andagainagain

Facebook doesn't want to be a utility as far as I can tell, they want to be a functional monopoly. They want to be so big that people effectively can't leave the platform even if they wanted to.

And then they would use smaller "social media" platforms as a legal defense, even if they don't compete on content or functionality.

Use the wiki. Even better, abuse the wiki, and use tutorials excessively.

Even better imo is to play until you get really confused, then use all the internet resources possible to understand wtf is going on.Then repeat.

I tend to avoid things like the lazy been pack or graphics packs. That's up to your taste though.

Honestly I though it was going to be the story of an early bug where dwarves would carry around an arm in their mouth forever.

It's definitely has major design philosophy differences that make it scratch a very different itch then dwarf fortress. Both good games, but not really equivalent imo.

RimWorld randomizes difficulty through the game. So when things go crazy the response tends to be Angst against rngesus.

In dwarf fortress when problems arise the answer is almost always that it could have been prevented and or dealt with in many many ways (some that the developer never considered).

That is indeed the reference. I don't remember where I read it, but it came from toadyone I'm pretty sure. Might have been one of his early podcasts?

Quick plug that system76 uses core boot in modern hardware. If anyone is in the market for a Linux pc anyways.

Not sure if anyone else installs it by default, it's been awhile since I've looked.

I bought a set of 1cm element cubes awhile ago. There is definitely a change of perspective of density when you see several things of one generic size, and yet they are dramatically different weights.

I think it's fairly common to see volume and assume weight. And less volume is often assumed to be a structure issue, like expanded metal vs solid blocks of metal.

What I said applies to all topics. Including ones that you personally value.

As for whether math is useful or not... I'll just say I REALLY wish more of my coworkers knew their math. I work in a factory, and it's useful WAY more often than you may think.

"Russian Math" seems to just be "More Math".

The basic education concepts at ploy here are well known, just not widely deployed.

Why? IMO it's because of what I think is the sole problem with american education - parents themselves not caring if their kids actually know anything. It's actually common, extremely common, for american parents to think that the point of education is to get a piece of paper (degree) or to get a job. And a large number of the parents that think the point is actually knowing things also put no pressure on the school systems to actually provide that.

That isn't necessarily true. All you have to do to keep the concept of external soul alive is to accept the idea of simpler souls. Maybe there isn't am irreducibly complex soul.

part of the issue is how fast they want to hire them too. People do not just think of themselves as employees in waiting.

If you are a business that is going to lay off a bunch of people... temporarily... then be sure get an agreement that they will come back.

Imagine you're one of these workers laid off. You move. You find another way to live entirely, another way to pay the bills, another entire path to another entire career. Heck, even if they give you your old job back... even at a higher wage. Would you take it back? It's not an obvious decision.

Scientists that I used to know would just quietly judge people who they suspected of fraud.

Several classes I had emphasized that peer reviewed journal papers were basically only good for reading their methods and results of those methods. And even those come with the baggage of "ok, but who put this out, because we know xyz groups make shit up all the time"

So many things annoy me about this sort of self-help guru vagueness.

"One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard" - this is not true. You have to work, but the "hard" part implies that stress is important. Stress is incidental - everyone experiences stress regardless of work. I learned years ago that high achievers don't experience more stress... an in fact they tend to rephrase problems to give them LESS stress. They work, but they purposely make those things less stressful. The work itself, from their perspective isn't "hard" at all.

"There are three ingredients to great work: natural ability, practice, and effort". These aren't separate things! Natural ability is learned just like anything else. It's a set of skills that you develop through building your own ways of thinking. You get those through practice. And for some, that effort is often negligible for one reason or another - experiences and thoughts that they have because of emotions or places they grew up or what context they relate to. I could go on for hours about this specific topic.

"And yet Bill Gates sounds even more extreme. Not one day off in ten years?" - A surprising number of people do this anyways. If it's not stressful to them, it's not effort... it's just what you do. By the way, most of these people don't become rich. Why? It's not because of "natural ability" or "lack of practice and effort". It's because their daily work covers things that aren't, directly, money. "Cows got to get fed" or "lawn has to be mowed" or "kids need to be watched" or "spend a bit of time on something that I actually like". For Bill Gates, that "just what you do" was probably "work on microsoft". And if it failed, he's publically said that yeah, his backup plan was to go back to Harvard, becuase that was of course an option for him. Relatively speaking, it wasn't a super high risk decision.

"Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful". This sounds, honestly, quite unhealthy. It's "feel pain now because reasons. I have multiple theories on how this sort of thought process comes around. For example, When we can't relax during our downtime, or we don't actually get the rewards of our labor.

But you notice that outside of constructed work environments (like school, or any job where you have a direct boss), this doesn't happen. Those who practice violin practice until they're done practicing, then they relax, then they come back later and practice some more. They don't half-ass practice, because there isn't a point to that. If you're practicing, it's not "so that I can work hard, and if I don't I feel guilty". Instead it's "I need to polish this one part of the song" or "I'm struggling with my fingering here" or maybe even "I'm going to play with this section of the song, it seems fun". Note - it's not pointless work. So "I'm working, but not working hard" just... doesn't happen. Because why would it? That doesn't make the song better, it doesn't make you better.

The more I go through the article, the more I just think the goals are getting tripped up by a combination of external forces that take up mental resources, and a mental model where the stress of the situation determines the quality of the product.

I have tons of suggestions (I trimmed this comment down and rewrote it 3 times already). The big one though I think is learning to roll with what matters. Do everything you're doing, and then take a break, and then do it again. Honestly, unless you get into the nitty gritty details, It's really a lot simpler than people think.

This makes sense from all sorts of different perspectives. Heuristics have, over and over again, proved to be faster than manual logic for basically everything. And, if the heuristic is well trained, it can often be equal to or better in statistical results.

The limit, I think, is bounded by two things that come off the top of my head. First is the problems with heuristic fail states. The second is in the statistical portion in those results.

Heuristics fail sometimes spectacularly. This is how you get a question like "what is the the most effective way to play Tetris" with a result like "drop all the pieces on top of each other and then pause the game forever".

And when heuristics fail in a more subtle way, they can quietly do all sorts of things like remove trust, discourage workers, reduce quality, etc etc.

Statistics, meanwhile, can hide a lot of what is actually going on. And sometimes this can cause long term problems, that data (with a good scientific process behind it) would reveal.

I think there is a similarity between both statements. The issue as I see it comes when people have strong opinions not based in commonly agreed upon facts.

So what we end up having is person A saying "we should get rid of ABC, it causes XYZ!", and person B says "ABC is amazing! Everyone should have ABC! The XYZ claim is overblown conspiracy", both opinions are very strong. But they don't agree on whether ABC causes XYZ. Before an intelligent conversation happens, the basis in fact has to be agreed upon.

This is basically impossible with non-falsifiable claims. But non-falsifiable claims generally means "there is no evidence for it". Because if a claim relies on evidence, then it is by default falsifiable. Show the evidence is wrong, and the claim disappears.

If there is no evidence... they didn't come to their beliefs through evidence. They came through some other means. Find out THOSE reasons, and you can have a fruitful discussion.

I've had plenty of fruitful discussions about politics just as I have about religion. The key in both cases is finding that reasoning. In both cases that reasoning is almost never the topic at hand. Don't start a political conversation with slavery. Start it with... idk... maybe what news outlets they pay attention to.

A local union factory relatively recently started hiring like crazy a few years back. Their wages were higher than every other job in the area, and the same thing happened. Within a year a job that WAS offering $10.50 and saying that they were generous started offering #$12... then $13.50... then $14. Now they're also offering a few hundred dollar bonus as well.

I just looked up the volume of aluminum vs lithium here: https://www.periodic-table.org/lithium-atomic-radius/

They have the same atomic radius of 121 pm. The length of bonds might change the calculation when you actually look at chemistry, but the increase in number of orbitals is not an issue.

Also, no battery uses 100% of their electrons for storage. Your calculation of using the number of electrons on the outer orbital vs the atomic mass is completely misguided. their claims don't say aluminum ion holds more energy per unit mass, but simply looking at the ions available per unit of molecular mass also doesn't tell you this.

Meta analysis is a great way to look at data that isn't actually showing what you want, and make it show what you want.

What we would want is access to both the meta study and all the studies it referenced, just to see if there actually was anything here at all. Assuming all of those studies were well done and from a reliable source, and assuming that they actually tried to disprove themselves and that there weren't any other studies that successfully disproved them... then we would look at the data.

Normally we can sorta fudge that because the claim doesn't sound illogical or controversial. But... 45% reduced cancer risk from eating a whole class of foods that just happen to fit well with ancient chinese medicine? Found on a chinese medicine website? The sniff test should fail from 3 miles away.

When we get to "experiment with large double-blind randomized sample shows that..." , then this will be interesting.

"study finds" means very little. You can quite easily make a "study" in all sorts of ways to "find" basically anything you want. It's so easy it often happens just by accident. Particularly in meta-studies like this article references. But that didn't stop them from coming up with a biochemical mechanism. Note to scientists - the theory comes before the conclusion. Otherwise we have Post hoc ergo proctor hoc.

But then why is an unlikely, unverified result put into an article? Who would do this?

"South China Morning Post" ... "For Centuries, Chinese Medicine Practitioners have used mushrooms...."

This article can be safely thrown away.

Thanks, I'll save that for later reading.

I read about half of "The Republic". I would pull out the book again to find a good example, but I think I donated the book a few months ago.

Name me two.

And I've read some Plato some years ago. I would not classify him as a clear thinker by any remotely modern standards.

why would that be true? Many things that are true are socially uncomfortable and are still known.

History is chock full of examples of things which others in the field (and society) hated but could not disprove, and then became well known. I can think, off the top of my head, examples in math, human biology, plant biology, psychology, and martial arts, (the last one due to the wonders of the internet). It seems to happen all the time.

Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets.

What I've found, from famous books by famous philosophers all the way to pop philosophy books to vague philosophical discussions... is some of the muddiest and most convoluted self-indulgent thinking i've ever seen.

I am thus convinced that philosophers ENJOY the mud, not the clarity. If clarity comes, it seems more likely than not that it is an accident, and other philosophers come quickly to obfuscate it. "yes, we see the same color, but do we REALLY see the same color?", as if an infinite regress of definitions somehow makes their thought process more valuable. And, from what I can tell about famous philosophies, perhaps to other philosophers they do.

The problem with dream laptops is that dreams change all the time due to marketing and newness. 16:10 screen is better largely because some fancy models today come with 16:10. 5 years ago that same feature wouldn't have mattered. It's just weird.

Just like 1080p vs 1440p. 2k vs 3k vs 4k. Just like the material of the chassis, the brightness of the screen, the weight, the stiffness, the depth of keytravel, the color scheme of the background, the placement of buttons on your window, using usb-c for charging...

I mean, I could ramble for pages about ideal features. Some of those features are important to enjoying a laptop long into the future. But a lot of them are purely whatever the latest craze is. 16:10 screen imo is of the later category.

I assumed the majority of distro makers chose it because of red hat and canonical choosing it, making it a defacto standard.

Kinda like gnome, even though kde is more customizable and has more features.

I haven't done an lscpu check in a long time... at some point apparently it started telling me whether I am vulnerable to a whole bunch of cpu issues. That's amazing.

once I stopped respecting coworkers personal decisions, it made more sense to just ignore them and get what makes sense to me.

they don't like my phone, too bad for them. I don't like theirs.

This will always be a problem, because the problem is basically "It suprises me that not everyone has the fancy features advertised 3 years ago on a flagship device".

It's like people being suprised that the newest laptops don't all have high DPS displays and thin bezels, but they ignore that 1 - those aren't easy to engineer and 2 - they sacrifice things like repairability, reliability, and manufacturing cost to do so.

It is indeed faster and more accurate to use physical keys on a smaller device.

The competition is the exact same thing btw, with less screen and tactile feedback. Both will give you text thumb repetitive stress problems, but doing that on a hard screen will more so. Remember, this isn't theoretical, we used to use these all the time.

The drawbacks of a physical keyboard are in things like flexibility (you can't easily remap or change the size of the keys) and thickness.