jrgoff
jrgoff on Hacker News
I got it in the US in my late 30s or early 40s - I think it was even at One Medical (though I assume One Medical may be fairly different now after Amazon took it over). It was covered by my insurance.
I've had conversations in recent months with several friends who are non-tech, "granola" type folks. They pretty universally expressed dislike for and concern about AI, but then when the conversation turned to whether they used it for anything, the all admitted that they do appreciate being able to use it for some tasks. I think it's complicated for a lot of people (myself included).
I like digging into well designed puzzles and figuring them out, but also - like the author, I like interacting with friends around puzzles and the group dynamic and power of bouncing things off of each other, as well as the reduced likelihood of stupid blind spots.
When I played through Blue Prince, I had an important area of the game undiscovered for in game weeks because I just didn't notice a path that was not meant to be hidden. It was in an area that it made no sense for me to further explore because it was challenging to get to and seemed to have nothing else to offer (I presumed until I had unlocked something further in the game). It was a big relief when I was talking through my progress with a friend who was further along than I, and they prompted me to go back and look again.
Thanks for this - it looks interesting, I'm planning on giving it a try for my low level reflux that's been bothering me for over a decade (but always had other health issues that seemed higher priorities to try to address).
This comment reminds me of my own socially anxious belief that I am boring, that people don't want to hear what I have to say, etc. And I have had plenty of evidence to reinforce those beliefs. As I have been working through things in therapy though, I have realized that my wounded mind grabs on to those things that reinforce that negative belief and tends to be dismissive of things that would contradict it. I've also realized that because I have those fears/wounds I often interact with people in ways that are more likely to elicit disinterested responses - I often have a flat affect and emote little, display no enthusiasm when communicating about things that I care about because I expect that the other person won't be interested or care. I wouldn't be surprised if I subconsciously have chosen friends who re-inforce those beliefs as well, I think I sometimes feel uncomfortable when people do respond enthusiastically toward me.
Some of my early experiences as an adult that broke my heart open a little were also with children - I don't have any of my own, but when my nephew and niece were young they were so open and enthusiastic and happy to see me it got past my wounded defense mechanisms.
I just started using apple tv+ again this month - the only pre-rolls I've noticed are previews for other shows/movies and the previews were skippable.
I'm not sure how this fits in, but in my experience a further complication as someone with chronic pain/illness is that often the thing that bothers me the most isn't what I would describe as painful. I would describe it as very uncomfortable but on a different axis than pain. As a simple example that I think most people can relate to - I do not think of being dizzy as painful, but it's very impactful if you are dizzy all of the time. I had an episode of vertigo that was one of the most miserable experiences of my life but I don't think I experienced much pain during it.
I guess if the goal is to tell whether the person needs pain meds that complication may not matter as much since they don't help (afaik) with those symptoms. But I do sometimes feel like my health problems get taken less seriously if I report on my pain levels rather than my discomfort and/or how it impacts me. Eventually I found a migraine pain scale that focuses on how it affects your life rather than directly how physically painful it is and that helped me have a normalized system for reporting.
I don't know what gets taught in school these days about what was done to the native groups in the US, but when and where I went to school (in the US a few decades ago) we were taught about a number of very bad things that were done: Intentional spreading of diseases, broken treaties, forced displacement, etc.
I do think there are a lot of things bad that we did and do that get ignored or glossed over but a lot of it does get (at least briefly) taught and as far as I know, other than government secrets that are recent-ish, information about these things is not repressed.
I tried to send a message to your the feedback email address on your dustmite guide site but gmail told me it was undeliverable because the address was not found.
What I emailed about was asking what you meant by biweekly for washing bedding - is that twice a week or every other week?
As a man in my mid-40s who has gradually become more aware of my emotions and the need I have for connection, I disagree. Of course I can't make claims about anyone else's needs or happiness, but for myself my life has been a lot better as I have built supportive friendships. I don't feel infantilized, I feel more able to have my needs met, be happier, work through blocks that are triggered by old wounds, etc. I feel more capable of living a satisfying life.
That often happened for me in grad school as well. Generally the questions I had trouble with on a take home exam would yield to late night inspiration. And if they didn't yield by a semi-reasonable time, I would go to bed and many times, as I was drifting off, an insight would come to me. One memorable time though, that didn't happen and I woke up several times in the middle of the night from stress dreams where I was trying to solve the problem. And when I thought about the dream, nothing I had been doing in it made any logical sense to actually help me with a solution. Fortunately I woke up early and was able to figure it out in the morning. It was not a very restful night of sleep though.
Empathy may not be the right term for this, but I've noticed recently times of emotional resonance with some characters/stories. One recent example that I particularly noticed this with was actually a Harry Potter fan fiction. It was fairly well written, but you know, not exactly fine literature. But I noticed how activated my emotions were getting reading those stories, the anger coming up about how the character was being treated, the sense of righteousness in her response to the circumstances and people around her.
I'm not sure if that helped me understand other people better, but I think it may have helped me understand myself a little better. Get a little more in touch with my emotions about parts of my own life. A little catharsis.
And this is not the point, but I think that getting in touch with my own feelings more probably does lead to more empathy for me. I've definitely noticed that when I feel more compassion for myself, I often also notice an increased sense of compassion for others who I perceive similarly.
https://wildernessawareness.org/ - I went there over 15 years ago now and did what is now called The Immersion adult program. The capture the flag type event was around 4 days long, there was another capstone experience that was around 4 days on a survival trip. I think they probably still do these activities but I'm not certain. I thought it was a great program for me. They also have programs for kids and teens including summer camps. I've heard great things about the teen wolf tracking expedition and I imagine their other programs are great too.
There are a few other wilderness schools in the area, some of which may have similar activities, so I am not sure if that is the same one the GP was referring to.
They only limited devices for free accounts.
From the article - "nonplus" evolved from a noun to a verb within the frame of the late 16th century to the early 17th century. A fairly short stretch of years.
Also I think we probably have far more literacy over the time frame of this nonplussed change than at pretty much any other time in history. So it seems strange to me to blame these shifts on illiteracy.
Just to add to the common name list - I grew up in Alaska and we called the crane flies "mosquito eaters" there.
You could also do a random sampling.
I think it would be helpful to have programs like this in earlier contexts as well - How to date effectively? How to communicate healthily with friends/family/work/romantic partners. Etc. I spent a lot of years fumbling around with underdeveloped social skills, low awareness of my emotions and needs, etc. I was fortunate that some of the people I dated had better skills in some of those areas and helped me start to level up but it was still a long and painful slog. And while some of the growth I have had took a lot of work, there were some skills that were much more straightforward to learn and develop.
Have you looked into options around medical leave and/or disability? It certainly sounds like your health is impacting your ability to do your job so those seem like appropriate avenues to explore. Hopefully if you are able to make use of those options they would provide you enough of a buffer to relieve some of the stress you are experiencing and get back on top of your health.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly - do you feel like emotional intelligence and resilience are not appropriate to teach kids? There are a number of fairly simple social and emotional tools/approaches I have learned in adulthood that I really wish would have been taught to me and those around me growing up.
I'm curious if you have any suggestions for such people to find a successful therapy fit (I'm asking both out of personal curiosity as well as hoping that it will help others)? I'm not in that category of brilliant, but I tried therapy off and on for 10 or 15 years before I started feeling like it really helped. I think part of the problem is that I didn't know what was "wrong" with me - I knew that I had trouble with maintaining romantic relationships and I knew that I was sometimes unhappy (though I was rarely willing to admit to myself how unhappy I often was), but I didn't really know why. And I spent a lot of time introspecting, so generally when I tried therapy out the therapist wouldn't have any real insights that I hadn't thought of already. I didn't dislike my therapists, but generally would give up after a few months of not feeling like any progress was being made.
I'm not sure all of what went into things working out for me in therapy the past couple of years, but I think at least a part of it was shifting into a more emotions based approach. I'm not sure how open to that I would have been when I was younger. My tendency to approach most things intellectually was a very powerful tool, but it wasn't successful at getting to the underlying feelings I was not really aware of. Having more access to those feelings has been overwhelming at times, but also has enabled a lot of ongoing progress on being more satisfied with my life.
You can form hypotheses and test them though. That is what they do when they run the "standard" tests, but once those tests are done most doctors don't seem to be good at and/or interested in coming up with further hypotheses.
I can't picture things in my mind like that, but I also can't do a very good job of reproducing a photograph that I am directly looking at. If I can trace it that's one thing, but if I can see the photo but not hold my tracing paper directly up against it then it's a skill I haven't developed well.
I've seen others who felt similarly about the enjoyability of the space part vs the dog part. But for some reason I felt the opposite, the space part was alright but I didn't really connect with any of the characters or plot there much. But I loved the part on the dog planet, for me that world felt like he started with a question of "What might it look like if a pack animal achieved human-like level of intelligence?" and explored from there, and what he came up with made a lot of sense to me and was really interesting to think about.
I don't know how or where you learned calculus, but when I learned it and when I taught it, the classes were filled with physical world examples to motivate and train the material. That said, my experience as a student reflected on as an instructor, was that a lot of the explanation and example stuff didn't have a lot of fertile ground in my mind yet when I was first learning the material. I'm sure it helped, but there were definitely times when as a grad student I reviewed the foundational material and thought "This makes so much sense, why didn't they teach me this when I was in high school?" only to realize that almost certainly they had taught me that in high school and I just didn't have the mathematical maturity yet to retain it. I think I was also hampered in my chances of learning the conceptual fundamentals because I was able to do most of the work through a solid ability at algebraic manipulation. While solid skills in algebraic manipulation is quite important, I do think it would be a good idea to restructure those classes so that a solid conceptual understanding is also more necessary to pass the class. Of course, easier said than done.
I would add to this the importance of listening to be part of this approach. I used to work at a company with a couple thousand engineers. My team was 20 or so people at the time and our dev environment was constantly breaking. It was not unusual for me to spend more than a full day each week trying to get my dev environment working and unable to do any development on what I was supposed to be doing. And that was common across the whole team. We had 1 to 2 senior engineers working close to full time on improving the situation, communicating with the team who maintained the dev environment and finding workarounds for our requirements, but often in a week or two those workarounds would stop working as the devops team made more changes. To be fair, the devops team was actively working towards creating a new dev ecosystem and our team had some dev needs that were not needed for most (maybe any?) of the rest of engineering. So they kept breaking our workarounds, we would be told we shouldn't be doing things that way anyway so it wasn't their fault, but also there wasn't an officially supported way to do what we absolutely needed to do to do our work.
Eventually the situation got escalated up the chain and the director came to our site to look into the situation. I was hopeful that that would lead to some improvements but when he was introduced to the team and gave a little speech it basically boiled down to "back in my day engineers would get their hands dirty and figure things out, maybe as a company we've become too lazy and expect other teams to fix things for us" - i.e. "you guys need to stop being lazy and figure it out yourselves". We were pissed. Fortunately the management chain was able to get him to understand the situation and he assigned one of the main devops guys to work with us to make sure our needs were met going forward. He never even apologized to us, I think he just decided it would be better to disappear and let things settle (we worked in a satellite city and he was at the main office so this was the only time many of us had ever interacted with him).
Yeah, I grew up where it was not common to talk about either. I think I mostly picked it up from significant others, and from joining a community for awhile where it was much more common to talk about those sorts of things. I'm glad that I did!