funkjunky

For a fun logical proof that proves why you can't use logical proofs for philosophical questions, see the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf Introduction by Bertrand Russell

Spoiler: logic is inherently limited by language. To quote Russell, "In order to understand Mr Wittgenstein’s book, it is necessary to realize what is the problem with which he is concerned. In the part of his theory which deals with Symbolism he is concerned with the conditions which would have to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language. There are various problems as regards language. First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it; this problem belongs to psychology. Secondly, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to or mean; this problem belongs to epistemology. Thirdly, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood; this belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject-matter of the sentences in question. Fourthly, there is the question: what relation must one fact(such as a sentence) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This last is a logical question, and is the one with which Mr Wittgenstein is concerned. He is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism, i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence “means” something quite definite. In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise."

First of all, whether "getting high", as you put it, is or is not the best "available" therapy for depression is debatable, and not known at this time. Ketamine has definitely shown to be much more effective against certain kinds of depression than therapy, and much quicker acting, and I wouldn't doubt that psilocybin might also be.

But more to the point, you were asserting that the effects of the drugs were secondary to the therapy associated with them, to which I strongly disagree with. The action of the drug itself is main driver of its therapeutic potential, specifically that of "breaking" normal heuristic patterns of activity, suppressing others, and allowing more inter-region connections and plasticity to flourish where non existed before. Most people can't do that very easily, if at all , with just therapy, meditation, diet, and exercise or whatever. However, I -CAN- do that, quite easily and without effort, without the guidance of a therapist or anything else, by simply eating some mushrooms and letting them do their thing.

You realize that drug tests don't detect psychedelics. And it's ridiculously easy to grow your own psilocybin mushrooms (the spores for which are legal to purchase in all states except California, Georgia, and Idaho) if you're worried about the supply chain.

It's amazing how strongly people can have an opinion about something they have clue what they're talking about.

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/17/4853

Synopsis: no, actually the drug has a pretty powerful impact on your brain and is the main driver of the effect

Seriously, the responses in this thread are just embarrassing. It's like listening to purity-ring wearing adolescent virgins talk about sex.

Most of the people I know wouldn't think twice about dropping some l or shrooms on a weekend with some ketamine and a hit of DMT, and we all have respectable jobs and families. It's just not that big of a deal.

I'm Garrett. As stated in my quote, I was already in the library all day for the air-conditioning, and thought this would be a fun way to waste some time. My submission was the "Internet based resource retrieval system (No. 8996546)" highlighted in the article. It was honestly shocking how obvious of a patent it was, it basically just described an online yellow pages. I could find one of those before 2004, easy. Internet Archive wayback machine, away!

I -really- could have used the winnings back then, (I made my submission ~4 years ago), but hey, it all worked out in the end. I'm an SRE living in SF now, with my own apartment in a nice neighborhood. Still no AC though.

Hi

I'm one of the bigger winners, for the "Internet based resource retrieval system (No. 8996546)" patent they highlighted in the article. Probably one of the coolest things I've ever participated in; special thanks to Cloudfare for organizing such a clever competition for a such a worthy cause. I hope other companies are able to follow their example to leverage the community to help solve these kinds of problems. For generous rewards, of course ;-p

Because you reached out to them for support and you want to make sure they're only looking at what they're supposed to

It's blog posts like this that make me realize I have no idea what I'm doing. Great work on troubleshooting a complex and interesting problem.

Practice meditation long enough and you will know what a shitshow the mind is at any given second. Go even further, and you'll start to pick up on the shit-tornado the subconscious mind is.

I thought part of the fun of having a cat is the claws. I really don't understand how people could mutilate their supposed loved ones like this, it's barbaric.

"The therapist can also steer them away from the notorious “bad trips” sometimes associated with magic mushrooms."

Bad trips are where the most important breakthroughs occur and lessons are learned

What the actual fuck

It's a nitpick, but also a deal killer for me. The way Firefox behaves when you click the address bar on Android absolutely infuriates me. The way chrome immediately clears the address, and gives you buttons to either copy the current address to clipboard, share, or edit, is brilliant and makes it a joy to use. Therefore I use chrome.

Why do you think I keep coming back here?

That's a pretty reductive viewpoint. While PTSD is certainly a component of the story, it is all but a facet of the humanity and consequences of war

I really, really enjoyed this. Also I cried a little.

I use a dot grid bullet journal with multiple colored fountain pens. I find it addresses most of your concerns whilst being flexible enough to accommodate any deviation you can dream of, without any dependencies on technological solutions. It's dated, organized, consolidated, efficient, flexible, portable, with room for artistic expression, and it gets you away from your monitor and keyboard and phone.

It depends. For some contractor jobs, they need high level engineers short term and don't want to deal with the normal Google hiring process, which is expensive, difficult, and time consuming for many current employees (most technical interviews at Google are carried out by a random assortment of other engineers). In those cases, they can and will often pay equal or higher salaries to the contractor.

In my case, the equivalent job at Google definitely carried more responsibilities, and they were paid more. However, I believe Google paid my consulting company more than the FTE salary for each of us, with my company taking their cut off the top (at least, that's what I heard).

In short, it's complicated

Tell me about it. I can see now the rest of my career is going to be "how, in any way, can I make this place just one tiny step closer to what I experienced at Google?"

1. I didn't arrange it, it basically landed in my lap. I was near homeless, and I was lucky that my firm found me on some job board. I think the main qualifier they wanted was somebody knew some amount of Linux and programming, who could learn anything quickly, and didn't come with too much baggage/experience of how "things should be". If you want to apply, look up (edit).

EDIT: I'm probably forfeiting my referral bonuses by handing out that information. Better to contact me: g@yabasic.net

2. I worked almost 2 years at Google, you're damn right I do. I still work for (edit) at a different assignment to pump up my SRE experience though, so I don't know what the effect will be on future prospects. I imagine having Google, even as a contractor, looks good on a resume. In either case, the experience was invaluable.

3. This gig MADE my career. Again, I was homeless, jobless, no real experience of any worth, and now I'm making 6 figures in San Francisco with extensive knowledge of cloud computing, application design and architecture, SRE principles, etc. We'll see where it goes from here, but honestly I prefer the coding side of things, so I'll have to put in more work to learn to pass coding interviews if I want to get away from SRE/Ops work. That's something you can't learn on the job, which is really the only way I tend to learn things.

What they don't tell you is that it's basically the nerve center of Google's internal culture. If you ever want to find out what the latest news is, get a pulse on the current mood of googlers, or even to see if there's an outage somewhere, the quickest way was to check Memegen.

I worked as developer support for Google cloud (for Platinum/gold customers). I worked alongside their FTE support staff (called TSEs) and the SWEs and SREs on many GCP projects like App Engine and Spanner. I loved it, learned a lot, met a lot of great people, etc. But customer support burns you out after a while, and I figured I learned enough for a proper engineering job elsewhere, so that's what I did.

Also they took Memegen away from me. WTF.

I was a contractor at Google and I thought they treated me VERY well, with most of the perks that come with the office (food, activities, music room, gym, etc). They even let me work on a 20% project during office hours.

Then I got a new manager, new policies were enacted, they canned my project, and they took away my access to Memegen. Memegen was the last straw, so I left.

Anyway, Google had good reason to use contractors. Their hiring standards and policies makes it extremely difficult and costly to hire people, and many jobs there typically only have a retention rate of about 9-12 months, or just isn't "involved" enough to demand a FTE position, or needs to be scaled up more quickly than they can hire for. It just isn't worth it to go through the full Google process for jobs like that.

As a former GCP support rep, this is actually true. Their strict hiring practices prevented them from scaling up support along with their platform, so they had to contract with other IT companies to provide the necessary manpower. Unfortunately, that also meant that Google's support was manned by people not up to Google's own standards. This started to change over the last year when they got sick of the lackluster support from their contractors, but I still doubt they are able to get enough Google qualified engineers willing to work in customer support. It's definitely not for a lack of trying, though. The problem is that if you're good enough to pass a Google whiteboard exam, wouldn't you rather build things, rather than coach other people building things? I sure did.

You're not the only one. The daily grind of dealing with this shit on the streets and homeless/muggers on muni is giving me a noticeable rightward shift from my typically progressive politics. And I used to BE homeless!

My homeless friends in Berkeley pine about the good old days before the nuts, tweakers, dope fiends, and dirtbags started to multiply and swarm the community. If HOMELESS people are complaining about the homeless people in your city, you have a big problem.

Anecdotally, a crazy homeless lady was stabbing random people with scissors in my neighborhood last year, and I just checked up on what happened with her. Charges reduced to misdemeanors and set loose back on the streets. Meanwhile uppity rich liberals complain about police treatment of the homeless, and launch anonymous opposition to shelters and new housing development when they come to their neighborhoods. That basically sums up everything going wrong here from my perspective.

When I went from amateur Python programmer to Google Cloud developer support, I remember being completely blown away by technology and design patterns I've never heard of that goes into modern web/enterprise architecture. I had to learn it all the hard way, but these days there are great free (or mostly free) courses you can take to learn this stuff.

For Google, check out the study guides for their certifications, specifically Cloud Architect (basic overview), Cloud Developer, and Data Engineer.

https://cloud.google.com/certification/

Be sure to follow along with the recommended Coursera and Qwiklabs tutorials and do the exercises. You'll learn about all kinds of neat stuff, like scalable application design, container technology, monitoring+metrics, various types of database technologies, data pipelines (including Pub Sub messaging), SRE best practices, networking+security, and machine learning.

I currently work on AWS, and don't find it a good starting point for diving in to these things quickly, but most companies use it so it wouldn't hurt to learn I guess. I still recommend GCP over AWS to start with, as their technology is far more interesting and focused, and quicker/easier to work with.

I need to know too

Anecdotally, when I volunteered at an animal shelter, we had to undergo training to work with both the dog and feline populations. Something they taught us, and eventually witnessed ourselves, is that cats form much more complex social systems than dogs do. Dogs have the typical alpha/everyone else system, whereas cats seem to have more specialized roles in their organization. Some monitored the food rations, some were on watch at the door, some controlled certain areas or furniture, etc. They even rotated night shifts! Hard to verify experimentally, but work with them often enough and you start to notice the patterns. I think they're much smarter and more sophisticated than we give them credit for, especially when it comes to social behavior.