I tend to give some people bad vibes because I am hyper-alert. I can’t help it. You try having redneck bullies kick your ass for years and see what your alertness level gets set at.
Anyway, I like being always alert. I don’t actually like relaxing. Perhaps I am just accustomed to it. Nevertheless, relaxing is not relaxing to me.
If I were dictator, I’d immediately shut down Facebook as it has no real positive use. It’s destructive societally, socially, individually and collectively. It can’t be reformed so it must be destroyed.
And by immediately shut it down, I mean I’d send hundreds of agents to show up at data centers and offices, herd the people out the doors, bar the buildings, destroy the servers, and be done with it all tout de suite.
I don’t need to be a fuckin scientist to know that beef is more nutritious than plant-based substitute.
I was vegetarian for 10 yrs. I was anemic & skinny fat even though I worked out every day. Supplements didn’t help.
Red meat cured anemia, incr muscle mass & overall health https://t.co/AwSx1skwFR
— Jamie (@badjamjam) April 25, 2019
Exactly. There is abso-fucking-lutely no way I wold’ve been able to gain 10 pounds of muscle and double my strength in a little over six months on a vegetarian diet.
I would’ve made next to no progress at all because a vegetarian diet is hardly good enough for sitting on your ass, much less busting it every day on the weights. Supplements don’t really work and eating phytophilically means you are missing out on the best source of nutrients out there.
It’s cute to watch the 28 year old container people reinvent tech we had working perfectly well 25 years ago, but that they just didn’t understand how to use or find “old.” Their reinvention is never better, but it is often vastly more complex and more failure-prone.
Some parts of it are admittedly useful, though, like autoscaling. That’s the the only good tech I’ve seen come out of the container obsession. The rest is pretty poor.
Does anyone else feel that they basically lucked into a high paying career because their interests randomly aligned with scarcity and a rapidly growing field, and that it's nowhere near as hard, or as societally valuable as what teachers, medical professionals and care-givers do?
— Colm MacCárthaigh (@colmmacc) April 24, 2019
Absolutely. I happened to be interested in computers and that led me to a career in IT. I don’t think what I do is even as valuable as what a janitor does, but I was in the right place at the right time with the right set of skills. That’s all.
If I’d stayed in journalism, my original career choice, my life would’ve been much different — and worse. I didn’t switch through any real wisdom or because I knew journalism would basically die (this was in the 1990s), but because I liked goofing around with computers better.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I do provide value and I am very good at my job and improving all the time. I just think what a janitor or a teacher does is more valuable though compensated far less.
Thank the heavens my dad was obsessed with computers. That really changed everything for me.
I’ve been using computers for a long time — sat down at my first one in late 1979 or early 1980.
So I used them when they were crappy, slow, balky and terrible. Funny to see them and related return again to being crappy, slow, balky and terrible. Not, as in the past, because there limited resources but because surveillance capitalism and user-hostility has ruined it all.
We had about a decade or so of really good years in there, though.
What’s puzzling about so many sites “optimized” for smartphones is that they do not work correctly on smartphones.
My hypothesis is that this is due to unskilled developers using frameworks that are terribly slow and not knowing how to do any better. Many sites today, whether viewed on a smartphone or a real computer, are slower than they were on dial-up 25 years ago.
For a future house, I need to research what kind of plants are best at removing CO2 combined with hardiness and light requirements.
It seems that even moderate levels of CO2 reduce cognitive performance, and CO2 scrubbers just aren’t really something commercially available. I could build one as it doesn’t require much actual tech or knowledge, but plants are much nicer and don’t break in the same way that tech does, and are also cheaper.
One day my manager pulled me aside in the open office. “I got a new manager as you heard who now works in this office, and we’ve been talking restructuring the team,” he said, with a grave tone, “And he says you don’t type at your computer enough.”
— Stephanie Hurlburt (@sehurlburt) April 22, 2019
This happens a lot in IT. Had a manager tell someone who worked for me, “I don’t see you working on the servers enough.” The employee tried to explain that we remoted into them and had no need to be at the physical console almost ever, but the manager didn’t understand this at all.
I’ve also gotten criticized for staring at my screen “doing nothing.” I had to explain that I do a lot of design, and if I think about something for two hours I need to actually think and not type, not read (though reading breaks help the unconscious work), not have meetings, and not chat with co-workers (all crap MBAs absolutely love to do). I got a little snippy and said that I might stare at the screen for two hours, but when I was done what emerged on said screen was correct and didn’t need all the re-work of the social butterflies.
Mathematicians Are Overselling the Idea That “Math Is Everywhere.”
Yep. Teaching all students anything beyond very basic algebra is a vast and futile waste of time, like teaching everyone to use an enormous industrial combine because “all our food comes from farms.”
This will only be more the case over time as math becomes the domain of expert systems and AI.
Very good article, that, and one you don’t often see since the math scam is so pervasive and influential.