glennonymous

Indeed. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/by the false azure in the windowpane...

102. Eschew advice books.

I sent an unsolicited 25 page paper about memes that I wrote, as just some (fairly pretentious!) guy without a college degree, to Professor Dennett, in the early oughts. And he just went ahead and read the thing and gave me very kind feedback on it.

I'm sure he was a busy person, and didn't have any obligation to respond to me, at all. It touched me deeply. What a generous and gracious soul he was.

I mean these words in a non-supernatural way, of course. :-D A toast to Mr. Dennett's wonderful memory.

A couple of thoughts: I’m unable to go back with my browser’s ’Back’ key. not being able to revisit an activity reduces the site’s usefulness. Also, I’d recommend adding a feature that lets users add activities.

Seems to be more or less impossible to play on my iPhone.

There’s an additional factor to this that the “leaving your AirPods in when talking to someone is rude” crowd don’t realize: AirPods are actually very effective hearing aids. (https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/study-airpods-pro-ar...)

This is how I use them. I have moderate hearing impairment and a modest budget, and have been hesitant to plunk down thousands of dollars for decent hearing aids. When I realized the $250 earphones I already had were really good hearing aids, and figured out how to set them up that way, it was life-transforming.

I do try to take a minute to explain to people that my AirPods help me to hear, when I think about it. But if you suffer from stuffy judgments that people who wear AirPods are inconsiderate a-holes, you might want to think twice about that.

I think this is a misunderstanding. The EU bans if there is a possible hazard; the US bans based on calculated risk. While it’s possible (but unlikely) there could be cases in which the EU rules are safer, the EU rules also result in harmful, expensive absurdities such as banning GMOs.

Am I the only person who hates it when people say “anyways” when they mean “anyway”?

Creative people suffer from a lack of neural plasticity? Interesting…

For people familiar with Scheper’s work: What are the “three challenges” he refers to in the hero’s journey?

I haven’t heard anyone express this before, but when it comes to my death and the deaths of others, I take comfort in the idea of the Block Universe. On the Block Universe concept, time isn’t real in the way we think about it—everything that ever happened or will happen exists in a timeless, eternal block of spacetime. (This video by Sabine Hossenfelder explains it nicely: https://youtu.be/GwzN5YwMzv0.)

If this is true, then our lives are eternal—not in the way envisioned by religious people, but eternal in a very real sense. It’s true that I am finite in time in exactly the same way that I’m finite in space, but just as I don’t lament the fact that my body isn’t infinitely large, I shouldn’t lament the fact that my life doesn’t extend through all of time. (I wouldn’t mind living for a lot longer, but that’s a different matter :-D.)

I realize this conception of immortality will be too abstract to provide any consolation to many people. But ideas of an afterlife or reincarnation are abstract, too. This one at least has the advantage, to my mind, of being plausible.

It’s not that I once was not, then I was, and after I die I will be no more. My life, my presence, this experience—it’s eternal and ever-present.

Well, I followed this method and the onions took 3 hours to get to deep brown. This leads me to “Hofstader’s Law of Caramelized Onions:” Onions always take 3 times as long to caramelize as you think they’re going to take, even when you take Hostader’s Law into account.

This is the exact opposite of my experience. As a chronically depressed person, my inner voice is pretty much my enemy. I listen to podcasts to drown it out. I mostly listen to podcasts that soothe me, that I have no need to listen to every word that’s said. This works even when I listen to a podcast with hosts’ banter I enjoy on such a low volume I can’t follow what’s being said, at all. I do this quite often, in fact. I listen to podcasts, when I’m not working, probably 75% of the time. I estimate it’s improved my mood by a similar percentage.

+1. Also writing. WRT reading: I think the trick is that being absorbed in something mitigates boredom and existential ennui. And for me, the effect is most pronounced when I read something difficult, i.e. encyclopedic novels (Gravity’s Rainbow, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway) or difficult philosophical books (Gödel, Escher, Bach or Being And Time).

Greenland is surprisingly good, and scandalously overlooked: https://www.google.com/search?q=greenland+movie&ie=UTF-8&oe=...

It’s time to put this tired myth to bed. The truth is that HFCS and table sugar are virtually identical, and the health effects of consuming either are the same.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/high-fructose-corn-syru...

Oh come on. Surely you can think of a few things other than iPhones and malaria medicine we have, that were completely unavailable to kings and queens of old. (Although “smart phones” admittedly encompasses a LOT of things.) How about air conditioning and central heating? Modern dentistry and medicine of all sorts? Refrigeration? Air travel? The light bulb? A much better than king-sized variety of entertainment options on demand? Indoor plumbing, for God’s sake?

Or what if it’s a kite, or a piece of trash blowing in the wind, or a paper airplane, or…

I would like to read the book and I’m sure it’s good. But whenever a character says “does it not?” I want to soak the book in gasoline and light it on fire.

I live in Silicon Valley. I went to one of the few clinics covered by my insurance, and the dentist spoke in heavily accented English I could barely understand, exacerbated by wearing a mask and a face guard. They showed me my X-rays and told me “something something cavity something something” and had me make an appointment for a filling. I came back and got the filling, then they told me to make another appointment for another filling. This happened eleven times. Eleven fillings after not having received one filling in the previous 20 years.

For my next checkup, I searched and searched for a dentist who spoke in unaccented English I could clearly understand. He checked my teeth and cheerfully told me I needed to have all my lower front teeth removed and a bridge implant. Out of pocket cost: $30,000.

I couldn’t possibly afford this and decided to get a second opinion. The problem is, my insurance only covers one checkup every 6 months. In the meantime I agonized over how I would possibly pay for my extensive dental work, and I managed to find another dentist with whom I could communicate.

I asked this dentist if I needed the $30,000 procedure and she scoffed!

I was instantly furious and gave the Rolls Royce doctor bad reviews on Yelp and Google Maps. I’ve been getting a real-life lesson on the practices described in the article. I plan on sharing it with everyone I know.

I went to a dev boot camp (Fullstack Academy) in my 50s, took a job in Silicon Valley, moved my family out here from NYC, leaving a career as an advertising creative that was lucrative and high-status but hateful to me.

Moving out here was a gigantic fail that basically ruined my health and my life. It’s been heartbreaking.

Much of the blame for that is mine, and not all of it is due to ageism. But I always find it shocking that people minimize ageism, give excuses for it (older people have families and therefore don’t want to work as many hours etc.), or flat-out deny it exists.

Shortly after I arrived here, my boss moved on to another job, leaving me with a new boss in his mid-20s. This new boss made no secret that he hated older people. He made jokes about older workers in staff meetings that, were he to make such jokes about women or people of color, he would have been subject to lawsuits that would have bankrupted him and the company.

After I was laid off, I had the lovely experience, over and over again, of seeing young interviewers’ faces freeze into going-thru-the-motions masks as soon as they saw that I was middle-aged.

Once I even had the bitter experience of having the 45-old-ish hiring manager phone me on the drive home, telling me she wanted to hire me but could not go against the consensus of her barely post-adolescent staff.

Again: Much of my situation is my own fault. I had generally bought into the bullshit 70’s fallacy that “if you believe in yourself you can do anything you want to,” bolstered by the fact that (being young and reasonably talented) I mostly to that point had done anything I wanted to.

Having said that: Young people are bigoted against old people, regardless of older peoples’ abilities or willingness to work. It has always been thus. And it is worse in tech than any other profession (including advertising!!!), and worse in SV than any other place.

Upon five more minutes’ consideration, I thought of several reasons why this would probably not imply either of the things I suggested it might imply. But my larger question is: What, if any, would be the larger cosmological implications of this discovery?

Not a scientist. But if this is true, would it imply that A) the universe is younger than we thought, or B) there was a much longer time between the Big Bang and the formation of the first stars? Seems to have very major cosmological implications.

The many skeptical comments on this thread are well founded, however the idea that video games positively correlate with well-being seems to resonate with my own experience. When I have downtime nowadays, I often tune out by listening to podcasts while playing video games on my phone. I jokingly refer to this with my wife as “dial tone mode”. This doesn’t take the place of reading; I read a lot of articles and books, both fiction and non-fiction. I reckon I read much more since I acquired a smart phone and basically carry a library in my pocket FWIW. But I don’t think reading serves the same function as dial tone mode. I suffer from depression and anxiety. When I’m not reading, I don’t usually sit around and have wonderful ideas. Instead, I listen to the often nasty voices in my head telling me there’s something terribly wrong with me and my life. This is especially true if I’m stressed out. Dial tone mode feels therapeutic to me, and iPhone video games are a part of that. I’m quite aware I could be wrong, even about my interpretation of my own experience. But so it seems to me.

I naively moved from New York to Silicon Valley when I was 52. Not saying there isn’t age discrimination in NYC, but here it’s a nightmare.

The drop in my interview track record since my 40s is stark. 2 years ago, after 6 months during which I failed to get 6 jobs for which I interviewed, I made it to the final round for a position at a startup and was subjected to the usual all-day grilling. The CEO was an older man and the hiring manager was in her late 40s, but all the other interviewers were in their early 20s. I left convinced I had nailed the interview and feeling optimistic. On the way home, the hiring manager, bless her soul, took the unusual step of calling to tell me the team had overruled her own enthusiasm for hiring me and she felt terrible about it. Without saying it in so many words, she made it plain it was because of my age.

The age discrimination here extends beyond getting hired. I’ve been subject to cruel jokes and shunning in the workplace that, were I in another disenfranchised group, would be labeled workplace harassment and likely subject to strong discouragement by management at the very least.

Some people in these comments ask the source of the age discrimination as if they are skeptical and astonished, Astonished!! such a thing could be going on. They look for a rational explanation. Here’s the explanation: we are tribal animals. From young people’s perspective, they are “Us” and we olds are “Them.”

Sometimes young people are conscious of their hostility toward us and sometimes not, but that’s it. It requires no explanation more than that.

It’s traumatic to be subjected to treatment like this, to the point I have stopped looking for a job. Humans are not built to tolerate constant social rejection, and it’s more important for me to be alive than to be wealthy. I’ve withdrawn from the tech world and started a business that will not make me and my family wealthy, but will support us, albeit with modest means.

I hate the fact that I have become a bitter old man at 57!! I hate that Silicon Valley has come to this!!

I’m working through my bitterness and will get over it someday. And I will have the good fortune to leave this dystopia.

In my case, I experienced high anxiety no matter what strain I smoked, and I smoked a wide variety of different strains.

I quit because, among other reasons, cannabis causes me to experience major anxiety (AKA “paranoia”). I’m surprised more people don’t complain of this side effect.

I also suffer from Bipolar II, and cannabis was a contributing factor to an episode of hypomania with extremely life-damaging effects.

And a robot Kevin Spacey to prevent the clones from revolting.

I had a drinking habit very similar to yours, and greatly reduced my drinking with the help of marijuana. Marijuana has the distinct advantage of not destroying my body in the same way alcohol does, and I find that it doesn't reduce my inhibitions as much as alcohol does. I regard this as a harm reduction strategy.