Friday
yofuckreddit
2yr ago
I've improved them gradually over the years. Portions have gotten smaller, I enjoy vegetables (especially grilled) etc.
But I can't quit occasionally having a decadent cheeseburger or getting multiple items at Taco Bell. It's not a stretch to say that 3-4 times a week I have a 1,000 calorie meal. Sometimes I'll counterbalance that with 1-3,000 calorie bike ride but then I'm pretty frickin hungry etc.
I don't eat breakfast or drink soda, but when I've done calorie counting I'm consistently above what I need to be at for true weight loss. I suppose part of it is that eating is second only to sex in terms of sublime pleasures that makes life worth living. If I have to eat salad every day I'd kinda rather just die.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I can agree about the goods, that's a lot trickier
Goods has always been the main sticking point really, and it's integral to the border question.
You can have it half automatized by scanning the cars coming in, and then checking for passports.
Maybe? This is what Gove would occasionally to try to square the circle, 'technological solution blah blah blah', but at the current moment it does seem that one does require some physical border presence/infrastructure to keep some people out, so there really is no getting round the Good Friday question. A border must fall somewhere.
How does the regulatory framework require stupid cookie banners, and gender self-ID? These are new / relatively new laws even in the EU itself.
The government did not comb through EU regulations one by one (that is hardly plausible), they just transplanted them all directly into UK law with the view that if they wanted to get rid of any they could just do it later, which they still can do (and the usual suspects keep prattling on about a 'bonfire' etc.), but no-one in Britain actually cares about GDPR so they have no compelling reason to really bother.
What's impossible about letting in the Irish, but not other EU members?
Well because in order to determine which people and goods are Irish, and which are not (which in itself already creates problems given the free flow of EU goods into Ireland, so the distinctions are not entirely clear), one has to have a 'hard' border, with supervised crossing points etc. in order to carry out the necessary checks. No-one supports such a border because it endangers the Good Friday agreement, and the only other possibility if you want a border somewhere it so check goods moving between NI and the UK.
The transplanting of EU law had to happen. One cannot simply abolish a regulatory framework built up over decades overnight.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
Yeah, this is the Friday Fun Thread, not the make-jokes-about-current-hot-CW-topic thread.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2yr ago
There's a difference between being the manager of a mission-critical project that directly reports to a C-level exec and the manager of a project that is one of many projects your company runs to categorize capital expenses better.
The former has a lot of power, because it's basically a "Head of X" position that you can transform into a real "Head of X" position when the project is over. He or she can yank the best people from existing teams to work on the project full time and doesn't have to worry about their compensation or covering their absence.
The latter doesn't even get his own personal fief like any line manager does. He or she has to go to existing teams and beg for estimates, resources, commitments and results. Any piddling team lead or section head can brush him or her off, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that by Friday. We've been fixing a production incident and you know Barry knows the system better than anyone, that why he's been assigned to your project, but this incident means he's busy until next Tuesday. Oh, and the vendor we've sourced the driver from has raised its prices, so we'll need you to approve additional $15k. No, how can I negotiate with them? I'm not procurement. And you might want to take it up with Larry if you want Barry to work on your project instead of fixing production issues, Dave. I'm just following the priorities I've been given."
So poor Dave goes to Larry, who explains he's the fifth PM he's seen today. No, there are no resources. Look, here's the meeting minutes from March when the resources were assigned to projects. It's written right here under "Risks": overbooking likely if system stability doesn't improve. And guess what, Dave? We're overbooked. Yes, I can tell Harry to ask Barry to work overtime. Can you pay for it from your budget? Oh, it was the first line item that was slashed? Guess what, HR has slashed our overtime budget, too."
_malcontent_
2yr ago
I don't know why 5 workdays became standard instead of 6 or 7. Perhaps 7 was out due to the influence of Christianity in most Western nations meaning there had to be 1 day of rest, and perhaps 1 more day on top of that just made sense for giving people more flexibility.
In the US, until relatively recently, there was a 6 day work week. From Wikipedia:
In 1908, the first five-day workweek in the United States was instituted by a New England cotton mill so that Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.[12] In 1926, Henry Ford began shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday, due to pressures stemming from the October Revolution,[citation needed] which witnessed the ruling class persecuted for not giving the laborers dignifying conditions. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the United States slowly followed, but it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide.[12]
AvocadoPanic
2yr ago
Guilty Pleasures
Do you have guilty pleasures, you can share?
@Stefferi post on Eurovision exposed one of mine. My first exposure to Eurovision was in 2003 while living in Germany. The Turkish entry won that year.
That there are often scantily clad ladies performing helps elevate the show above many Idol and xfactor style contests. Also distracts from some of the more bizarre or political songs.
The Ukraine won in 2004.
Greece in 2005
Finland broke the sexy lady winning streak in 2006. Though not for lack of competition from FYROM and The Ukraine
CloudHeadedTranshumanist
2yr ago
Male humans and female humans, in fact, act qualitatively differently and are more accurately modeled separately, notwithstanding how “masculine” a woman is or “feminine” a man is.
If this is what you want me to address, I can address it directly.
...
Actually no I can't address it. My life is too weird. The reason I didn't add my own anecdotes is because I understand that most people weren't finally taught to socialize at the age of 20 by transgender-rationalist group houses. Didn't go to a private high school with the cast of an anime, didn't go through middle school with the hippie fifth of the school- the only fifth of the school that inexplicably goes to class in repurposed trailers outside and goes on hikes every Friday. In my life, male and female humans do not act qualitatively differently. They are all queer fucking autists doing their own thing in some galaxy brained direction.
Most people don't go through every stage of their life surrounded by the strangest possible cast of weirdos. I'm sure many, many people actually do get utility out of gender as a modeling tool. I only ever get utility out of gendered 'things'. Yin and Yang, left side and right side kabbalah. Things that different people pick and choose according to their need, regardless of what happens to be in their pants. Culture and biology as tools that you tear apart and reassemble to fit your need.
I didn't argue that the 'gender spectrum' idea is useful to me, because it's actually insufficiently intricate for me. I didn't argue that it would be useful to raggedy_anthem, because it doesn't sound like it would be that useful. The gender spectrum as an idea is good for one thing, and that is being the antithesis to the gender binary. That is to say, if you are so stuck on the gender binary that you cannot conceptualize why a man would want to wear makeup- then the special sauce: 'Male and Female are not thin edged monolithic categories, there is some blur, you have to model a bit more finely than that.' might be just what you need. But raggedy_anthem claims to be doing alright with their conception of males and females +/- small variances. They have enough of the special sauce to conceptualize the gender weirdest woman they know.
It seemed like delving into their anecdote would mean more to them. I'm easily empathy-sniped by people sharing their social troubles. I blame the estrogen.
Tanista
2yr ago
Last thought: I really hate the show Succession? It seems like fantasy porn.
I really like it but I definitely think there's a ressentiment/"revenge fantasy" element to this entire genre of shows that boil down to the idea that rich people are all particularly pathological.
It's basically the "happiness stops increasing after $70K a year" of TV.
SSCReader
2yr ago
You have to start earlier than that, after all wokeness is a reaction itself.
Did the US have that "conservatism" imported from Europe, assimilated it, had elements react against and create wokeness, then re-export that AND the "conservative" reaction to wokeness again.
Much of the US's cultural information was imported to them. Its why the US is largely aligned with the Anglo world in the first place. Plus Ireland due to high immigration. If not for large amounts of Irish people bringing their cultural exports with them the Presidents wouldn't be touring Ireland so regularly and they wouldn't dye the rivers green (and the beer).
They are re-exporting to us as we once exported to them. Partly because thats what the global hegemon does and partly because of the close relationship.
Lots of funding came from the US for the IRA for example. The US was also a big part of the Good Friday Agreement happening at all.
You have US immigration in Dublin airport so you can fly into a domestic terminal when you reach the US!
The US has a big finger in the Irish pie so to speak (and vice versa) if you believe that nearly everyone i meet in the US after learning i am from Ireland tells me some story about their grandmother being from Meath or similar. Progressivism (or the reaction to it) is hardly only the most recent.
My kid is 9 and has been homeschooled the whole time. She is far ahead of grade 4 (she just finished gr 8 math, but math is pretty a priori, so it's easier to push than history or something) and she isn't that much weirder than the other kids. I'm not even sure her weirdness is from homeschooling- it might just be hereditary. I am a public highschool teacher, and quite apart from the low-balled curriculm and culture war stuff, just talking to other teachers is enough to make me prefer death in the street to sending my kid to school, at least until 10th grade (I'll consider it then).
Social interaction is absolutely the biggest problem. We live in Canada, in the reddest part of the country (although blue is the colour of the red tribe here, and red is the colour of the blue tribe), so there is no shortage of homeschooling families but they are a)weird as hell and b)hyper individualists who prefer to opt out rather than to work within a system. I don't blame them, that's why we homeschool too, but the result is that the slightest disagreement over vaccines, or theology, or which video games kids are allowed to play, leads to ghosting. These are people who REALLY fear that their kids will develop the wrong values, so they try to find people with perfectly matched values. This works great for Mormons, but not for anyone else.
The next part of the problem is that virtually all social interaction is mediated by mothers and determined by their relationships to each other. Just dropping your kid off at their friend's house is pretty rare. If the kids are hanging out, the moms are hanging out too, so the moms have to be friends. Sometimes they form Mom Groups. Often these groups become Machiavellian dens of intrigue and betrayal, and now your kid's friend just doesn't exist anymore. If you try to organize stuff yourself, it freaks out the moms.
So maybe you sign your kid up for soccer or swimming or something so they can make friends there with some normal kids. The problem is that no other parents thinks of these places as incubators of friendship- that's what school is for. So if you suggest that your kids hang out together sometime, people act like you just invited them to a threesome.
Now, my kid has like 4 friends, and I went to school and had like 4 friends too, so maybe she's not missing out, but maybe she is. I tell myself that it's a tradeoff- you can't count on getting a liberal arts education at university anymore, and you shouldn't try anyway because of the costs, so this way I can give her something like that between ages 12-17, and then she can go get technical training and in any case, who still talks to their elementary school friends?
So if you're opening yourself up to "You kept me isolated throughout my entire childhood," you want to be able to say "No I didn't but also, look at the education you received."
Math is easy. Push Khan Academy. My kid starts Algebra 1 next month, and she's 9. That's not prodigious, but it's pretty good. She'll understand it at least as well as the average kid in Algebra 1. I pushed her pretty hard, pretty young, which led to a lot of rage from me and I don't recommend it and I wont do it with my other kid. Eventually I figured out that as long as her age matches the grade level (9 years old = grade 9 math) everything works okay. If we creep beyond that (because you can advance through this stuff really fast when you aren't doing a crossword about fractions every Friday) she muddles through but it's just not worth it. This takes about 45 minutes per day.
Reading is easy. Teach your kid to read early. My one kid could read by 3, the other one is taking a little longer, but will be semi-fluent by 4. This literally adds years to the kid's info-absorbing life and boosts vocab hugely. This isn't just a party trick, since vocab limits comprehension of text. Push reading fiction to learn words and culture, and non-fiction to build a model of the world. Building an accurate model of the world is the most important way schools fail children. This takes about an hour per day.
Writing is less easy: Get the kid to write poetry and descriptive stuff, emulating the style of distinctive things they have read. There is a book called "Writing Power" by Adrienne Gear which has a lot of good tips for making a kid's writing suck less. This varies hugely. Writing about a trip to Disneyland takes 15 minutes, writing a 12-line poem can take an hour.
Science is easy: Science up to like grade 7 is just general knowledge. If the kid reads a lot, you're good. We follow our province's curriculum as a minimum standard, but it's stuff like "opposite poles attract, similar poles repel." Pretty simple stuff. We do this as the opportunity arises. Maybe an half an hour per day when we're doing it.
History is easy: History up to grade 12 is just bien-pensant propaganda. If your kid reads a lot, you're good. My kid is now at the age where we watch a lot of pop history videos, and we also read The Story of The World, which is a homeschooling classic and is a good starting point for building the model. We cover our province's curriculum in about 10 minutes every year just to be safe: "What happened to the Indians?" "Everyone was mean to them." "Was residential school a good thing?" "I'd say no." Done. This mostly is covered by reading time and conversations in the car.
Gym: BJJ and lots of swimming and biking. She has no idea what to do with a basketball or a baseball. I'd sign her up if she asked, though.
If your wife has a PhD, the above is probably all you need to do. We tried The Good and The Beautiful, which might be good for older kids, for for a small kid it was a lot of "Write 4 facts about Switzerland" and "Memorize this poem of dubious artistic merit that was clearly chosen for no other reason than its memorizability." It's made for stay-at-home essential-oil-selling moms with no real education of their own, and is pretty good for those situations. My wife sorta falls into that category so she gets my kid to do a lot of Duolingo and stuff like that, but I supervise most of the real work.
It's a ton of work. I help my kid with her math in the morning before I go to work and check her writing when I get home and ask her about the books she's reading and read classic stuff to her at night and show her the movies of cultural importance that she can understand. But when it goes well, the pride is indescribable, and we share enough of a common language that when she asks something like "What came before God" I can explain most of the debate pretty quickly in terms she can understand and she wails in frustration as she realizes that some things are not just unknown but unknowable because she really does understand the problem. This might happen if she went to a regular school, but the . . . intellectual(?-she's 9?) . . . relationship wouldn't be there, it would be- if it existed at all- between her and a childless 30-year-old wine-aunt teacher who obsessively watches The Bachelor. There's a fine line between "Why have kids if you're going to have someone else raise them?" and "I'll keep your body in the freezer so we'll never be apart," but I think all this effort and interaction and conflict leads to a better parent-child relationship, and I wouldn't want to cede that to an appointee of the state. Many parents have ceded that relationship with their kids to me without even knowing it ("I asked my mom about this stuff, but she doesn't know anything"), and I don't feel good about it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2yr ago
All of that is rather well said but I imagine the case is simpler. The main kind of dangerous misaligned strong AI that Yuddites propose has the following traits:
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It's generally intelligent, as in, capable of developing and updating in realtime a holistic world model at least on par with human's, flawlessly parsing natural language, understanding theory of mind and intentionality, acting in physical world etc. etc.
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Indeed, its world modeling ability is so accurate, robust and predictive that that it can theorize and experiment on its own architecture, and either has from the start or at some point acquires the ability to rapidly change via self-improvement.
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It's viable for commercial or institutional deployment, as in, acting at least pre-deployment robustly in alignment with the client's task specification, which implies not going on random tangents, breaking the law or failing on the core mission.
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For all that it is too clever by half: it interprets the task as its terminal goal, Monkey's Paw style, and not as client's contextual intermediate goal that should only be «optimized» within the bounds of consequences the client would approve of at the point of issuing the task. So it develops «instrumentally convergent» goals such as self-preservation, power maximization, proactive elimination of possible threats, and so on and so forth and ushers in apocalypse, rendering the client's plans in which context the task was issued moot.
Well, this AI doesn't make any sense – except in Yud's and Bostrom's stilted thought experiments with modular minds that have a Genie-like box with smartiness plus a receptacle for terminal goals. It's a Golem – animated clay plus mythical formula. Current cutting-edge AIs, maybe not yet AGI precursors but ones Yud demands be banned and their training runs bombed, are monolithic policies whose understanding of the human-populated world in which the goal is to be carried out, and understanding of the goal itself, rely on shared logical circuitry. The intersection of their «capabilities»- and «alignment»-related elements is pretty much a circle – it's the set of skills that allow them to approximate the distribution of outputs clients want, that's what they are increasingly trained for. If they can understand how to deceive a person, they'll even better understand that a client didn't request making more paperclips by Friday because he cares that much about maximizing paperclips per se. In a sense, they maximize intention alignment, because that's what counts, not any raw «capability», that's what is rewarded both by the mechanics of training and market pressure upstream.
They may be «misused», but it is exceedingly improbable that they'll be dangerous because of misunderstanding anything we tell them to do; that they will catastrophically succeed at navigating the world while failing to pin the implied destination on the map.
theCircusWeakman
2yr ago
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup - 0.30 Tournament: The Motte Clan
I know there are some fans of classic roguelikes in this community; I've seen references to Cataclysm DDA and Dwarf Fortress both here and as a lurker during the reddit years. In my opinion, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is one of the most enjoyable, user-friendly and well-polished examples of the genre, with enough depth and difficulty to challenge roguelike veterans but enough quality-of-life features to make it fun and rewarding for beginners. But one of the best and most unique features is the possibility of online play in your web browser through official servers, with semi-annual tournaments marking the release of new updates! You can spectate and chat in other players' games, fight "ghosts" of other players' slain characters, and--most importantly--compete for high scores or for a number of "challenge banners." I've played in tournaments in the past, and I strongly recommend it for anyone who likes this type of game. Instructions for how to play online
So I thought I would gauge the interest in forming a clan to compete in the upcoming tournament, which runs from 20:00 UTC today, May 5, through May 21. (But if you're interested, you can join a clan anytime between now and next Friday, May 12). Joining a clan is simple and fairly informal: instructions.
You don't have to be an advanced player, or even to have played at all; it's fun just to help each other learn the game, discuss strategy and tactics, etc. I also don't expect any particular time commitment (the great thing about roguelikes is you can play for a few minutes at a time, quit whenever you like, and when you come back the game will put you right back where you left off). If you're interested in playing and think you can manage a couple hours or more over the next two weeks, you're welcome to join. Even two or three players would make a viable clan, but more is merrier!
The tradition is to give the team a name with a terrible pun. Because quokkas are a type of enemy in this game (for some reason), and in honor of our mascot, I have chosen "QuokkaRoundTheClock" as the tentative clan name. (I realize it's awful, and I'm open to better suggestions!) You can join by adding "# TEAMCAPTAIN theCircusWeakman" to the top of your RC file. Let me know below (or in a DM) if you want to join and what your player name is, so I can add you as a team member!
I'll be checking this thread every few hours, in case anyone wants to join or has any questions!
jeroboam
2yr ago
Minor annoyance Friday. I'd like to take a page from our European brothers and whinge about something that has crawled across the pond. This time, the direction of flow is reversed. A European custom is being imported to America.
I am talking about hotel bedding. Specifically, the trend of having a single, heavy duvet as my one and only bed covering at a hotel.
This bizarre bedding choice seems ideal only from the perspective of saving a few shekels on laundry. It is completely awful in every other way. Why must I choose between no covers and a giant heavy cover? There is no way to be comfortable if the room is above 60 °F (which is guaranteed because hotels also muck with the AC unit to save money). I find myself waking up, drenched in sweat, only to kick the heavy duvet off, then freeze, then compromise by having my torso covered with my arms and legs hanging out. It's not a nice way to spend the night.
I first discovered this awful arrangement in Germany in 2012 but it seems to be becoming more common in the United States as well.
It is time to scrap these monstrosities and replace them a sheet and two layers of washable, microfiber blankets. For the freaks, a heavy duvet may still be made available in the closet.
Fuck you Europe. Sincerely.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
2yr ago
Facetiously: Last Friday night. I am not a smart man when plastered.
Being a bit more serious, pretty much exactly 19 years old. I have a pretty extensive online footprint on various forums (civfanatics, criticalsecurity, various IRC servers... good times), so I can pretty accurately pinpoint when I stopped being super cringey and more or less myself.
(Tangentially around there I can also pinpoint when I discovered and consumed the Sequences, which purged me of a whole bunch of blatantly flawed thinking that I'd never have today)
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2yr ago
This is the Friday fun thread, but still, less of this, please.
Grant_us_eyes
2yr ago
The only thing I take away from that essay is the overwhelming desire to do bodily harm on the person whom wrote it.
Why I would take anything in good faith from someone whom hates me and mine and gleefully spends hours of his time writing about how much he hates me and mine is baffling to consider. This doesn't belong in the friday fun thread - this is pure rage bait and culture warring.
I can blow a whole weekend, not speaking to a single soul, working on some obscure programming project like writing a TiddlyWiki launcher to reduce memory usage over the default Node.js launcher. A pointless investment of effort that will be of limited help for my employment prospects. No one else is going to use it or even see it. But it's fun though!
Dude, read some of my Friday Fun Thread posts. That sounds like a perfect weekend. It keeps you sharp.
Women here make smarter choices. They demand more from their hobbies rather than just a short burst of satisfaction from solving some obscure problem. At the very least they expect it to have Social value. Though this may be changing with Social media addiction.
I wonder if this behavior is truly more effective. It has a downside where one may feel unmotivated to do anything if no one is there to see them do it. They may also find it difficult to start tasks or leisure activities unless they have a group to join them.
SophisticatedHillbilly
2yr ago
More of a Friday Fun post, aside from my minor questions, but here are some updates on the mining:
Winter slowed things down, but I now have a shaker table, a jaw crusher, a propane furnace, a non-functional ball-mill, a 55-gallon drum of sulfuric acid, and a ramshackle shack.
First concentration runs with the table were interesting, but not particularly good. Managing angle and flow across the table is harder than I expected, and I seem to have lost about as much good material as I got. Regardless, I ended up with some buckets of concentrates to play with which will hopefully inform me what's in the rock or extractable.
Acid leaching is honestly shockingly simple and easy. I've got blue crystals containing copper and other metals now, and was able to melt them into small nuggets of a pinkish copper/silver/gold mix, with swirls of color throughout. Biggest issue would be scale. Doing it in small trays is easy, but IDK if I'd want to deal with larger amounts of acid. Does anyone know if there's a market for small irregularly shaped blobs of metal, maybe as a craft thing?
As I progress, I'm becoming increasingly aware of the daunting task of metal extraction that's coming up. I can get some basic amount of mixed metal blocks by furnacing, but actually separating the different metals is much more chemistry than I'd like to have on my hands. Which brings me to my main question: does anyone here have knowledge or experience shipping concentrates to a refinery? If I could simply do the concentration as I have been, either through acid or crushing and tabling, and then sell it to the professionals, I'd be sitting pretty. I've been away from polite society for a good while, so I've been putting off sending emails. Maybe ChatGPT can help.
DradisPing
2yr ago
This is in between Small Scale Sunday and Friday Fun...
Refuse to pay for Twitter has become a culture war signal there. Even going so far as the #BlockTheBlue hashtag.
Elon appears to be trolling prominent accounts by giving them free blue checkmarks.
It's quite amusing.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2yr ago
I get how you feel, it can be tiring sometimes. But I was reminded last week why it's not so bad when someone linked a meta drama thread from Less Wrong in the Friday fun thread. The Motte is almost terse by comparison! And at least most motters try to write entertainingly, I often find myself sighing at the length of a post when I first see it, but then getting sucked in when I start reading it.
General updates
tldr for the entire post - started studying 6 hours daily, working out, coworking, had my grandads 90th birthday, stopped hating my parents, saw LOTR, Cyberpunk Edgerunners and John Wick 4. All three are amazing and finally picked up Ramayana and chess for my leisure.
So currently I do math (three different subjects), python (udemy course titled python data science machine learning bootcamp) which has some very rudimentary python in the beginning followed by more advanced stuff at the end. It is on ude,y, has about 25 hours worth of lectures. My aim is to do about 4.5 hours of math and finish this course before the months ends or the next month's first week. After that fast.ai and then my sabbatical would take over my life with me returning to formal logic, nannd 2 tetris and lots and lots of pure C programming.
The whole point is to take these next 6 months and hammer home the real basics so that I can learn to think instead of just matching patterns or lying about things. Anyone can cram questions for interviews but to actually learn under someone good one on one and do so to ensure I not only cover my own gaps but those modern education has is a worthwhile idea.
My Initiation
I also about a month and a half ago got my janeu, the sacred thread which is given to men of very very few clans when they come of age, I was the first to revive the tradition in my house (not just home, house as in the house in terms of clans under the ruling family, feudal lords) and was overwhelmed with the support I recieved from all my e friends. You recieve gifts on that day and I got close to 500 usd (500 is the exact conversion, to inr closer to like 5k in terms of purchaing power in India) in under 24 hours. I only asked for 11 rupees and got close to a hundred donations from friends (mostly) and family in less than 24 hours.
My grandad also turned 90 so we had a large party for him with close to 60 or so guests at our house. I have stopped hating my parents or even wanting to cut them off permanently, making money, having any kind of status. The people who showed up and the kinds of gifts he got did show me that my family indeed is doing well and my disdain for them is more out of my spite for them pointing out my shortcomings rather than anything rational.
I still have issues with my oneitis (I see her in my dreams sometimes. Will leave town when my sabbatical ends. I know what to do, just that time and situations right now are testing me. All this PUA knowldege, nowhere to implement it lol, still stuck on the same chick) and I still have depression and agitation according to my psychiatrists but co working with a bunch of friends my age and older has helped tremendously. I will also officially graduate uni in the next month so another thing I look forward to. My last update was very gloomy and one of my friends even called me upon reading it and spoke to me for hours trying to reassure me, he was right and it has been relatively alright since then. I appreciate all the good things I have, whether it is such gestures by friends or helpful comments on these forums.
Meeting e friends irl
I met one very close e friend recently and he bought me a pair of swords attached to a shield as a gift for my initiation on behalf of his own self and some other friends. We went out, smoked cigarettes, watched some movies and I had a great time with him overall.
Working out
I gained 5 lbs of weight and now weigh 150 lbs, it is not all fat because I can see my face better, same for my abdominal area. I started working out again at home using HIT style bodyweight workout as mentioned in project kratos (by Drew Baye, you can find it online, ideal workout routine tbh), going to total failure on 12 exercises in a circuit is plenty painful so I wish to keep this up for at least 2 if not 3 days a week and slowly gain more quality weight. 145 at 6'0 is very skinny given I have long limbs. I can see all my lifts go up each time I workout and it takes less than half an hour with little to no equipment.
All good for now. Just need to keep this up, build momentum and ensure I rest properly. Proper rest (meditation, actual real leisure, social interactions, sleep etc) are much much more important than people think them to be. I cut my working out to two days for this week due to bad sleep last week due to work and saw great improvements. I will switch to 3 a week now and study more but cutting back at times is important.
Pop Culture
I saw three things that are must watch according to me. Cinema will never be high art the way literature is but it is damn fun. Cyberpunk Edgerunners (Anime on Netflix), John Wick 4 (watch it in theatres) and LOTR extended edition, all were a treat to watch and left a tremendous impression on me.
Highly recommend anyone who has a gf to watch Cyberpunk Edgerunners with her. Edgerunners is a great emotional rollerocaster of an anime whereas John Wick 4 is the second best action movie I have seen, maybe as good as Mad Max Fury Road. Everything about them is brilliant, just go ahead and watch both. Also LOTR extended editon, all three movies are fantastic and Tolkien was a genius. He was able to craft a tale that manages to tell a story that makes you appreciate the atavtistic values your own forefathers defended. The entire thing is beautiful, I had never read the novels and will never watch the garbage amazon is putting out but the original trilogy is a work of pure art. Will review all three things this friday on the fun thread. I cannot imagine comparing harry potter garbage to these things. I was blown away by harry potter as an 8th grader but this is aeons ahead. Truly fantastic.
Leisure
My leisure is Chess and Ramayana as I stated earlier. Ramayana is an amazing epic, Lord Ram, the protagonist whilst an incarnation of Lord Vishnu was never aware of his own divnity and hence his journey through the world is not that of an immortal being but rather that of a mortal man going against the worst evil of his time and winning against it. The tale of a man who did everything he could to live by Dharma and hence is remembered as Dharma Incarnate. He never lived a happy life, his wife chose exile after his victory and his homecoming which we celebrate as Diwali was the only time in his life where his entire family was happy as many suggest that Mata Sita was pregnant with their unborn twins then. I cannot put it down, I love reading it. Ram is everything you can hope a man to be and more in ways that you just cannot help but idolize him and for good reason. Read the epic, I am reading the goldman translation and recommend it highly.
Chess is a fun way to pass time too, I had many exciting games but Ramayana is still my go to.
Until next time!
I don't know if this is "fun friday" material, it's a video of an ongoing war that includes real people visibly dying; but I think it will be interesting to people here, and it's not culture war* or appropriate as a standalone post. Anyways,
Some of the most incredible combat footage I've ever seen, posted today: Battle of Honor Company for the last road to Bakhmut
* there is culture war content in that Da Vinci Wolves is Right Sector, and the leader of Honor (not sure if the perspective guy in the video) has old social media posts celebrating Hitler's birthday (and pre-war Vice articles about that); keep that in mind as this frontpages on Reddit, but it is besides the main point of posting this
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2yr ago
I somehow managed to get out of a major months-long slump. Still not sure how. Salient aspects below, but most of them may be cause or effect and I don't know which.
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Winter ended. It's warmer and less dark. Switching time zones is annoying, but I do appreciate summer time. I probably do get a major case of the SADs (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in winter, not that I'd ever go to anyone who might diagnose me. But psychospeak aside, I hate winter. I hate the cold and the dark and the denuded trees and the grey skies and the soggy ground and the feeble sun and the shortness of the days. I can get comfy at home, but it still feels like some kind of half-hearted afterlife with the best parts of living gone and not coming back for many months. It's still too cold to go swimming or cycling, but I'm planning to go on as long a hike as my busted knees will take to take in the springtime sights as soon as there's a sunny weekend.
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Had some modest but tangible successes at work. It's been a slog before, and I'm still not doing anything praiseworthy, but right now I'm managing without needing to rope in others to help me out. Maybe I just lucked out and picked some easy tasks for once, but it's nice either way.
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Managed to fix up my own codebase. I was immured by bugs of my own making from having been too sloppy, overambitious or just plain distracted in the past. Couldn't do anything without it falling apart thanks to the shamefully low level of code quality. Just about everything failed one way or another. I considered scrapping some features, quarantining others until I might fix them, and simplifying the rest until I might manage. I considered just trashing it all and starting over. I considered trashing it all and never starting over. Instead I sat myself down and did the only right thing - wrote tests. Wrote a lot of tests. There are still large swathes of code that are unusable right now, and it does take me serious effort, but it bears fruit. Bugs are getting fixed. Functionality is restored. And I even manage to add some new things and see them work out.
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Marriage is much more harmonious. I get along better with the wife and we even managed to talk about some difficult topics without it devolving into pointless arguments. Wife has more patience for the child. Child is much more agreeable than she was a few months ago. We went on a trip and had a good time. Nice.
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Successfully extricated myself from work-from-home for once and spent a day in the office. It was productive and I got a lot of workplace socializing done. The 4-hour commute sucks, but once in a while it's absolutely worth it. I try to make it once in a week, but so far I've been held up. I hope to get there again soon, maybe spend a night, get in a few hours of exercise and even meet some old friends.
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Finished playing Cyberpunk 2077. See https://www.themotte.org/post/449/friday-fun-thread-for-april-14/88260?context=8#context . Mostly when I play games it's just to unwind, or to challenge myself, and I have a hard time justifying the waste of time. This one, for once, actually had me along for the ride purely for the story. I normally scoff at storytelling in video games - stories in games universally suck, why not just read a book instead? - but in this one case I'm convinced that it was actually well-served by its format. I'm still thinking about it days later. Still listening to related music (https://youtube.com/watch?v=p4cqqUUfy3A). Maybe I'm just impressionable, but somehow it's been a good impression and I feel that playing this game has somehow done me good.
None of my fundamental life problems are fixed, but somehow in spite of them it's going ever-so-slightly uphill right now. If it really is seasonal, then I hope very much that I manage to get as much as possible out of this season, and to prepare as well as possible for what comes after.
Friday is my last day as an 811 utility locator. There are a lot of reasons I'm leaving the job behind: contractors abusing the free service, no reasonable opportunities for additonal training or advancement, out-of-touch upper management. I am accepting a position as a engineering locator that is a double-edged sword: I'm effectvely taking a paycut because there's less overtime available.
Thankfully, my budget is at a surplus of $1500/month, so I can currently afford the hit. However, I ought to figure out how to do more valuable things...and I am just at a complete loss on a path forward.
If there is anyone else here who is construction-adjacent and can offer some advice on how to clear six figures within 5 years, I'd love to hear it.
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