blacksmithgu

I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.

I want to learn how to sleep well again. The difference in how I feel when sleep deprived versus fully rested is staggering.

Everything is peak software. Extremely fast, can be bound to a global keybind to bring up anywhere. I use it so often now that I forget to recommend it to people sometimes.

People would turn to games and other forms of escapism even if the governments were stable and honest and the churches preached only love and acceptance. Reality cannot compete with the sense of progress, exoticness, and control that games offer.

The titan submersible made for good entertainment while the migrant ship did not. This isn't a grand moral failing, it's just business.

I'm sure people have thought about it, it's just hard, annoying, and asking a lot of mostly unpaid OSS contributors. Many mod developers are high school / college aged.

Sandboxing Java code running in process requires ugly and obscure security APIs and restricts you to having to have a common modding API (Forge). Many mods use bytecode patching and would be broken completely.

Individual contributor means people who directly write code (individuals who contribute), as opposed to people who manage (managers and project managers).

Being social nowadays is like exercise - it not longer naturally happens frequently in our lives and so we have to consciously choose to do it. Also like exercise, it seems impossible when you start and takes months of effort to really feel comfortable about it.

Given only ~25% of the US population exercises regularly, this bodes poorly for actively being social. I suspect we need to "artificially" engineer living conditions to push people together naturally.

Violent crime in general is dominated by men who have faced "major life stressors"; it's just a fact of life that is unlikely to ever change. Men are much more likely to react to heavy stress violently, and struggle to both find and accept help.

Finding men who may be going down a dark path is a good first step, but genuinely helping such individuals (beyond trite therapy) is challenging. I suspect the problem is only going to get worse as society becomes more and more isolating.

$10000/video seems crazy to me, but it makes sense if each video is averaging 10M views for ad-friendly content.

It'd be interesting to see how many Youtube channels make it to this size, and if there is anything that differentiates successful channels from obscure ones (beyond quality).

Speak to more humans.

ChatGPT could probably pass most FAANG programming interviews - it's successfully done linked list inversion, binary tree searches, dynamic programming like knapsack, and will even do program design if you ask it how to design a data structure or class.

CSV, for all it's faults, is probably the closest thing we have to a "universal 2d table format you can import anywhere."

I messed up the wording on the above comment - I'm only skeptical of all the "performative charity" that you see on social medial.

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or simply the "frequency illusion". Or maybe just dumb luck :)