roflc0ptic

Yeah dating novice therapists is bad because they are still trying on the tools and they’ve got a neophytes zeal, dating experienced therapists is bad because they’ve integrated the tools so much that it’s hard recognize when they’re pulling them out. Being wrong and very skillful at pushing your viewpoint can feel pretty isomorphic to gaslighting in the right circumstances.

Therapists do indeed experience “vicarious traumatization”, which is exactly what it sounds like. But this comes more from descriptions of traumatic experience than difficult existential questions. As others have said, existential questions are softballs. The rough stuff is staying present and emotionally open while someone describes a personally horrific experience.

I think the unvarnished therapist response to existential questions is something like: that’s fine, those are valid, but they do in fact have no answer; the only way out is to turn our attention to the day to day problems of living.

If you keep harping on unsolvable problems, I think they’ll mostly feel annoyed.

It’s a tech site; there’s a whole tech industry devoted to what is basically securities fraud, and it’s annoying. I work in smart contracts trying to build an ambitious global network, so I’m not exactly some Luddite afraid of the future.

If I read an article about people artificially inflating the price of something in a pump and dump scheme, I pattern match that to crypto. I’m tired of hearing about it, too, but I to stop hearing about it because someone regulated the fraudsters out of business, not because defrauding unsophisticated people became a norm we don’t criticize.

Dated a therapist who was adamant she could only see 15-20 people a week and still give quality care; built her schedule around making sure she had adequate breaks because it felt irresponsible to her, otherwise. Anything past that it was a plaster-on empathetic smile and “that sounds hard, tell me more.”

Per my understanding it isn’t strictly illegal to bribe people in foreign countries, just that it’s _often_ illegal, under circumstances I’m pretty vague about - no clue about your example. Also NAL

Check the Foreign Corrupt Practices act

I’d suggest looking into rationalist/effective altruism meetups. As far as professional interests and demographics, its hard to imagine another niche group with more overlap - naturally both seem born out of SF

That’s the joke, pretty sure

fully agree, think what you're saying is a misread of my comment. GP said "literally everyone says this thing is bad." My comment was "Well, clearly there were people not telling them [or else they'd probably have stopped short of $500,000,000 in expenditures]".

Your comment is a mechanistic explanation of the failure mode, which again, I quite agree with. I worked at PwC for a couple of years; quite corrupt incentive structures and quite a dysfunctional organization because of it.

Clearly there was someone making part of that $500,000,000 that wasn't telling them this.

Once you get a certain level of karma you get the ability to downvote comments - lighter font means people downvoted it

Super misleading. You can block websites manually, but you can’t add an adblocker to Chrome - so if you want an ad free experience, then you’re forced to use safari, a historically subpar browser - but worse, it’s vendor lock in.

If this article is true, this is some terrifically anti competitive behavior

I can't read the article, but this headline is the worst. Pretty sure melting 4x faster than Arizona is still zero melting.

I like where you’re coming from, it’s just this specific example - should we rewrite stuff in react - really strikes me as something an engineering manager shouldn’t be asking. “I heard about this implementation detail and wonder if we should be doing it like that.” Just much prefer a boss who can parse those questions himself

I really think pinning this on autism is misplaced. Willingness to engage in exploratory conversation is a combination of intelligence and learned habits of mind.

If your boss (anyone, really!) comes to you with an idea and he misunderstands the first thing out of your mouth as a rejection, then you probably should work on how you communicate that thing. Or just surround yourself with smarter people.

Also if your boss doesn't know anything about technology and comes to you and says "I heard about someone doing this on a podcast, what if we made this arbitrary tech choice that doesn't apparently add any value?" then consider shopping for a new boss. Autism really is orthogonal to that situation sucking.

I think you get so accustomed to people making bullshit, hyperbolic claims that honest people reflexively are put off by things that _could_ be bullshit, hyperbolic claims. Not saying it’s totally rational, but when I first saw the “10 percent of top million sites are dead” I thought to myself, “that’s probably bullshit.” Odds are good that anyone claiming to have cured “cancer” is also entirely full of it.

oh, totally - my post also said I thought the initial lockdowns were fully justified and correct, and that only after the discovery of the ACE-2 mechanism did the calculus for children having schools open change (for me)

I'm definitely not lying about this. See: https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1550856205706338305 Also see sibling comment.

You can _also_ find people saying the lack of response is because of homophobia, and this is the thing that makes me want to flip a table: the WHO describing reality is morally culpable and causes homophobia per that tweet, the lack of effective response is homophobic, emphasizing the actual events that have had a causal role in the outbreak is homophobic. Homophobia/whatever flavor of the day is the a-priori conclusion, work backwards from there.

When you bring up the excesses of this cultural movement, you're told

1. it's not really happening

2. you're just nut picking, or

3. it's actually good.

and it's so often tied up with accusations of lying or dishonesty. Like, everyone is so mind poisoned at this point we can't just _disagree_, it's got to be an issue of mendacity or moral corruption.

I mean, I think my real complaint is that

1. humans are fuckin' terrible at thinking through second order effects, and 2. often they are simply unknowable a-priori

so to the extent that I am doing the thing I'm unhappy with, it's less hypocrisy and more accidentally proving my broad point.

At any rate, about kids: the same reason kids aren't especially susceptible to COVID seem to also substantially reduce their transmission of it. It might be the case that it's still worthwhile for the broader community, idk - I'm certainly default a little skeptical of anyone saying "think of the children!"

I don't view them as unalloyed goods, for sure - it's just that most of the hostility came pre-anyone having great arguments against them and struck me as fundamentally tribal - went into an ice cream shop with my girlfriend in Ocala, Florida, got glared down as the only people wearing masks. This wasn't well considered social pressure, it was most assuredly "we don't cotton to them types around here."

I do think the arguments against wearing masks when interacting with children/making children mask have been quite strong, post ace-2.

I find myself despairing that almost no lessons were learned, no clear institutional improvements came from these systems.

The response to monkey pox is bearing that out. A subset of the left (my team) saying “asking gay men to stop having orgies is homophobic”, totally isomorphic to “being worried about COVID is racist against Chinese people”, one of the initial lines.

Then you have the total failure to mobilize an institutional response for contact tracing. There’s not apparently any infrastructure for it, despite how monumentally useful such a thing could have been, would be now. I don’t want another endemic smallpox-related virus, and this virus having lots of hosts to evolve in has some clear second order risks.

Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks.

The initial lockdowns, I think, hold up pretty well in retrospect. Closing schools never really made sense for the children once it was identified that the virus attaches via ACE2 receptors; keeping the schools open was a lot less clearcut for the teachers. You don’t become a schoolteacher because of your high appetite for risk.

This is also "sins of the father" style reasoning. The fact that other people did a thing in the past doesn't mean I agree or support it. I have ancestors who fought with the confederacy; does this mean I shouldn't be opposed to human trafficking in 2022? I think that would be an unreasonable jump to make.

Product that would be really useful here is a sit stand desk that you can schedule: there’s just no way I’m realistically gonna context switch every 20 and 10 minutes to adjust my desk height; if it just happened and I had to intervene to stop it, I’d probably let it happen

Maps does let you download areas for offline use. I'd agree that it's non-ideal for long trips, though in practice this has never been a huge problem for me.

For the contract language, I’d recommend checking out Daml! It’s a Haskell-based smart contracts language with some pretty neat behaviors

I think the issue is: are tomatoes fungible for onions? What about garlic, or leeks? Or shallots? Just some pretty fuzzy categories.

This is the entire ethical basis of animal testing, except in this case, they’re at risk of actually helping the animals they’re testing.

Compare that to e.g. malaria trials where they buy mice, infect them with malaria, and then see if the malaria responds.

I’m a vegetarian because once I made the leap that animals probably have an internal experience, torturing and slaughtering them so my mouth can feel a certain way strikes me as not personally justifiable. How much worse is that? Should I go around calling everyone a monster? Hardly.

Animal testing at least has some meaningful rationale, and testing treatments for diseases animals actually have seems solidly in the realm of ethically justifiable

LDS is huge and contains very smart people and, despite some questionable historical beliefs, they’re not AFAIK anti-science in any way. HN is huge. Definitely gonna be some overlap

Thanks for the detailed response!

My own sense here is that detective work is a deep part of being a software developer, because fundamentally we can’t escape the particulars of the problems we work on, but I guess that really depends on the complexity of the systems we’re working on.

Where have you worked where there were enough resources to effectively document all of your backend code?

My job is currently mostly detective work, and it’s neither a function of incompetence nor laziness, it’s just a function of needing to prioritize business objectives over sacrifice-able things like documentation.