mostly_lurks's comments

mostly_lurks | 1 year ago | on: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

I'm (apparently) aphantasic, having learned about the concept on a couple of months ago. However unscientific the [VVIQ](https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq/) is, I couldn't answer a single question with anything other than "No image at all."

What I find interesting is that for the past few years I've also been getting regular IV ketamine infusions to treat major depression. The imagery I visualize during these infusions is hyperreal and unlike anything I've ever experienced. I see these full-motion, hyper-detailed, 3D environments that absolutely blow my mind. I also seem to have fairly vivid dreams but when I'm conscious, I can't visualize anything to save my life.

mostly_lurks | 2 years ago | on: Henry Kissinger Has Died

> Maybe every so often a conversation within a podcast episode contains some extraordinary analytical insight not found elsewhere

Much like comments written on the internet.

> That being said, it is probably correct to ignore most of them.

See above.

mostly_lurks | 2 years ago | on: MrBeast has become a viral sensation for his acts of altruism

> how is what he’s doing any different than what we always were told reality TV was doing or gameshows do?

It's not. Those things are bad too.

> My kids watch his videos because the algorithm feeds it to them and from what I’ve seen, I’d rather they be watching MrB than ads for DraftKings

I'm curious what your goal is here. It seems like you're disagreeing with me by saying "look, Mr. Beast is equivalent to/better than these other bad things, right?" I don't find your particular applications of whataboutism and false dichotomies terribly convincing or at all relevant to the discussion.

Like, you understand that "these other things are bad too" and "it's this or draftkings ads" are not substantive or relevant arguments, right?

mostly_lurks | 2 years ago | on: Intel Announces Layoffs After Paying $1.5B in Q1 Dividends

Let's reductio ad absurdum our way through this, shall we? If what you say is true, then during the run up of Bitcoin, any corporation that didn't lay off all its employees and use the money to buy as much Bitcoin as possible was violating their fiduciary duty to maximize return on investment, right? Or maybe every corporation should turn itself into a casino or pornography producer since those are quite profitable endeavors, right?

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

> My original comment was in agreement with the poster I was replying to, and I was adding nuance and finding common ground in a semi-shared experience.

Do you genuinely not see how "adding nuance" to a "semi-shared experience" is taking the focus away from the parent commenter's experience? When someone is recounting racism they suffered, how is adding "other people experienced other kinds of hate" adding any nuance? Do you genuinely believe that there's valuable common ground between, for example, a black person being called the n-word and another person who isn't black being called the n-word or some other slur?

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

Hate directed at black people, who have been exploited, oppressed, enslaved, killed, and more for over 400 years has a more significant and problematic impact than hate directed at other, more privileged groups. Recentering the conversation away from the black person's experience is a form of dismissal, not validation.

An abuser on IRC calling a black person the n-word is objectively more harmful than an abuser on IRC calling pretty much anyone else pretty much any slur.

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

I was not engaging with the argument made by the post I replied to because the poster's argument is completely beside the point.

When someone says "I experienced racism because I'm black," the appropriate response is not "Well, actually, lots of people who aren't black experienced that terrible thing." So what if lots of non-black people experienced that terrible thing? That's not what we're talking about here. Your statement is re-centering the conversation away from the black person who's describing their experience. And you know what? It's the black people who are being routinely discriminated against, incarcerated, and killed because of racism, so maybe it's irrelevant to say "my feelings were hurt on IRC too."

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

> this sounds an awful lot like, "because you're responding to a comment made by a black person, the only acceptable response is one of total agreement"

This is clearly a strawman. I wrote nothing remotely like what you're describing. I asked you to think about what prompted you to redirect the conversation away from a black person's experience of racism and towards whatever your idea of an injustice was. My hope was that upon such reflection, you might realize that black people experience these sorts of microagressions and dismissals routinely, and that such things add salt to the wounds caused by racism.

Instead, you went the fragility route. There couldn't possibly be something for you to learn here. No, instead, you have to create a strawman to protect your fragile ego from the idea that maybe you did something hurtful to someone, inadvertently or otherwise.

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

I think you might want to reflect for a minute on why you thought "but do you know how virulent some of those communities were to just about everyone?" was an appropriate response to a black person talking about their experience of racism. I recognize you believed yourself to be mitigating the effect of your statement by prefacing it with "Not disputing your bad experiences," but I think you'll find that the net effect of your comment is still one of dismissing a black person's lived experience, or at least pulling focus away from it in an unhelpful way.

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer (2022)

> Even so, the apparent protection extended to all age groups. In all, men who averaged 4.6–7 ejaculations a week were 36% less likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer before the age of 70 than men who ejaculated less than 2.3 times a week on average.

Sure, they use "apparent" as a weasel-word but "protection" is clearly suggesting causation.

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

That all makes sense. I think context matters. Yes, when I have a service that's been up and running for some time, if that service fails, I want my service to restart.

But when I'm trying to get a service running for the first time and I'm not sure that I have the right command in the entrypoint, the right arguments to that command, or the right supporting files in place, or the right libraries installed, or the right file permissions, …, well, then I don't want things to just blindly restart, I want a handle and some information so I can figure out why it isn't working.

ETA: I recognize that your link to docs about running a supervisor addresses this problem. For me this raises some interesting questions. Like, I understand why Ben would implement `litestream exec` but maybe it would be better to steer users to a proper supervisor? Separately, what if it's the supervisor that's failing? Now I'm back to seeing kernel panics and not having error messages or a shell.

mostly_lurks | 3 years ago | on: Migrating from AWS to Fly.io

Caveats: 1) this may not be what grandparent was trying to do and 2) I have limited experience debugging "regular" Docker, let alone firecracker or whatever Fly.io does.

With that said, I succesfully deployed a simple Rust/Actix/Sqlite app with a Dockerfile to Fly.io. I then thought I'd try out litestream. For reasons I'm still not sure about, having `ENTRYPOINT ["litestream replicate … -exec myapp"]` resulted in immediate kernel panics.[1]

As I was debugging, my instinct was to want to `fly ssh console` into a running container to see if running the same command from the shell produced any clues for further debugging. Though I understand this is the wrong mental model, the thought was something like "well, I know everything else works, I just need Fly to ignore this failing command so I can have a minute to poke around." To do this, I ended up just removing litestream from the ENTRYPOINT so the deploy would succeed, then I could SSH in and play around at the shell to see what was going on.

Again, I have no idea whether this is the same sort of problem the other person was having, but for my case, what would be helpful is probably not changing how `fly ssh console` behaves, but perhaps some documentation of suggested debugging techniques in case your app is failing to start.

[1] Putting the exact same command into a "start.sh" and making that the ENTRYPOINT worked fine so that's what I ended up doing.

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