HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

themodelplumber

10,301 karma · joined June 29, 2013

2022 Ukraine Conflict Notes & Resources: https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/ukraine-conflict-notes-and-resources

My RSS feed: https://www.friendlyskies.net/rss

----

This is not the most massive profile in the world.

This is just a tribute.

Some reasons why I like HN:

- /newest is kind of a stealthy, underrated knowledge-sharing platform. It's a bit like an alternative portal for a lot of interesting stuff going on out there. It makes a de facto news website/outlet on its own due to its instant format.

- The HN mindset generally represents and defends the stabilizing view of tech, in which things stay broken longer, true...but dammit, at least we know how they are broken! We appreciate the value of looking back, not just forward, during a time when a lot of people are rightly concerned that tech mainly/only looks forward. Plus, there are always workarounds to get the most out of our favorite broken stuff from the tech-past, and we like that.

- HN is part of my personal history. You can say that I got used to HN, after lurking for a number of years and then finally making an account. I have shared a lot of myself here, for better or for worse...

- On HN, you can study people who aspire to be great minds. If you read this far, there is a very good chance that you aspire to be a great mind. (My own mind is not so great, but there are always... ah... usually...err... sometimes workarounds!)

----

Personal comment policy:

If I ever decide to ask ChatGPT to write a comment here on HN, I will also ask it to write like an awfully-suspicious tech bro and make some grammar or spelling mistakes.

Oh and keep it damn short, basically assume details don't matter, new ideas are a waste of time, and nuance is for _suckers_ who probably don't even run an ad blocker.

Why would I want to explain this?

Because I can write like normie ChatGPT all by myself, and I think YOU might want to think about this thing that can happen while writing here:

All I have to do is think, "nah this is way too direct," and edit my comments to be a little bit less potentially-offensive than my usual.

Maybe even add in some additional perspectives as a bonus, because I love this place, or I love the idea of it at least.

Et voila, I have become ChatGPT, AND it's super obvs to everybody:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37192471

You thought your Aunt Karen had it bad...now we are doomed to forever stream forth with blunt, brusque critique and commentary, or the pitchforks and torches come out!

So, follow along as I devolve into fellow-kids-speak fam, this ChatGPT talk is sus.

(To really big brain it here, I should probably A) write --> B) edit until I sound like ChatGPT --> C) ask ChatGPT to rewrite. And to rewrite like I'm someone who is basically the best, chillest therapist you could ever imagine, but someone who's less _about_ mental health specifically...oh wait this is reminding me that I come here to unwind after giving coaching sessions, bruh I can't)

(Is the ChatGPT-sucks meme starting to get more complex? And do you think that brusque discourse is no cap op, OR are you pretty sus yourself?)

Losing My Ship Policy:

As always, I reserve the right to very calmly lose my sh*t while authentically learning my way around some new mess of a topic...

At a casual scroll-around, I'd guess it happens at about a 1:100 ratio of ship:shore at worst, so please keep that in mind if you are browsing this profile to figure out if I'm more/less broken than you may fear that you are.

----

If I helped make your HN experience more informational, interesting, amusing, or god forbid, inspiring, here are some other projects & sources you might appreciate:

My blog(s): I run a multi-blog, info-hive-style site at https://www.friendlyskies.net/

You can browse daily excerpts from a library I hand-selected, out of 400+ classic Project Gutenberg texts: https://www.friendlyskies.net/notebook/the-fs-daily

I'm a productivity expert. Read 100+ of my productivity articles: https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/maybe-tags/Productivity

Learn about my modular productivity system, Task BATL: https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/the-balance-first-approachable-to-do-list

Get into Shortwave or Amateur Radio by geeking out--You may find my Radio page useful: http://www.friendlyskies.net/radio/

Read my radio & ham radio articles: https://www.friendlyskies.net/hamradio

----

In case you've tried meditation before, grounded yourself over and over, and become aware of your breathing, surroundings...

...and kinda want to try something new for a change...

I discovered that a majority of meditation techniques are sensory in nature.

This is a lopsided approach to human psychology. Many times what's needed is something else.

It's like making every day leg day, and never working your upper body.

It's like eating nothing but bananas and broccoli for every meal because those are healthy!

So, to complement the usual meditation activity, I created a free, mind-based meditation alternative for effective rest, called Frontdooring:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/frontdooring-a-new-form-of-quiet-visual-subjective-intuitive-meditation

----

Let's see...what else...

Might as well link to the ol' Mastodon profile: https://oldbytes.space/@marcolas

And the ol' Calckey profile (?!): https://calckey.social/

(Good lord, how many of these things are there? And why do they never quite scratch the same itch as the ol' website?)

----

On theory, concepts, and..."vapor"...

Please note that there is some theory to be found here. There is usually some theoretical element to my writing, as I've discussed on my various blogs to some extent.

As of the 2020s I no longer feel the need to give examples of everything I talk about at a theoretical and conceptual level. Especially with broad conceptual thought--just no, that's not how that works.

If you are a skeptical critic who "supports" the tech community by being closed-minded and grumpy, and who still wishes to be consulted, I understand that any given theory which does not fit your views and which does not immediately resolve to brass tacks examples _may_ be upsetting.

You may reach for the "vapor" label. How are we expected to grasp the _vapours_???

Don't worry--I've learned that it's important to be OK with that. Don't just grasp for vapours, don't just test them. Nourish them, give them focus, give them space and time.

There are names for this, names like "concept design" that may be familiar to some yet which are not generally as well-known, as arts and practices. It's really too bad.

And, designing examples of conceptual outcomes off the cuff, for critics who don't believe in that, is by many definitions a waste of my time.

And _so much great stuff_ starts with air, vapor, idea space, whatever you want to call it. It's how human activity works.

I've taken many projects from vague idea to published reality, on topics varying widely--from extreme weight loss to productivity.

Critics who thought they were being consulted, and who wanted a working prototype on their desk stat, only got in the way.

So, to protect myself from becoming too huffy with people :-), I'll offer this:

Instead of asking for examples, it's often a better idea to ask for relevant learning resources. Don't let skepticism turn you into a simmering cognitive blind spot who rebuffs education.

----

Bored?

I built this page to un-bore myself:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/fmk/index.php?tpl=Boredom-Curing-Websites.html

Be warned, it's currently at LO-Writer HTML-User-Experience level :D.

Anyway, since I started working on it, I became an expert on personal interests and their relation to energy levels & health. Right now I maintain a list of over 1,200 personal interests, and I've developed unique structures to support them, so they're more than just vapor! It's fun and interesting.

Related, I'm a professional coach and I watched many techies and tech execs fall into a common productivity trap, burning out without giving nuanced attention to development of personal interests. I have also watched unemployed people fall into the same productivity trap, which is really hard to watch and in some ways more dangerous. It can be really tough out there--please take care of yourself.

SO: Productivity is for you, too. Your time is not just for your employer, your investor, your BFF or your family. Reclaim your world and make it interesting and energy-giving, to YOU.

Live an interesting life! Learn to support your own energy levels intrinsically, it's worth it!

----

Want to read a weird theory?

You should always set some goals that are easy and indulgent! Make a goal to eat a favorite snack, or drink a favorite drink today.

Don't let your shadow own your indulgent side, it's not worth it, and if you ignore the little indulgences for too long you'll generally have to pay down that debt later. For some it's a life crisis, e.g. a quarterlife or midlife crisis.

Send a few swears into the universe and unwrap your favorite candy bar or bite into your favorite pastry once in a while, show your willingness to pay meaningful attention to the important bio-emotional health aspects of your life.

Let the tribute continue...

----

More weird theories I'm HORRIFIED to share...

- ARE ONLINE TECH COMMUNITIES FREE THERAPY FOR INFO-PEOPLE? ARE YOU HERE TO WASTE TIME...OR TO PROCESS AND RECLAIM IT? There are two general types of self-supportive outlay--emotional and informational. What's outlay? It's expression, talking, writing, communicating, with/to self or others. The emotional type could involve crying, sharing excitement, venting, or complaining, sometimes to a therapist. The informational type could involve acknowledging or clarifying your current status, like "I am dehydrated" or your current schedule, "I have a meeting coming up at 10" or your project status, "I am working on a game in Python but it is laggy for some reason".

Everyone needs to engage in both types of outlay in order to feel comfortable in life. Techies tend to get in more trouble the more they neglect the informational-type, and tend to develop a painful relational blind spot if they don't do _anything_ about the emotional-type. This is reversed for lots of other people who may seem annoying to me and you at times--they need to process feelings _mainly_, so commenting on HN headlines with hot takes on numbers, structures, and statuses isn't therapeutic to them, but would be more like an advanced excursion in psychological discovery if they decided to go there.

Communities that focus more on one method or the other will often reveal tacit community structures for punishing too much of the type of outlay that they're not there to support. Tech communities will generally have means of punishing a lack of logic, or expression of emotion without due attention to supporting info-structures like procedure and measurement. It's natural and nothing personal--but something to look out for if you are feeling persecuted out there, just for being you!

Eventually I hope we can all stop warring over which side is superior, and maybe then us techies will find ourselves more emotionally present, nuanced, and even more supportive of our communities as a side benefit.

- THAT'S US, DRINKING THE RADIOACTIVE MILK: Today we look back at the early 1900s and think, "wow, people drank radioactive stuff, they microwaved themselves, they didn't wear seatbelts--things were super unsafe back then!" I'm confident that in the future we'll say this about the current decade(s) and mental health. Today we couch clear mental health risks in terms like "bold," "direct," "authentic," and even "joining the conversation" as if we can handle it all, NO PROBLEM! LOL yeah no. In the future this will be seen as groundbreaking in broader history, but also really dumb and unnecessary. The same problems can be dealt with more safely with less risk to human wellness, especially at an individual level. (And boy, let me tell you, the average Youtube comment section is at the TOP of my unnecessary-risk list!! I would not be surprised if these "experiences" are regulated in the future so we can all stop hurting each other so frequently...)

- GET THESE SUPERHEROES AWAY FROM ME: Currently our entire human life-path & career medium is built around teaching ourselves to be heroes ASAP, and trying to become stronger heroes, from birth until we die. We've been taught to talk ourselves up, our teams up, our families up, and our (whoever...pets?) up so much that we've created a massive superhero problem: And it's a long way down! Sure, we can now be described in many ways as a world of superheroes. Half of whom are annoying AF tripping over themselves to "help"--self included of course--and just to nail that little aspect in good, our superhero movies even reflect it in choice of plot and characterization. How clear can it be?! ...Are you IRON MAN aka Tony Stark, with a stereotypical teen-girl archetype issue tugging at your overbaked and under-necessary take-control style, or are you SPIDER-MAN aka Peter Parker, with a bad case of the whinge? COLLECT them all! Superhero downside risk is a thing! And at the same time, one of the biggest perceived problems that comes with living in our lovely little world is...? Being seen as weak, dumb, under-powered, of course. Which would be fine...except we're all still humans! This dichotomy will create a disturbing hypocrisy-resonance issue and silent havoc until it is broadly reconciled. (Perhaps when the sacred chain-spell of Marvel Movies is finally broken with the arrival of the long-awaited sequel to _Captain Ron_!) The hero's journey model is powerful and relevant, but let's also admit that it's stale and old, and often activates some downright AWKWARD behavior. Do the world a favor, leave the cape at home and relax! Lowering the stakes for yourself is one of the best productivity moves known to humanity.

- RECHARGE NOW: Individual humans are more than ever running out of, or risking their supplies of, reliable energy, and the world's energy systems are simply echoing that massive & strangely subjective issue at a macro level. Until we find a sustainable, reliable way to stoke, recover, and retain energy at an individual level, and taking into consideration our weirdly energy-sucking economic systems, we'll continue to have an energy problem at a macro level.

- INSERT / RETRY / FAIL: Most problems that relate to personality differences come down to what aspect & how much of yourself you excitedly insert into situations where other people also want to insert themselves and their own tools. The quicker you can recognize what parts of you you're dying to insert, and which tools you're dying to show everybody, the less of the problematic half of the equation you'll be. You'll also be able to solve more problems, faster...strangely enough!

- NO, _YOU'RE_ A FRAUD: "Science" vs "Pseudoscience" is one of the riskiest vocabulary dichotomies we have right now, at a cultural level. The two terms map way too easily onto "objective" vs "subjective" which is essentially the yin-yang of all human psychology. All of it, is in all of us, and we bounce around between objective and subjective modes all day long as individuals. If we want to evolve further we need to make this dichotomy obsolete by using better vocabulary. "Science" should be either considered in levels or not used at all. Does scientific mean somebody wrote a paper and ran a test? The same goes for pseudoscience. Does pseudoscience really just mean untested? These are incredibly lossy filters and we need new words, or sets of words, that can go in those same places. Otherwise we cannot by definition get results that help humanity transcend the limits of current humanity. We will fight against ourselves until we can better identify our individual pseudosciences and their usefulness. Oh and: If you don't yet know about, or know know how/why to celebrate your personal level of pseudoscience, you are not ready to contribute to this discussion.

- DON'T GOOGLE IT: Mathematics is simply the subjective organization of things. It is better to learn to embrace the subjective part earlier than later. It's too bad we don't feel like we have time to teach this...so now we have a bunch of online communities with DON'T POST HOMEWORK PROBLEMS stickied... :-)

- ARE YOU OBJECT-ORIENTED, OR JUST ANOTHER NERD? The goal of programming languages during the latter half of the 20th century was to help the world cement a socially-productive schedule. Everyone was to get with the program. Once this goal was reached, the goalposts moved. The new goal was to help humanity become suitably extroverted. Extroversion means being more objective, or object-focused, rather than subject-focused. Thus the eventual emergence of object-oriented programming, the biggest metaphorical clue-bat ever wielded above the heads of introvert society-designers (social network coders) as the 21st century arrived. In the coming years I expect the emergence of coding paradigms related to the unknown, since this is our next huge hurdle.

- THEY TOOK MY UNCLE TO SPACE: We, humans, have not been suitably trained at / experienced in dealing with the unknown. (In fact, it might even make you uncomfortable if I don't give specific examples of what I'm referring to! "Here, have some of my wisdom--you probably mean UFOs!" Don't do that!) We continue to try to frantically map our past onto the unknown as soon as it emerges, and this activity is an existential threat to humanity. We have also trained ourselves to look at people who interpret new circumstances as fresh, unique occurrences as idiots, and we insist on showing how everything emerges from our past. This is dangerous and unnecessarily closed-minded and sets up really silly policy decisions.

- GIFS ARE JOULES: Meme culture accelerates our contact with questions that emerge from the human-unknown. This is really great--It's an acceleration of our evolution. If I could invent a new branch of science it would be maybe: metrics-of-meta-memetics. God, imagine tracking the meme economy like it's a climate system! Watching millions of hastily-crafted ideas that agitate people in various ways gradually reshape the human psychological landscape! It is going to be SPICY in Elon Musk meme-land this year everybody, take sunglasses and stay hydrated.

- ENTER STAGE RIGHT: If everybody annoys you and life sucks and there's no workaround, you might be living a script that doesn't offer you good leverage anymore. If everybody annoys you and life sucks and you have some clever workarounds, you still may be living such a script. If everybody is living a script that you can mostly identify within a person's first couple of sentences, and you can identify those who live a script that's just like your standard script, and you also know some pretty fun workarounds to the worst parts of your own script, and you can borrow others' scripts as needed to solve problems you couldn't solve in the past...congrats, chances are strong that you are now off-script in a good way.

- EXIT STAGE FRONT: The best setup for preparing to go off-script is to think of the scripts we live as tools that provide us with safety. There is a really good reason to stay on script, just like there's a really good reason not to ski off a cliff. This can help you contextualize what's about to come your way as soon as you deviate from your script, and what level of tooling you might need prepare and maintain in order to support such activity.

Because sometimes, you're skiing the same damn run again when you could be relaxing at the beach! God my aching thighs!

-- WARNING ---

Divisive content

- FOOD #1: The best Mtn Dew is Diet. Right now Diet Mtn Dew is also the best overall American soda on the market, followed by Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper. The best energy drink is Celsius Sparkling WildBerry, followed by Celsius Orange, followed by Rockstar Pure Zero Fruit Punch, followed by Rockstar Recovery Orange--which tastes exactly like the 1980s McDonald's Orange Juice with the foil top has returned to earth again in all its glory!!! And if you like orange, don't' miss AShoc #10 Orange Freeze!!! (If you aren't into energy drinks you are missing one of the biggest FLAVOR revolutions in history, caffeine or no)

Why diet? Diet drinks are one of the best ways to capture the subtlety of a flavor.

Diet drinks are also a good way to prepare yourself for the coming Flavor Wars of the 2030s, in which concentrated flavor will become a resource at critically low levels of supply. Watch for my book.

- FOOD #2: The best Pop Tarts are Cherry, followed by Boston Cream Pie. Corollary: The WORST foreign-food review videos in the world are the ones where people try Pop Tarts for the first time and take just a little nibble of the nasty crust, as if there's not a huge glob of frosting just sitting there waiting! Put these folks out of their misery! COAT THE WHOLE DAMN THING IN FROSTING, EVEN BONES AND SPOCK WOULD AGREE AT THIS LATE POINT. LET'S GOOOO!

- FOOD #3: The best diet phase is a dirty cut phase built around massive amounts of one's favorite candy bar. You should be able to eat a box of Whatchamacalits over the course of a few days and still lose 2-3 lbs. a week. (It is extremely unwise to focus only on macros at this level)

- FOOD #4: The best burgers have no veggies and _maybe_ carmelized onions (NEW THEORY FOR 2022)

- FOOD #5: One piece of pizza is a meal. Two is a celebration. Three is almost always a mistake in one's rating of one's own sensory perception capabilities.

- FOOD #6: The Taco Bell Chalupa is one of the best hybrid foods ever created.

- FOOD #7: Malt-O Meal Cocoa Dyno-Bites are better than the real thing unless you care about more direct cocoa taste than texture.

- FOOD #8: Snickers is the best all-around candy bar ever created.

- FOOD #9: The Cadbury Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut Chocolate Bar is the weird candy bar hill I will probably die on, followed by the Ritter Sport Rum Raisins Hazelnuts bar. But definitely _not_ including the Nestle Chunky bar.

- FOOD #10: Even manufactured candy needs to be eaten as fresh as possible. It tastes better that way. Jar or closet or drawer candy is typically really nasty if you are used to fresh candy, and naturally keeping candy in those places longer than a few hours is a clear sign of personality issues to work on! (JUST a theory!!!)

- FOOD #11: After a difficult trip to the dentist, the best way to forge ahead in life is to immediately procure a massive donut with your favorite filling, washed down with a favorite diet energy drink with at least 100mg caffeine to help the numbness wear off. Your fresh new teeth and any fixes need this burn-in period! And your psychology needs to associate drilling in the mouth with pain that is ONLY TEMPORARY! Obvs.

- FOOD #12: The best fruit is a Pyrus pyrifolia, just out of its protective wrapping, enjoyed on a breezy august evening while looking at the moon rabbit & stars.

- FOOD #13: Yes, despite what the first 20 results on Google will tell you, you can get VERY sick by consuming expired whey protein, coming a DAMN SIGHT nigh unto death itself in fact! Don't Google it!

OK, this was way too fun. Finally,

- PROCRASTINATION REPLACEMENT THEORY: Always pick a different word, or set of words, to use in place of the word procrastination. This will give you a new range of solutions to try. EXAMPLE: You aren't procrastinating by reading this profile page. Probably one of these models fits better: A) You needed a break and a reset B) It's better in some way to wait right now, so you're learning about others and their stuff while waiting C) The universe brought you here to be prepared for even better success in life!

Well that last one is laughably unlikely, but there you go! You've defeated procrastination by selecting better words!

----

How about some HEAVY self-development advice?

Some of you have contacted me about what I'd consider advanced self-development.

I have some hard news, maybe.

The stuff you're already interested in probably isn't advanced level for you.

If you really want to stop repeating the same cycles in life, if you really want to break through into new frontiers, you have to learn to recognize the approaches and topics you naturally ignore, topics that make you laugh in derision, things (topics--practices--tools--theories) that make you bored.

An example of boring stuff? Stuff you already know about! You may have to take that deeper, and you may have to use your imagination to do so.

You have to focus on who you are to some degree for any kind of personal development, but eventually you have to get advanced enough to see who you aren't... And why that sucks...and what to do with that information.

You have to look at the people who you tend to talk over, or talk down. You have to take an open-minded look at the people you would otherwise resent. You have to be willing to say "been there, done that" and then "but I'm still intrigued by..."

And then you've got to find your way into whatever the next thing is for you, learning bit by bit until you start to exhaust yourself, still inspired by those who seem to take immediate benefit from boring or ridiculous thoughts or beliefs.

You'll become: I don't know what, and I hesitate to predict. The fun part here is that I don't know, and neither do you, and even probability-based perspectives are kind of broken at this level.

IMPORTANT: Self-development at this level WILL make you a better problem-solver and theorist. You may even start to feel more powerful than you've ever felt. But this process will probably also bring about swings of emotions; it may even exacerbate mental illness due to pressure you feel to reconcile the changes with your past identity. Be careful if so. Go slower, be more nuanced.

If you eventually change what the world considers your "identity," you will learn, as I did, that this model is broken. It's a safety blanket that was never really there in the first place.

You will likely have to learn new ways of talking with or relating to your friends and family. They will not understand you so completely anymore, and they will naturally test your relationship for changes by returning to old relationship patterns and feeling out your reaction. Many will be pessimistic. Some friendships and relationships will have to remain in your past, but by their choice, not just yours.

They will try to sum you up, but you will notice that summaries don't really do you so much justice anymore.[1]

Please be careful, since human growth is, and has always been, a function of stress. I learned long ago to identify my psychological damage threshold by feel, so I can skirt the line and set boundaries when needed. If you are new to self-development, this is very risky.

If you can, please join me as we push ourselves a bit, to develop new ways of thinking and new ways of talking about those ways of thinking--and benefit the human race as a whole. You won't be just a techie anymore, but you'll be something we all need more of.

1. https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/so-just-to-sum-that-up-summarize-and-understand-summaries-more-effectively

----

Need a quick inspirational quote?

I got bad news. All I got are these long-winded ones.

http://www.friendlyskies.net/other-projects/generators/inspirational_quote_generator.php

But sometimes nothing motivates better than the same ol' word salad, shuffled around a bit...

And like I always say, nothing sometimes better motivate the same ol' words, than some salad around the shuffler!

----

Do you like short fiction? How about some stories? You can knock out a few within seconds.

Six-word Story #1

Schoolmate fun. Even the birds joined.

----

Six-word Story #2

"Yep, alternator's going." Hundreds? Thousands? ...Millions?

----

Six-word Story #3

Toffee breath. .45 against my ribs.

----

Six-word Story #4

Up ahead, the chairlift began collapsing.

----

Six-word Story #5

Boy Scouts. Various beverages. All panting.

----

Six-word Story #6

"NVIDIA," it read, seemingly without reason.

----

About me: I'm just a business owner in Northern California.

I like to play with the concepts of identity & profile, to see what I can learn about myself, or about others.

I was raised in various environments where a strong focus on exclusive, singular forms of both identity & profile were REALLY treasured. There was tremendous fear of a loss of key aspects of both.

Chances are, you think those things are kind of important too, in some ways. You may draw national, political, social, or technical boundaries around your identity and profile.

You have probably given a reasonable amount of self-conscious consideration to your (singular) identity, and even more likely your (singular) profile.

But I have also learned how this can be REALLY bad, for all of us.

(Humans)

Anyway, welcome to an experiment. A thought, in some kind of progress.

----

There are currently zero Lamborghinis in my garage. God, I'm lame.

I started my current business with various tech offerings (including custom USB key menu software design, those were the days...) and eventually began offering standalone support & training services. I later became a trainer & coach for creatives, tech executives and startup founders.

Somewhere in there, I taught art classes at the local college as well.

In developing my teaching, training and coaching practice, I was lucky enough to be mentored by respected coaches, academics, and psychologists. It was fascinating to learn deeply about human personality dynamics, personal development, individual gifts and blind spots, group dynamics, and changing the world we live in for the better.

----

Pause for a breather

I can do a reasonable Scooby Doo impersonation.

I can imitate a rendition of an American preacher from the Great Awakening circa 1810...as translated into Japanese in a VHS film made for distribution by a high-demand religion, which I had copied to cassette tape in 1997 for Japanese study. As a missionary living in Japan.

Wanna hear it? OK:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/other-projects/music-sound/Marc-Carson_Japanese-Preacher.mp3

Sometimes I call that whole episode of my life a waste of time.

But also I know exactly which onigiri I like and where I can buy them.

I know how to talk my way into a Japanese housewife's apartment. lol

And I can tell you exactly what to eat on a cold rainy day in Gifu, so you'll never forget how beautiful everything was.

----

During my personal identity & personality theory studies, I was required to step completely outside of the tech space that I had thought was the best of all worlds, and I appreciated what I saw with new eyes. I immediately began work on my own new theories and self-support practices.

Outside of my own personal life, I've been fortunate & happy to watch my clients, including some of you on HN, make important and impressive life changes.

Some big moments for me:

Losing over 100 lbs. to overcome obesity. My friends were taken aback in public encounters when I called them by name. "Do I know you?" This is a pretty weird feeling.

Studying, measuring, and analyzing myself using journals, spreadsheets, and brainstorming sessions to overcome severe chronic depression and anxiety.

And: Using those same analysis tools to realize I had been raised with a set of fundamentalist religious beliefs, beliefs which brought the worst parts of the past forward along with the good.

These days, I like to blog and write in various places online about topics like productivity and work/life balance, personality dynamics, psychometrics, organizational psychology, FOSS and Linux, the outdoors, ham radio, stationery and writing, and computer graphics projects. I'm also a technical trader & investor and enjoy hacking on my own trading methods and frameworks.

Productivity-related publications:

My productivity system, Whole Productivity:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/whole-productivity-mp3-and-pdf-epub-now-available

(Whole Productivity describes productivity which is compatible with being active on HN)

My modular to-do list-based productivity system known as Task BATL:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/the-balance-first-approachable-to-do-list

My OODA Loop alternative, the A2i Loop:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/from-awareness-to-integration-the-aoaei-loop-a-problem-solving-tool

My mastery framework to assist in measuring your undertakings, from simple experiences up through mastery:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/from-experience-to-mastery-a-framework

------

Other stuff for fun...

I like exploring and using FOSS projects. To me, FOSS in action is very close to an archetypal human ideal. And paying frequent attention to my ideals reliably gives me tons of good vibes--I learned this while working my way out of chronic depression.

A favorite moment was when my little submarine USNROV-1 was shown in the Blender SIGGRAPH demoreel in 2005:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3lZ4Iuwld4

I like to build extensions to various models based on the Jungian Cognitive Function (JCF) system of frameworks describing some building blocks of human psychology:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/functional-extensions-do-plus-minus-take-1

I founded a detective society, the International Society of Creative Sleuths:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/we-d-have-you-as-a-member-a-new-international-society

My Boy Scouts replacement, the Junior AdventureChucks (Beta):

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/introducing-the-junior-adventurechucks

------

My daily journaling template:

https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/daily-journaling-template-updated-2020-04

Some notes & examples of how I integrate it with Geany:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XehGA1fYulo

Recent favorite songs:

Somebody Else Now by Daði Freyr - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPsIIXkvEOQ

Tunnel of You by Cannons - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmitvsoXgaI

Beautiful Losers by Hocus Pocus - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HO26K_rLtw

Stand Together by All Hail the Silence - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L3-9uSTEW8

Hématome by L'Impératrice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOs7wtSiJnQ

Outta My Mind by Monsune - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjgMmo6_DH0

Some Favorite Chip, Game, & Demoscene Tunes:

C64: Tarzan Goes Ape OST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeKm0eOMTjg

C64: Drax - Why Me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZHnzt4eb_M

Human Race, subtune 4 - o2 Cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OHnwA3iv5I

stardstm.mod - Stardust Memories by jester/sanity (Volker Tripp): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY9p1oiE1_Y

Aquarium by Awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgfeqO-ei1g

Radix - Emelie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWd4gZYWlaY

Radix AKA Mosaik - Loell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QP_4VETFVaY

Hunz - Sarah's Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYQUlUXQxR8

Hunz and Mosaik collab - No Way Out But the Sky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew2Qe3-YCdQ

ROTT OST: Goin' Down the Fast Way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX_Kb0cDN98

Tip & Firefox - Hyperbased, Daxx Remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQFYGWG2Lug

Planet Boelex & Mosaik - Sisumies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9V8wfsIY74

Norfair - Chillzone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6OR3zKUq7s

Norfair - Obtuse but Smooth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doxmc1W7WNI

--Marc

PS Have you ever posted a Helveticomment? Have you ever been the _Extraterrestrial_? Here are some phenomena I've noticed on HN over the years...

--The Helveticomment--

This is one of the weirdest experiences you can have while participating on HN. It also might be a sign that you understand the current thread and its topical sh-- at a level that not many others do...or, it may simply mean that you can produce original thinking about the topic, which is cool.

Helveticomment Example: You comment on an article or entry which ends up getting a _lot_ of comments. Yours was one of the first comments there from the start, yet it has received no upvotes or downvotes. Quite often it will have no replies, either.

This is a really strange feeling for the commenter, because the comment, which comes straight from your deep and thoughtful experiences, will often end up buried, while a bunch of really basic discussions, or "let me sum this up" comments float up to the top of the thread. I've seen this happen to others (reasonably sure despite not seeing the actual upvote count), and I've seen it happen to just a few of my comments.

I call this the Helveticomment, which is a combination of "Helvetia" and "comment", because the state of the comment is neutral. It's like the Switzerland of comments, sitting there between all these warring comment-thread countries. And yet, at the same time, it's an educated comment and not really lacking in quality despite the big noise happening around it.

If it's true that you're educated on the topic--or maybe even if not--the phenomenon can certainly give you that feeling of being an overlooked genius. But the surprising sense of neutrality and disconnect from the general discourse can also be a great moment to leverage into a coffee break during which you can further reflect within the environs of your unique mind.

(This is all assuming you haven't been muted in some way...)

--The IWBWYW--

This is an interesting Ask HN phenomenon:

"Ask HN: What do YOU look for in an online service that you'd subscribe to?"

"Ask HN: What do YOU want from your software? Tell me your dreams, your desires!"

"Ask HN: What do YOU love to pay for, in terms of tech services?"

"Ask HN: What do YOU think is missing in the software world today?"

The posts always start like that.

And the point is, op is looking to build what you want. For you! As a service. One that other people can pay for, too!

(So: You are to provide a specification, which implies a request and a time / cost burden on the creative inventor, and in return it is implied that you are to provide your customer attendance and associating funding on opening day--is a blunt, but I think fair way of putting this.)

These are what I call "I Will Build What YOU Want" (IWBWYW) posts.

Sometimes the implied offers/queries seem generous, even irresponsibly so. (For example, in these cases there's generally no "Sub-section A: Enter the amount you will pay me for this")

At other times they are filtered as the threads develop: From "Ehhh, OK. But I can't build that by myself" (this brings the Ask post further into focus for everyone) to "Hmm, interesting, I will have to think about that one."

And at other times a bunch of spectators jump in, apparently to cause random interference and pain for op, who for all we know is in desperate need of some money. Somebody comments, "I want this thing that does X and Y" and then they get a reply from another passer-by: "Just use service Z, it already exists?"

Uh, I'm sure the thread author really appreciates that!

Either way, as much as I admire the can-do attitude, I sometimes have to avoid IWBWYW posts, as they remind me of my days knocking doors and selling religion.

Knock knock. (Ton ton! This was in Japanese)

"What would make you happier than anything right now?"

--The Extraterrestrial--

I see these people in various online tech communities from time to time and have been one myself...

This is a name for someone who leaves a relevant comment or starts a comment thread where other commenters admit they don't know wtf the original commenter (the ET) is talking about, but share that they are intrigued, and/or ask for more information.

The other commenters want details, but the details won't help the discussion right now because 1) they will need time to review and process, 2) it's not an appropriate venue for long-form explanations or Q&A, and 3) those asking still lack insight that only comes from experience.

Since the information cannot be processed meaningfully, the original commenter and their experience might as well be from another planet, and all other people can do is make light commentary (which is specifically against guidelines in some communities), stare, mumble, wander off to ponder life, etc. It is difficult to respond even if the reception is positive.

Compounding things a bit, this can feel like a real perplexing situation in a community based on common intellectual values (knowledge, competency, interest in various learning and even some esoteric topics). Commenters generally expect that they can jump into a thread and either contribute or share some experience. The ET may have also expected that others would know about or have some experience in the domain in question.

So, the ET will get comments like "uh huh, interesting I'll check this out" or something similar. They may suss out that this kind of comment is not exactly a proud moment for either side of the conversation (it kind of should be, if it's relevant and new though, right?).

They realize that community members are definitely not their colleagues or peers, even though values are shared.

The result is that the commenter feels like they are from another planet. They are an Extraterrestrial (ET). They may therefore feel pressure to find a better home, leave the community for a while, etc.

They may also be concerned that if a non-ET really dissects...ahem, I mean scrutinizes...them with the wrong tools, amount of experience with the topic, or skeptical attitudes, their ET knowledge may be considered risky, dangerous, or a threat. When otherwise, within its native community, the knowledge itself is considered normally-good, nothing-fancy-helpful, normally-bad, even old hat maybe--just a broad mix of things.

If you are, or have been an ET, there's a chance this could be a cue to consider documenting what you know for lay persons in the communities you value. It's one thing to know something, it's another thing to know something deeply, and it's still another thing to package it up for distribution to those who are smart...

...but obviously not aware of _everything_ out there...(UFO synth sounds)

submissionscomments
themodelplumber··on Show HN: The HN Recap – AI generated daily HN podcast
> Some people find it distracting and senseless.

And some people who prefer music OR no music, depending on the moment and mindset, are ... The same person!

themodelplumber··on Htmx Is the Future
So are you saying that ChatGPT will probably offer to write an htmx app in bash?

> I'm sorry, but it's not possible to write a weather forecast app using bash and htmx as htmx is a client-side technology and bash is a command-line shell. htmx is typically used in conjunction with HTML and JavaScript to create dynamic web applications.

Cuz that didn't work. It straight up forged ahead and wrote a bash script to show the weather though.

I really wonder today if ChatGPT is going to cause a bash renaissance

(If you are telling me I can do this myself plz reread posts thx)

themodelplumber··on Htmx Is the Future
ChatGPT made it very clear it understood exactly what I wanted, short of writing the code. The steps it offered were long, and far from generic. So. Why no code? It offers code for other langs all the time, even unprompted.

It was like...if you've ever been mansplained before, when you know how to code something, but are asking a specific question that interests you, related to the process of having a service do that part for you--and someone comes along like, "well, it's easy to code that yourself!"

Not sure if you've experienced that before but it's very similar.

themodelplumber··on How Wolfenstein 3D shocked the world, 30 years later
Funny. It's awkward sometimes as a parent to weigh the excitement of "how cool is this" with the possibility of your kid being exposed to that kind of excitement before it's really appropriate. Particularly if your own childhood worked out more or less fine that way...

You got me thinking though...I first saw Wolf3D in high school drafting class. Mostly 386/40s but some 486/33 systems too. My mouse sat on top of a big digitizer tablet next to the computer.

The teacher was cool with us playing games and things at lunch. Sometimes people would pop in to ask about drafting and CAD while we were playing on Wolfenstein or...what was the artillery one? Scorched Earth I think. Death's Heads going off while brushing doritos crumbs off the shirt and saying "hi there, welcome...so these are all CAD systems running AutoCAD, and uh..."

To counterbalance this, another student was usually rendering things in POVRay and I think at one point I brought in VistaPro to show people.

It's funny to think about the scariness factor. Wolf3D and Doom were both pretty good for jump scares and relative tension. But the feeling of excitement was really well balanced in various ways. Finding weapons, using cheat codes, etc.

I still remember that I found Friday the 13th for the C64 _far_ more terrifying than even Doom on the PC. Similar with Force 7 and Aliens for the C64, in which the landing sequence made you think you were playing Master of Lamps and then boom, you were screwed.

Weirdly, I also remember Prince of Persia for DOS being kind of scary in an atmospheric way. It was one game that I'd usually quit after too long when playing it alone at home. Terminator Rampage was atmospherically intense and I couldn't play that one for long either.

Apogee and Microprose games in general were way easier on the atmospheric tension...some Blake Stone followed by Aces of the Pacific and then a bit of FastTracker II was so often my jam. Good memories...

themodelplumber··on Htmx Is the Future
Thanks for the reminder, I've been meaning to try it out. Just to get started, I asked ChatGPT to write an htmx app to show a 10-day weather forecast.

It described the general steps and seemed to be able to describe how htmx works pretty well, including hx-get and hx-target, etc., but then said "As an AI language model, I am not able to write full applications with code".

I replied "do the same thing in bash" (which I knew would be different in significant ways, but just to check) and it provided the code.

I wonder, is this a function of recency of htmx or something else? Do other htmx developers encounter this? I imagine it's at least a little bit of a pain for these boilerplate cases, if it's consistent vs. access to the same GPT tooling for other languages.

themodelplumber··on Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux
Cool that you even tried it! I was considering trying it out in Wine since I've had some dumb luck when it's configured to run as various past versions of Windows. Maybe a long shot though.
themodelplumber··on My pay went from $240k to $0
There are some legal differences in terms of relevant laws from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But you might be surprised by just how much of a given agreement may end up de facto legal due to a variety of practical factors.

Not the least of which is the question of whether a judge or even mediator will ever even see the terms.

At least here in California there are also unfortunately no roaming sets of contract cops meting out street-contract-justice.

themodelplumber··on My pay went from $240k to $0
I almost had something similar happen to me with music production & licensing (I was contracted to help build out an e-store library of sweet tunes and FX for Flash websites and interactive CD-ROMs, lol). It's a matter of perceived power and often some perceived norms as well.

Fortunately somebody in my family had previously warned me about...was it Winston Groom? Anyway, I read the contract and got suspicious, and saw money being redirected in all kinds of sneaky ways before it would finally trickle in the direction of the actual creator, me! I called an attorney.

The attorney was super upset about it after some review, so I ended up pushing back in the negotiations with what amounted to way too much effort. The attorney was new, but at least they were on my side...

The contract was then handed off to someone with more time on their hands to negotiate with me. This person happened to be irritated by sneaky moves in general (lucky me) so he drafted a brief, completely new letter contract on the spot, right there with both of us in the office, and I signed it immediately.

At the time this creative effort was meant to pay my rent, and to think I almost did a bunch of work for no reasonable recompense and therefore almost couldn't make rent despite hours and days and weeks spent on the project made me really angry. I still really feel for people who end up in that same kind of situation.

If you are a creator you should at the very least know your industry groups. Whether you become an official member or not.

Working in music and 3D animation more regularly a bit later on in my early career, I was surprised to find the Graphics Artist Guild Pricing and Ethical Guidelines handbook extremely helpful. It had a lot to say about contracts as well, IIRC, and the organization also put on helpful webinars on contracts even in the early 2000s.

Few things felt quite as helpful around this topic as having someone who had negotiated hundreds of contracts with the Disney Corps of the world saying to you, "you are right to ask about that, and here are some ways to negotiate those terms" or just "that's a ridiculous thing to see in a contract, strike it out and give them my number if they complain".

themodelplumber··on Agile soccer skills for a bipedal robot with deep reinforcement learning
Well, and your favorite side will be offering to kit yours out to look like anybody you want.

Then someone will get permission to let you pay for first-person or pseudo-third-person streams from given customized combatants.

This will be a definite "personalization of warfare" moment.

Then special ops of the kind only previously imagined will cross the traditional extreme privacy barrier.

A group of teens will crowdfund a tremendously capable soccer/spec-ops bot that strongly resembles Christ Jesus. They will dress it in robes, swim it into the Spratleys, and it will emerge from the water, tie a crown of thorns around its head like Rambo, and then...it will be mowed down.

But this will only be the first exciting moment. I fully expect version 3 to make it past the beachhead.

themodelplumber··on The Verdict on Drinking Smoothies for Weight Loss, Say Experts
What's the verdict on feeding from gigantic carafes of oil for solo ocean crossing in a bathtub?

If I mix it into my peanut butter, does this satisfy the recommendation not to drink my calories?

themodelplumber··on Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux
It's an amazing story really, this project. And, what was it about the word "lotus" back then; surely the name-as-meme bore some tremendous global significance and possibly world-horoscope-level weight. It was kind of a powerful word.

And I mean James Bond was even in on it.

I do look at the graphics with a bit of longing curiousity though...I wonder if I could get Lotus SmartSuite for Windows 95 running again, just to try it for nostalgia.

SmartSuite was bundled with one of my first PCs (toward the end of the days when the word lotus was still kinda cool), and I still remember looking at the blank agenda (and even the paper binder-planner skeuomorphism in Organizer) and full office launcher, and just taking in the raw organizing power of those tools...a real "where do you want to go today (TM)" feeling!

("I'll play Jane's USNF for a couple hours and then eat cereal for dinner" never felt quite right to fill in on the agenda, but that turned out to be where I wanted to go today, on so many days back then)

themodelplumber··on UFOs exist in the low information zone
I don't want to share my list after reading that category. Please keep going! Maybe my list is more boring than I give it credit.
themodelplumber··on Jack Dorsey Has a Lot to Say, Including About Elon Musk and Twitter
> “I wouldn’t be surprised if he is withholding his voice from Twitter out of some principle,”

Well, yeah. And IMO that that principle is, Jack is an incarnation of Geppetto, and sees the situation as if he effectively created who Musk now is, by dint of having created Twitter. It's Jack, so this can't not be a very deep and complex situation.

Such a gripping set of morality-tale-encircling circumstances keeps Jack stuck in a deeply intense power-trip/silent-power-drip persona-expansion loop, in which even the manifestation of Meta-Influencer Twitter Musk in all its "I'm on it" is too deep to really comment on conclusively, as if to fix. As if!

(We'd never just come out and order someone around, would we? Nah, we'd wait for our literal f*cking shadow to come along, buy out our business, and then wreck everything by extending every personal whim to a corporate dictate!)

Meanwhile, Musk is attempting to adjust to life as a nascent Real Boy, mostly by breaking shit and giving people a hard time in the Land of Toys.

What this story needs is a fairy who can come along and absolutely entrance Musk into a healthy divide between work and play, but please, if somehow this CANNOT be a real person and definitely not an unsuspecting recording artist, thanks in advance universe!

It's only _ever_ so slightly frustrating to watch so many people needlessly hurt, harmed, and otherwise negatively affected the various turns of events related to this whole thing being impossibly personal, to the degree that it makes so many times more amounts of sense to say "Musk" than even name the corporation in question...a corporation which was actually built by thousands...

themodelplumber··on UFOs exist in the low information zone
> There's also bubbles of swamp gas, birds, weird atmospheric optical phenomena, miscalibrated radars, and hoaxes.

Damn, some of my favorites aren't even here!

I think the never-amount-to perspective is interesting. It's very outcome-focused. IMO this psychology is not normally a great fit for UFO research, which is rather income-focused and outcome-distracted. So you get a diffusing effect and the most promising work is to be found in pockets and almost never in the big-picture view.

themodelplumber··on UFOs exist in the low information zone
> non-alien flying objects built by humans

I get the feeling you think "ET/alien" or "human-made" are the only two possible choices?

themodelplumber··on UFOs exist in the low information zone
When they are unidentified and still discussed online, they constitute an information pothole on the information superhighway.

Such potholes are sometimes more like utility trenches, however. And, well-meaning folks occasionally attempt to fill them in, more out of personal frustration than accurate perception of the circumstances, and are later discovered to be kind of dumb for doing so.

themodelplumber··on UFOs exist in the low information zone
> UFOs (or at least, against UFOs being aliens)

This right here is a huge issue. You get UFO believers who can't talk about UFOs without mentioning aliens.

But then you get disbelievers with the same problem! It's ridiculous and automatically calls into question individuals' claims of rationality or scientific intentions.

themodelplumber··on UFOs exist in the low information zone
> zero undisputed evidence

Why would this ever be a useful qualification for any kind of evidence?

Seems like a simple troll with questionable intentions could in such a case easily undermine useful evidence of any quality.

themodelplumber··on Ask HN: Books that helped you become a better person?
I have to say that training & certification were far more helpful than books for me, especially regarding the dynamics of being in the company of others, relating, and so on.

My professional mentors helped me learn really useful things that aren't found in books at all, and I can't even recommend any good books on those topics, because they haven't been written.

As a general example, a huge component of "being enjoyed in company" comes down to the specific relationship dynamic in each situation. So it's a very common mistake to make it personal / about you and how enjoyable your company is. This can then cause the unwanted outcome where you end up inadvertently making the whole situation about yourself.

As long as you have the basics of relating covered, it's typically much more about the mix of people in the situation, one of whom is you. And in many cases it's better to treat a "how's my company, good/bad" situation as a roll of the dice, and simply move on to another set of people if your company isn't enjoyed to your satisfaction. (It's typically weird to read this and still kinda weird to write it, but it's really a thing)

There are literally relationship combinations out there that are associated with near-instant laughter and enjoyment among those involved, even among people who others think are the most dead-boring people on earth. These combinations and their dynamics have been mapped out in various ways by various groups (and this is right about where people usually ask me for books, and sorry).

Also, people of different personality dynamics tend to experience different categories of things that they _can_ consciously realize they were lacking, and then _can_ consciously change. So this leaves open the possibility that you can read very helpful books and never connect their advice with the most obviously-needed changes in your life, because you can't consciously admit that you need those changes, until & unless you discover the nature of this blind-spot dynamic within yourself.

I found that there were a lot of classic works or other public domain works which turned out to cover both the conscious / unconcious-stuff-I'll-appreciate-later aspects. One of these was _The Count of Monte Cristo_. Others include _Scaramouche_ and _Tom Sawyer._ In non-fiction, _Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin_, _James Nasmyth, Engineer, an Autobiography_, and _Around the World on a Bicycle_ were of immediate interest and later I was also able to see a different, more helpful side to them.

Batchelor's _Buddhism Without Beliefs_ and some fairly existential stories by authors like Osamu Dazai really helped me explore the conscious-existential side of life without so much of a self-help / philosophical-didactic conversion aspect. They effectively enabled some immediate and really huge relationship benefits, with regard to relating to others, that I didn't understand until later. (I translated some Dazai, and IMO if you can talk or write like Osamu Dazai, most of your up-front relating work is already taken care of, maybe)

I really appreciate this kind of non-didactic stuff that has such a simultaneously tangible effect, but sometimes it's also kind of one-trick-pony content, in that way. So later I return to enjoy it for nostalgia, a different type of self-support.

There are some way-more-didactic self-help titles that I found helpful early on, but I find them kind of embarrassing to talk about these days at the same time. For example Dale Carnagey / Carnegie's _How to Win Friends and Influence People_, L'Amour's _Education of a Wandering Man_ and _Life's Little Instruction Book_, but those books may be helpful to just about anyone at a basic level.

Just some ideas / thoughts, good luck to you in your search.

themodelplumber··on The Case for Postmortem Survival
> insane from boredom

I never understood why this was such a forced conclusion. It seems like "super great" presupposes a condition where the "not so great" parts aren't really there anymore. So mapping boredom onto the "super great" situation seems a bit irrational, just in terms of the logic.

If it's "super great" then it seems more helpful to ask, why would boredom _not_ be a thing? For example. Maybe one can even learn a new way to beat boredom in the here and now.

> And are other people there? Yeah? Talk about a road-trip test of a relationship hanging out for eternity. No? Okay thats lonely.

This one also presupposes conditions like:

- Lack of empathy

- Inability to connect with others in a sustainable way

- Alternately, nobody's around therefore I feel bad

But again, this is a 1:1 map of present onto "improved circumstances," which doesn't make much sense.

It's been a long time since I've actually believed in the afterlife myself, but I still don't see why it's necessary to project so much of the known world onto something like that, especially given the blanket-positive postulates so frequently established right up front.

themodelplumber··on Ask HN: How do you figure out which illnesses / bugs are going around
Gee, thanks a bunch Paul. Specifically asking for reports though.
themodelplumber··on SNOBOL (“StriNg Oriented and SymBOlic Language”)
I can see why. One is a whimsically-named, serious language. The other is a seriously-named, whimsical language (from what I can tell).

(It's also somehow strange to see the author photos accompanying that article, I guess since for one, unlike many other -lang-article-photos, these seem fairly up-to-date, turning the popular-language-with-old-photos wiki-norm on its head)

themodelplumber··on Bricking Incident – Public Announcement
> and not communicating effectively the gravity of consequences of not complying with the license, in a manner timely enough to allow ORQA to remediate the problem

Do you see your own argument's fallacy here?

themodelplumber··on Scientists launch manhunt for Covid patient infected for two years
> "We reverse analyze [wastewater] to see if anything in there that doesn't match any lineages," said Johnson. "Very early on there was this [sample] that was different than anything we had seen."

> Johnson does not know if the person is contagious, nor does he know how they have managed to stay positive for COVID-19 for such an extended period of time.

So wild that it's a poo-analysis manhunt!

Now that the story is out, I wonder if there are people in the area leaving the team some pretty awesome voicemails. "look, I just know it's me, been sending y'all morse code in creamed corn, take me now"

Regardless though this would make a fascinating book or long read. The poo-analysis infrastructure alone would be interesting to learn about.

themodelplumber··on Bricking Incident – Public Announcement
Well, that's really the thing: Who bricked it?

There's really no question as to whether the current outcome is possible under a licensing agreement. This is why random people are asking to see the licensing agreement in question, lol.

Sometimes when there's figurative smoke, there are figurative paragraphs of fire that somebody signed off on in a moment of assumption, excitement, or whatever.

themodelplumber··on Bedtime Procrastination
I like how this can be read as an existential dialogue, a cry for the kind of help that can only come from within, or a relational chess-opening of the validate-me-acknowledge-my-intractability variety.

Personally I recommend the first of the three, if it seems a reasonable approach to life for you.

The second is more like something to work on intensely in private but never to reveal publicly.

The third represents something to get off the chest just before you return the favor, as is only polite. :-) Good luck!

themodelplumber··on GPT knows fork all about Columbo, with so much certainty
I mean, just look in the kitchen, everybody can see it was the poor dogs that did it!

(Actually you don't wanna look in the kitchen.)

As an informational interface, GPT is lossy enough to give JPEG a serious run for its money...

themodelplumber··on GPT knows fork all about Columbo, with so much certainty
I hate it when it does that kind of stuff with coding and particularly obscure third-party APIs sometimes.

Was this GPT-4? With 3.5 it sent me smack into a community of bemused devs who didn't know they had an API to speak of.

So I got to hear about how much GPT sucks, our jobs are secure, yada yada, oh and btw no help with code, no suggestions even.

themodelplumber··on Bedtime Procrastination
IMO-PSA: Procrastination is one of the worst words you can use to describe [1] something you want to have more control over. This word should really be shown the figurative door, for all the trouble it has caused.

I've written hundreds of articles on productivity, helped lots of people stop procrastinating, and my #1 thing these days is--if you are procrastinating, that word has to go.

Really, as far as most procrastinators are concerned, you might as well call procrastination "Autogyro Congee 4000" because at least that rewording might seem novel enough to warrant some hope.

Additionally, procrastination is over-weighted and over-diagnosed online, in part due to the fraught nature of the topic as experienced by people who are online when they feel they shouldn't be. This has always been a thing.

People in the grip of procrastination will also get passionate AF and cross all kinds of unhealthy boundaries to project their latent frustration with their own procrastination onto others' situations, so you get massive overdoses of anecdata, instead of like...curious questions or ideas of flexible approaches for example.

IMO if bedtime procrastination is really a pressing issue for someone, it should be re-worded to include specific, relevant detail instead. In desperate cases, the first, most desperate rewording should probably even involve solution-referencing words:

- I've got the haven't-planned-tomorrow itch again

- I have the didnt-take-melatonins

- My work boundaries suck once more

These will at least keep the tractable parts of the situation in focus.

Most important of all, if you are procrastinating and hating it, please know that there are easily thousands of fixes. (It's great to see the interventions listed in the wiki article)

1. https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/defeating-procrastinatio...

/end oddly-passionate IMO-PSA

themodelplumber··on Ask HN: What Is Intelligence?
Acceptable to use, or flexible enough to be useful? To me the latter is way more important, since the general tech trend flows from acceptable --> accessible, and from objectively-identified & pursued convergent outcomes to subjectively-tailored divergent outcome-sets.

For this reason I'd stay away from defining intelligence as an end goal. Or, I'd say it needs to be done so as to be referential to a spec. Intelligence as defined by a scope with good reason behind it, and not the other way around. This is why GPT will keep using the word "model" when you talk to it about its intellect. One can even say that models are way cooler than intellect in like a million ways.

A respected veteran in personality research once told me at a conference, "NTs invented intelligence." [1] This wasn't meant in a complimentary way, but rather as something much more neutral and observational. But this is an example of the kind of specific, field-by-field argument vis-a-vis intelligence that turns the deferential approach to intelligence as a concept on its head, and hints that intelligence may be far from a reasonable general requirement of a suitable human OR machine, depending on the situation or problem scope.

It basically says, "if you walk out of your group and into another, don't expect your tools to work the same way there." Well, the same is true of any general-purpose problem-solver. From "if you are only intellectual enough..." to...if you are only _what_ enough, in this context? Powerful tool.

(If you combine this with the fact that the notion of lowering the perceived value of intelligence measurement or intelligence-related discourse is sometimes seen as a threat within tech communities, you can get really interesting chin-stroke going)

Anyway you can end up with some neat concepts that intellect-loving folks might call meta-intellect, more like developmental outcomes that integrate a higher level of consciousness. Not in a woo-woo way, so much as a "stuff I don't really care about, or think is outright stupid, might actually matter more than I think" sort of way. Because just when we think we are suitably [2] cross-trained against bias or just not knowing enough interesting stuff, we get another turn around the course.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter#Rat...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXBQAJsxzm8

← PreviousPage 7 of 34Next →