100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Shia LaBeouf interview in New Orleans.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Are we to bully nerds so they can become this worm of a man?
So, no matter how many times I explicitly say "I don't support extreme bullying" people are going to write versions of "BUT WHAT ABOUT EXTREME BULLYING."
Can't win 'em all.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I agree with your take on this.
Remember, I like to have a little fun with most of my comments. Sometimes this means I toss out something like "autistic weirdo" that actually has a lot more nuance to it. In this case, my having fun with the Damore hubbub was too clumsy and unrefined. Damore wasn't at all expressing a strange opinion. If had been bullied more in childhood I don't think a "better" outcome would've occurred. That's my specific take on Damore.
But, more broadly, I think it's pretty easy to imagine a situation where an awkward male or female in a workplace does say or do something pretty odd that, had they been subject to a little more social pressure (bullying) earlier in life, they'd be spared from very real career consequences. This isn't a far out opinion; there are entire major network TV programs about how weirdos at work are so weird people don't like interacting with them.
This isn't about HR-style "everyone has different strengths, and we can all get along!" I am saying very much the opposite of that. Bullying is the harsh correct force of social interaction. It shouldn't be extreme, of course (hazing, real abuse), but it should be CLEAR and OBVIOUS so that the subject of the bullying can become aware of where median social boundaries are. But wait, it gets better! Like I said in my original comment, you can continue to be a weirdo even after you get bullied if you are truly committed to your weirdo-oing. In fact, this is often how the truly creative double down on what makes them unique. We, as a society, derive a lot of benefit from those who hang tough through bullying to do amazing things.
We do not benefit from zero bullying. In fact, those least capable and least prepared for life suffer the most from not getting that social feedback. The tender young man who doesn't get pushed into a locker once or twice in ninth grade grows up to be the guy who wear's the hentai shirt during an interview and has a mental breakdown over it. He didn't Do Anything Wrong (TM) - which is true. But he never learned how to avoid and/or deal with this nonsense because of the "loving acceptance" that pops up in a "zero bullying" regime.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Apparently a lot of this is because of the gay-hockey-smut novel turned TV show, which brought exactly the kind of audience you'd expect.
Serious question - When are we going to start re-diagnosing Nymphomania and Satryomania? It seems to me that there is a small percentage of the population (male / female straight and gay and ... other) that have extreme difficulty in regulating their sexual behavior both with other people and on their own.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
Aletheia
How the hell did they decide to name it something so hard to pronounce.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I’ve never had an interviewer ask about my open source work Other members of hiring committees have never known what I’m talking about when I bring up a candidates open source work.
These sound like companies that will fail
but the degree to which it is ignored in standard tech companies is a huge blackpill.
The dude who wrote OpenClawd literally got hired by OpenAI less than a month later.
Like I probably could get more ROI by writing a blog post every five patches, but I barely have the energy to write patches, so I definitely don’t have the energy to blog and tweet about it.
Sounds like you should change careers.
I'm being pretty harsh on purpose.
"The job market isn't what I want it to be." Correct. You can either adapt to it or try something else. Complaining alone gets a person nowhere. It's an old redpill quote, so take it for what it's worth, but the saying goes "Life never gets easier, but you can get better."
Technical hiring has been fucked in one form or another since the easy money days of 08 - 16 (roughly). The people who succeed are the people who don't follow the herd and make an effort. If all you want is to resume spam that's fine - expect resume spam level results.
If you, instead, build a network, build a brand (also - who said anything about Instagram? Some of the biggest voices in tech still run their own personal text heavy blogs. Gwern comes to mind). If you don't want to do either of those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
I agree and like the civic ritual framing.
An additional angle is that a lot of people on the left have this deeply seeded sense that Men's Hockey takes the spotlight awayfrom the Virtuous Valkyries of Women's Hockey. This is why they're aren't constant viral articles about the NHL during the regular NHL season.
And interesting comparison to make is with the cringey hyper fawning of both the mainstream media and much of twitter over the Racoon Haired Ice Skating queen (I can't remember he name ... Aileen? Or is that the PLA Skier?). While I respect her gold medal accomplishment, I fail to see any reason for attraction. She's a mix of aweirdo chungus manic pixie dream girl. I've seen ring leaning twitter accounts call her "bubbly." I've seen girlboss millenials call her "everything" (which isn't specific enough to help). My operating theory is that the winter olympics create a Women Are Wonderful hyper-booster. I'm not sure why (in the Summer olympics I feel like only gymnastics is similar).
Returning to Hockey, I think the Men's Team hate is a clunky means, in part, to try and shoehorn the Women's Team into this Women Are Wonderful gravity distortion field.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
For more perspective here is my resume
Your projects section is counter-productive. Don't tell me what you've built - show me.
Setup a GitHub repo and sling whatever code you have already developed at it. Then writeup a 1000 or so word guide on how you did everything.
Constantly apply to every job listing
This is a low success strategy and will burn you out. You're still early in your career so I empathize but the reality of the matter is that you do need to be networking with people so that when you need a job or you want to move up for more money, your talking to a human whom you know and who knows you already. Resume blasting was mostly dead five years ago and with AI HR systems it is 100% dead today.
Networking in a nutshell:
- Find people who are working on things in areas that genuinely interest you. Twitter is bizarrely high leverage for this. I have scored many clients via cold DM on twitter because they posted something like "I am working on a banana counting machine" and I DM'ed with "That seems cool. I've been in the banana counting game for 10 years. Want to trade notes?"
- Add value in whatever small way you can without expecting anything in return. The default way this is done in networking is to recycle your network meaning you see that Person X is into thing Y, and you also know that Person Z is into thing Y. You introduce them. That's sort of networking 101. I think a better strategy is to shoot random e-mails / texts / DMs to people you already know asking for nothing but a 15 minute catch up call. No objectives, just listen to them talk about work. People like to be heard, a the kids say, and just kind of generally strategizing about work and career with other people pays off well if you're actively engaged and earnest present with it. If you're not, you'll come across as a scuzzy network robot.
- Returning to twitter - this is where real tech networks exist and evolve. Linkedin is a hellscape for jobseekers and ... in general. There are some things that Linkedin is really useful for (mostly, getting to people who are Linkedin addicts but have budget and authority). I'd say skip it or use lightly.
- (And this one, I think is 100x more true in the age of LLMs) Have a digital public presence that is your own. Not linkedin, not even twitter. Build a blog. Substack is getting pretty cringe and hearing someone say "hey take a look at my substack" is almost a counter-signal. There are plenty of other plug-and-play blogs that don't force branding and their platform into your face. If you're already semi-regularly posting on forums, you can carve out the 1 - 3 hours per week it takes to post a solid 1000 word blog post. Once a week is fine for someone employed full time.
One of the many failures of the boomers was in failing to teach their children the reality of networking and jobs. My own folks, as much as I truly do love them and as much as my upbringing was 11/10 fucking awesome, failed at this as well. I was told, up until college, that you got a job by working hard, having a slick resume and a good handshake. Then I got to a fancy college and all of my friends who had grown up knowing the game went "lol, no, bro, it's networking."
Whatever the outcome of LLMs, I'm quite certain that the returns to cultivating deep relationships will grow ever higher. I feel good and bad about this. It's good to have meaningful connections to real people but, on the other hand, schizo posting with you degenerates is fun the entire original promise of the internet was that physical proximity no matter constrained meaningful knowledge sharing and productive interaction. I suppose the remedy would be a fundamentally new protocol that enforces "humanness." Twitter's recent bot nuke is a gesture in this diretion, but now I am getting off topic.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
Experimented with so-called "hostage tape" because I am worried about becoming a mouth-sleeper-breather.
So far it sucks. It manged one good nap with it but, at night, it seems to lose its adhesiveness and fall off. Then, to add insult to injury, in the morning it looks like I was snacking on Oreos in bed. There's a noticeable black reside about my lips.
Silver lining; the breathe right nasal strips really do work, imho.
Anyone have any history in converting themselves from a mouth breathing caveperson to a nose breathing patrician?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
6d ago
What if I am strictly a Caucasian dater?
I think the pure economics side of you argument makes a large category error; you model what is a complex, dynamic system as a linear one.
Let's focus on just this part of it:
The argument simply multiplies the ISS daily cost by a Delta-V multiplier and then by a headcount of 100. This is mathematically illiterate in industrial contexts.
I won't walk through it step by step because
ain't nobody got time for thatit's probably more effective to just bulletize the concepts you overlooked:The book-of-books, imho, on Technological Progress is Mokyr's Lever of Riches. One of the primary points he repeats again is that Technological Progress cannot at all be modeled linearly - it's far too complex for that. Second, that so many major technological breakthroughs were products of recombinatorial innovation - i.e. the borrowing of knowledge between domains to develop a novel approach to a problem.
These are the reason to support Space Exploration even if you don't really care about Moon / Mars colonization. These under explored domains will probably have returns to more conventional domains. "Why can't we just focus on those conventional domains in the first place?" Re-read the above paragraph. It doesn't work that way. Technological Progress is a lot of semi-random happy accidents that collide back together to do wonderful things. In many cases, there can be huge amounts of CapEx and investment with nothing to show for it ... until this everything to show for it. Moreover, sometimes solving one problem requires some counter intuition.
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