yepitwas

> That's funny, I often love learning for the sake of.. experimenting, building things. I just recognize that I cannot do it all and prioritize immediate needs first.

You've misunderstood, I think: if I have something I want to experiment with or build, then I can learn what I need. What I have such enormous trouble doing that I'm nearly incapable of it, is going "I should learn this so I can do something, to be determined later, with it..." and then learning. Making up projects for the sake of learning, when I don't really care about the ends, also doesn't work.

I need the goal first, then I can learn what I need.

I do also learn things just because I want to and for no real purpose, but have never been any good at directing that impulse.

It's been such an obvious self-own for tech workers not to capitalize on any of the multiple booms they've seen, and unionize.

I say, "you're going to need to pay a team of PhDs to work on this to maybe get a solution, eventually, or change your approach. Here's why: [evidence]"

I've never worked with or for anyone who wanted to hire the team of PhDs.

> I stop when I find a solution to the problem

That.

I’ve embraced that I cannot direct which topic my self-directed learning will take up and sustain (almost none of which ends up going toward tech stuff, aside from a span of some years in my teens and early 20s—and all of that was motivated by wanting to accomplish specific things with computers) and rely on assignments to motivate me for career-relevant learning.

I’ll learn whatever it takes to get the job done. Then stop, because I don’t actually care about the tech per se, most of the time, and trying to force myself to learn “just because” does nothing but make me miserable and waste time.

This isn’t even “how I approach learning as a generalist”, it’s how I became a generalist.

My interest in continuing to fiddle with stuff after the job’s done is basically zero.

My experience has been that it takes amazingly little effort to be above-median among practitioners at a lot of things. How many React developers have spent one entire hour reading through the core logic of React itself? How many people working with LLMs have read the Attention Is All You Need paper? How many people read about the disk storage layout of a database they’ve been told to use? It’s way less than half. It takes so very little to stand out.

"Go fuck yourself" would have been a less-insulting reply. Lovely.

I've tried to figure out what the evidence is for this and come up with extremely little. I've tried, and can't find it. A lot of people seem really confident in it. I want to read what they're reading, and I cannot find it.

[EDIT] FWIW I've yet to see anything that makes me confident enough to assign any strong and specific guess about the guy's motivations. I'm confident in "he was very online" and "he played Helldivers a lot, or at least spent a lot of time communicating with people who do" and that's about all I'd feel comfortable confidently asserting if someone asked me for the "TL;DR" on where we're at on that.

Which answers do I need to give for you to help me out here? Are you going to? I'm not looking for an argument.

I would (no joke) appreciate any pointer the actual evidence for this. I’ve seen only extremely vague hearsay and a screencap of using a filter to look like a video-gameish woman so far.

[edit] I’m not setting a trap, I actually would like to see it if there’s more than that, I’m not prepping to pounce on anyone who tries to help me out here.

This is almost an amazing thing. Some common top-level way to set parental controls across systems would be a godsend. That’s all a giant pile of time-wasting shit right now.

However, any system that just uses age is useless. They’re always excessively cautious, so you may as well just not provide access at all for kids between the ages of 6 and 12 or so, if that’s all you have.

No, block all + allow lists are still where it’s at. Please make those work better.

(If anyone knows the magic to make Minecraft [java] work with macOS allowlist-only network access, I’d love to know what it is. The fucking launcher wants to talk to a half-dozen bare IP addresses to work, and the addresses change seemingly every single launch, from a pool of what must be many hundreds, at least, it’s completely unusable)

Amount shrinking isn’t as bad as the individual items shrinking (though both are bad). Or swapping ingredients for worse equivalents.

Totino’s pizza rolls are quite a bit smaller than they used to be, for example.

(Yeah, they’re trash, but they’re one of a handful of childhood-nostalgia trash items I allow myself a couple times a year, and it bothers me that they’re a different size now)

It’s be really nice if they’d repudiated political violence by not electing Donald Trump president after he mused on stage about how his supporters could shoot Hillary if she won, in 2016.

That was the first big test of whether we were going to enter a new era of normalized political violence, and we (his voters, but collectively we as a country) flunked it. Wave of violence it is, I guess. Reckoned at the time it wouldn’t be much fun, and go figure, it ain’t.

This went out the window as a viable approach when McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat. We’re at minimum-two justices being on the take, post a coup attempt with the leader of said attempt back in the Oval Office, and Republicans have already declared intent to gerrymander their way to victory with no roadblocks to that in sight. And this is not an exhaustive list of ailments.

You can’t go in with legal gloves and no hitting below the belt et c. while your opponent is bare-knuckle and going for nut shots and headlocks. You’ll just get your ass kicked, every time, no matter how morally pure you feel about it.

Meanwhile, fixing gerrymandering almost certainly means getting Republican votes to do so. The only way to do that, in this environment, is going to be to make them believe their odds are better without gerrymandering, than with it. That means using it against them, until it’s made illegal.

If they went in blind, they chose to.

Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”

I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.