blunte

Joined 13 years ago

Karma
9,064
Submissions
2,412
Member since
May 15
To the good HN readers, I wish you well. To the bad ones, and the shadow-banners, fuck off and don't die, but live with the reality you have cultivated.

I leave now, and in the small scheme it is irrelevant. In the grand scheme it is also irrelevant because there are truly deadly scenarios on the near horizon.

---

It seems I am shadow-banned, but not with balls. It's more a passive aggressive thing where I post occasionally and get a response "you are posting too fast, slow down". Not true. Be honest. If you don't like my content, own up to it. And explain how I gained the karma I have if my content is sh*t.

HN is becoming like every other corporate money interest. It is unwilling to pay for human consideration, and instead it exists to promote goals that favor investors of one sort or another.

Before HN I had many years on slashdot, and 186k karma. Either I'm exceptually influential, or sometimes stuff I say has value. I don't get paid to be on HN, and frankly my reputation here is irrelevant. When I say something, it's because I have a thought or opinion or question that I hope to get feedback on from other thinkers. If HN is no longer a place for thinkers, then it can fk off and die like slashdot and digg. Dinoaurs die. They may make bank, but they ultimately die as losers. Don't be a loser. Be a team player, a participant in humanity; be a change that you want to see.

Don't allow spammers to submit 10+ stories per day that favor Russia or US right wing bs. Or maybe do that, and life as we know it lasts 20 or 100 years less than perhaps it could if we tried to correct things. But hey, if you can earn some money and live large and die, who cares right? Just don't have any kids, because they're going to bear the burden of your sh*tty choices.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
Did you bother to look at the poster's submissions? It's not "thought policing". It is intent-awareness.
Comment · 4 years ago
That's unfortunate. The submission page says link or text, and I wanted to say something.

Thank you for the suggestion!

Comment · 4 years ago
Perhaps because ffmpeg and other swiss army knife tools can do so many useful things.
Comment · 4 years ago
For dev-types and general tinker-problemsolver types, that's assumed.

I can't count how many things I've made, most of which I abandoned after I stopped needing them. Sometimes I just make a one line shell script that uses a command line util, and other cases I'll write a bigger "script" (higher level programming language" which often still leverages command line tools.

Comment · 4 years ago
What's not clear to me is whether other participants of the meeting are aware of my sound while my mic is "muted".

I'm far less concerned about the videoconference system hearing me than my other meeting participants. This morning during a boring company-wide meeting I accidentally fell asleep (it was an early morning meeting and I was still in bed!)

All that said, it should really be a right of consumers that audio and video capture devices have a physical on/off switch.

Comment · 4 years ago
It's a question of what you live for and where you find your worth. If you live for other people, and you find your worth in them, then you will direct your path accordingly.

If you find your worth from within, or perhaps from without in a very broad sense (making something big that the world needs/wants/admires), then 1:1 is not so important.

Comment · 4 years ago
Maybe this is my pessimistic view, but most relationships don't last. Some of the ones that do last only because of complacency or discipline (but they arguably should dissolve).

Conscious memory seems to favor the positives. Unconscious memory favors the negatives. If you quickly raise your hand near a person who has been physically abused a child, even as an adult they may instinctively recoil. But if you ask someone about their lost relationship, they will often speak of the great things of their partner, ignoring the (perhaps incomprehensible or inarticulable) negatives.

Life is hopefully quite long. Relationships involve 2 (+?) people. During one's life, one hopefully changes a lot. Picture vectors in two dimensions. People who pair up are vectors that cross at one moment (brief) or run somewhat parallel for a period. Try as we might, adjusting our trajectories, it's practically impossible to maintain a parallel path without giving up some or all of our own development.

So realistically in our modern times, relationships are based on a period of relatively parallel trajectories. And when the distance between those vectors becomes to great, it's time to stop trying to maintain a connection. That involves some feelings of sadness, but it also offers new possibilities.

Comment · 4 years ago
There's really a lot in this essay, and I'll forget or get before before I provide all the commentary I might want to.

> But she never did. She never agreed.

Your rights end where mine begin. And by that, I mean "my intolerance trumps whatever your opinion is".

That means the most flexible people, often the most rational, have to accept the intolerance and lack of flexibility of others to coexist.

I don't like my kitchen counter cleaned with a rag that becomes dirty upon first use and then adds bacteria on multiple following uses. I would rather the counter keep only the germs it currently has. Or better yet, I would prefer it be cleaned with a fresh towel or even light detergent and very hot water.

I don't like the toothpaste bottle to be buried in a basket under my wife's nightly consumables, such that when I go to bed later I have to dig through a lot of stuff to find the toothpaste. I would rather the bottle be left on the counter where both people can find it. But that bottle on the counter is a no-no. So I bend, but it pushes me a little more away every night.

> It was about consideration

I do not believe that consideration was the issue with TFA's wife. TFA had valid reasons for leaving a glass on the counter. Wife lacked consideration and pragmatism.

As an alien to earth, I realize my perspective may be warped. But it makes sense to me.

And as such, I think the problem with most relationships is ignorance and lack of ability to reason.

Reasons people feel how they feel:

- there is a practical time/money/pain cost between the alternatives

- there is a habit which is hard to change

- there is a behavior with no forethought and no post-evaluation

Some things have assessable costs. I could come up with any number of examples, but one very silly example would be parking. If I choose to park behind someone on a driveway instead of beside or on the street, it will take the starting and moving of my car (time, fuel, and minor wear and tear cost) to move my car out of the way so they can leave. Now in the larger consideration, perhaps there is no side-by-side room, and the street option is risky. Then it's a matter of risk balancing and personal time cost.

Some things are just habits, often learned from our upbringing. Someone who grows up with a particular scarcity will be extra sensitive to waste on that resource. Even when the resource is no longer restricted (what's the right word I'm looking for?), the habit remains. "Don't use so much water!". "Yes, but it takes 60 seconds for the hot water to reach the faucet, and proper washing requires (debatable) water temperature." Or "nothing should be left on the counter", so the toothpaste goes into a bin beneath many other things. So whomever comes next to brush must dig for the toothpaste. Amusingly (passively-aggressively) my solution to the toothpaste problem was to buy a freaking lot of them and get a new one each night, allowing them to pile up.

Finally, there are just behaviors we learned as kids before we had reason. Some things must be done a very specific way, and other things can be done any way. Unfortunately, two people from different families will have different combinations of specific and any. Then it comes down to realization of the behavior and rational analysis of the pros and cons, and perhaps then the alternatives.

Comment · 4 years ago
Never a dull moment! Some good laughs on several of those :). def avoid the snakes!
Comment · 4 years ago
These would typically be short, time-boxed engagements (like one or two hours or less).

For example, some years ago I was trying to setup a Stellar (cryptocurrency) node, but I was having some problems with configuration. I asked on the Stellar slack or discord group and found someone who was willing to help. We negotiated $100/hr, and then we arranged a time to meet online. In the end, I paid for 1.5 hours of time, and it was well worth it. If he had solved my problem in 5 minutes, I would have still paid for a minimum 1 hour; win-win.

It seems like there could be a matchmaking service to facilitate exchanges like this. It's a bit like how you can go to stackoverflow, and if you happen to see a question you know the answer to but which has no answers, you may choose to take 5 minutes (for free!) and answer it.

In this case, however, requests would expire after a specified time. Solution providers could setup notifications for certain topics so they know when there's a need for their expertise.

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