prionassembly

My wife and I have a tentative agreement where we'll try to cover for each other in work "crunch times". But it doesn't work. About 5-10% of care is stuff only dad can do (basically calm him down; I'll hold him to my chest, I don't get agitated easily); 90%+ is mommy-exclusive no matter how hard I try. (His first actual word was "mama mama mama mama").

I don't know what the freck we're going to do. He's a terrible undersleeper too. We wanted to start taking him to childcare (like pre-pre-pre-school) by age 2, but it might happen sooner.

In a closely similar situation, I went for counseling personally. It helped me understand where she's coming from and stick it out. You can never judge other people, but marriages have their lows and it's worth fighting for them -- at least more often than pop culture and individualist mores ("get out, it's getting you down") would have you believe.

And I mean, you will have your cross to bear eventually. That's life.

> Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and what it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity'. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?'

> In the introduction to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein mentions discussions with Sraffa over many years and says: "I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas in this book".

Wittgenstein wrote two major books, the second of which basically undoes everything the first did. In the middle of that is Sraffa, presumably triggering a crisis of faith.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piero_Sraffa#Personal_connecti...

> back tips of the fingers over the chin

Yes, but the "no me importa" gesture sweeps over the chin.

I have a years old Twitter account with like 300 followers (many mutuals) but very low engagement on anything that isn't a reply to a higher-profile account.

Should I create a fresh account to reset how the algorithm sees me, or should I double down on this one that already has /some/ (not much) visibility?

Oh, that's fancier than my ready-at-hand qute for these situations, which was 90s-girl-rocker Ani DiFranco: "so I'll walk the plank / and I'll jump with a smile / if I'm gonna go down / I'm gonna do it with style".

On one view, Morphy et al. picked low-hanging fruit, no longer available to Kasparov. On the other, Morphy and Capablanca etc. laid the foundations on which Carlsen and Kasparov walk.

You have the benefit of suburbia, where you can let your kids bike around like in Stranger Things and maybe even have joint backyards. In other places houses are conspicuous and unsafe, whereas sets of apartment buildings can afford joint facilities like swimming pools, treadmills and lifting equipment, not to mention safe space for kids to run around. This isn't necessarily better than your situation; it's just that suburbia has been heavily subsidized in the US and not so much elsewhere.

You can't easily discount culture and habit, nor can you easily account for it in studies. Cross-country comparisons are often surprising, but even then they blur within-country heterogeneity (is $country fatter on average/mode, or does it have a looooooong tail on account of a slightly higher rate of rare genetics?)

At one point my nihilistic consumeristic 20s got me in the hobby of "Lomography", which was basically using up ("shoot from the hip!) expensive film without care and seeing what kinds of random stuff turns up, if any at all.

Turns out shooting from the hip produces a lot of creepy angles on callypigian figures you were honest-to-god not trying to do. (Would a creepster use film?)

Is Ghosts the one that has "Corona Radiata"?

There's two pieces of music I can't. One is Tchaikovsky's Cappricio Italiano, the other is "Corona Radiata". I'll break down sobbing and eventually wailing and I don't frakking have a clue why.

Everyone likes to shirk away from their jobs; engineers and programmers have ways of making their fun (I'm teaching myself how to write parsers by giving each project a DSL) look like work. Lingerie designers or eyebrow barbers have nothing of the sort, they just blow off work on TikTok or something.

The thing about this kind of take is that there isn't really one bus hurtling towards one cliff. Climate, biodiversity, water pollutants, sustainable agriculture and extractivism... these are not orthogonal, but often run in different directions nonetheless. And then there's civilizational issues...

Stranger Things.

ST is generally awful and I was compelled to watch up to S3. I'd probably be watching S4 if I had the time. The thing is impressively optimized.

Matlab has OO concepts that make for much cleaner concepts.

Also: Matlab OO is hellishly slow, like having to go on a 5-hour plane trip and mistaking the Ambien you planned to take for a Ritalin.

I taught myself this exact algorithm at 8 or 10 by sorting playing cards (we established an order for the kind, diamond < leaf < spades < heart) in a very very very long plane trip where I had neglected to bring comic books or something.

Baby had a starting preference for things we put with headphones over the mom's belly. This might sound insane, but I was in the OR for the C-section and once the baby was put on the mother's arm I started to play one of these music tracks and the baby stopped crying, appearing to recognize stuff from the older situation.

That said, the pregnancy music selection was mostly daddy's music because daddy has a music education, mommy's pretty much deaf to intervals between notes and stuck on music from her youth. But the things that were there, baby still loves.

Since then I've made an effort to expand on his repertory from daddy's music. Mom's attempts to do so are met with less enthusiasm.

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Thaaat said: parenting so far has confirmed the story about the Oedipus complex. In plain words, it's like this: mom can't give him her full attention; the world and society and large steal her from him. Luckily, the baby learns to personify all this stuff into dad -- it's dad who steals mommy. This is lucky because he can aspire to be me, while "society at large" is enough to drive anyone insane. This is very very clear in this family: kid wants to be with his mom, often alone with her; but also: kid wants to be like me. He attentively watches me as I dress, and enjoys enormously the homologies (hey, let's all put on socks!). Even when it comes to daddy's "no" -- this is understandable, the overarching ways of the world are not. (Jacques Lacan has this pun where "le non du pere" becomes "le nom du pere" -- baby will have my name, this is the heart of fathering.)

What was the child like when younger? I have no idea what his interests are.

I have a one-and-a-halfer and I keep him busy when I want to kick back at the end of the day by putting some really challenging music on the TV (initially jazz and prog rock, but by now we're watching flamenco and some lieder by Webern and Schoenberg). Kid is really into music; Camel's "Rhayader/Rhayader goes into town" (rock music but instrumental and an almost-suite kind of structure) is his jam, no Backyardigans or Peppa Pig in this home.

He's also very curious about books, physically. I can't tell if he's going to be a reader (of course he likes baby books with the tactile colorful elements) but he likes to touch them on the shelves and had to be taught not to remove them. He might just like rectangular (parallelepipedal?) things.

Anyway, when I imagine keeping my son busy at age 3 I imagine sending him to piano lessons, going to concerts, maybe trying to do two-part harmonies. Also maybe reading him books or just making piles of rectangular bricks -- give him initial ideas and leaving him to it. What will he be like at age 11, I don't know. But I will by then.

I did this for nearly five years until the birth of a child took the remaining free time I had. I highly recommend it.

I'm philosophically pro-life but agree with your general stance.

This is a "wrong" opinion, but I think laws should reflect our best standards for society and then we should be very casuistic and lenient when thinking about specific cases. I know this can have horrible consequences (uneven application of the law leading to grounds for persecution), but it feels like the right trade-off for me.

I think I'd be okay if a vast majority of abortion trials were nullified by juries. I think killing unborn humans is a serious matter (not as serious, however, as killing an adult one -- as I said, I feel everything's very contextual), but by that point everyone has given it serious thought -- a woman, a prosecutor, twelve jurors.

I have an uneasy personal stance that abortions past, say, neurulation, should be very hard (with the usual exceptions for rape and endangered life of the mother) but that burning women who try to kill their babies at the stake is way too much. I feel like the previous standard on abortions made them frivolous and was paving the way to widespread late-term abortion, which is horrific (I spent time in the NICU and saw many second-trimester babies fighting for their lives). The conscience of twelve jurors might just be where the buck stops (or doesn't).

Modern Fortran is easy to learn if you have Matlab muscles; there's a few additional concepts to learn because it's a "static" language, but much much easier than, say, Rust.

Human brains have high degrees of plasticity -- our brain is much more generic than its usual functional organization would suggest. I don't think we'd be able to upload brains ("state vectors" was the sci-fi buzzword) before digital supports are able to emulate that.

I use basically variations of copy-pasted code from tutorials and (I think) pymonad. I keep reimplementing things because the last API had warts. Maybe one day I'll have a library.

Parallel question: what would be better to learn job market wise right now, Cobol, C# or Java?

I started using monads in Python as sort of a gimmick / something to add flavor to a boring project (I was guessing in a final form we'd keep Result types and throw away most other things) but by now they're a boon to productivity and easy to read in fluent notation. Plus they're easy to implement from scratch if you're dependency-phobic (on the rather rickety selection of monad libraries out there, too).

I'm a pro-lifer. This isn't a hypothetical.

> If you decide a fetus is trespassing in your body,

I think I remember the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child stating that (1) children are not the property of their parents and (2) parents have a responsibility for its well-being.

I don't think the reasonable pro-lifers were in a protest that culminated in a bombing. Go to crazy places, meet crazy people.

Most pro-lifers in the upper echelons of intellectual and professional life are probably silent, fearing reprisal.

I don't think the unborn are to blame for the flaws of the people who set out to defend them.

It'd be interesting to see if persistent homology can be found in this representation (like it often can be found in phase-delay representations of time-series).