taylorexpander

This part is what I don’t like.

I _dont_ want my social identities linked together.

Maybe I’m the odd one, but I’m constantly making new reddit accounts. I always just generate a random username and a random password, that I don’t store because I just don’t care or want to. I have different logins for all my devices because I don’t want people associating my reddit account with my personal blog and so on.

It's because formulas have a convention, where the LHS is a single term naming the value you want, and the RHS contains the terms for values you have.

This is simply not true.

I literally just made an account today and it subscribed me to a bunch of defaults.

So why isn’t it done? I think it’s not controversial to say that the trackpads (or “trackpad experience”) on MB*s are just plain superior than anything Windows has access to.

You are severely mistaken. Window tinting is legal in AZ (resident) and a quick search tells me TX as well.

Maybe you’re thinking of the black out style tinting that you see in movies but most people tint to filter out like 5-20% light.

I’m sorry you lost your friend, but you didn’t make a mistake. You did what you could, what you thought was right. It’s not your fault that you didn’t have hindsight, and it’s not your fault that you didn’t or couldn’t know what your friend was going through.

That said, I agree with you on being persistent in helping friends who are or may be clinically depressed. Let me warn that I am not a trained medical professional, but just a person diagnosed with depression so I want to offer my insight on this being persistent thing.

For you or for anyone in a normal, rational, state of mind, if you asked me to come out and do something with you and I said no, you’re probably just thinking “Alright, I’m sure he has some good excuse. I don’t want to push him.”

For me, when I was going through my darkest times (I am now on medication and have weekly therapy sessions), my read on that situation was 100% different.

First, the excuse:

“No thanks. I’m just so busy with ____ right now. I can’t do it. Maybe next time.”

That’s even if I bothered giving an excuse. Most of the time I saw the text message and just ignored it. More on this later.

Next, the aftermath of hearing you accepting my excuse (or not following up, if I ignored you, again more on this later):

Internally: “I guess he didn’t want to hang out after all. If he really did, if he really cared about me, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He knows I’m in a bad place right now. He knows I’m having all these issues. He knows _______. Why doesn’t he care? Why doesn’t anybody care? Do I have any friends who care? Do I even have friends? What am I doing with my life? What’s the point of my miserable life?”

Now here’s the thing. You might read this and think things like “I didn’t sign up for this. Why should I have to do that? Why should I have to accommodate him so much? It’s his problem, he just needs to get his shit together.”

1. It’s not his problem. It’s not his fault. He can’t help it. His mind isn’t functioning properly. He can’t just magically get his shit together. If he could, he wouldn’t be in his situation.

2. You put up with it because you’re a good friend. If your friend had a broken leg and couldn’t leave his apartment, you go over and hang out over there because circumstances are preventing him from physically leaving. In this case, circumstances are preventing him from making rational choices, so sometimes you just need to make them for him.

I’m not advocating power of attorney or anything like that. I’m saying that when I was in my state, doing ANYTHING felt like climbing Mount Everest. Seriously. Picking out a T-shirt? I was so mentally exhausted. Being asked if I wanted to watch a movie? I might as well roll over in bed and cry instead of deciding. Which is what I did, most of the time.

Some other things from my personal experience:

- don’t offer help and suggestions and advice

I hate and hated it when my friends would ask if I tried meditating, or say maybe start running, hit a gym, etc. Yes those things all make sense, and may have been proven to work, but here’s the thing: those things all take effort, effort that I just didn’t have to give. Yes, even the simple act of “sitting down and breathing a few minutes for meditation” required a monumental amount of effort. Does it make sense? No. But depression is not rational.

What was worse, was that these advice and suggestions weren’t new to me. I’ve done the research. I’ve googled “how to not be depressed”. I know that exercise is good for me etc. You telling me makes me feel like you think I’m stupid, or that you think you’re so smart for thinking up that advice, and so on and so on. Is my reaction like this warranted? No. But again, depression is not rational.

Instead of “maybe you should go running, there’s a lot of couch to 5k apps.” You say, “hey let’s start running together, every day after work at 6pm. In 5 weeks we’ll be able to run a 5k together!”

etc

When I was recently going through a bad time (clinically depressed) I started withdraw myself from my social life. I started talking and opening up to my friends Less and lesse, because I didn’t want to bring them down with my problems. I started making up excuses to not go out with them, because I just wasn’t feeling well. When people came to me and asked me what’s up, I made up excuse after excuse of how everything is fine, I’m just stressed from this and that, I’ve just got this deadline, really don’t worry about me I’m fine.

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t fine. My brain was, in short, “broken” much like a bone is broken when you fracture it. My mind was broken after who knows how long of neglect to my mental health and well-being.

Every little thing required so much effort, that it was easier to just do nothing. Doing nothing was the most rewarding choice, but at the same time I knew that doing nothing would make the problem worse. Yet, I didn’t care. Much like a cigarette smoker might know it’ll increase their risks of cancer x fold, I didn’t care that not going out today will make me feel worse later on. That’s a problem for later on.

When my friends would ask if I wanted to go get dinner with them, I would politely say no. Every single choice that I was given, I would choose the easiest one because it gave me immediate results which made me feel better now. What I wish my friends would have done instead was not give me a choice. Tell me, “We’re going to dinner at x, and look I’m going to come over at 7pm and either we both go or we order pizza. But I’m coming over, cool?”

For me, what I needs was someone to push me. I wasn’t capable of pushing myself. I needed someone else to do it for me. More than that, I needed a swift reminder that there were people in my life that cared about me, and that I fit in and belong.

Remember that when you’re depressed your brain is literally not functioning properly.

In your mind, if you invited me to go out and do something with you and I said no, you’re probably thinking “okay well maybe he’s just not feel it now, maybe next time.”

In my mind, what was going through my head was something totally different: “I just don’t wanna go because it’s so much effort, so I’ll just say no. Wait, why is he saying that’s fine? What the f—-? Does he not care about me? Do I not matter to my friends that they can just write me off like that? Why aren’t they trying harder?”

And that thought process makes me withdraw from my friends even more. Remember: your friends mind isn’t functioning properly. It’s not his fault.

When you get some one on one time with him, the most important words you can say are some variation of

“Hey, I know times have been hard on you and I can’t even begin to imagine it. I just want you to know that I’m here for you. You don’t have to open up and talk to me, but I do care.”

Also, remember that his mind is an unstructured mess right now. One that that might help is for you to offer some structure. “Can we get dinner together every Thursday at 8pm?” You picking the time and date helps him because then he doesn’t need to think about those (and believe me, they are monumental decisions for people who are depressed) and it also gives him a sense of structure and something to look forward to every week.

In the long run, what he needs is therapy.

That example is two moves. Come on, it’s not that hard.

You might be interested in lattice Boltzmann methods. They solve complex equations (navier stokes for example) using similar rules like Life. They can also be coded in 3D.

Right, so when you buy things from Amazon you have several options:

1. Items sold by Amazon. 2. Items sold by 3rd parties and fulfilled by Amazon. 3. Items sold by 3rd parties and shipped by 3rd parties.

The problem is that items in their fulfillment centers, (1) and (2) are mixed together. Just because you buy something sold by Amazon doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be sent a counterfeit item that a 3rd party sent to amazon to use for fulfillment.

Does r/politics insight hate and literal violence?

In some languages (German for one) the common word for laptop is translated to notebook in English.

I thought I’d share this here to spread more attention to the practices of FlightSimLabs, a flight simulator software shop.

The short version is that they included an executable in their installer that when run would extract passwords saved in Chrome and presumably phone them home. Their reasoning was that this was purely for DRM reasons. They claim that this password stealing tool would not run for legit/valid serial keys.

This was only discovered by someone on reddit recently, and since this has been public the developers have claimed they’ve removed the password stealing malware from their installer. They have again made statements saying that this tool was only used against pirated copies of their software. Not once have they apologized and their users for the most part don’t seem to care.

For some reason, the ads I’m seeing on Instagram are creepily relevant for me. I just checked and literally it just shows me advertisements for furniture (I like design…) and plants (I like plants…). I’ve actually bought a plant related thing from one of them, and the ads that show up actually do make me stop and look at them.

On the other hand, it’s also showing me advertisements for watches. I have no idea why, because I hate wearing watches and I’ve definitely never googled for watches before.

I’ve never used IRC before, so I’m honestly curious, what features does IRC have that Slack(/Discord) don’t or can’t have through extensions like bots and plugins?

I’m a researcher and I also think reddit and upvotes/karma is trash.

Why should I use your service?

Good that thing national laboratories and research in general don’t have to show profitability then. Because otherwise we’d get nothing done and funded due to the likes of people like you.

That’s a silly take.

I’ve hidden friends before who I have close relationships with, simply because the content they post is trash:

- reshares of “inspirational” and “motivational” memes - post frequency too high - constantly posting pictures of their kids - unfortunately a close aunt is into MLM and I can’t just unfriend her without causing drama - generally only posting things I don’t care for enough to see like guns, cars, etc

Like, just because we are friends, doesn’t mean we have to share the same interests nor does it mean I want to hear everything you have to say on every topic.

I think this highlights how out of touch you (and the Facebook developers) are.

I’ve had a Facebook account since the days of needing a edu email account to register. During my college years Facebook was a very important thing and all of my friends were very active and it was nice being able to see what people were up to and doing.

Over time Facebook started optimizing away to whatever it is now. I’ve deleted the Facebook app because it’s simply garbage. My friends don’t really post personal things anymore (most don’t even post anything anymore) and the influx of users and this “retweet” culture has made it so my Facebook feed is essentially spam. Why should I have to bother and waste time to curate what I see? Why should I have to hide so many individual pages?

Furthermore, the recent(?) addition of these marketplaces made it just way worse. My news feed activity is constantly telling me about new things for sale here and I just don’t care. I thought I’ve disabled these notifications but apparently I haven’t because they still show up. To be honest I don’t even know how to disable these messages because everything is hidden under 20 layers of options.

Not to mention the whole age/generation issue:

I’m 30, and my sister is 20. I’m at that age where I don’t really meet a lot of new people anymore, so my friends list has been very stagnant. I really just keep a Facebook profile just to let the occasional old friend/family contact me or find me. My sister and her friends look at Facebook and think it’s something old people use. For her everything is Snapchat.

It’s Sarajevo and this blog post is about the only thing I can find on this with quick google searches, and you said it yourself that you’re not a lawyer, so I really think you’re just misunderstanding something and are making a big deal out of nothing.

Well, in terms of high performance computing, IBM makes the BlueGene series of supercomputers. These computers currently occupy the #4 and #9 on the Top500…

Who are you to tell other people how to live and what they can and can't enjoy?

Does this only affect the Kazakh language or also the Russian language they speak there? I know a small handful of people from Kazakhstan, who identify as "Kazakh" nationally but as "Russian" ethnically, and they only speak Russian (+ English). The general response about Kazakh the language I remember is that they learned it at school, but as they lived in a heavily Russian speaking area they just never cared much about Kazakh and instead focused more on English when they got the chance.

Hi,

As someone who grew up in southwestern US in the desert, I absolutely detest sunlight and sunny days and the concept of a seemingly universal "nice weather" description meaning 80F and sunny or whatever it means to the majority of people.

Unlike you though I don't have hypothyroidism (that i know of but I'm quite sure I'm healthy), and I have never been diagnosed or claim to have: depression, social anxiety, etc.

It's just that the idea of being outside in the sun isn't a pleasant idea for me at all. I don't know about you and most others, but growing up where I did there was no such thing as "playing outside" when I was younger because it was always like 110+F every single day of summer, which was like half the year. The 3 months of winter it was cooler at around maybe 60F in the mornings maybe, to 80-90F in the day, or something like that. In all seasons it was sunny, about 99% of the time and this is not hyperbole. It hardly ever rained, it hardly ever got cloudy, it hardly ever did anything except "sunny and blazing hot" to "sunny and mildly hot."

As a teenager my instincts were: "I'm in my air conditioned house right now, I need to walk super duper fast to get to my car and start it up and turn the AC on full blast, then I need to drive to the store/school/work and prepare myself to step outside back into the 110F heat and walk as fast as I can to get back inside."

As an adult noped at the thought of doing this my whole life and moved away.

Today I live in the PNW region where it supposedly rains all the time. It doesn't, or at least not like I thought. Unlike my peers and coworkers I love it when the weather is "awful." The rain literally doesn't bother me: grab a rain coat. The snow when it happens doesn't bother me because surprise I love being cold. I go running in the snow in the mornings---in shorts. I don't understand the people running in tights. Why would you want to be warm? Is my thought.

I love working in the winter, and I'm absolutely more productive. I LIKE waking up when it's dark, going to work when the dark, and I don't MIND leaving work when it's dark.

I HATE waking up when it's light, and I HATE getting to work when it's light because I feel like I'm so late. Despite me getting in to work at 7am well before anyone else.

During grad school I spent one semester in Norway for an internship, in the winter. People told me oh it's gonna be awful, you're not gonna see the sun. TLDR, I survived, and I would love to live in that environment but just not in Norway (nothing against that country, id rather prefer to live in the PNW where at minimal the culture is "American" and the language is English).

All through my adult life I have been "fighting" with friends and family who tell me "it's just a phase, you'll hate the snow soon enough." Except, I left the southwest when I was 18. I'm 31 now. My feelings and thoughts on this still haven't changed.

Perhaps it's all in my mind. Sometimes I joke about how my childhood in the desert scared me for life and now these are all "repressed feelings." Either way I don't care. I don't like being outside in the sun, I don't like working in the sun, I don't like sunlight. I prefer the rain, clouds, snow, "awful terrible depressing weather." I wake up and look out the window and see it's rainy and overcast and I'm in a much better mood than if my room is all lit up from the sunlight.

There is actually a term used in the field by engineers and scientists: "delta v." You might have heard Musk mention it a few times in his talks.

It's a measure of change in velocity (hence the delta… v…, and in mathematical terms is literally written with the symbol delta) required to reach or escape x orbit.

For example you need a delta v of approx 9.3 km/s to go from Earth to LEO. From LEO to GEO you'd need a delta v of roughly half of that. Engineers in this sense would talk about a total delta v budget of ~13 km/s and some change to achieve Earth to GEO.

The question is then how do you design a rocket that can produce those numbers? Higher delta v requirements means higher mass requirements. You'd need more propellant to produce that thrust, and more structure to house it and hardware to control it. At some point it simply doesn't work anymore because it becomes counter intuitive to keep adding more mass.

Enter the concept of staging. Staging allows you to discard your useless mass after it's done it's job. For example you might need 9.3 km/s to achieve LEO, but you might also know it's not a linear relationship so that you need more of that upfront and less of it later. In that case, rocket engineers simply designed around that and created heavy first lift stages to produce the bulk of that delta v, and then discarding the heavy structure and hardware after the propellant has been exhausted.

I tried reading your 27 page long essay but got bored a couple pages in and then skimmed the rest. After that I looked at the examples in the repository.

My only question is: why? Seriously, what problem are you trying to solve here?

Your 27 page long essay was useless in conveying that to me because it was written overly explicit and seems to have too much background but not really any content.

Looking at the examples I just don't see a point. I'm a scientist. I work with PDEs. You even mentioned one of the software I work with in your paper.

Nothing you have written explains to me why I should decide to write e.g.:

nabla v = 0

In whatever notation it is you are trying to sell me.

So please explain.