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That sounds nice but is there a case when 'strong men' created good times? The example that I see people gravitate toward here is how soldiers coming back from WW2 in the US 'created' a society of unprecedented prosperity. But this of course ignores almost every single external factor that precipitated this prosperity, ignores that the prosperity was for a minority of people (both in the US and /especially/ globally), and the fact that war does not in fact make people stronger but tends to break them down. Ask your nearest vet.

This just sounds like a factoid upholding an antiquated ideal of masculinity.

I think it is individualism more than straight-up narcissism, but the two go closely hand-in-hand. But I do think there is a difference between people who have been enculturated to not need (or think they need) community and people who would only participate in community if they could be the leader.

Girly is a social construct. As such, if a sufficient number of men believe that a Miata is girly, it is girly. I'm a gay guy who used to own a Miata, because I thought it was fun and wasn't overly concerned about how it would affect others' perception of my masculinity. I would often get comments about my feminine car.

Just like most things that straight men abstain from because it might make them look gay, it was really fun. Y'all miss out on a lot of cool stuff because you're worried your buddies will make fun of you.

Different strokes for different folks. I would rather the excitement in my life didn't come from my job as much as possible.

Quite a broad generalization. Sounds like people who don't have an actual plan for their money other than to have more of it. The kind of person who retires and realizes they don't even know what to do now that they aren't striving for that $$$.

Explicit nullability is one of my favorite features of kotlin. Kotlin basically treats nulls like a checked exception: deal with a null value immediately or incur the mental overhead of having your data treated like a 2nd-class citizen in all the code it touches.

I've worked for Amazon and have friends that work for Meta. As much as it pains me to say it, I don't think that as a whole those who were laid off would make a very good company. There are exceptions, like I think Amazon made such heavy reductions in the Alexa org that there were probably some very competent engineers let go. But mostly the layoffs affected (1) HR and product, (2) low performers, and (3) people with very little political savvy. This doesn't sound like it would make a good company.

Maybe I am just brilliant but this has been obvious to me the whole time. Advertisement and the 'need' to market to groups results in reifying those groups in the population. The more the marketing works, the more the groups actually become differentiated, and it creates a positive feedback loop.

That isn’t what I mean at all. I’m just differentiating “discovery” from “being shown”

> discovery of content that you're interested in

I am skeptical of this line of thinking, even for something like Hacker News. It is the same thing that people say about TikTok, and pretty much every other preceding social network/content distribution app. "Discovery of content" implies to me that there is some kind of search. It implies an amount of self-directed, self-motivated activity. I would think that a PhD researcher or a programmer on stack-overflow or a person in a library is "discovering content"

However, on these algorithmically informed apps, the thing doing the discovering is the app, not you. It is discovering the bare-minimum amount of interest that it can provide such that you don't leave. If the app showed you only things that you are the most interested in right away, that would mean that each new piece of content was less interesting than the previous. You would open it up, spend 5 minutes, and then leave. Instead, it learns how to intermittently reward you with interesting content and figures out how much filler you will put up with without exiting.

At least on hacker news and other forum-based sites, you have the ability to only click on links that you want. I regularly open the site see there is nothing for me and leave within 20 seconds. Facebook is more controlling as you can only see a few posts at a glance. TikTok is completely controlling as there is no realistic 'browse' experience. You can see someone's profile, but since the content is video you can't really preview anything or know what it is going to be like without diving into the one-after-another-no-breaks feed.

The over-all point here is just to remember how passive a process using any of these applications are, and to remain clear-headed about it.

The big difference between most people's relationship with their father and their mother (at least for us of a certain age) is that fathers historically were not involved in caring how their children felt. The traditional role of the father was to lay down the law of the house and to provide income. This comes all the way back from the initial formulation of the nuclear family, which was an imitation of the royal family where the king makes the rules and is responsible for the wealth of the land.

I provide that background only to point out that it is based on nothing other than folklore and fairy tales. It was a tradition that served its purpose but is not really necessary in modern times. You can be emotionally involved in your son's life. You can let him know how you are feeling, even if you are feeling weak or unsure. I can't say for sure, but I would investigate if you are more concerned about how your father feels about you as a person or if you are more concerned as to whether or not he thinks that you are a success. Is he the voice in your head that says "you can do it, I believe in you!" or "you better not mess up!"?

Part of this has to do with being emotionally competent yourself, which is something that you can work on.

I'm not worried about getting fired, I'm just trying to see if anyone has a similar experience of shifting priorities without finding an entirely new position.

For the sake of not having to disclose the specifics of my personal life and finances, lets just say that for whatever reason I would rather make $90k to primarily make well-known code changes than my current position of making $300k to work long hours and tackle large ambiguous problems.

Same as with music theory, writing, programming, or other creative endeavors or art. The thing is that when someone creates something from their heart, from an incredible desire to create and share their vision or experience, it often ends up following some kind of storytelling guideline. And that is because stories worth listening to have a structure that makes them engaging.

The problem comes in when someone tries to analyse the structure of stories and assume that they can create a template for telling new stories. If you start with the template (or the music theory, or the best practices) you end up with something that feels formulaic and like crap.

Theories of art are always descriptive and inductive, not proscriptive or deductive.

This doesn’t make any sense at all to me. If the video itself is a problem, it shouldn’t matter if it was recommended by a human with human intents or by an algorithm designed with capitalistic intent.

It would be hard to convince me that the intent of the system that recommended the video should be heavily considered. At least in the US we have a highly consequentialist legal system.

Why is this women’s fault somehow?

If tickets were regularly given out in this way I think it would lead to even worse driving behavior. Sometimes I find myself going 10mph over the speed limit because that is the rate that traffic is going. If I knew that there was some MVT ticketing checkpoint coming up, I might be inclined to suddenly slow way down, stop, pull over, or otherwise freak out.

I don't know if you meant to, but all three of those links are hilarious if you read them. The first one has `moving toward` in the title, which is academic speak for "it doesn't work and we don't know how to make it work". Otherwise it would be arrived at. Very similar to Betteridge's Law of Headlines for academia.

The second link is a news article that is very critical about the motivations, projected success, and sneaky language used by companies to justify pyrolisys. And this is coming from what is ostensibly a pro-chemical news source.

The third article is paywalled and I'm guessing 99% of us can't read it. However, the `Opportunities and Challenges` is again academic talk for "we looked into it and it's really really hard".

I feel like this is a classic example of trying to engineer a non-engineering problem. Isn't what we need to just maybe not eat so much? As an aside, most people's calories come mainly from carbohydrates anyhow.

s/produce/replay

Yes reproduction allowed the top .01% of musicians to gain world renown, but as GP stated it really made the activity of socially enjoying and creating music less accessible.

It’s possible but I don’t really buy it. There’s a very real sense in which narcissism is just a lack of acquired skills that most people have. That skill being the ability to see both the good things and the bad things about yourself and about others at the same time. If you’re raised in an environment where your caretaker teaches you they are always right (with severe consequences for pointing out they aren’t) then it is hard to develop a nuanced worldview. The child can either get on board with the parent, become “one of the good ones” and become a narcissist themselves or they can become a black sheep of the family, usually with worse outcomes.

Importantly, the skills can be learned as an adult it’s just hard to do. I come from a long lineage of family members who did not know how to swim, but I don’t think that there’s a genetic basis for this.

Self checkout makes it very easy to buy sushi for the price of peanuts.

In bike messenger circles there is a phrase "steel is real". The idea being that when you inevitably eat shit going around a corner you might dent your frame, but the chances that a steel frame will crack or shatter is basically zero. And more importantly dings and scratches don't cause the structural integrity to degrade like happens with aluminum or carbon fiber. Your steel fork is bent? Hit it with a hammer until it's true again!

At the very least there seem to be 10s of causes of schizophrenia and just as many different manifestations of it. Similar to cancer or depression in that regard.

I loved both it and the book. More than just being fun, I think that it really does a good job of capturing the feeling of what it was like to be a hippie in the early 70s, realizing that the world is moving on and your dreams aren't coming true. 50% conspiracy theories, but also 50% real acutal conspiracies because capital won't allow a utopia.

This doesn’t make any sense at all. If buying twitter was just a complication, why is he being so active in it? If I found myself accidentally buying a company outside my wheelhouse, I would find some suitable management and not touch it an all. Or make small changes, Berkshire Hathaway style. Not take the helm and for everyone.

The philandering of rich young NYC men is not exactly an unbiased sample.

Weve been "paying" to take care of our elders in various ways since the beginning of humanity. The only problem is that in our ponzi scheme capitalist culture if someone can't make money they are considered dead weight.

Oh I don’t have experience teaching a second language but I have quite a bit of experience teaching programming. Luckily, when I’ve taught programming it’s been in a context where there is no need to validate the learners acquisition outside of their own satisfaction.

In a school setting however, there is a strong urge by both the students and the teachers and the external system to provide some sort of “proof” that a standardized level of comprehension has been achieved. Students want to get As, teachers want reproducible methods, and administrators want standardization.

My intuition is that language acquisition, more than almost any other subject, has to be done naturally, idiosyncratically, and non-linearly. This is horrible from the perspective of needing to provide a test at the end of the class.

Top comments are about how gig work can help make ends meet for people who are struggling. By some estimates 9% of adults are currently doing tech-enabled gig-work, or have done it in the past. That is too many people trying to make ends meet. That number is so high that the conclusion that /I/ draw is that about 5% of the jobs being offered on the market are gig work, and the people who are in a position to take them aren't paid well enough to make a decent living.

All of this is related to hustle culture. Where instead of believing in the myth that corporations buy your labor from you, we have a new myth that we are all to some extent self-employed. That our greatest assets are our ability to push ourselves for economic gain. That our attention is for sale. That the solution to financial ruin is a side-hustle. We used to rely on the community of people around us to make ends meet and provide enrichment in our lives, but the new mythos doesn't make room for that. Friendships are monetizable. Attention is transactional. Hobbies are for improving oneself.

I don't fully know where this rant is going. I don't think everyone thinks these things. But there is something about individuality and money being more important than camaraderie and material wealth that I think motivates the prevailing viewpoint that gig work is anything other than an erosion of protections our great grandparents fought very hard for.

Glad to see there are so many enlightened souls in this thread who wield their well-configured flaming swords of truth against the darkness between the non-whitespaces.

I for one was eternally flustered as a new programmer in college trying to edit Makefiles with the tools that I felt comfortable with and that were available to me. The tab/space debacle is a completely unnecessary footgun, even worse than the various atrocities of variable assignment spacing and test bracket spacing in `sh`. I am grateful for Make to exist in that it is an important part of the history of Unix and software development, but would rather not use it if given the option.

I for one graciously accept Stuart Feldman's apology.

  C begot Unix
  Unix begot Make
  And Make begot the 10_000 things