rwnspace

As someone who as held national records in the sport of speedcubing, I don't feel this makes it easier to understand, at least if you are going for an instrumental understanding of how to solve it. I think the community are pretty good at teaching that now! But it does look extremely cool.

My favourite one-liner for improving understanding is something roughly like 'solve areas made of pieces, not faces made of stickers'. Very much clearer when you have a cube to take apart and put together in the order you would solve them.

You'll like him even more if you know who Andrej Karpathy is, as they're the same person.

I just don't care about the interests I'm not interested in at the time. The issue I used to have was that spending time on A meant I wasn't doing B. Now I'm in my thirties and I just don't care about B, as long as I'm finding my time rewarding. Across the years the literal item A might have become item B or vice-versa and it just doesn't matter. If there's something specifically and directly relevant to work or getting work that's a different matter. But interests? Fk no, I'll follow my impulses there like a child, only sometimes will I cajole myself into doing something challenging for interests.

Let's pray they didn't read Maus on that same course!

> All countries in Europe are experiencing the same thing.

That's not quite true. Only a few countries are facing a 100% (or 'more') wipe-out of disposable income for the majority of the population.

The UK is only really affected by Russian gas in it's impact on the global market. We can do fine without. Yet we are among the worst affected in terms of billing consumers.

Other governments are doing more in terms of alleviating household spending, policy change and enforcing windfall taxes.

What I find deeply disturbing about this is how fast the 'cuz of Ukraine war' narrative has taken hold in the UK, even among intelligent colleagues of mine.

The UKs (complete lack of) leadership is going to send the country into an economic meltdown larger than any in living memory unless something seriously drastic is done by January.

I am already on rice and beans or porridge for every meal. If nothing is done I will literally be reading by candlelight under 5 layers this winter.

As an aside, when people point out virtue signalling (I'm taking it as an analogue of status games) without adding some analysis my first assumption is that they are virtue-signalling to put others down or make others seem shallow (or themselves deep). The cornerstone of western morality is Jesus and he was quite the "virtue signaller". Point being that the observation on it's own is uninteresting without saying something about the context or consequences of a behaviour. There aren't many things that are /purely/ virtue signals (or status games) and those that are, are quite obvious.

The only thing I've done in line with the absolute pessimism of my beliefs about the future is stop paying into my pension (for now). I still plan to have kids, gods willing.

It's one thing to worry about the planet and the animals, and people dying directly due to climate events (floods and storms, heatwaves and drought) etc. I am far, far more worried about what we will do to each other when the 3 billion of us who are vulnerable to climate change want to move somewhere else.

The practical purpose of public schooling is to A) catch the odd prodigy to send to the big leagues with the private school kids, B) get the well-behaved used to 9-5 hours, and C) have somewhere to keep the rest while the parents work.

University used to be just the first group, nowadays it includes the second.

Precisely this, kitted-out vim in the hands of someone experienced is a force multiplier but it's uh, 'late-game'. VSCode and the like take absolutely minimal brainpower and experience for near-enough similar gains (for most users, I would say).

I say this as someone who uses both the editors I mention depending on context.

" Genes and racism

S1R- Steven Rose notes in his recent letter (Nature 22 January, p.335) that a National Front journal New Nation has claimed to find support for racism in my writings on sociobiology, as well as in those of Dawkins and Maynard Smith. Rose calls on the latter two authors to dissociate themselves from such misuse, although curiously he does not extend the same invitation to me. To keep the record straight, I am happy to point out that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour. As I stated in On Human Nature, "I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation. Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations" . lf there is a possible hereditary tendency to acquire xenophobia and nationalist feelings, it is a non sequitur to interpret such a hypothesis as an argument in favour of racist ideology. It is more reasonable to assume that a knowledge of such a hereditary basis can lead to the circumvention of destructive behaviour such as racism, just as a knowledge of the hereditary basis of haemoglobin chemistry and insulin production can lead to the amelioration of their pathological variants. l now call on Professor Rose to consider these and similar arguments raised in my writings. It is my hope that he will not confine himself, as he has in the past, to arguments that link sociobiology to racism and thus to continue to abet the very misuse which he piously claims to deplore.

EDWARD0. WILSON Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA"

https://www.nature.com/articles/289627b0.pdf

Yet in 1981 he either had a total change of heart, or, you are - wittingly or unwittingly - spreading misinformation: https://www.nature.com/articles/289627b0.pdf

I personally think of it as 'conditional' depression. Mine was conditional on getting out of poverty wages and into a decent job. I'm still cash poor but I also have a place of my own and stuff. I was in a depressed or depression-adjacent place for years, treatment didn't help, either felt nothing or went manic depending on the med.

I dont expect to ever own a house, I don't expect to find a wife and settle down any time soon. I don't expect a big number in the bank. I leave that up to future me. Present me is doing the best he can to keep moving forward and doing right by himself. Can't worry about what I can't control. Can take control of what I can now, and trust the person I evolve into in the future to handle more, having learned how that works first person.

I think the laundry list of "things quitting gives you" is massively overblown. I know people whose use of social media puts them in a competitive mindset that helps them get to work that day and put their face and clothes on nice in the morning. It's a major part of their success and happiness. I know other people without it who are depressed degenerates that don't know very many people.

As far as the individual is concerned, large studies on the effects of quitting are pretty much meaningless. It depends entirely on your context and relationship with it, and how much your social life hinges on events primarily organised on FB/Messenger et al. I quit about 5 years ago, and missed out on a ton of casual, ad-hoc events. And yes, they were "real", if mostly circumstantial - but still important - friends.

For me, these are the things which I think aren't so context-dependent when it comes to these good/bad/unhealthy discussions:

Issue A is the addiction pattern - "the scrollies" - being unable to tear your thumb (and eyes) away.

Issue B is losing your own take and knowing what your own take requires - I now do my best not to read other people's words in my usual reading voice, although it's not easy. Particularly with toxic/pseudonymous sites, you're often eating where someone else is shitting. You take on opinions without knowledge and viewpoints without experience.

Getting off social media doesn't do shit. Fixing why you are vulnerable to the issues we all know about does. Sometimes you need to get off SM to fix it. Sometimes you don't. Let's not turn this into some kind of religious rite of transition.

FWIW, I learned to read in order to load the Thomas The Tank Engine game from the CD drive via MS-DOS - and I went and spent most of my time on music and literature until I got into my tech in my late twenties.

I think it's fine providing they're getting all the other fun creative IRL stuff too :)

Gorgias was perhaps the most well-known ancient Sophist, and is also the namesake of one of Plato's Dialogues, which happens to be one of my favourites. Highly recommend reading the above, and into sophistry and rhetoric more generally, if you're the sort that gets annoyed by modern bullshit, and wants a set of names and tactics to defend the sanctity (and sanity) of your opinions.

I would love to see a J program written in a literate programming style (with the same terseness of code). Though I'm sure that idea seems like anathema to most of those people!

Edit: thanks very much to commenters below for showing how wrong I was to assume the above :)

FYI, Dylan is back from his break/w.e as of a few weeks or so ago :)

For a while I used vimwiki in a drop-down term: guake and yakuake have this as a primary feature, good for gnome/KDE, but if you're using a tiling WM you can use termdrop on most terminal emulators.

Well it happened to me - I struggled with motivation, went for a diagnosis, got on the meds, got hooked, and have been dealing with the consequences ever since. There are many possibilities to explore and steps to take when one suffers from a lack of motivation, focus, or anhedonia. Diagnosis and treatment is not a silver bullet - there is no such thing as a magic pill. It can do wonders - for my one of my friends it is incredibly helpful, but she had already taken steps to deal with other issues. I don't think it's wrong to add disclaimers in discussions like this - ADHD medication can change personality and cognition long-term.

I've heard it on good authority that schizophrenics find nicotine/tobacco significantly ameliorates their symptoms - it can be a lesser evil for some.

I think the lack of a stable is part of the appeal, most people don't have anywhere to put a horse.

A wise point, it took me a while to realise this - intellectual honesty can lead to the habitual expectation it will be reciprocated and upheld by others.

And yet here I was, going to the comments first (as is tradition), wondering whether Herdwicks is an individual sheep with the power to terraform, or a breed of some mild historical significance.

> He gave me various simple rules, of which 1 remember only two: "Put a comma every four words", and "never use 'and' except at the beginning of a sentence".

And some wit to boot!

> and those people actually get paid to distract you

And thus a veneer of legitimacy curtails the otherwise dragging distraction of guilt.

Fwiw, I doubt a BBC journalist wrote that sentence (despite satisfying modern standards).

Note that it's good to be angry about losing or doing poorly. The trick is to really feel the pain, and not take the easy route out and find excuses in the things that weren't in your control. High feedback situations or 1v1 games give you fewer opportunities to dip out of the internal locus of control mindset.

I'm surely not the only one who read this as 'tendies'...

Job posting requirements are generally a poor way to assess the requirements for a job. They're either written by someone non-technical & may be inaccurate, `OR` specify the unicorn candidate. The latter serves to improve the quality of applicants by cutting a good amount of time-wasters, but it also cuts an unfortunate number of valuable self-doubters. Which is why the 'just apply' advice turns up frequently; the people who care enough to ask on forums are probably conscientious and interested enough to be in that latter group, and some will be good value hires - even if they tick only 20% of the boxes at the time of interview.

In my limited experience, your attention is better spent sleuthing about on LinkedIn, on the company website, and especially a dev blog if one exists. Getting to know a company is far more instructive and helps with every stage of an application.