JhanicManifold
No bio...
User ID: 135
arccos is gonna give you too sharp a result near the equator (i.e. predict that the last few degrees as you get closer matter the most). What you want is just cos(latitude/90 * pi/2).
edit: the way you visualise this is by holding a square piece of paper in front of you, and tilting it until you're looking at it edge-wise. The "visual area" of the piece of paper in your field-of-view is what will give you the proportionality factor.
JhanicManifold
1mo ago
I have, perhaps surprisingly, managed to make new close friends as a mid twenties guy. Here's the trick, you first say "hey bro (or girl I want as a friend), I really enjoyed talking to you at that thing that time, we should get coffee sometime, how's next thursday?". Next, you need to talk one-on-one, it's hard to make a new close friend when you're always in a group with them, and you need to (gradually) tell them some of your secrets, vulnerability is required for close friendship. Virtually everyone to whom you offer one of your small secrets will reciprocate with one of their own, and thus the friendship builds.
Then, once you've hung out a few times one on one, you hit them with a heartfelt "hey man, great hanging out today, this is kinda weird to say, but I want you to know that I'm really grateful to have you as a friend". Think of yourself, would you allow yourself to grow closer in friendship with someone you weren't sure wanted the same thing? Realising that someone you considered a close friend doesn't feel the same probably hurts at the same level as romantic rejection. That's why the earnest declaration that you consider them a close friend works so well, it alleviates their fear that their friendship will not be reciprocated. People do want close friends, they're just afraid to hope.
JhanicManifold
3mo ago
defeat Where I Really Tried
I think this is the crux of it, I notice the same aversion to Really Trying in myself. If you win without really trying, then it doesn't feel good because that means that your achievement was well below your means, you might as well feel good about putting on your socks in the morning. And if you lose without really trying, it doesn't feel that bad because you can still imagine yourself winning if you really tried.
This is all an ego-protection mechanism. If you're like me, then you started conceptualizing yourself as "smart" somewhere in adolescence, and from that moment on you started trying to avoid any experience that would imply not being worthy of that label. I think the key to enjoying competition is letting go of this fixed mindset that thinks every True Loss is evidence that you permanently suck, instead of just being evidence that you temporarily suck.
As for actual practical advice, I think it's hard to practice Really Trying on the big, long-term stuff. You need a hobby you care about with a really short time-to-feedback. I started Jiu-Jitsu a few months ago, and I think it's perfect for this. The prospect of actually getting chocked out in a match of physical dominance against another man really brings out the competitive part of me, in a way that no other sport I've ever tried managed to do. Though as a woman Jiu-Jitsu might not be ideal for this unless you find a gym with a decent number of other women, against whom you actually have a chance of winning.
JhanicManifold
5mo ago
Doing tren just for the hell of it would be profoundly stupid, it would shut off your own test production, make you (even more?) depressed, possibly turn you gay, irritable, frustrated for no reasons whatsoever, possibly give you life-altering acne, hair loss, increased fluid retention in the face, and then of course there is the systemic organ damage that it would cause. Literally the only positive effect would be that you'd have increased muscle growth, but from what I've gathered of your comments you haven't exactly optimised protein intake, sleep and workouts, so you have plenty of low-hanging gains to be had.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Doesn't Hamas put bases under hospitals specifically because of this? The two options are either to never bomb hospitals and hence to accept Hamas as the leader in-perpetuity of the region, or to give every available warning to the population to evacuate and then bomb the terrorist base...
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
In the drug realm:
Biggest by far: semaglutide for weight loss. Works so well that Walmart is noticing sales drop... if that isn't an amazing endorsement I don't know what is.
Second biggest: occasional moderate dose (1.5g) phenibut taken 8 hours before a stressful social situation.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Money won't solve this. The EU tried building water pipes in Gaza and the pipes just ended up being repurposed as homemade missiles. You can't solve this by sending money to someone who cares more about killing you than they care about making a good life for themselves.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
I'd say it's for the same reason that I "support" north korean refugees not being sex slaves in China. Or I support african children not getting malaria. In fact essentially no world affair news truly ever relates to me directly, not even news in my own country. Having opinions on global news is something on the level of a hobby, it serves to be more interesting in conversation.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Ben Shapiro also makes the point that they drop "knock bombs" before the real bombs, the only purpose of those bombs is to shake the building to tell civillians to evacuate.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Buying it on indiamart.com from India pharmacies, I haven't really had problems with importing it in Canada
Ah, in my case it was extreme fat loss, yeah, I didn't really gain muscle, just revealed what was there. People who haven't seen me in a while tell me I got jacked out of a misunderstanding of where muscle comes from.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
This part never usually pans out lol.
Oh it did for me, I still remember her reaction when she saw me for the first time in like 6 months: * looks at me, does a double take, eyes widen, face becomes fully red, furtive looks the whole evening *. I actually feel a little bit guilty about just how good revenge feels.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
It's a close cousin to benzodiazepines (though much easier to acquire), so the withdrawal symptoms are massive as fuck, there's a reddit community dedicated to people who've fucked up their lives taking phenibut everyday, though I can't seem to find it right now. I also notice increased anxiety on the day after I take a dose. It works very well for my use case, but I periodically remember not to treat it lightly.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
For regular consumption, creatine is the king, there's no other supplement with as clear and massive of a benefit, it makes you stronger, helps cognition and 30 years of intense research hasn't found a single negative effect (maybe apart from slight intestinal distress in some people).
I also use phenibut and modafinil on special occasions. Phenibut is amazing at lowering social anxiety in particular while leaving your reasoning capacities essentially untouched, and modafinil is good at boosting concentration and making you stay awake. You shouldn't take these daily, phenibut in particular will fuck up your life if you take large doses daily, the best is to use it for occasional job interviews or presentations, for which it works amazingly well.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
look on the bright side, she's gonna go through the same thing when you ignore her in a year after you've gotten jacked as fuck from the motivation this rejection brought you. (speaking from personal experience)
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
I am "out of the hole" in the sense that once you've lost all the weight, you can start eating at maintenance again, which is much easier than eating at a deep deficit. So pre-semaglutide my daily maintenance calories might have been like 3500, and I was eating at like 3600, very slowly gaining weight. During semaglutide I'm eating 2300, which is a very deep deficit, made much easier due to the appetite reduction. After semaglutide, my reduced body weight will push my maintenance calories at around 3000, which will be much easier to maintain, either with discipline or with low-dose semaglutide. I think that the state of being obese does some kind of permanent damage to appetite regulation, so that anyone who has ever been significantly overweight will basically need to be on some sort of permanent diet for the rest of their lives, and there's no scenario in which they eat "naturally" and don't gain all the weight back.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.
As someone currently using semaglutide, and having lost 40 lbs with it after around 10 years of trying to lose the weight, you are severely underestimating the variance in the willpower required for people to lose weight. Of-fucking-course the healthiest choice is to never have been fat in the first place, just like it's better to never start smoking cigarettes, but once you're addicted and fat, it makes no sense at all to insist on trying (and failing) to do it without help. Semaglutide helps you make better choices and dig yourself out of the hole, sure, it might not be healthy by itself (just like nicotine patches), but it sure as shit is healthier than having a 45lb plate strapped to your back all the time.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean by that, does Emily Ratajkowski's SMV really depend on her parents and social status? I guess maybe I'd find her a bit less attractive if I knew she had a deep Appalachian accent or something, but I truly don't give a single fuck about her social status, she could be an outcast with no friends for all I care, and it wouldn't matter a bit.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
Great point about the relationship to SMV increase possibility, really obvious in retrospect. Though I didn't mean to suggest that the women's myth was stupid, just that I didn't resonate with it the way that women don't resonate with what I like.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
So, I went to see Barbie despite knowing that I would hate it, my mom really wanted to go see it and she feels weird going to the theatre alone, so I went with her. I did, in fact, hate it. It's a film full of politics and eyeroll moments, Ben Shapiro's review of it is essentially right. Yet, I did get something out of it, it showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect". And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think women (including my mom) seemed to enjoy it.
You can really see the mutual blindness men and women have with respect to each other in this domain. Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her, and the big emotional payoff at the end is supposed to be that Ken "finds himself", saying "I am Ken!". But this whole "finding yourself" business is a fundamentally feminine instinct, the male instinct is to decide who you want to be and then work hard towards that, building yourself up. The movie's female authors and director are completely blind to this difference, and essentially write every character with female motivations.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
Dharma
Wow, super interesting to see how the Hindu use of the word seems to differs from the use of the word in western meditation circles, which might be more like "Ultimate Truth", or "Behaviors in harmony with the Ultimate Truth", where Ultimate Truth is understood to be the truth of No-Self, achieved by enlightened beings. So there "Dharma" means something like "the set of knowledge and behaviors that lead to Enlightenment, as well as the knowledge gained from Enlightenment"
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
The Manhattan Project scenes are pretty good, the best part is seeing all the characters from your college physics textbook show up for their contractually mandated appearance
I wanted so much more of that. I honestly couldn't give less of a shit about Oppenheimer's communist orientation, I wanted an actual history of the manhattan project, and I wanted all my childhood physics heroes to actually be portrayed in the film, but all I got was some guy putting marbles in a jar as a metaphor for the enrichment process. I went to see it with my mom who had no background physics knowledge, and she was left hopelessly confused about almost everything (which I guess is normal for a Nolan film). We left an hour before the end.
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
I think I share a common preference among men that I’d rarely pass up on a hookup with an attractive woman but would probably not date a woman long-term who has slept around too much
I'd pass on even a hookup with an attractive woman who has had too many partners. Some character traits or behaviours lower a woman's attractiveness so much that she just drops below a critical level for me. For instance, if I see a woman being cruel to a child, she could look like Emily Ratajkowski, and I still wouldn't want to fuck her (or maybe at that point it wraps back around to hate-fucking, I'm not sure)
But yes, I think that casual sex unethical, because "casual sex" is for men what "friendzoned orbiters" is for women. In both cases only one party gets most of what they want: sex for men, emotional intimacy for women. In most real cases of friendzoned guys and girls having casual sex, no one is making it clear that the relationship has no chance of going further, both these situations are fundamentally consequences of power imbalances.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
Hmm, I would say that if the secret is like "AI will kill everyone and there's nothing you can do to stop it", don't tell her. If the secret is like "your father was a murderer" or "you have terminal cancer", then do tell her, because it's "her business" in some sense. Another factor is how much knowing the secret will eat at you over time, if the person is a close friend of yours, keeping this secret forever will be a great burden and you should tell them, if it's just an acquaintance, then not so much.
If you think you're good at acting and deception, you could even indirectly ask for their opinion on the matter, all you have to do is invent a new secret with all the relevant characteristic about some distant friend, then ask them whether you should tell your distant friend.
For maximum attractiveness to women, being lean (say 10~12% body fat) at something like 21 to 22 ffmi is probably the optimum, see this calculator to play around with your own stats. Regarding specific muscles, side delts are #1, then chest, back, and arms. Girls don't care about legs as long as they're not ridiculously out of proportion with the rest of your body. Glutes are also important for the overall silhouette from the back.
See this video for discussions about the optimal muscle level for attractiveness.
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