ohyes

I don’t use any of those features and the smartphone has become garbage for web browsing so I’m not sure I need one at all.

Presumably there’s a payday involved.

People have different experiences with poverty. So, while I agree the risk assessment is bad, competent people do stupid things for bad reasons because of their personal history all the time

I’m sorry life hasn’t gone the way you wanted it. Unfortunately almost no one’s life does, this is just a fact of life. Many things that seems to be promised or “owed” us turn out to not be, or to be struggles. Depression is very real, and really does require professional help sometimes to get out of it. So I would suggest getting help if you can afford it.

On the bright side, your life is far from over, 43 is still plenty young enough to have meaningful relationships and build a career if you want to, it just requires that you out yourself in the correct situations repeatedly. You can still get married and have children if you want, you’re definitely not that old. Many people move on to their second marriage at your age.

I would suggest, that rather than promising yourself radical change each night, promise yourself one small change that you’ll make tomorrow. Just a single thing that will make your life better. It can be as simple as going for a walk or cleaning a single room. Do it first thing so you don’t procrastinate on it all day, banking an accomplishment each day is small and easy, but when you look back at a month of that you’ll have accomplished a lot and you’ll start to have a habit of doing things.

I think, in terms of the hype, VR was going to be the next big thing in gaming, and then maybe not just gaming after that, but other applications. So I was expecting it to become a required peripheral like a headset or a good mouse & keyboard.

But I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything by not having a VR headset. Like the product direction was very clear for oculus, had lots of buy in from devs… then it was bought by Facebook and became so much muddier. (“We’re going to use it in the meta-verse for boring work stuff” VR will be everything).

You need an exciting killer app for these things and they need to be commodity hardware. I’m guessing the best thing anyone could do for VR is give up all their patents.

Tbh if oculus weren’t associated with Facebook in a meaningful way I’d be all over it. But it is so I avoid it. The technology works fine but is a commercial failure, that’s not wholly Carmack’s fault.

You need to cool the laser presumably, I wouldn’t use water for that, however.

You don’t have a perpetual license, so no.

It probably has more to do with paying someone to keep it patched and running happily.

It’s interesting to me that entire genres of games were created because private dedicated servers were available and bored teenagers could create a TC and play with their friends. Also the technology was such that assets and game scripting were accessible Team fortress, counter strike, Dota, plenty of examples. You bought half-life so you could download and play the mods. I guess that niche is filled by Roblox now? Or maybe Minecraft?

Not necessarily, it depends on how the reaction scales. If the reaction does not scale linearly (as is claimed) you don’t necessarily have to get more efficient, you just have to up the power until the output curve has increased past the input scaling. How big that is is determined by the efficiency of the input device itself, but it isn’t a question of if it will ever happen.

Well, it requires fewer more skilled employees. Employees some of whom could be founders themselves and compete with you. So despite the number of employees being lower, their opportunity cost is likely similar or higher, just more concentrated. Therefore what you’d have to pay them if they were negotiating rationally is similar to what you’d pay multiple people.

The limit here is an edge case, it’s like dividing by zero. Sure if you can automate everything the founder gets all the profit. If you only have 1 employee, however, that single employee is immeasurably valuable and has some incredible leverage on you (you’re screwed if they walk). There’s a net benefit to the employer to having a certain amount of redundancy.

So this whole argument (to me) toes the line of sophistry. It just gets a big eyeroll and me thinking Paul is out of touch.

How would one engineer that?

I would expect there to be some signs that it would be lethal in the future… a continued decline rather than full recovery.

I haven’t had it yet, I suppose I should prepare to be practically the last person alive.

This seems far-fetched

To be clear, there is no evidence for any of your claims.

I thought about this a bit more… there’s no reason this wouldn’t apply to a secondary infection with a different strain of covid is there? I don’t see what’s special about the vaccine that would make this effect noticeably worse than simply being infected twice.

So, down the line, you might be more susceptible to a similar mutation. (Based on no hard evidence for this particular virus).

(Social media reports aren’t exactly reliable and everything seems to indicate that your chances of serious complications are worse without a vaccine).

Right now, there’s a deadly virus going around and there might not be a “later” for me if I don’t get the vaccine. I think I’ll take my chances with the vaccine. It seems like a no brainer to me.

Just so it is clear to you, the Forbes article you link is an opinion piece.

You had the vaccine so you recovered quickly, if you didn’t have the vaccine you might not have recovered and needed hospitalization.

I mean, the alternative where you don’t get the vaccine includes much higher risk of lung damage, nervous system damage and total organ failure.

I think even if there was data to back this up (that somehow vaccine gives less protection than a real infection…), getting a booster every year or 6 months is well worth it given what happens with an unvaccinated covid infection. People do seem to get reinfected and die after already having it once.

I don’t think that your model of how vaccines work really makes sense. I mean, the point is to prime your immune system with antibodies to something similar but relatively harmless so you can fight off the disease immediately rather than waiting for it to get a strong foothold… in a way that is safe.

Saying it is less effective than getting sick is like totaling your car to avoid regular maintenance.

don't ask, simply answer the question you have wrong.

I've long thought that maybe we should just measure everything in joules and call it a day.

Counterpoint: If high school is a hellish experience then why are only the smart kids recommended to skip it? It would seem that the most mature would be best at navigating an experience like that.

High-school (and puberty) should simply be made to not be a terrible experience for everyone. Good luck with that without a dramatic cultural shift.

As a man, I don't want to hear about your video-game exploits either. I play, but I definitely don't want to define my personality or hear/tell stories about it.

I think the difference is that a video-game is (as you said and viewed by me at least) as mostly consumptive rather than creative or constructive. I'm playing a game I know I'm dicking around and wasting time, the same as if I'm watching a movie or (even) reading a book for fun.

I'd say that some games are more constructive, like Minecraft or other games where you're building something or creating a story yourself... but I think what's being targeted is largely RNG lootbox online grind games. There's also an argument that top tier professional gaming isn't really that much different than being good at some other sport... and that's kind of an unfortunate side-effect.

The title is a bit misleading as there's no provision for 'offline' games.

Culturally for me... regulating media time seems like a parent's responsibility, and maybe this does give parents the tools to do that as the child could use their parent's account with their permission fairly easily.

I'd be against a similar thing where I live, but as I am not a Chinese citizen nor do I plan on living there, I can't say my opinion is worth much.

However, I think people are making this out to be much worse than it is as there's (for a long time) been a provision that children under a certain age can't sign up for online accounts (in the US) without a parent's explicit permission (with the implication that that the parent takes responsibility for monitoring the child's activity). This makes that implication more explicit as the child must use the parent's account most of the time.

This is one way of solving the 'online games have predatory practices against children / teens,' I don't think this is how I'd solve it, but again, not really my business.

Agreed. I would be very interested in reading an example of Pacaso's LLC incorporation documents.

I would expect some sort of ongoing property management contract between Pacaso and the LLC, which I wouldn't expect to be indefinite or impossible to change via vote.

So, if I buy every share in one of these house LLCs, can I do what I will with the house? (I.E. ending the relationship with Pacaso, doing major renovation, changing the terms of the agreement).

If so, what happens if I just buy 51%?

It seems that the argument against being a timeshare is that it is structured in a legally different way, where Pacaso itself does not own the house anymore, they just collect a monthly fee similar to a condo association. This seems like really, the ultimate in rent-seeking. I'm going to sell something and force you to continue paying me for it, until you sell it to some other poor sucker.

It seems like the obvious move would be to acquire a controlling share and vote Pacaso out, then start issuing new shares with your controlling ownership to pay for maintenance fees or any other incidental costs of the house. Continue issuing shares until the other owners are diluted enough to own like, < 1 day a year, buy them out for cheap...

It seems like the only way for Pacaso to guard against this would be to retain a controlling ownership, at which point they are much closer to being a time-share.

That’s not how the smart money sells a large amount of any asset. There’s plenty of proof that this will either temporarily crater the market (if selling it all by filling any open orders) or take an eternity to execute. That’s just how things traded on exchanges work and it tells us nothing about Bitcoin itself.

The one issue with this is going to be the storage space. 512GB isn't really enough for multiple AAA games. It will also be interesting to see what the battery life is going to be on this thing, and how well they've tuned the controller hardware.

It could either be an amazing upgrade for mobile gaming or incredibly janky.

750 per what unit of time? 1 year that’s not enough to even get me to answer the phone.

Well, the jig is up, as they say. Being absolutely honest about what is going on could work, or it could get her fired. But if she genuinely likes the workplace & people and management is worth staying around for, it can work out fine.

“I’m finding this repetitive task combined with the isolation of quarantine is having a negative effect on my productivity. I’m interested in developing new skills to broaden or introduce some variety into my role, is there anything that we could do to make this happen?“

It’s turned from a question about someone’s productivity problems to a question about how much more can I do for the company. 9/10 a good manager will jump at the chance to avoid an awkward “why aren’t we getting the work done?” conversation and have a (much more productive) “let’s help each other out” conversation.

It is also very likely that no one has noticed the work is slowing down and it is just a normal sort of check in.

Really you should not let it get this far that you feel this negative about the work you are doing.

YMMV, & not my fault if you try this and lose the job anyway as loss of job is an expected outcome when you stop doing it. No one should get soulcrushed and discarded, but it does happen frequently.

Also, this only applies to the relatively privileged industry of ‘tech’ where you’re expensive to replace and finding anyone competent enough is an incredible chore.

Firstly, life is too short. If you hate what you’re doing, definitely find something better to do then quit. Philosophically, if you could do anything what would want you do? What things in your life make you happy to be alive? It isn’t giving up if you’ve found something better to do with your life.

Management is really hard to do well and not for everyone, I realize that much more now than I did as a young person.

> The canonical point of a workplace is to come together to fulfill the aims of the entrepreneurs.

See, that right there is a political viewpoint.

Some would argue that work is about fulfilling the needs of society to produce necessary and useful goods and services, the aims of the entrepreneurs take a backseat when they harm society.

Others might argue work is entirely about the needs of the workers, that the work game is mostly about the individuals who are there.