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David R. MacIver
144.5K posts
David R. MacIver
@DRMacIver
What's for breakfast? Onward! Towards the abyss.
@[email protected] if you want a backup, but I don't toot there yet.
The modern condition is mostly trying to do things on your own that people have historically achieved with a large support network and wondering why you're tired all the time.- Sci Hub is such a perfect example of the difference between the legal and the moral. Significantly illegal, constantly on the verge of being shut down / blocked / excluded from platforms as a result, and a huge net positive for humanity with almost zero downsides.
- I particularly enjoy this one because everyone ignores the fact that it makes no sense outside of its original cultural context. We don't have westeros style long seasons where you can grow up never knowing winter.“Oh you sweet summer child” being entirely the invention of Game of Thrones is another one of those things.
- "Minds are basically computers" is wrong if you think of computers as abstract turing machines but spot on if you think of computers as a horrible assemblage of kludges bridging incompatible legacy code which only work because critical bugs are masking other critical bugs.
- Huh. This is a genuine actual output from GPT-4's DALL-E plugin. This is the first time I've seen an image generator quite this pixel-perfect just straight up copy something from its training set.
- Consistently the best approach I've found for managing depression is to always do slightly more than depression tells you is reasonable. Depression is a contraction of your lifeworld, and the only way to get out of it is to walk right up the the edge and push.I try to say this with compassion and as a person who has had extreme depression before but if you suffer with depression you will 100% be mad at me for this: These tips are not helpful. They are enabling and will feed your depression. Depression is not like cancer or Parkinsons
- Humanities people should really learn at least one STEM subject so that they can actually properly grasp that abstraction depth is a thing that really exists and not everything is about near-universal human experiences.
- One mistake people make in salary negotiations is that they try to make a practical or moral argument for the higher value. This can be useful, but I've had surprisingly good luck recently with words to the tune of "I like money. How about you offer more money than that?"
- I forget this isn't widely known, so here's a social tool. The "correct" way to ask someone if they know X when trying to decide how or whether to explain something is to ask something along the lines of "How familiar are you with X?"
- A lot of visible problems that you can't seem to solve are secretly solutions you don't want to admit to adopting to problems you don't want to admit to having.
- "Pandas is what happened when someone concluded that the problem with Python was that it wasn't enough like R, so built an R clone on top of numpy, the library that was written when someone concluded that the problem with Python was that it wasn't enough like matlab."
- > driving > Google maps says it's found a faster route > I ask if route is actual road or insane horse track > It doesn't understand > I pull out a diagram explaining what is road and what is insane horse track > It laughs. It's a good route sir > It's an insane horse track
