asymptosis

lol, this was obviously posted by a woman who wants other women to throw themselves under a bus.

The claim is that women can help themselves by simultaneously failing to acknowledge a boss's power, while also making the female assistant feel awkward.

It is rather similar to the joke about how you can walk into an army base and gain authority by referring to every private as captain: all you will do is single yourself out as someone who doesn't understand how things work around here.

If I was the female CEO of a company and I had a male assistant, and another male employee treated my assistant as equal to myself because of solidarity something something, I would stomp them both into the ground. Don't expect to be treated differently just because the sexes happen to reverse.

+1 to you because I hadn't come across this concept before and it seems like a useful thing to have in the back of my mind.

I've also got a couple of thousand. I already had about a thousand by my early 20s. I was an avid reader as a kid. I'm in my 40s now. I still like to read, but there are so many more distractions these days compared to 20 years ago. So, the rate of book acquisition has slowed down. When I was a kid, I read a couple of books per week. (And not just YA, I've been reading adult-level books since I was 10.)

My library is about a 50/50 split between fiction and non-fiction. I like speculative fiction (scifi/horror/fantasy and their intermixings such as weird fiction), with a smaller percentage made up of thrillers, comedy, dramas, and classic literature such as you might cover in an undergrad English Lit degree.

The non-fiction covers just about everything: physics, biology, mathematics, philosophy, history, the arts, finance, computing, politics, religion and the occult, and roleplaying game rulebooks. (Well, maybe rpgs are fiction, but it feels like non-fiction because they are more for rules reference than because of the great prose inside.)

I've read almost all the fiction, except for about a dozen in a pile which I'm still working through (I did a bulk buy last year and it's taking time.) The percentage of unread non-fiction is a bit higher, mainly because I don't have as much patience/time as when I was younger. It's a lot easier to set aside an hour for fiction before going to sleep at night; reading non-fiction at that time would just give me insomnia.

Hey, thanks for replying, your answer is excellent :)

Regarding the upright stance things, how do you see Alex the African Grey Parrot evolving towards becoming a spacefaring species without going towards an upright stance? He's smart, but he'll need to get smarter.

Regarding the upright stance thing, if you read again you'll notice that I qualified my assertion with "non-marine". Once we already ruled out the idea of marine organisms becoming spacefaring, there's no point arguing about things like whether giant squids can be spacefaring.

Naturally, I haven't answered your every point, because you made some valid points.

Quiet, heretic! Who let this one in here to disrupt the omnicogitations of the vimniarchs!?

Thanks for the pointer. I guess I was more thinking about the culture involved in explicitly denouncing a from-source build. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

I'm intrigued by this. However -- and this is probably a cultural thing with me being an old-timey unix guy who likes to build things from scratch -- I have a point of confusion.

If you choose Run A Server, it suggests two main options: Ansible or Docker. It specifically warns against "from scratch".

When I'm developing software, I want people to be building it from scratch. If someone likes something I made enough that they want to take it and build a docker or ansible thing out of it ... okay, that's flattering, albeit a little confusing, and it's not my default.

And I probably wouldn't agree to support those third-party ansible/docker things which someone else felt the need to create.

What happened to rolling a versioned tarball that you can chuck in opt or wherever and point nginx at it? Eg, if I knew I could pull in versions of lemmy server through my package manager, I'd be totally trying it out as my side-project this weekend.

We're talking about fiction. If you can't recognize it as technology or civilization, how do you plan to write about it?

As for combustion, indeed, other planets may not have it. So how do you propose that they would start to develop a technology which would lead to building spaceships?

> Because primates are a universal deterministic outcome of evolution on all worlds

In all fairness, if you think of the constraints required for a species to become space-faring, you're going to be hard-pressed to make it work with an organism which isn't at least a bit like us.

1. You can't be a marine organism, because developing advanced technology requires combustion, and water isn't something you want to be carting into space with you.

2. You need a musculoskeletal system which can support a large brain. For non-marine organisms, this implies something with a big head on top of an upright stance.

3. Having a surplus of limbs is contraindicated for large organisms. Large limbs are expensive to build, and larger organisms are more constrained by gravity than surface tension, which makes multiple limbs less useful.

4. You need appendages for manipulating tools, and voices to debate and share ideas.

5. To develop non-trivial intelligence, you need to be multicellular, and multicellular organisms need to be able to reproduce. So, there is probably going to be sex involved, along with all the complexity that goes along with that, such as sexual competition and selection, caring for the young, and all the politics that arise from these kinds of interactions.

Putting these constraints together, you don't have too many options for aliens which are both realistic and interesting enough to build a story around. Your aliens are either:

* Bipedal politickers.

* Robots.

* Not capable of building something we would recognize as technology or civilization.

The worst part for me is, it's the back of my head, where I can't see it. To a thousand other people, I'm a guy with a bald spot a mile wide, and to me in the mirror, it's like, oh, I need to run some clippers over this golliwog do before people think I'm a hippy.

One day I'll replace my pattern of scalp growth with a permanent base 64 underscore, and then everyone will be happy.

I don't think you're being clear on all the details. You say this:

> I just want to validate one user.

This is important enough to you that you say it multiple times.

And yet, if I have just a single user, I can validate them easily: we agree on terms for exchanging auth info as a one-off, job done. I might agree to meet them in person and they show me their driver's license, or whatever. The details are irrelevant: we just use whatever we agree verifies this person.

I think that, just perhaps, you might have more than one user, and you're trying to scale this.

So, where are the details?

How much are you trying to scale, and what are the constraints around privacy and so forth.

You can't just say "I want a cheap perfect auth system with no constraints except for some hidden constraints which I'll explain later."

Sorry if it came across as a put down. I was more questioning the use of language around calling people ignorant for not knowing how base64 works.

I thought if you're older than 16 (even in their 40s like I am), being called 16 again could just amuse you. After all, it's not really relevant to my point.

My point is: we all start somewhere. Think twice before belittling the ignorant; either educate them or ignore them.

Where are you putting your self value if you belittle the ignorant while doing nothing to uplift them?

Arguing with people who are trying to tell you how to market better isn't going to help you market better. Quite the opposite.

Well, if you're only 16, that would have been 4 years ago. Right about the time I learned about base64 as a guy in his late 30s who didn't have a computer science background.

We all start ignorant.

Interesting idea about the underscore, I'll try to keep that in mind.

Nice to learn about the Book of Proof. I usually suggest my students read (or at least have a look through) Velleman's "How To Prove It". Book of Proof could be a good competitor to that recommendation.