MrBingley

Joined 11 years ago

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497

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Apr 18

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Comment · 10 months ago

I am going to disagree with almost all of the advice about studying abroad or joining a club. Those are well-intended, but they are addressing the symptoms, not the cause. Judging from these descriptions:

> I’m socially anxious and keep to myself

> small talk tends to bore me

> it’s exhausting always having to text them to hang out, if I don’t then we never talk again

It's highly possible that you have undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. I say this because I am reading a book right now about ASD[0] and a lot of this is ringing true, especially the part about being confused why friends are dropping you. Speak to a psychologist and see what they think (or read the book first, and then speak to them). I am 30 now and am just cluing in that I might be on the spectrum, and oh boy do I wish I had caught it when I was younger. (It's also possible that you don't have ASD but some other condition like avoidant personality disorder, but whatever it is, it is so much easier to solve it once you've figured it out.)

[0]: https://www.isthisautism.com/

Comment · 4 years ago

> life-changing generational wealth

By that measure, the people who had their life savings in FTX (and Celsius and Luna before that) have certainly succeeded.

Investing in total-market index funds is the single best strategy for the average investor. (In fact it's so good there's a proof! [1]) If you invested $10000 in the total US market in 1992 (30 years ago) and never touched it again, your inflation-adjusted balance today would be $72452 [2]. That's an insane 7x of real growth that requires absolutely no effort on your part. Even if you did a more conservative mix of 60% stock and 40% bond (VBMFX) you would have 4.5x real growth.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

[2] https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio

Comment · 5 years ago

Recently I've been reading Vasily Grossman's A Writer At War, which is a collection of his journals from the Eastern Front, and the depths of Stalin's brutality are staggering. In the Battle of Stalingrad he forbade that any citizens flee the city since he thought it would motivate the troops, and special battalions were set up behind the front line to shoot any who retreated. In the battle itself Soviet snipers targeted the German water carriers, and so the Germans bribed children with food to fetch water for them, who were promptly shot since any collaboration with the enemy was punished with death.

Comment · 7 years ago

I understand and perhaps admire the GNU project's insistence on being blob-free, but that also means Guix won't run out of the box on 99% of all people's computers. The options are buy (old) hardware that doesn't need blobs (which sometimes isn't even possible), or compile the default kernel to include the binary firmware yourself (which the Guix documentation won't explain for ideological reasons). Both of these will sadly limit the appeal of this distribution to enthusiasts-only, which is unfortunate since Guix probably has the most advanced package manager of any Linux system.

Comment · 7 years ago

Apple only cares about privacy insomuch as it makes them money. In the West privacy is marketable, and in China it's not. It's as simple as that.

Comment · 7 years ago

The Turris Omnia and soon-to-be Turris Mox are the only ones that I'm aware of. I know Linksys has a special line of WRT "open source ready" routers that are supposedly OpenWRT compatible, but the Amazon reviews are completely trash. They're a little more pricey, but my next router will be a Turris.

https://www.turris.cz/en/turris-omnia/

Comment · 7 years ago

> From a public relations standpoint, Apple had always been on the side of privacy advocates and civil libertarians.

Oh give me a break. Apple only cares about American user privacy, and only then because it aligns with their business interests. Where is the oh-so-noble Tim Cook protesting the heinous civil rights and privacy violations in the business they do in China? Nowhere. Apple only cares about user privacy so much as it makes them money - in the US that means resisting the government, and in China it means hopping into bed with Big Daddy Xi.

Edit: For example, Snowden leaked an NSA slide saying that Apple had given in to cooperate with Prism, but Apple denied-denied-denied as soon as the news broke. It was only post-Snowden, when privacy could be monetized, that Apple suddenly started to care.