mellowdream

Division was manufactured when Trump became president? So what do you propose as the reason for why he became president in the first place? Who is responsible for that?

This is a collection of interesting old websites: https://peelopaalu.neocities.org/

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, On Reading and Books, 295 -

"Because people always read only the latest, instead of the best of all times, writers stay within a narrow circle of circulating ideas, and the age silts up ever more deeply in its own muck.

Therefore with respect to our reading the art of not reading is extremely important. It consists in our not picking up whatever happens to be occupying the greater public at any given time, such as for instance political or literary pamphlets, novels, poems and so on, which currently make a lot of noise and even reach several editions in the first and last years of their run. On the contrary, we should consider that whoever writes for fools always finds a large public, and we should devote the always precious and carefully measured time set aside for reading exclusively to the works of the great minds of all times and peoples, who tower over the rest of humanity, and who are distinguished as such by the voice of fame. Only they really shape and instruct us.

Of the inferior we can never read too little and the good never too often. Bad books are intellectual poison: they ruin the mind.

In order to read the good it is a condition that we do not read the bad; for life is short, and our time and our powers are limited."

Just moving my lamp around (i.e., making my face whiter, I'm guessing?) could add 2-3 points. Putting on glasses could do the same. Not sure what to make of this.

Of course the methods listed should be effective regardless of the language as they simulate immersion, but it will not be so "painless" the further away you move from the European language families which share many similarities.

What kind of work do you do? I've heard nice things about working for the government (in terms of QOL, anyway), though of course the work is nothing sexy.

'If anyone should think he has solved the problem of life & feels like telling himself everything is quite easy now, he need only tell himself, in order to see that he is wrong, that there was a time when this "solution" had not been discovered; but it must have been possible to live then too & the solution which has now been discovered appears in relation to how things were then like an accident. And it is the same for us in logic too. If there were a "solution to the problems of logic (philosophy)" we should only have to caution ourselves that there was a time when they had not been solved (and then too it must have been possible to live and think).' - Wittgenstein

Private schools can be and are as unfair as they want, only it's upsetting when they still maintain pretenses suggesting they are not.

It's nice that this sort of due diligence and review is even possible with public institutions.

Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest discusses this, only it's a film.

Other commenters here seem to say that the culture, if not the modern phenomenon, of children moving out of their parents' homes early is more characteristic of the West (U.S., Western Europe), and not so much places like China, Japan, India (continuation of tradition, less modern stigmatization). This aligns with my experience and what little I learned in school as well. (Yes, N = 1.)

It so happens that this pattern is economically inefficient, and only in our inability to support it does its discontinuation serve as a negative economic indicator. American culture makes it an effective metric in the U.S. Where it's already common for children to live with their parents longer though, such as in India, the original choice could very likely be to stay, which makes the metric less useful.

"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Thomas Jefferson

"Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists." Norman Mailer

"Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation." George Bernard Shaw

"In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has." Mark Twain

"I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets." Napoleon

"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X

"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands." Oscar Wilde

"The lowest depth to which people can sink before God is defined by the word journalist." Soren Kierkegaard

"Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends." - Wittgenstein

"The newspaper epitomises the goal of today’s educational system, just as the journalist, servant of the present moment, has taken the place of the genius, our salvation from the moment and leader for the ages." - Nietzsche

https://web.archive.org/web/20180327031901/http://www.aarons...

You didn't make any value statements with this data, but it should be noted that disparities in representation have nothing to do with whether or not groups should or deserve to be represented more or less.

This design exists in the form of the more complex Yamaha Tenori-on, which was featured by Four Tet in There Is Love In You - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M20ukzn_rsw

It's also expensive, now 500 USD on eBay - so it's nice to see a version of the product getting put together on the web :)

I thought I was clever to disable YouTube viewing history, thus replacing all the interesting and addictive videos I normally get lost in with the most inane garbage from the typical "news" vendors, sports highlights, celebrity interviews, Star Wars/capeshit theorycrafting, crap from Business Insider and TED and the like, etc. which I of course planned to never watch...

Now when I want to avoid working I just end up watching stupid clickbait instead of interesting clickbait...

Stalker is still the most beautiful film I've ever seen. I took a film class in college and fell asleep when we were watching it (embarrassing, but the professor was wholly understanding) - I watched it 3 or 4 times later the same week on my own. But it's also the film that's been hardest for me to understand. I "get it" the least of all, I'm still not sure what it's about - it's an otherworldly experience, though.

With Stalker I turn to Fellini - I don't like the idea of "understanding" a film. I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn't. If you are moved by it, you don't need to have it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it. That's why I don't think my films are misunderstood when they are accepted for different reasons. Every person has his own fund of experiences and emotions which he brings to bear on every new experience-whether it is to his view of a film or to a love affair; and it is simply the combination of the film with the reality already existing in each person which creates the final impression of unity. As I was saying, this is the way the spectator participates in the process of creation. This diversity of reaction doesn't mean that the objective reality of the film has been misunderstood. Anyway, there is no objective reality in my films, any more than there is in life.

I actually looked through a few LeetCode problems a couple months back and had a brief panic that I found tricky/nonintuitive to formally prove from first principles problems that were apparently "easy" or "trivial" to just intuit (as LeetCode commenters tend to characterize, anyway). I was never satisfied with people's "oh, just do xyz and it makes sense" - I just assumed I was dumb... Still not sure what to make of this - I'm not the only one, I guess... ?

If you're "just a normal person with a few computers at home", it is VERY easy to obtain secure copies of LTSC for free if you look in the right places.

And I can attest to how pleasant LTSC is to use as an everyday consumer desktop - I'm using Linux now, but I never had problems with drivers/hibernation/multihead/administration/updates/etc. (some common complaints people have with Linux and Win10 Pro/Home) on LTSC. It's especially good if you need big proprietary software packages, of course.

It's SO nice hearing that I'm not the only one who thought this - it was actually around this release that I just gave up on iPhones and moved to Android phones. The amount of fiddling/setup/googling I've had to do since has been dramatically less.

I've wanted to like Apple's way of doing things for years - Unix-like and support for MS Office, "ecosystem" integration - but every time I've used their products I've returned them or passed them off to my family members hoping they'd get more use out of them.

Nowadays, I get more questions than ever asking for help on how to do X Y or Z thing that seems really trivial on Android/Linux/Windows systems (like copying files without iTunes/iCloud, a frustration I remember dealing with even almost 10 years ago). It's now to the point where I just recommend 3rd party apps and alternatives for basic utilities for Apple's macOS and iOS to my family.

I actually do share many of the author's thoughts on how maddening it can be to collect specific pieces of data that seemingly should be collectable but aren't because of some stupid reasons xyz. To play devil's advocate, though - Is it really malice, or just that people rarely think about these particular use cases in the first place?

It seems like a lot of the things and products mentioned here, if released by an independent dev or small team, could similarly be overlooked. I can't imagine most of the engineers I know (and I suppose especially not rich megacorps) to really ever consider the .01% of people (the kind of demographic you'd find on HN, I guess) saving ALL browsing history across browsers according to some universal standard or LinkedIn statistics or YouTube text history.

OT-ish: I can see how this would be relevant for most people living well enough, say, like middle-upper class America, who can afford these technologies and to care about the multitude of examples presented, but is there a conversation about how much data we should or need to be collecting (to say nothing of handing off to 3rd parties) at all in the first place?

I've always felt that relying and interacting with less technology (or at least making efforts within reason to) was better for my own quality of life (less tracking, less worrying about posting regrettable stuff, sticking to basic principles like "move more, eat less" instead of obsessively counting stuff on my old MyFitnessPal and Fitbit) - surely I'm not alone?

This is a cool idea that I'd personally love to see work in some form or another.

In my experience, though, the tedium of tracking macros and the like has probably been the biggest obstacle for being consistent. When I cut now, just maintaining some very simple principles like "eat less, eat vegetables, it's OK to feel hungry" has been vastly more useful long-term than weighing food on scales and calculating BMI every week... But maybe that's just me.

This solution might make for a nice compromise.

This is why I've been saving PDFs/HTMLs or even just taking screenshots of webpages I find especially meaningful or important to me... Archiving things as files this way can get kind of tedious and definitely feels primitive at times (we made the LHC but I'm here not expecting the same pages of cool interviews, designs, etc. to be up next month), but what can you do?

But it's nice to know you're not alone in wanting nice things to last :)

This happened to me as well, wish I had figured this out then. I unfortunately had "Restore tabs" set on - ended up just reinstalling the executable (and losing a hundred tabs...).

Windows 10 is honestly really good as a user desktop as long as you run the appropriate optimization and debloat scripts on an LTSC image.

I'm still using Linux as well, but I've been really impressed by the stability of the LTSC Win10. Even fewer problems than the recent iterations of MacOS, in my experience. It's worth considering especially if you need access to commercial software like Excel or Adobe CC products.

I don't even think it's necessary to point out specific examples, though you're welcome to do so. All it really takes is showing the kind of numbers music databases like discogs (for both generalist and specialist consumers alike) are posting - millions of records added PER YEAR [1]. This alone shows "a million contemporary popular music tracks" is not representative of modern music's "state" whatsoever.

[1] https://blog.discogs.com/en/discogs-year-end-report-2018/

Some might say it's the same drive that makes one pursue becoming a CEO in the first place that makes one incapable of giving it up. The whole industriousness characteristic of the five-factor model that men in particular have evolved to take, if you're into that.

Should people who know they're too poor to raise children without raising them obese be having children?

From my own experience I'd agree with this - I can feel down, certainly, but I'm nowhere near the non-functioning, clinically depressed state I was in for 4 years a few years back.

I don't think the "realistic" vision I had of "the world" has really changed, just the attitude: I'm still "stupid as f*ck" and observing "person X I knew in high school totally has such a better life than I do" - but now, it's about interpreting it as a reason that things should probably change, whether it's the perspective ("So what?") or the action ("Are you not even going to try doing something about it?").

OTOH, it really doesn't help that there are so many more things to be depressed about pretty much all the time - abuses of social media, pornography, addiction, fracturing social structures. I ask, incredulously, how can anyone read this [1] and NOT want to die, or at least profoundly sympathize? People haven't evolved "rosy enough glasses" to mask these symptoms of modernity - of course there are problems, both with "the world" and our abilities to get by.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"

1 https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill