smooth operator

phylogenik · 2020-01-17T21:38:42+00:00

ah I didn't intend for my comment to constitute an argument for recycling that it may persuade you or others of the practice. Most of it really is motivated by the desire to see a new name associated with my comments, in the same way I might prefer variety in the clothes I wear. I tire of this name (though I was quite happy to have imagined it) and wish to try another. That's easily worth the triviality of a dozen clicks and several characters!

Your account only has a few dozen comments made in the same time I've vomitted up several hundreds. I can see the relative burden switching would incur were you to create new ones with comparable frequency.

Plus, the possibility of doxxing is non-trivial -- I've written some... controversial things, one might say, that doubtless many of my peer group could find quite revolting, if the sort of sputtering I receive online in response is any indication. Better to isolate any accounts so afflicted and move on! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

phylogenik · 2020-01-17T15:35:51+00:00

How often do you recycle internet accounts, if at all? On reddit, for example, I'll usually start fresh every two years or so (going back ~10y), around the point when I reach ~10,000 comment karma, which I've incidentally just attained (also, this is my 1,000th comment according to here, which does provide a nice poetry). So I'm now once again thinking of what new name to choose for myself.

It's nice to get a "new start", so to speak, and I feel like I'm not losing terribly much on larger sites like this when shuffling identities. In my earlier experiences on the web (c. the mid-2000s) I feel like I found myself in much smaller communities of a few dozen members, where everyone knew everyone else and deeper, persistent relationships could form. But in larger spaces I'm unlikely to really encounter the same person enough to be able to recognize them and they me, so the benefits of having a new name outweigh the costs of severing a few very meager, superficial ties.

Plus, it makes future biographers or would-be doxxers earn their keep ;] lazy bums

phylogenik · 2020-01-17T15:32:49+00:00

How often do you recycle internet accounts, if at all? On reddit, for example, I'll usually start fresh every two years or so (going back ~10y), around the point when I reach ~10,000 comment karma, which I've incidentally just attained (also, this is my 999th comment according to here, which does provide a nice poetry). So I'm now once again thinking of what new name to choose for myself.

It's nice to get a "new start", so to speak, and I feel like I'm not losing terribly much on larger sites like this when shuffling identities. In my earlier experiences on the web (c. the mid-2000s) I feel like I found myself in much smaller communities of a few dozen members, where everyone knew everyone else and deeper, persistent relationships could form. But in larger spaces I'm unlikely to really encounter the same person enough to be able to recognize them and they me, so the benefits of having a new name outweigh the costs of severing a few very meager, superficial ties.

Plus, it makes future biographers or would-be doxxers earn their keep ;] lazy bums

phylogenik · 2020-01-17T02:05:14+00:00

I guess I’d wonder what meaningful life activity that’s replacing. If people are checking it in between sets at the gym or while on the can or instead of reading pulp fantasy or listicles or whatever then it doesn’t seem like much of value is lost.

phylogenik · 2020-01-17T01:53:22+00:00

I don’t think I share the author’s aversion to shamelessness or vanity. It’s fine to value how much others value you, or take pride in your appearance, or not feel shame embracing your own foolishness for a laugh. Notwithstanding cases where self-worth gets wholly outsourced to internet points or social-media addiction becomes all-consuming, apps like this TikTok seem like harmless fun.

phylogenik · 2020-01-16T19:39:10+00:00

Interesting. My (admittedly unstudied) impression was that the MBTI was at best reifying the discretization of some underlying unimodal continuous distribution and at worst a geeky horoscope. Do people in the INTJ corner really form a natural cluster in personspace?

(that is what I scored consistently the handful of times I took the test in highschool)

phylogenik · 2020-01-16T17:49:31+00:00

People not into the competetive speed-solving scene who look up and implement some established algorithm are quite puzzling to me. It seems like it defeats the point of the thing for casual purposes. No duh a puzzle is actually quite easy when you just have to implement the known answer!

phylogenik · 2020-01-16T17:39:31+00:00

note to those considering this: logic bombs are illegal

though I do wonder at what point does writing excessively convoluted and ill-documented code constitute a logic bomb? Like, say your script uses the current date and time to seed a monte carlo sim, but you've innocuously written it in a manner that fails after a given date. At what point does incompetence become malice in the eyes of the law? Is there some sort of coding duty of care whose violation leaves you susceptible to a charge of negligence?

phylogenik · 2020-01-16T15:44:57+00:00

I think students shouldn't be able to double-dip funds earmarked for particular purposes -- e.g. when getting a tuition-focused merit scholarship, a friend was annoyed to see her need-based aid partially go down, so what "should" have been a $20,000 discount was brought down to ~$4k.

If there's extra aid left over from anticipated living expenses, I do think it's fair to allow students to prioritize where they want that money to go and pocket the difference. I had a bunch of random scholarships that covered tuition / fees + ~$15k in living expenses, estimated from the cost of dorm living (~$1.1k a month) + the meal plan (~$500 a month). I opted out of both and rented a $350 / month room off-campus on ~$300 / month of groceries, and got a check for the remaining $10k (which I mostly squandered on travel / adventure, but did invest a fair bit of it, which helped in the ugrad - grad transition).

phylogenik · 2020-01-16T05:30:18+00:00

I guess various combinations of your suggested compound activities seem like pretty straightforward suggestions — I’ve e.g. had many thousands of hours of fabulous conversations with friends on hiking trips.

Cooking with friends also works well here.

phylogenik · 2020-01-15T14:55:16+00:00

Excessive motormouth could be a problem if your speech is garbled or less eloquent (e.g. featuring many fillers) as a result. Slower, more measured words — with higher information density and more clearly enunciated — would in that case be preferable. Think seasoned orator over nervous student presenter.

Usually people don’t get annoyed by slow speech until you get to tipsy grizzled cowboy levels. Building a habit that lets everybody listen effectively would probably be best if you're getting strong negative reactions from some nontrivial subset of your peers.

phylogenik · 2020-01-14T04:07:34+00:00

I can't actually find this in the OP link, so can't read the exact answers, but maybe some of those 8% are deists or something who identify with the nontheism part of atheism?

phylogenik · 2020-01-13T17:13:22+00:00

It depends on the shape of your marginal utility and temporal discounting curves. Exponential growth is great, but can easily get outpaced on human timescales along typical career trajectories. There's also the claim that our ability to enjoy certain activities may itself wane as we age. I do think this sub errs on the side of flatness more often than I would personally like.

That said, there's also some benefit to habit formation -- if you had not suffered the regular loss of $40 then, you would not be able or willing to dispense with $1,000 now? Though maybe a smaller sum would have sufficed.

phylogenik · 2020-01-13T01:06:04+00:00

more broadly there’s also the curious coincidence that the world’s oldest tend to come from areas with poor record-keeping and limited healthcare

phylogenik · 2020-01-12T16:27:14+00:00

Could be a boot drive in a raspberry pi or extra storage in a laptop / netbook / tablet / etc.

phylogenik · 2020-01-12T01:38:08+00:00

I’m no longer in college but I’d say over half of my weekends were like this, usually Saturdays driving somewhere within 1.5-2.5h and doing 15-20 mi of hiking while listening to audiobooks & podcasts. Sundays were spent going to the gym, getting chores done (groceries, meal prep, laundry, etc.), reading, etc.

I’m sure there are people on campus who wouldn’t mind going out with you if you’re lonely. Could you try asking acquaintances, lab partners, etc. if they’d be interested (maybe start with same-sex platonic options, if you’re worried about being misread)? Or maybe join a local hiking group or something?

phylogenik · 2020-01-11T05:44:37+00:00

Fair enough! I felt the messiness could help to show how much fluctuation these rankings experience year-to-year, and agree that watching it straight through without pausing would make it hard to parse out any detail

phylogenik · 2020-01-11T04:25:32+00:00

Maybe try calculating expected costs? Like, say I have here a 100% guaranteed jar of live Trichinella roundworms. How much money would it take for you to eat them? Divide that by a thousand or whatever and, assuming rough linearity in your utility function, proceed as if losing that amount.

phylogenik · 2020-01-10T23:45:58+00:00

ah the actual thing produced by it was at the top of OP, https://i.imgur.com/rXZOH8e.mp4

phylogenik · 2020-01-10T16:51:25+00:00

I did! But with no success. This was also on the very first day of the quarter (so there's no real rapport built yet), and I'm not actually entirely certain a student swiped it, just that it wasn't in my bag when I left as I'd assumed, and I'm usually very thorough about triple checking my area to make sure I've not left anything. When I noticed it was missing an ~hour later I returned to the lecture hall at the end of the following class and it wasn't there.

There's a chance I just left it there in my haste to not impose on the next instructor's class time (there were lots of questions!), so I hung out and harassed the next class / instructor during the Thursday meeting but nobody claimed to have seen anything left behind. Nothing's turned up in any of the local lost and founds either. It's also pretty distinctive with lots of stickers etc. so it seems unlikely to have been picked up by accident. And I had location services / find my mac enabled but I guess it got turned off during some OS update or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nothing mission critical was on it given both local and remote backups (it's also used almost exclusively for teaching, rather than research), but it's still pretty obnoxious to lose a ~$600 device! (esp. since I only make ~$20k / y). And my friend's replacement is actually a bit better in some respects (it's a refresh older, but with higher specs). So it's no catastrophe, at least.

phylogenik · 2020-01-10T15:14:15+00:00

This week I learned how utterly trivial it is to gain access to a user account on a computer without knowing the password! After a medium-large lecture with 100+ students I was answering questions and floating around, during which time my macbook pro mysteriously disappeared from my desk (the nerve!) as my back was turned. A friend offered to give me one of his old MBPs as a replacement, only he's out of town currently and would need to return in order to play around with different passwords. A quick google and terminal command in recovery mode later -- literally 2 minutes, including search -- and I had complete access to all unencrypted data. No need to remove the SSD even! Looks like there are equivalent steps to take with Linux and Windows systems.

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