The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many celebrities who die at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles.
I had the same thing for Slashdot.org for many, many years. Both the reflex and the browser autocomplete. I still miss the old /. It was like HN + Hackaday + Usenet.
Yep, have been on constant "pager duty" for 2+ years, although I have more help now and I get paged 1-3 times a week instead of per night. Still, carry my lappy everywhere I go. Bought an ARM Windows laptop to get that 20hr battery life so I could worry less during my travels. You know, fancy things like going get food or going grocery shopping.
Rough shift, my worst was every other week and my boss prior to hiring me was 24/7 just like you. I just carry a backpack with a few batteries + my work laptop, fortunately only a few really bad stories but hooooo boy me and that backpack have seen some fun times.
Yes but are they printed with PLA or PETG, or even ABS? Or are they using material designed exactly for their use case, and tested thoroughly before being certified for flight?
Or do they get their parts from some vendor at a swap meet who spends most of his time fiddling with his Ender 3?
Neither of those is suitable for this application. Ultem or PEEK. Anything else would be a very bad idea, and even for those two you would want to do a lot of testing.
LLM's follow the old adage of "Garbage In, Garbage Out". LLM's work great for things that are well documented and understood.
If you use LLM's to understand things that are poorly understood in general, you're going to get poor information because the source was poor. Garbage in, Garbage out.
They are also terrible at understanding context unless you specify everything quite explicitly. In the tech support world, we get people arguing about a recommended course of action because ChatGPT said it should be something else. And it should, in the context for which the answer was originally given. But in proprietary systems that are largely undocumented (publicly) they fall apart fast.
You’re going to get poor information presented with equal certainty as good information, though. And when you ask it to correct it, more bad information with a cheery, worthless apology.
Exactly. I left high school over abuse. Another student spent the whole period sitting next to me staring at me muttering about how he was going to tie me up in the middle of the desert, and all the things he was going to shove up my ass, serious serial killer vibes, and the teacher just acted helpless, despite seeing everything. When they started stalking me after school, and it started getting physical, and the school did nothing, I left.
Thankfully that level of toxicity did not follow into the workplace, but I did have a car vandalized by a coworker.
Truth be told I was a bit of a punk, and had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. We all have our flaws, but nobody deserved what I went through. I'm a man now, not the insecure boy who tried to act like he was better than others to compensate, and I reject toxicity immediately. No room for it. Hard lessons to learn when you grew up with abuse.
Math is amazing, and I'm becoming interested in it after being out of school for over 30 years. But, my own incompetence with numbers meant gravitating away from them, for me. I am not dyslexic, but I think my ADHD does with numbers what dyslexia does to words and letters.
Dyscalculia means that you should probably avoid situations that require you to do your own arithmetic, but there's way more to math than arithmetic, and most professional mathematicians aren't that great at arithmetic either.
Wow. I have never heard of this. Thank you. I just Googled it and while not all of the symptoms fit, a good number of them do. It's rather interesting, I know how to use numbers- I've done several types of analyses over the years, professionally. And my own budget/savings is done in my own self-designed spreadsheet, calculated/balanced down to the cent.
I want to disagree with 2, but OTOH it's also so easy to do that I've just accidentally done it my whole life.
20 year programming career and I've never engaged with math beyond approximately Algebra II, in the real world. Hell, I go years at a time not needing anything trickier than Algebra I.
Nearly all of the math I actually use I learned in the 6th grade or earlier, overwhelmingly elementary school arithmetic—mostly the "bad" kind I got from memorization-based practice that mathematicians seem to hate even though it's a contender for the best bang-for-buck of almost my entire educational career, plus a lot of fractions-related stuff (so, so very many people are terrible at this, can't even do basic things, IME it's where an awful lot of people permanently fall off the math-train, way back in like 3rd grade), basic arithmetic, and pre-algebra-tier simple variable substitution.
Every now and then I get a bug up my ass to try to expand my math abilities, but 1) I'm so goddamn rusty at this point because I never use any of it that I have to start back at brushing up on high school stuff, which is discouraging, and 2) I'm not even really sure what I'm going to do with it (long experience suggests: nothing) so the motivation fades fast.
I do agree high level math isn't as useful for dev work. I have a masters in math and started working as a data analyst. I moved to programming years ago and I basically never really need to use the math stuff I know anymore.
Weirdly my math background is actually more useful as a 'soft' skill in my current work. I am the go to person for talking to the data analysts in my company, and having a statistics background is pretty helpful for interfacing with managers or people outside the dev department.
Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.
> Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.
I can distinctly remember the three times this happened for a team I was on, in my couple decades of doing this, because everyone involved kinda got a thrill out of the extreme novelty of doing something resembling actual math of even a lower-end-of-undergrad level. Lasted all of a few minutes to perhaps a few hours, but still.
You're probably using math without knowing it. Debugging through a piece of code is the same as finding a hole in a proof. "This method HAS to return the right value because C. C is always true because B. B is true because A. Ohh... but A isn't true if the record passed in is for a legacy user with no org manager. The method needs to be changed to work for inputs that don't satisfy the current assumptions."
It's not the math facts you learn so much as getting lots of practice with that kind of reasoning.
I sit here, pondering whether that type of logic is math or philosophy. Most likely, it is the intersection of the two. Of course, spending even a few minutes pondering such things tells me that I personally need to avoid the math and embrace the philosophy.
Philosophy includes the study of mathematical reasoning, but you don't get practice at it while you're studying it. It's like taking a music theory class versus learning to play an instrument.
Hm. When I was studying philosophy, we did have logic classes, and did diagram out the logic of arguments. It was a critical component for success in later courses, so I'd say we absolutely practiced it.
I own a modal logic textbook used by a course in a philosophy department, and on any given page it looks an awful lot like a math textbook except that the presentation is far friendlier and the explanations are better than are in 99% of math books.
OK, but I've never been anything but complete shit at proofs, and I'm really good at debugging. They don't feel like the same activity to me at all.
This "well actually you're doing math!" stuff feels like some kind of rhetorical trick, when the "math" I'm doing doesn't seem strongly related to or to require being any good at the math-thing it supposedly is. It's not quite the same thing nor quite so far off the mark, but it seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry. Sort-of yes, going by something like unfair riddle-logic, I guess? But in reality, no, of course they don't.
I don't see any daylight between this claim and, "diagnosing a funny noise in an engine is math," and if that's true then I think we're heading into territory where we've rendered the term "math" so broad that it's no longer useful.
> it seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry.
It's maths in the same way as when your brain hears a note at 440 hz and you go 'that's a C', i.e. while it may be practiced, the maths part of that is subconscious and its completely detached from the conscious maths anybody except mathematicians think about.
All of these are interesting analogs to each other, in that they involve a critical "thinking about" aspect paired with an intuitive, creative, active mental process.
In the case of catching a fly ball, the "thinking about" approach using trigonometry is completely unhelpful. In the case of music, the "thinking about" approach of theory can be helpful, but many people who learned informally have been brilliant musicians without ever learning a formal approach to theory. In the case of math, the critical "thinking about" aspect is vital. Pretty much everybody needs it, Ramanujan aside.
What unites all of these cases, however, is that the formal "thinking about" aspect is useless on its own. Without the productive, creative aspect, it doesn't have anything to critique and make better.
5) Yes - but even if not popular, competent people are always respected
6) I would say that there's correlation, but it's not 1.0, more something like 0.5 - 0.7; other factors matter as well.
Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible
We were the last people in town to get a flat screen TV. In 2015. We still had a 27" Sony CRT TV. That thing was beautiful. It didn't bother me really until one day.
A young person about 10 years old came over "What's that thing hanging off the back of your TV?"
I got some nice parts out of that TV, and cracking the vacuum seal on the CRT was just so satisfying.
> cracking the vacuum seal on the CRT was just so satisfying.
I've totally felt this before! As a teenager we were offered an old CRT for free if we would pick it up. We spent several days trying to fix it but ended up breaking it much worse than it already was, to the point where my friend's dad (who was a programmer but also did a lot of electronics repair) basically told us to take it to the dump. We did, but not until we took it deep into the mountains and shot the vacuum tube with a .22 long rifle :-D (we did get our asses reamed because we didn't know there was mercury in there, but even after that the consensus was still "it was worth it" though we never had the guts to tell parents that). We did at least have the foresight to put it on a big drop cloth so cleanup was pretty easy, though I later became mortified at our recklessness. The only thing better than shooting that was being able to shoot an old church bell that somebody dumped in the woods.
Facebook for a couple things, IG for keeping up with friends, sharing pics with friends. And a carefully curated YouTube subscription list. Only stuff that's worth watching: People I can relate to, have no ego, and are just having a good time sharing what they do. I gravitate toward hackaday worthy stuff and off-road exploration type videos. I limit intake of news sites, and instead try to focus on living my own life, accomplishing goals that I have set, and focusing on improving myself so I can help others.
Also, being a Gen-X-er who grew up without any of this stuff, I have to snicker just a little bit at people being up in arms about a ban on things that didn't exist 20-30 years ago. I know there is FAR more nuance to it. I simply found the thought humorous at a simplistic level.
I only mentioned that I know it's simplistic so that the pedants would not attack my character for being so naive. But, I guess it takes more than that to keep the pedants from finding fault.
Because humans have the capacity to compartmentalize and reason about things despite their gravitas, provided the opportunity and capability to do so.
For example, yes, the given family friend dying is very heartbreaking, but we might discuss it separately that he was basically a living corpse for the past several years already as-is, and so their family is probably at least going to be able to move on now, even if they don't feel that way themselves at the moment for understandable reasons. We might also be very wrong about that, and this may well be very rude to say out loud, and then incredibly embarrassing if found false later. Such is life.
There's no such distinction here however, because it's the internet, it's a public forum, so everyone sees everything. The best next option then is to communicate the distinction and trust that people understand the intent. We both did in our own ways. You did not care either time, and/or was not willing/able to treat it as intended. That's the risk we took. A lot more people did than did not reassuringly though - maybe that should tell you something about this.
Right. Well, I think they were being perfectly appropriate and that your comparison is asinine: starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't. Almost as if highlighting that was my damn point, which they then found appreciable, and you clearly didn't.
Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only alternative to constantly and pointlessly arguing, or being reliant on content sorting and filtering. The latter two of which will constantly receive some (but on occasion a lot?) of commentary about being biased in some way, automatically or manually (how would one know?), fairly or unfairly (according to who?), and repressing dissent or giving a voice (usually both, but never to satisfaction).
> starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't
"Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted population control, not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war, and a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there).
So, yes, I call it serious. And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Nor was what we were going for, yet your scrutiny didn't escape us.
> "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts
It is quite literally the bare fact itself as per the title and the article's contents.
> a coercion over a population
This is a characterization. I could remark that it was in defense of a population, and it would hold the same weight: it's worthless.
> the possibility of attempted population control
Just like the previous, this too is a matter of characterization. I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses, and what I'll see will conform to each. If I look at it through a lens of ethnic tension somehow, I'll see ethnic tension or a lack of it. If I look at it through a lens of globalism vs protectionism, I'll see either one of that. If I look at it through... you get the idea.
The cherry on top to this is the phrasing "the possibility of". Lots of things are possible indeed, kind of at any point in time.
> the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war
Last time I checked, social media were tools of mass telecommunication. I think it's fairly agreeable that if one cuts themselves off of such platforms, then the cheap and highly scalable tools of modern informational warfare will become ineffective, and the old ones will need a return. Did you entertain gauging the possibility of that? Why not?
> a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there). So, yes, I call it serious.
Was I trying to argue there's no merit to these platforms or something? Did I ever question its seriousness?
You seemingly rattled off on the idea - which was complete headcanon on your side - that my "goal" is to make light of this, to downplay its seriousness, or to deny the merits of these platforms' existence. But that was in fact not the goal - it was the predictable side effect, because turns out, there's lots of downsides to these platforms, which I felt was rarely ever brought up in threads like this. The goal then was to remedy this strange miss. To finally break the unending cycle of blackboard-scratching tier perpetual unproductive whinging about """free speech""" and censorship that a HN thread about an issue like this would normally receive. And to that end, I was successful. There's still a lot of that, with the usual end results, but for once that's not all the thread is about.
> And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.
Wake-up calls are rarely gentle. Perhaps it's not my behavior that's odd, but instead your frame of mind on this is. I cannot tell you.
And where did you intend to go? In front of "State cuts the services" you went "Oh I get advantages staying without them". Yes but see, there are 30 million people there that may have had different choice, and some of them with rational choice (and fully evidently so: the World Video Archive is in the ban), and those 30Mln are within other billions that may be in a similar situation. (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
> [Missing out on social media] is quite literally the bare fact itself
Very certainly not: Nepal has blocked YouTube... Being forbidden access the worldwide video library cannot be reduced to "cannot be able to post comments" (that many serious YT users will not do, not even having an account, by the way).
> a characterization
Gross logical fault: there is a coercion in there, and reframing it as protection does not remove the presence of the coercion, which remains a debatable problem. And by going towards "protection" you are confirming my point («not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war»), which is again an extremely serious problem.
> I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses
And a number will reveal that the situation can be construed as serious. Were you to defend the idea that it were not serious, relativism will not help the substantial solidity of the argument.
> Did I ever question its seriousness?
Well, look, if the article is "they blocked the services", and you go you "feel better after doing without them", that heavily suggests you downplaying the seriousness!
Of course we could also have discussions about "could we revaluate the optimal level of those services in life balance", but maybe really not in front of "the State has decided for you"!
> there's lots of downsides to these platforms
Yes. That is also extensively discussed. But it is not in context: here, the matter is something decided for somebody else, and that there are a number of bigger problems (e.g. organized misinformation) that overseeing entities (States) will mismanage in their inability to counter them.
> Wake-up calls
You will probably be reassured that many of us are very much aware that having released transnational masses of substantial infants into echo chambers - to mention one of the foremost consequences - is a hell of a problem.
Where I said I did. I explained it to you several times over. I can only do so much if you're not willing to listen or are unable to relate.
> (Many of them are here, your peers in these pages.) In front of them, going "I found out there are bright sides" would make them go "Duude...".
Cool - and if the same thing happened in Russia and I posted this to my Russian mates on Discord [1], as it happened before, they'd laugh their ass off first, and then we'd shift to discussing workarounds. According to what you explained so far of your world model though, things are either inappropriate or appropriate, and they are observer invariant and temporally static. I guess this would make my Russian mates wrong about what they themselves think or something?
Not very persuasive. I'm also not really sure why you think these peers on these pages need explaining why this situation is bad, or why they'd benefit from reading another endless charade, enumerating the same tired points, and making them spiral even further (since according to you, this was definitively coercive, so there's nothing they can do anyhow). Why there isn't and should not be a space for this specific angle, as it is inappropriate according to you, and even though it is not practically possible for you to have consulted those peers to get their opinion, you're just speaking in their name.
> Gross logical fault
There is a word for that, it's called a fallacy. I did not engage in any, which you must have also noticed, hence why you didn't say that instead.
I feel our "discussion" has run its course.
[1] Yes I did see Discord was blocked in Nepal. Please apply reasoning to fill the blanks.
You think you show much hearing on this side? In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple. The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
> I did not engage in any
Apart from the one I pointed to and the other ones I have not mentioned? Not just precising the difference between fallacies and logical faults, but all the attributions of intention you expressed you construed, such as «explaining why this situation is bad». The latter was only pointed out to you because you clearly do not seem to get it, if you go "there are plus sides on not using social media" in front of of a government ban that closes the doors to a critical part of information to a population.
I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media. The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
> In front of what is happening in Nepal and elsewhere, the reduction of the matter to "oh a break from social media is healthy" is neither on point nor constructive - very simple.
I understand that that's your position. Would have been pretty hard to miss. I just feel otherwise. I'd think that's been hard to miss too.
> The constructive part you meant to convey, I still do not get.
That's regrettable. Unfortunately, you've spent all the empathy I had for you regarding this, so that's something you'll need to reflect on on your own terms if you want to figure it out.
> Apart from the one I pointed to
No, including that one, as that isn't one.
> because you clearly do not seem to get it
I'm not responsible for empathizing with myself on your behalf. I very clearly do get it, which you'd be able to appreciate, if you bothered to even consider its possibility.
> I hope you have seen the frontpage now, "14 Killed in protests in Nepal over social media ban"
I have not. Nepal is not what my world revolves around, and I've been working all day.
Not sure that's the most appropriate way to mention that by the way, you almost sound excited for it, as if those 14 people having deceased now lets you "prove" your point. Would be pretty dishonest and inciteful to frame it this way, right? Then why are you doing it to others?
> over social media ban" - which, as already a number of posts reveal, is not about social media
Can you be bothered to restrain yourself from encoding your conviction into every sentence supposedly meant to persuade? It's like announcing the decision before the trial.
It'd go an awful long way in at least making it appear like you actually wanted to persuade someone, rather than just talk about how hurt you feel and expecting to be finally heard for it by magical happenstance.
I get it, you think I should be treating this as if children were dying, as if there was a famine, whatever. I don't want to. I think that's beyond asinine and pointless. It can still be, and is, serious despite this, it's not a race. It can even escalate. It's also not just a single modality, things can be serious in different ways. Would be awfully cool if I didn't need to wade through your loaded sentences to be graciously allowed to have my own position, and not be portrayed as some heartless asshole for it.
> The benefits of your "abstinence" have little to do with this.
I disagree. Not sure how your insistence that we were being insensitive, and how that means we shouldn't have shared these things, helps these folks though.
By the way, you do recognize just how utterly ironic is it to campaign for us not to talk about something in a thread about censorship, right? I restrained myself from mentioning it so far, as a way to show some solidarity. But it's clearly not being appreciated, so fuck it.
Edit: I have since read the news on the unrest in Nepal. It did way more to contextualize this and why my comment might have been insensitive and misguided than this "discussion" ever could have. Turns out, mentioning that the place is volatile and despotic would have been pretty key info. It's still extremely hindsight heavy though. Like do you have even the remotest concept just how similar this news was in this thread to many many others before it? Where the place wasn't so unabashedly authoritarian that police is licensed to fire live ammo at citizens, and didn't result in an unrest and death? So far removed in perspective, no shit I didn't have a clue why you are making a scene! If this is you "raising awareness", there's a LOT you should improve on, holy shit.
My comment was not about suffering, war, starvation, or anything of the like. You've clearly added your own context and then judged me for it. Great job.
The context I added was that of the facts I construed from the shreds of events and opinions I met. They are not there to be compared to "starvation" as a parameter with scalars of "what is worse": they are in the same cone of "something bad happening", in front of which simplistic dismissals are puzzling.
Since you added context to my comment that I didn't ask for, I'm going to add some to yours that you didn't ask for.
Because of an unknown metabolic disorder, I watched my wife starve to death. She literally died from malnutrition. It was the most awful ugly thing I've ever seen.
You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to.
Sorry, but I suppose there is an ugly thing I should add, geocrasher.
It remains very unfortunate that I came to pick a simile about hunger not knowing about your past - to signify in perching_aix's case that abstincence better be voluntary and in yours that loss of something achieved remains a bad thing.
The ugly thing: about "having no idea what I'm talking about",
we are both in this world together - and the rest. We all have seen hell and misery, in the different forms that chance and the evolution of facts inflicted us. I felt immediate participation to your story. Do not suppose, for good or bad, that you are an exception.
We all have seen and lived the most horrible things.
Of course the simile I found to try and show that "look, this branch does not seem appropriate for the context" was random. I thought of a few, in time constraints, and the one that looked the best of the bunch happened to be the one of "starvation". It could have anything - surely you understand.
> You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to
But I was talking of the matter in context, and the simile, as said, was logic, not comparative.
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