pugets

Lesson learned: Always take the royalties deal.

I felt the same way for years. I don’t recall which track changed my mind, but I started liking him when I had a realization that his music has a childlike element to it that I haven’t heard in any other artist. He often rebels against traditional electronic song structures, preferring instead to create sprawling expanses that finish in a very different place from where they start.

I started loving his music after I noticed how much care goes into each track, and the wide array of technique he employs.

Xtal, Ziggomatic 17, Fenix Funk 5, Mookid, 4, T69 Collapse… these tracks sonically have little in common with each other, except that they all sound vaguely “Aphexy” as a result of his trademark playfulness and high quality of polish.

Something similar to it happened in 2019. A man became completely paralyzed, but retained his senses. With the help of medical experts, he learned to control his level of brain activity. A computer monitoring his brain activity produced an audio tone which would rise or fall corresponding to his activity level. Soon he was indicating “yes” or “no” to letters. One of his first sentences: “I love my cool son.”

Source:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/22/1047664/locked-i...

Typical UBI trial run. Not universal. Not basic income, unless you consider $12k/yr in LA a livable income. Ends in three years, so no one can retire early or buy a bigger home.

The program will conclude that people are quite happy to receive a $1000 check in the mail each month without measuring the economic impact such a program would make if it were applied to every American long-term.

You only need semi-structure. Walk the dog every morning. Take out the trash at night. Read for a little while before bed. Call mom every Saturday. The exact times and durations don’t matter and won’t be known beforehand.

I made the mistake of trying to organize a master plan for how I would live my days. In my experience, it just doesn’t work out the way you plan it. Daily life is too chaotic.

I now use a much simpler approach instead. 8am, 12pm, 4pm, 8pm. These are the times by which I need to get something done.

For example, 8am: Walk the dog. By 8, it should be done. If it gets done before 7, even better. If it gets done at 8:10, start earlier tomorrow. 12pm: Fold the laundry. 4pm: Go to the store, call mom, read. 8pm: Make dinner, take out the trash.

When you are comfortable with how many tasks you assign yourself, add more tasks. But don’t go crazy when you’re just starting off. Keeping one habit is better than flirting with five.

I worked with a guy who spent $55k on a new truck. We were both making $18 an hour. He was in his early 20s living with his parents.

That was in 2017… I wonder if he’s still paying it off.

How do I transfer out of AEM? I’m a junior dev at a company that uses AEM and I realized long ago that I’m wasting my time with it, but I have trouble landing interviews with AEM as my primary dev experience. I’m not an AEM author, I use Java every day.

At the risk of sounding ignorant, I don’t think there is such a site that is popular among Gen Z. I’m just north of the Gen Z border, and I think I would have heard of that site by now.

If someone wanted to create a social media empire which gives users control over HTML and CSS, an obstacle they’d need to overcome is Gen Z’s use of phones over PCs.

What appropriately challenging cheat-proof calculus assignment could you give to a classroom of 100 undergrads?

As soon as those questions leave the classroom, they will be passed around in group chats. That’s why exams remain relevant. If a student averages 95% on their assignments, but shows up to the exam and can’t solve ∫sin x dx like they had supposedly done a hundred times on their own, then they’re probably cheating.

I don’t know if the UK is sufficiently litigious, but if this were in the US, one bad accident causing a head injury would lead to the company being sued into the Stone Age.

Helmets may inadvertently create more accidents, but they also protect the most vital organ in your body during those accidents.

I mix Adderall and marijuana. It's horrible for my health, but boy does it work. Adderall gets my mind moving, and pot keeps me sitting in my chair, ignorant of the passage of time, focused on work.

As counterproductive as it seems, I think pot makes me more mindful, which can boost my work productivity. Sometimes I will smoke and then spend 30 minutes organizing my folder structures, documenting code, or writing a script to do something that I do manually everyday. When I'm not on pot, all of those tasks seem too trivial to justify doing.

Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t provide me with any comfort. I’m only going to live once. When I’m old and bound to a chair (hopefully due to frailty and not because a psychiatrist strapped me to it), I want to feel like I achieved something more than a passive human existence.

All these hours spent consuming forgettable garbage on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and in video games… these are hours not spent learning recipes, making music, writing programs, lifting weights, or practicing Spanish. If I could channel my energy towards these things, then the long-term payoff would be much more enriching. Not only that, but I’d probably be a happier person if I was disconnected from whatever daily drama social media wants me to care about.

If I spend the next 10 years of my life the way I spent the last 10, I’ll approach my midlife with no discernible talents, ambitions, or meaningful lived experiences.

Sorry boss, can’t come in today. My mother died again.

It’s also possible for neither side to be correct.

I’m glad it isn’t built in. Twitter is already enough of an echo chamber.

>I disagree, I think using any platform you have to spread a message that is important to you is a GREAT use of said platform.

I'm curious, do you support the separation of church and state? Public school would be a great platform for Christian principals to spread the good word of God.

What exact precedent are we trying to set here? Every national election has potential long-lasting effects. It’s always argued by the losing side that the winners are misinformed.

This line is famous in aviation, where X = pilots

LinkedIn is cringe because it is a virtual environment for work culture, which is also cringe. Everyone on LinkedIn wants to be inspiring, and say something like "What you view as a negative, I view as a positive." That's not cool, that's corny.

Google results change frequently, even when they shouldn’t. Searching for “shrimp recipes” gives me mostly food blog articles that are from the years 2020 or 2021. Why would I want recent recipes over tried and true recipes? Where did the good recipes from 2013 go?

Shrimp recipes may not be a “significant category” but this I think highlights one of Google’s search issues. It’s also how they make money. If there were no revolving door of promoted content, then how would today’s advertisers ever reach you? It’s a balancing act to maximize profits while minimizing damage, and they aren’t doing a good job with balancing.

Too many people have a thought process that is along the lines of "[Bad thing] happens? They should make a law against that." That's the end of it, to them. They're not necessarily thinking about the Nth order effects that that their approach would have on society.

America has also changed its opinion about whether children should travel around town alone. It used to be that children could ride their bikes around town, knock on doors, and find kids to play with, and it would be okay as long as you were back home by dinner.

Parents today are worried about their kids being hit by cars, going lost, getting abducted by strangers, or simply having something happen to them that gets CPS involved. If something happens to my kid, then I'm the bad parent. Anecdotally, I saw this happen in my town when a 7-year-old girl was taken in her own front yard. Parents chimed in online to say, "The mother should go to jail" and "I always know where my kids are at all times."

Netflix used to do that. You used to be able to rate programs between 1-5 stars and see the average rating. I believe it also recommended other programs to watch based on what you rated highly.

They did away with that system and replaced it with their custom recommendation engine. I believe, without any evidence, they did this to make bad shows look better. They once hosted a documentary about sex workers (can't recall the name, sorry) that had an average rating of around 2 out of 5 stars, and after the recommendation system change, it turned into a "75% match" on my account.

>And companies may also have to contribute to higher household bills from being home-based, such as energy and internet costs.

Isn't this what we should not be doing? If government wants people to start working from home, then don't create disincentives for companies to make the switch. Temporarily, at least, absorb the cost.

I don't want video game recommendations from someone that wants to sell me a video game, because they have a financial incentive to sell me a $60 game that I'll like instead of a $10 game that I'll love. No, I would much rather trust the opinions of people who have bought and played the game. I want to know if 99%, or 90%, or 65% of players gave it a good recommendation.

Long-time Netflix subscribers might be having déjà vu right now. Old Netflix had a ratings system, and users could filter content by average rating and see the top-rated movies and shows. Netflix later replaced that system with a recommendation engine. Not only does the recommendation engine not get my taste right, but it sure seems to recommend to me a lot of Netflix Originals.

YT can counter brigades by giving viewers even more statistics about a video. Example: what’s the like to dislike ratio of a video in the past 7, 30, or 90 days, compared to all-time?

Steam (a video game store) does this already. They categorize reviews as either being recent (made in the last 30 days) or all-time. If a game has excellent all-time reviews, but mixed recent reviews, then you can suspect something has recently upset the playerbase.

> We should also move away from blaming substances or their users for addiction, and look at what's missing in people's lives, at how the world is broken and lacking and how this dysfunction is leading people to seek solace in doing things that make them feel good, even to their own detriment.

I think this is the right spirit, yet inconsistent with humanity. People are silly. They won't always (or even most of the time) do the rational thing for themselves, even when they know what it is. Some people start using drugs to fill a void, while others do it simply because they met the wrong person, or they wanted to see what it was like, or they wanted to impress their peer group, or any other silly reason. For examples of this, look no further than the rampant use of drugs in the entertainment industry. These actresses and rock stars can afford anything they want in life (especially counseling), yet so many still chase highs.

What percent of methamphetamine addicts would actually have qualified for a Desoxyn prescription before they started using? This health site [0] says 16,000 prescriptions for Desoxyn are written in the US each year, contrasted to the 12 million Americans who abuse meth.

[0] https://montarebehavioralhealth.com/why-is-desoxyn-on-the-do...

Facebook should first understand that a lot of kids avoid Facebook specifically because their parents are on it. No kid wants mom & dad to read everything they write online.

TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are all the rage among kids, and those apps are like the Wild West compared to Facebook and Twitter. TikTok is the fastest-growing app of them all, and the company don't seem to care at all what kids post online, who views the content, or whether kids are being harmed.

While in college, my summer job each year was working for the city in manual labor. "Street specialist" was the job position. I experienced three summers of hot asphalt shoveling, vegetation removal, catch basin cleaning, and traffic flagging.

I had a lot of fun working there, and so did most of the other guys who were my age. The job paid well and gave us more freedom than we were used to. But I noticed all of the guys who were aged 40+ had bad backs and were addicted to chewing tobacco. There's only so many OSHA-approved ways of paving a quarter mile stretch of road in one afternoon, and that can take a physical toll on someone's body over decades.