Ecoste

Thanks for the interesting read! How did you support yourself through all of the failed startups?

So going by your definition what would be a true black box?

How did we let discord take over is a mystery to me, or rather a tragedy.

The fact that you're baffled why discord took over is exactly why it took over. You can't even acknowledge that the user experience is 10x better and it's suitable for a general non-technical audience.

I've tried to start meditating a couple of times in my life but every time after a couple of days instead of being introduced to gradual calm/bliss/joy/whatever I get met with an existential dread, sadness, anxiety, melancholy etc. I guess am naturally predisposed to those as well, much more than 'happy' feelings. I had to then take a week or even more to recover. I feel like you need to have your shit together so to speak before you try meditating or it might uncover some suppressed trauma or whatever it is. I must say though I am way more 'aware' of my body and emotions more than before, but the problem is they might not be pleasant. It is okay when the feeling is transitory but an existential dread which lasts for days or weeks feels impossible to shake off, it consumes your whole life. One day I hope to be able to swing the pendulum in the other way.

When this doesn't work, does it mean that you're simply stupid? Asking for a friend.

Explosions

"It is useless speculating about things we can't ever know of."

And how do you know which things we can know of and which we cannot? Trusting your gut instinct on that isn't scientific. And why is speculating about immaterial things useless? I'm sure many great mathematicians heard some form of "what you're doing is useless and has no use or relation in the real world" especially in the realm of pure mathematics.

You bring up the soul which is a convenient example, but let's instead use a concept which YOU know exists for yourself which is consciousness. Can we ever know anything more about the mystery of consciousness or life or why any of this world and universe exists? Are those unknowable? Should we not talk about them? Should we only try to apply the lens of science here and for some reason not try to advance our understanding using philosophy even though it might not be as formal and unambiguous as math?

We have a ton of examples of great mathematicians who also happened to be great philosophers and vice-versa. Some philosophers also tried to incorporate mathematical symbols and such into their work. We value both their philosophical works and mathematical works. They were smart people and chose different mediums to express different concepts.

How can you try to explore the ego, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, suffering, life's purpose, subjective beauty, symbolism, truth, religion, god, ethics and whatever else that is not easily formalized? We might very well arrive at a formal and unambiguous description of these sometime in the far future, so are we not supposed to at least try to talk about these concepts now? You use different tools for different concepts, and science and philosophy is just 2 of those tools. At the end of the day philosophy undeniably changed the world, so there is at least some value to it. Philosophy is not anti-logic, it is very much for logic.

I think that if someone is completely unable to justify an observed truth to others, then it might not be a truth at all.

What if the observed truth that someone is trying to communicate is paradoxical and hard to communicate in and of itself? What if the truth is ambiguous? What constitutes ambiguous or unambiguous?

At the end of the day ambiguity is a real concept, so is a paradox, therefore there will exist things that are ambiguous and paradoxical and pointing that out does have value.

Which studies? I've checked a few Google results and none of them showed health-care even near the top, which is suspiciously surprising to me.

I wanna know more about the from scratch GPS receiver

You can find most books for free on the internet :) Please do support the authors though.

Comment the title is base64 to avoid spoilers because ChatGPT does not recognize what book this is.

"Time drunks deeply intuit this, and their procrastination-induced state of timelessness should not be considered a terrible character flaw but rather an act of spiritual rebellion against modernity."

Thank you, I needed that. Time to continue procrastitating.

But what if little timmy asks it how to make a bomb? What if it's racist?

Then what?

Now do an article on how to get the discipline to keep this going.

Can you cast a fireball now?

I probably should know but I don't even have the vaguest of ideas. What do consultants actually do?

Maybe we're just bike-shedding on the Sunday quote itself but I generally don't want to be reminded that I'm staring at a terminal on a Sunday ):

I'm not disagreeing, but we also must be aware of ideological tautolagies (not sure if the term is correct, but it's a kind of circular reasoning). Where an intelligent and skilled investor is only considered intelligent and skilled iff they make money. The moment you lose, you're not longer intelligent and skilled.

Maybe a naive question: but is there any way at all (impractical or not) to implement stateless revocation? In my mind JWT is already non-stateless in the sense that the server at least needs to keep one piece of information which is the secret key. It's very memory efficient, but not stateless. If a decision is made to revoke a user, that state needs to be kept somewhere.

https://archive.is/MfHFY

The author argues a reducing the size of a function of "a few dozen lines" likely won't improve the readability of the code. That's not even defensible! I would fail any (professional) code review for having that many lines of code in a function.

I would argue that such absolutist rules are harmful. Yeah, there certainly are times when smaller functions are better. But there are times where separating a function into smaller ones does indeed make it 'harder' for me to read, since with each 'abstraction' you're losing context/details that might be very relevant in the code to follow. I would rather have a 40 line function with the dirty low-level details rather than the same split over 50 lines of different functions that I need to go into and figure out the details.

And then again, who is to decide what is 'one abstraction'? Abstractions can be at different levels, and abstracting different things. There really isn't an objective way to do it. I would argue that this is analogous to writing -- there are all kinds of books/stories/poems, short and long etc. and one isn't necessarily better than another.

ok!! this is quickly! surprising!! "The average professional engineer (more than 200 PRs a year) authors nearly 600 PRs a year (590) with a median time to review of 1.34 days."

are they! just! typing! the whole!! day!!

And the country should just sit and watch those kids gets neglected and abused?

You're almost saying capitalism and efficient markets are pointless.

Capitalism necessitates efficient markets (and efficient markets necessitate HFTs) so any criticism of HFTs is a direct criticism of capitalism as well. I mean this isn't really a problem that's specific to HFTs -- there are just a lot of jobs that we can perceive as providing no value or even negative value (jobs that are possible specifically due to capitalism e.g. payday loans, 2008 style trading, certain scams or predatory practices etc.)

I think we can all agree that this is a flaw, and we're not criticizing capitalism to replace it with something else, but rather just recognizing this as a problem. At the end of the day, a useless job is a useless job even if it exists solely because of capitalism.

How did that happen, if you don't mind me asking?

This article is basically weaponizing surplus-enjoyment towards getting things done. Pretty cool :)

These types of articles act as a kick-starter to reflecting about your own thought-patterns and antagonisms. I'm sure you've read articles or watched videos precisely about procrastination etc. just like this article -- and it did nothing to help you with your own procrastination (and the other millions of people that are procrastinating). Every such article has a goal of "be happier" "be less anxious" "stop procrastinating" etc. but what they're essentially saying is "be happy", or "don't procrastinate" etc. After stating the overall trite, they go into personal details about what worked for them to address the trite. However the details are usually highly personal and won't work for you or anyone really who doesn't have the same belief (system/thought pattern/mentality/personality) as the author. In fact the author mentioned this himself in the article by pointing out that not everyone thinks the same as you (So then: why are you telling us about the implementation details of the solution to the trite instead of really drilling into what thinking led for the implementation to be effective?) At which point do you stop drilling into your meta-thinking? It's hard to know, and it's hard to drill-down as well and as you drill-down things become more personal and not applicable to a general audience.

Maybe we could go for a telephone booth style machine that would lock the door (and the vandal) inside, and then https://youtu.be/EbmQxZkSswI?t=57