hoorayimhelping's comments

>All ads are poisonous

This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.

3. You are strong enough to provide a serious and credible threat to the king if he implements a policy that threatens you.

Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.

>* However the both act in the brain the same way and both lead to bad ends to the vast majority.*

This is a poor justification for making something illegal. Chocolate and cocaine operate on the same neural pathways, but one is clearly more detrimental than the other. Following this reasoning, we should ban chocolate, and being able to see comment scores on hacker news, and like counts on Instagram photos, and reach on Twitter, and retirement account balances because they produce the same effects in the brain as illegal drugs do.

>I don't think there is such a thing as truth

This is a self-defeating statement. It's false on its face. If there is no such thing as truth, then this statement can't be true because it would mean there is at least one truth.

last.fm found me some of my favorite bands of the last 15 years.

This isn't the world we've built, it's the world we live in. We didn't create this world, and we aren't yet powerful enough to change the nature of reality, so to blame humanity for the necessity of defense is silly. You'll be a lot less dispirted if you accept that the world we live in isn't a human creation and that we still haven't made it out of the struggle to survive.

I was diagnosed 15ish years ago when I was 26. I tried medication and absolutely hated it. It changed who I was. Medication is a crutch. If you're completely crippled and you need it, then you should use it temporarily. But be very very careful developing dependence on it and using it instead of doing the work to deal with your behavior.

What worked for me instead of medication:

- Get on a sleep and wake schedule that follows natural sunlight. Try to wake up soon before or right around the time the sun comes up. Plan backwards on when to go to sleep to get the proper amount of sleep you need (I almost always wake up six and a half hours after falling asleep with no alarm, whether I want to sleep in or not), so I usually go to sleep around 11:30 to wake up at 6:00 AM.

- Get on a meal schedule. Whether it's 3 meals or 5 or 6 meals, eat them around the same time, every day. No more skipping lunch, or working through lunch then eating it at 3:00 PM.

- Eat some kind of protein and fat for breakfast. Don't eat breakfast made of sugary carbs (like bread or cereal). Eggs and a breakfast meat are really good. Steel-cut oatmeal cooked in a rice cooker and eaten with peanut butter and fresh fruit is also very good.

- Workout regularly. I lift weights in the moring 4x a week, and I'm on a program that uses progressive overload, meaning I'm making continuous (but slow at this point) progress. Having a goal that improves yourself is the key here.

- Spend time away from your phone and computer outside. Hiking, birding, fishing, surfing, hunting, etc. Do something that takes you out of your four walls and puts you into a place with plants and animals, and do it regularly.

- Pay attention to your behavior. Be wary of getting into a hyper focused flow for hours where you ignore everything else (like lunch). Similarly, pay attention when you find yourself bouncing around. Becoming aware of when you're doing this is a big step to breaking the habit and forcing yourself to focus or take a break. I'm not saying getting into a state of flow is bad, I'm saying staying in a state of flow for hours on end where you ignore everything else isn't healthy or sustainable.

A Brief History of Time deals with this subject very well. It's a very easy and quick read, meant for a wide audience, not a technical one. It's readable in an afternoon.

The concept that time is relative to the observer is where the theory of relativity gets its name from.

Also, it's worth noting that Apollo astronauts are not average-health men. They were selected for their extreme outlier health attributes, which is why so many of them live so long.

Space is generally defined to be 100km above earth's surface, an arbitrary point called the Karman Line [1].

Orbit is when an object is traveling so fast that it reaches the horizon of a body before the body's gravity can pull it down to the surface, but perpetually. It's basically perpetually falling around the body. Imagine one of those guys in a wingsuit skimming along the surface of a mountain, never actually touching the surface. It's similar to that, but at a much higher scale.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line

If you've ever seen fruit on sale, you've seen a coarse version of this.

Capable with current technology if intercepted early enough. I think most people visualize an asteroid hitting earth like a ball hitting the ground when dropped at arm's length. In reality, orbits of celestial objects are elliptical, and they're constantly moving. A small force, like that produced by an ion thruster, applied to an asteroid 15km in diameter for months or years would be enough to change it's orbit such that it wouldn't impact earth.

It's not like this is limited to "bad players." It's standard procedure for almost every website. Whether that's good or bad is a separate topic - the point it's not just nefarious people using cookies to watch user behavior. Normal people use this information to make their websites better and create more effective products for people. Which is exactly what people said when this legislation was introduced. So instead of actually fixing anything, they made it worse. Now we're being tracked _and_ we have annoying nags that block content show up on every website, exactly like people said would happen when this legislation was introduced.

It's the same tired nonsense as when regulators try to tax a business that's already operating on thin margins and act surprised when the business passes the cost to their customers instead of eating it.

I'm not upset with the intent of what they were trying to do, which was noble; the upsetting thing is that it was patently obvious their hamfisted implementation would lead to this outcome, and they did it anyway, knowing they could count on people to deflect blame away from them.

>I have been diagnosed with ADHD this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process?

As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD a decade-and-a-half ago in my 20s: You don't. You don't even think about using your diagnosis as an excuse or a shield for behavior that is unacceptable. You never consider thinking that you deserve special treatment because you were diagnosed with ADHD. You accept that there are tradeoffs that come with it, some positive, some negative, and that you will have advantages in some areas and disadvantages in other areas and you don't let it define you or your behavior.

>Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, etc. were all great games from the business perspective.

OP said:

>all these mmos were popping up saying they were the "WoW killer"

Guild Wars and WHO weren't positioned as WoW killers. They were positioned as WoW alternatives that prioritized or PvP or had an endgame that revolved around PvP. Which is probably why they did well - they offered something that WoW wasn't good at instead of trying to eat WoW's lunch.

I don't think this is good news, it's at best not-bad news. We're already inundated with content, most of it copycatting other content, and it's replacing meaningful things, like archetypal stories and philosophy. Look at how people describe Marvel movies and Star Wars shows - it's content, not stories. Scaling the ability to just repeat things without an understanding of those things will at best just add more content. It will likely contribute to the further creation of complex systems people don't understand and can't control.

"Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. Ya know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could..." (Emphasis mine).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PLvdmifDSk&t=61s

A hypothetical guy works at a hypothetical startup that publishes a lot of blog posts, and he's not the greatest writer, so he uses a hypothetical service that does AI-based editing for him. He loves the service and recommends it to everyone. The startup folds and he goes to work at a different company and that company has a professional copy editor on the payroll so he doesn't need to use the service anymore.

He's churned, but he hasn't rejected the service. He just doesn't need it anymore because his circumstances have changed. If he needs the service it offered, he could presumably re-subscribe to it later.

Tangential but related: "Toxic Propellant Hazards"[1] a video made in the mid/late 60s and published by the US National Archives Youtube channel. In addition to having some great information about hypergolic propellants, and having some interesting footage showing what they're like to use, it also has that mid-century production quality, the kind that the Fallout games love to simultaneously lampoon and pay homage to

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zha9DyS-PPA

>We just learned that it takes only $200m to buy a law in the state of California.

Incredibly cynical and reductive. I cast my vote on prop 22 based on my personal beliefs about where the government should sit in a relationship between two consenting parties. I haven't used a ride share app in about 2 years. It has nothing to do with the money spent on the campaign, or my loyalty to any company, or marketing through an app.

Despite what people on the internet like to think, people actually have beliefs that aren't based on cynical, simplistic, one dimensional worldviews. People who've never used a rideshare app might object to the government demanding companies solve a problem few people had. Especially in California, where the State is extremely paternalistic and overbearing.

>on the one hand, we need informed citizenry who can dissect media and think critically

That isn't what universities are creating though. They're creating people who think one specific way about the world. The problem is that they only teach Marxist ideas about the 20th century, and you have to go elsewhere to get a balanced and realistic view of what actually happened. My humanities classes 20 years ago all glossed over the horrors of Stalin's gulags, the horrors of Mao's great leap forward, and all the death caused by Marxist ideas being put into practice at a wide scale in the 20th century. I had to learn about all these things from my history classes. My humanities classes were all talking about the evils of capitalism while glossing over the 20-100 million dead from starvation and exposure under totalitarian communist regimes. I can't imagine it's gotten any less biased and one sided in the past 20 years.