daoist_shaman

Hey buddy. I suffer from a remitting/relapsing autoimmune disease called UC that has me urgently sprinting to the toilet 15 to 20 times a day. Sometimes it feels like I’m chained to it, and can only wander so far until the shits strike again. It’s chronic and wears down on my mental health in similar ways. It’s progressive, so one day my colon may need to get replaced with a bag that dangles outside my body so that my natural butthole will be able to go on retirement forever.

The one major observation that I’ve made from all this is the role that stress plays. Reducing stress seems to have a powerful inhibitory effect. Practicing positive self talk (and catching yourself when you say anything negative to yourself) and moving the body with yoga also seems to help. Getting adequate sleep and nutrition is critical. I’m also convinced that being open minded to both Western medicine and Eastern cultural traditions (diet, yoga, Taoism, etc) has played a role in slowing my disease progression.

You don’t have to wrestle with the guilt of producing a living being that is capable of profound suffering.

You’re improving the environment monumentally by preventing a new lineage of carbon producers.

You’re bestowed with the privilege of greater freedom to live your life.

There’s always a silver lining, even in the bleakest of circumstances.

I fully agree. Some other observations I’ve noticed as a mid career engineer:

- Boot on the ground doing the most work getting rewarded with the most labor

- Promotions are used strategically to entice people into toxic assignments nobody else wants or to appease flight risks

AI is probably the only thing that will be able to help humanity clean up the mess that it’s still noisily making. I’m talking about real AI, not the Mickey Mouse data science buzzword that keeps getting promulgated by C-suite crayon eaters.

Doomsayers can stir up all the FUD they want about AI, and point to works of fiction as their gospel. I, on the other hand, welcome a future where we are fairly governed and managed by our AI overlords, rather than exploited by “fellow” man.

C/C++ dev here.

Remember that it’s not the language that matters. The underlying programming concepts that you know, thanks to being a C/C++ programmer, are translatable to every other programming language. With the help of a search engine, you’ll realize that you already know how to express yourself in those languages quite proficiently.

Memorizing syntax is not the same as knowing how to program. You already know how to express yourself in all programming languages, now stop gatekeeping yourself and start applying to more jobs than just the ones you’ve been limiting yourself to.

One shouldn’t have to justify whether or not they are a victim of racism when they make a statement or claim. This isn’t Scarlet Letter.

You seem to place more value in the views of the supposed victims of discrimination. Ironically, this is discriminatory to anyone else who has something to say on the topic.

It’s something nice to put on the shelf and fantasize about enjoying, one day, when there’s time.

> A placebo presented as a stimulant may trigger an effect on heart rhythm and blood pressure, but when administered as a depressant, the opposite effect.

If placebos have been experimentally observed to induce changes in their subjects, then it holds that placebos can be used to alleviate symptoms similarly to conventional medications.

Comparing things to placebos does not imply that placebos have no effect. In some cases, placebos have very powerful effects, which is why we compare against them.

A design pattern boilerplate generator in different languages like Python and C++ is something I’ve been thinking of lately. It would be super useful for new devs at work too.

You seem to imply that consent is required. Consent is not required if you are not gathering data that needs to be consented to.

If my tools are gathering data behind my back and not telling me, that is troubling. I should not be liable for this, as it is an abuse of trust that would result in me no longer using the tool had I known prior.

I’ve been concerned about this.

My tech stack is built on various products, including no-code site building tools, and I believe these tools employ JavaScript/cookies at layers which are inaccessible to me. Some of these may cavort with GA.

How liable am I?

Hardware is the gating factor to all human progress.

Materials science is so woefully behind that we’re still charging up electrolytic batteries like it’s 1859.

Why does this have to be ASCII art? Is there a technical limitation to terminals that prevents the full color space of the video sensor from being rendered?