X too early is a sure way to lose his trust if he does get to know. And the OP indeed seemed a bit paranoid.
nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
VPN hosting country, these are drones. Drones, meet the VPN host country...

Or heck, just strong-arm them into adopting think-of-the-children laws one way or another.

nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
If you have something to say go ahead and enlighten us.
nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
Internet won't fuck up your children half as much as your intolerance of reality and their feelings will.
nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
The less you talk about drinking the more he'll hide it from you. Ditto with gambling and sex. My parents talked about everything besides sex and I never drank or gambled in excess. And I'll leave this post at that.
nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
> That's a great thought experiment: Is a site that serves ads that might contain 'adult' ads at times a porn site according to the British government and would need to verify that the visitor is of age?

The simplest solution is to just require ID from everyone everywhere. They'll figure it out sooner or later if you let them build the infrastructure now.

nightspirit··on UK Government proposes porn-viewing ID
> initially looking to find some "HOTCHIX" to... solve an urge.. to 6 months later only getting off to really extreme stuff

Been there, done that. Went away once I realized how fake and asexual porn actually is and that 90% of stuff out there (both vanilla and extreme, pro and amateur) really has no fucking reason to turn anyone on once the initial novelty wears off. I don't believe that wanking to people who are not aroused/shy/insecure/bored/desperate/trying hard to make a show ought to feel any good. It really is hard to find good porn.

> being unable to really form relationships

Had that before the internet, heck, even before the collection of printed lingerie ads cut from newspapers (good fucking luck "protecting" your kids from that, losers). Anyway, I tend to blame my parents' own shitty relationship for this thing.

> an epidemic of erectile dysfunction in really young people

Correlates with relationship problems, one could wonder which way the causation goes. Why should anyone get hard for someone he is with only for social acceptance or, worse yet, self-acceptance?

nightspirit··on Shame on Y Combinator
Yes, it is equivalent. The fact that you are deluded to think that you can change anybody's mind by repeating this "racism xenophobia sexual assault" mantra which literally everybody has already heard million times by now just shows that you are equally stuck in your ways and irrational as the people you oppose. It's knee jerking on both sides.

And, speaking of Obama, you guys reminded me of this beauty created during the previous campaign:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/

So we can have Trump-o-meter.

  1. start World War 3
  2. legalize rape
  3. eradicate Islam
  4. enslave Blacks
  
  ... any ideas?
We'll track his progress and see how far he goes.

Trump is a joke. A level 666 troll. If I were you, I'd be more worried about the number of pissed off people who just waited for someone like him.

nightspirit··on Disappointed with Europe, Thousands of Iraqi Migrants Return Home
I come from a Christian monoculture in Europe and find it hard to believe that other religions are any better.

It's hard to argue with people who have been brainwashed that everything good comes from gods who also demand all those superficial rituals and arbitrary cultural norms. Questioning their rituals throws their whole worldview and morality out the window and they aren't exactly appreciative for that.

nightspirit··on Disappointed with Europe, Thousands of Iraqi Migrants Return Home
Reportedly, there are places in UK which don't recognize UK laws.

edit: I mean practically, not formally. It's enough that violations of host country's laws stay unreported and violations of whatever other norms are punished unofficially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-go_area#Contemporary_no-go_...

Getting people from oppressive cultures who end up living in isolation with others like them to suddenly start exercising their new rights is a hard problem which can't simply be wished out of existence.

nightspirit··on Disappointed with Europe, Thousands of Iraqi Migrants Return Home
I suppose parent may have been extrapolating their willingness to integrate from that of other immigrants from Muslim cultures who have been living in France/Germany/UK for decades.
nightspirit··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
Don't worry, it'll take at least 15k years to blast a hole that big, unless the AI is really smart.

And life seems to be quite resilient and eerily altruistic at times.

We still haven't wiped this planet clear despite having enough nukes to do so. Some people put their military careers and the security of their countries at risk refusing to launch nukes despite snafus higher in the command chain.

And then you have all those westerners whose day jobs became so meaningless, detached from their environment and sometimes outright hostile to other humans that even if they don't commit suicide, they willingly stop breeding and openly talk about replacing themselves with more down-to-earth folks who have their priorities right: food, children, food for children, and maybe then some little AI R&D, although who cares about that if you can have more children.

Maybe the selfish gene is doing quite well.

nightspirit··on The Secret of Immigrant Genius
I tried to support accq's point that Einstein's "schema violation" was a joke compared to what's happening in case of Syrian refugees mentioned by the article.

Those people migrate between vastly different cultures and relating their experience to Einstein's doesn't make sense.

And I think you can't really compare Syria with Nazi Germany either. Nazi Germany was a government gone rogue, while in Muslim cultures, for some reason, the kind of stuff I mentioned is just the way things are and have always been.

nightspirit··on The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse–An Interview with George Soros
It seems that most of the time people point verses 2:190-194 as example, but frankly, they only tell to "fight those who fight you" [1].

However, in practice apparently some leeway in definition of what constitutes an attack on believers and reasonable retribution is used to justify things going on in Syria and, recently, in Europe. Or maybe they just don't care that much. It's not like medieval Europe followed the Gospels to the letter. The whole discussion is pretty academic.

[1] http://www.islamicstudies.info/tafheem.php?sura=2&verse=189

nightspirit··on The EU Is on the Verge of Collapse–An Interview with George Soros
Your post is borderline offtop and I can see it downvoted to hell, but you actually touch an important issue.

Using the Internet for two decades I came across countless campaigns against systematic human rights violations or violence against women in Muslim states. The politicians and organizations supporting Syrian immigrants are yet to explain how exactly they want to instill into those millions of people the same values that allowed them to come to Europe in the first place. So far it seems that they tend to settle in isolated neighborhoods and continue living the way they've always been, occasionally causing some trouble outside (the forbidden t-word, rapes in Koln, etc).

BTW, a friend of mine had seen a group of those refugees in Hungary. They didn't want to deal with local people, many didn't accept food or other help as if it was below their dignity or something. It appears that they have some kind of "give us welfare money 'cause we as victims deserve it and leave us alone" attitude. This isn't pretty.

nightspirit··on 'I fell in love with a female assassin' (2008)
It's sad that a woman who, if she remained a part of this conflict she joined, was in position to experience and realize its sheer insanity and maybe slowly weaken the frame of other participants, instead got killed for desertion in pursuit of acceptance from somebody who felt the urge to "fix her" in reaction to his private moral panic.

Your little flower won't kill anymore, but there will be someone new in her place, just freshly naive and clueless.

---

Sir, I think we may be going a bridge too far.

nightspirit··on New development could lead to more effective incandescent lightbulbs
> something that never happened to me with incandescents happened with halogens ... the halogen had blown up scattering little glass shards all over the living room

I've had one incadescent explode. Maybe it didn't scatter glass all over the room, but the bulb was definitely blown and lied in pieces on the floor.

nightspirit··on Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)
> If a child goes routinely to school I would not call this an action under coercion

I'm actually young enough to remember what school looked like and I'm sure as hell many of the kids wouldn't attend if they didn't know that they are going to be forced by their parents or the nanny state anyway.

nightspirit··on How bad are things?
> I would add that I'm not exactly a Christian, although I find a lot of inspiration in the gospel and the writings of Christian thinkers -- so one doesn't have to go "all the way" and believe in life after death and miracles and stuff -- it's often enough to focus on forgiveness and compassion, and that there's something bigger and more important than you and your tiny problems.

The Gospel of Thomas is a good example of this genre. The Zen-to-Magic ratio is much higher than in most Christian texts. Though, fwiw, mainstream Christians consider it heretic for some reason.

nightspirit··on How bad are things?
> 3. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact this unhappy, but they never tell anyone except their psychiatrist all of the pieces necessary to put their life story together.

4. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact unhappy, but they never explicitly tell anyone and I'm not noticing the other obvious signs because admitting the existence of such would reveal my unhappiness and bring me some questions I wouldn't want to answer.

nightspirit··on How bad are things?
> Anyway, why would you want to go back?

Like, curiosity? People used to think that God floats in clouds above flat Earth.

Wouldn't you like to understand how exactly the belief in supernatural can make people happier and whether the (hypothetical) actual existence of supernatural plays any role?

nightspirit··on How and Why I Taught My Toddler to Read (2010)
> Kind peoples said 'ooh look! so bright! so more advanced than Jonny or Bea!' I said that I didn't think that she is going to be any better at walking than Jonny and Bea ultimately.

Now you reminded me how I hated when parents used me for such dick waving contests.

My typical reaction was to stop whatever I was being praised for and quickly do something to piss off both them and whomever happened to be the target of their bragging.

If you are a parent - just don't do that.

nightspirit··on 1984 – When women stopped coding
> I've had some similar anecdotal experiences in an education franchise, where I've found that it's very difficult to convince boys or girls that math, physics, programming, or computer science is fun or worthy.

I think kids often operate on simple social heuristics. Guess what it means when somebody tells you ad nausem that something is important to you while his tone, body language and whatnot consistently shows that he cares about you learning this infinitely more than you do? Yes, exactly, this is the smell of bullshit. If science really was that important and if you understood science enough to be worth learning from, obviously you'd be using science to improve their lives all the time and they'd immediately start to monkey you. That's how it works.

I think my parents understood this to some degree and didn't try to shove down my throat things I didn't care about, except maybe for religion. Care to guess how far this one went?

nightspirit··on Charles Dickens on being unhappily married (1858)
And if you click the "Ellen Ternan" link there you will see that they lived together for 10 years and are even suspected of having a child (who died early).
nightspirit··on Charles Dickens on being unhappily married (1858)
Reputation damage control. Same with telling the wife to stay with him even though neither of them saw any benefit in it, the children were already cared for by their aunt and Dickens was apparently "cared for" by a lover.
nightspirit··on This Is Not a Day Care. It’s a University
It's something I call creationism. You give something a name ("insults"), ask some grammatically-correct questions about it ("where did it go?", "to whom did it stick?") and now you created this magic, metaphysical thing which you feel really exists and needs to answer your questions one way or another.

While in the mundane everyday world, the young warrior simply made a fool of himself.

nightspirit··on This Is Not a Day Care. It’s a University
But the schools themselves are voluntary. I utterly fail to understand people who attend them and complain. (In fact, also those who don't complain, but that's another rant for another day...)
nightspirit··on This Is Not a Day Care. It’s a University
Everyone is making such decisions on his own, obviously.

It's bullshit to expect that people will seriously consider all ideas out there, no matter how weird or outright stupid they sound.

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