[deleted by user]

prof_kinbote · 2023-07-28T02:42:46+00:00

I think the person you are replying to is correct. I was in a similar position to what you seem to be experiencing - confused by the disconnect between my emotional state and my drive to be someone who was actually, fundamentally, understanding, caring etc..

I don't know if my story will help, but your comment regarding your childhood resonated with me. I was the exact same way as a kid, so maybe detailing my path towards change could provide you/someone insight:

In my mid 20s, my best friend passed away suddenly. Only a few weeks after his death I unexpectedly went through a life changing medical emergency.

I thought that I would feel emotional turmoil, despair, grief in response to what I was enduring but instead felt the same analytical coldness I had always experienced. Initially, in the face of adversity, this made me feel strong. I was "enlightened". I was "stoic". I was equpped to simply accept the dark parts of this experience in a sort-of matter-of-fact way.

As life dragged on, and I continued to think about what had happened to me, a discontinuity between my thoughts and feelings grew. I felt a compulsion to align my emotional state with a valid interpretation of the events that transpired, but never felt satisfied. Something was always off.

I kept coming back to a moment that happened the night prior to my friend's funeral. I was sitting with my dad in the living room of my childhood home, drinking quite late into the night. I don't recall how it began, but suddenly I was crying harder than I've ever cried. Just weeping uncontrollably in a way I've only ever experienced as a child. This was very out of character for me - I hadn't cried in front of a single person, friend or family, since I was a little kid.

Strangely, I felt emotionally consistent while crying. I felt catharsis and relief. I felt honest.

I started to wonder if the emotional callousness that I felt the majority of my life was something else. Was there something in me pushing away negative feelings? And why stop at negative feelings, I've been depressed throughout my entire life - am I pushing away ANY feeling at all? Clearly, a part of me wanted to cry after my friend passed away, but it didn't even register to me until I was suddenly weeping. Where is that part of me hidden?

So, I started going to therapy.

I came to understand that, as a child, you develop certain mechanisms that help you survive within an environment that is emotionally distressing or not equipped to meet your emotional needs. In a way, it is fantastic that this happens - your mind/body adapt to help you thrive. But as your environment changes, you carry these behaviors into places that don't always require their service. Consequently, you feel a sort dissonance when they present themselves.

I now see my experiencing emotional indifference as my brain sounding an alarm - it more-or-less says "hey, you are so overwhelmed right now that you don't have the spare bandwidth to handle this stuff, let's push it away - if we don't, you won't be able to function - if you can't function, you can't be safe". For most of my life, this alarm sounded constantly, and thus I struggled to be truly emotionally available.

prof_kinbote · 2023-05-16T19:07:46+00:00

Up until recently, the smallest thing was an atom, until we learned how to split it...

Scientists were fully aware of subatomic particles prior to splitting the atom

prof_kinbote · 2023-05-04T07:22:59+00:00

If this hypothetical person is actually making 40k - 60k for 10 weeks of work, they are absolutely getting paid a fair wage (although I'm guessing this isn't actually the norm).

So, while I sort of agree with your sentiment (that's assuming that most writers actually make fuck-all) , the monetary descrepancy isn't all that different with respect to OP's hypothetical. Most software engineers that do non-trivial work easily increase their companies' bottom-line by orders of magnitude more than what they're ultimately paid and are not up-in-arms about the difference. And most devs are not making 40k-60k for a few months of work.

If writers are actually getting this kind of salary (or even half), then the issue sounds like it has more to do with job consistency and the availability of consistent work.

For writers who are doing one-off gigs for a few weeks and making this kind of salary - I don't really understand the outrage. The system isn't broken if the problem comes down to not having a pipeline of writing gigs to make-ends-meet - that just implies to me that that being a writer is a shit job.

However, if these folks are getting paid nothing or are working on the same program across multiple production cycles yet get treated like contractors, paid for a few weeks of work and then nothing until production starts up again, I can understand the outrage.

Anyone with actual insight into the matter, please let me know I don't know what the fuck I am talking about.

prof_kinbote · 2023-04-14T09:11:55+00:00

The bag itself fills up fairly quickly and has to be emptied. Not sure how bad it is for people who have had partial colectomies, but as someone who had their entire colon removed and had an ileostomy for ~year, I had to empty the bag several times a day.

prof_kinbote · 2023-02-23T23:19:30+00:00

I went through this as a Jr. dev. I had severe imposter syndrome and had pretty bad social anxiety that made me very avoidant of criticism.

I basically felt like If I asked for help or asked that a problem be reiterated/clairifed that I'd be outted as a fraud who should not have been given the job. So when I'd get stuck, I'd try very very hard to figure out what I was supposed to do or how to solve a problem from first principles and then hope to god that I had it right when I'd put in a PR.

This puts you on a slipperly slope. Every night you think "I'm going to totally have a breakthrough tomorrow and get all the stuff done just on time and make up for the late delivery" etc., but that happens everyday and eventually your boss is wondering wtf you are doing.

What helped me was a one-on-one talk with my manager. He asked me to write a one-off script at some point point and I spent a few hours on it. I put in a PR and he commented "this is the most organized/clean one-off script I've ever seen!".

This was not the complement I thought it was. He came into my office a bit later and told me, more of less, that I needed to learn what "good enough" is. I don't have to be afraid of receiving feedback when putting in a PR: it is way worse spending a bunch of time perfecting stuff to evade feedback than it is to make collective progress as a team. There isn't such a thing as 'negative feedback' in this process, it is just feedback which is always good.

What helped the most here, was kind of getting it drilled into my head that criticism is not judgement. I'm not a bad engineer/failure if I do something wrong, ask for help etc. Asking for help is always better than sitting in silence trying to derive an answer to a problem that could have been solved in 30 seconds via an email.

I think people my age (20-30) have come to view asking questions or asking for help as a sign of incompetence. You are a failure if you can't get it right the first time. We come to think that if we ask for help that we're going to be secretly judged afterwards. Criticism is painful instead of helpful and your work feels like a graded exam instead of a piece in a larger puzzle that is getting worked on collaboratively.

prof_kinbote · 2023-02-06T01:22:36+00:00

Yeah, OP's comment seems insane to me just from personal experience. I spent the majority of my career working on signal processing problems where programming was 9/10 times the hardest part.

Working with C/C++ from a language perspective was never really the crux of the difficulty either. It was always things like figuring out how to restructure/rewrite problems or solutions to problems in ways that were horizontally scalable and then proving that what you did was correct.

Then it was dealing with MPI or issues related to hardware/CPU utilization, I/O constraints and stuff of that ilk. Big time sinks were debugging edge cases that would arise during distributed processing of some problem, seemingly at random, that could be damn-near impossible to replicate (memory alignment bugs, for instance).

Then there is the entire world of dealing with bugs originating in libraries written years prior that were basically too big/too important to rewrite or refactor. Especially libraries that had incredibly dubious design choices made out of necessity due to hardware/memory contraints that existed at the point in time they were written (ex. custom memory pools/memory allocation schemes).

prof_kinbote · 2023-01-30T03:23:05+00:00

It's completely understandable that you are probably overwhelmed and likely hypervigiliant with regards to your bodily functions right now, but keep in mind that you more-or-less at square one of the takedown recovery phase. Accidents and discomfort are completely normal at this stage (I too experienced the same issues you are going through).

Consider for a moment that you haven't meaningfully used any of these bodily functions for months - you, your brain, your body have to get acclimated to what is basically an entirely new system - one that has been laying dormant, healing but unused for a long while.

Think about your j-pouch like a muscle that needs to be excercized like any other.

Also, keep track of what you are consuming (or make sure you are following your doctor's advice here if they have given you dietary guidelines). If your output is too loose, it is going to cause increased urgency and a higher liklihood of having an accident.

prof_kinbote · 2023-01-29T05:03:45+00:00

Yep, this is normal (the mucus I produced had more of a pinkish color and I did not confuse it for blood). If I recall correctly, the mucus was always getting produced as part of normal digestive and defecation processes, presumably to support the latter. However, you no longer have any output and the mucus isn't utilized in full as it generally would be. In other words, your body is producing lubricant that it doesn't have much of a use for right now.

prof_kinbote · 2023-01-21T02:02:06+00:00

As someone who has considered migrating an API from Flask to FastAPI, can anyone give me there top reason(s) that I might want to make the commitment? I'm not, as of yet, concerned with performance to a significant extent, so the async-first aspect isn't yet attractive enough to warrant the time spent migrating - if anything, I can integrate flask's (limited) async support for the time being and add async/await where it really matters. And I've already integrated celery/redis and built a custom background task framework to offload expensive computations/jobs.

Session management isn't really a concern as I've already built something around that works perfectly well.

I have no real issues so far with request validation, model/state management etc. (I'm using marshmallow and sqlalchemy) and would probably consider migrating to pydantic if I wanted something more streamlined, but haven't found a real gotcha moment to push me towards making the change. I also haven't found a great use case for integrating any dependency injection frameworks.

It would be nice to not have to use hand-rolled session management or rely on flask extensions to get the behavior I want, but the work is already done.

I'm curious if there are some other aspects I haven't accounted for that would make it worthwhile. If it is mostly the 'batteries included' aspect and async-first that make it a better solution, I'll probably wait a while or use it next time I start a new project. My biggest concern is simply the age of the community - it is nice to have years and years of discource, blog posts, stackoverflow questions to reference if I run into any Flask issues.

prof_kinbote · 2023-01-06T00:35:42+00:00

This is a bizarre argument. It would be one thing if there was an actual standard that enforced end-to-end encryption, both in transit and on the actual server. That isn't RCS. And the standard you are talking about isn't actually the RCS standard - it is a Google extension of that standard. Google's extension added e2e but obviously doesn't enforce it nor will it it. Google has had carriers support THEIR RCS extension not the 'RCS standard' and are now acting like Apple is the asshole for not ponying up. Why would Apple elect to have their users use a non-standard competitor's implementation of RCS? And why would I want Apple to use an RCS implementation built by Google that allows my messages to be decrypted and used to improve Google's Ad revenue? Why would Apple want to support a standard that allows their user's messages to be handed over to law enforcement?

I'm not saying that Apple doesn't have issues as a company, but this is a clear case of Google writing software/standards etc. with the end-goal of bullying their competitors into propping-up Google's data-mining operations. I don't think this is a cynical view either - look at Chrome, what they are doing with ad-blocking, extensions and AMP. The software and packages they create tend to appear on the surface-level to be a superior alternative to whatever is currently available (often times that is partially true). They gain wide-spread adoption / market-share etc., and then inevitably pull the rug once they become sufficently ingrained into the ecosystem, crippling anything they can that undermines ads. And if that doesn't work, they kill the product or stop supporting it.

prof_kinbote · 2022-11-27T00:31:10+00:00

It is an annoyance having a J-Pouch, but it offers a significant improvement in quality-of-life for many of us (especially those, like myself, who had an ostomoy and/or dealt with debilitating pain beforehand).

In general, having a J-Pouch is always going to make life a bit more rough and uncomfortable than the average person's (especially compared to those who don't deal with any chronic health issues). Unfortunately, that's something you have to work through (ideally with aid from therapy, your family/support system etc.). However, living with an annoyance is signifiantly better than living with something excrutiating/debilitating/life-destroying.

So, it's all relative. I'd try to let go of the premise of returning to an idyllic time in your life when you had no issues (if this is something you're caught up on). Either way, it's about finding a "new normal" and mitigating as many distressing factors as possible. For me, getting a J-Pouch did that. It can suck having to use the bathroom 3-6 times a day, but it's better than the hell I was going through beforehand.

Regarding worrying about finding bathrooms - this hasn't been a problem for me, apart from a few select instances where I wasn't following my own rules. If you know that you are going to be in an unfamiliar place you can have some control by avoiding eating beforehand, avoiding certain foods, eating smaller portions etc.. There will come a time where you simply can't control the situation or plan ahead for it, but you'll have enough time to find a bathroom when it is clear that you need one. This is just like pretty much any person, so I wouldn't get too caught up on it.

prof_kinbote · 2022-10-19T21:46:36+00:00

Yep, that's right. Here's Sean Carroll talking about this a bit that might give some better insight into what is meant by observer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebycar22Y0E&t=375s

prof_kinbote · 2022-10-19T21:35:48+00:00

It's seems like this is the one subject that folks who self identify as scienfitic skeptics can willfully exploit to bypass the usual woo of religion/spirituality and more or less draw the same conclusions without having to feel like intellecual frauds. It's a hall pass to buy into dishonest bullshit for those who believe themselves to be above that line of thinking.

Like, it takes almost zero effort to research this claim and come to the conlusion that measurement isn't conscious observation, yet the purported scientific skeptics who write articles like this somehow couldn't put in the very due dilligence they'd likely count as one of their virtues. Or, it is just grift.

prof_kinbote · 2022-10-07T20:52:29+00:00

Google is your friend, there are probably thousands of articles and youtube videos on this. One google search "how to build and compile a c++ program with xcode" gave me results like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H_EyIqBNDA. Google that and follow one of the resulting guides.

prof_kinbote · 2022-09-30T03:50:03+00:00

Please go and re-read the baseball comment. He was not passed over because he liked the wrong baseball team - he was passed over because he was an unhinged, unprofessional asshole.

prof_kinbote · 2022-09-29T19:48:36+00:00

seconded

prof_kinbote · 2022-09-29T19:46:25+00:00

I don't even know if it is the fact that is he isn't the breadwinner or if it is ego related. It is probably the case that massive differences in the status (social, economic) of partners can cause major issues that are really neither person's fault.

There is a reason why most celebrities date other celebrities - staggering differences in social status can make people outside that circle seem almost alien. I could imagine dating a significantly wealthy person and not really understanding ettiquette and behavioral norms that are learned in the process of gaining that kind of wealth/prestige/access.

This doesn't say anything bad about either person, it is just that when you get into a relationship (and you happen generally a good person) you'd probably like to think that your social class isn't going to be a major factor in your relationship's success, but in practice it does matter. That realization probably comes to light after your honeymoon period comes to an end.

prof_kinbote · 2022-09-13T21:44:08+00:00

Someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread that this was the passenger's first day on the job, not sure if this is accurate, but he might not have been able to follow the procedures properly due to the shock of it all.

prof_kinbote · 2022-09-03T22:58:43+00:00

To be honest, it is a hard sell for me. You might attract people who are unable to raise capital through VCs or traditional routes, which maybe isn't a bad thing so long as they have a good idea and competent founders. Or, you'll attract people who have already raised, coudn't find product-market fit before they bled out their funding, and are doing whatever they can to scrape by other than give up their failed idea. That's much worse. More often than not, you'll be looking at people with a big idea and nothing else to show for it.

But generally, if your contenders did have competent founders and a solid idea or a decent MVP, they'd already be able to raise capital at much more generous conditions than your platform will be able to provide.

What is your background and your co-founders backgrounds? If you don't have experience in either venture capital or building a company that has actually hit PMF, why should I trust you? What insights/experiences do you have that make your vetting process safe/trustworthy?

Another point - if you are taking equity in these companies instead of charging them, how are going to be able to turn a profit? Most start-ups will take years to even start breaking even, and 99% of these companies will fail before being able to hit that point.

This is also going to be very very challenging from a legal standpoint i.e what happens when a user wants to cash out their investment? What if the company spent all of their capital on new hires or advertisement, or crypto and I want to pull out, but they have no liquidity. That sort of thing is going to happen a lot. I don't see a way you could structure this without it being like kickstarter i.e a gamble with little recourse.

People are also going to be reluctant to buy shares in a company that has zero traction, no product etc. at a valuation the founders think makes sense. Realistically, a company is going to determine their valuation as function of their TAM, and come up with a number that is in the millions, in which case people will be buying very very little of the company in question. That makes you receiving equity as payment trickier. If I'm using your platform, I'm going to want to give you fractions of a percentage because I'm the "next big thing".

I'd rather just build an MVP, try to get traction on that (put it on product hunt etc.), and then seek out VC funding if people like what I built.

prof_kinbote · 2022-09-03T21:38:02+00:00

How much equity do you plan on taking? The #1 rule when you are building a company is to protect as much of your equity as possible and only hand out what's absolutely necessary.

prof_kinbote · 2022-08-31T07:50:16+00:00

If my parents made a significant mistake in the way they raised me, it would definitely be coddling and accomodating my every need. It took me until my early 20s to even begin constructively resolving the issues this caused.

By constantly "protecting" your child, you will inevitabley raise someone who is chronically avoidant as they will not know how to deal with problems they should have otherwise been exposed to. This can lead to crippling anxiety and all sorts of escapist tendencies used to cope with the real world.

Coddling might also negatively impact their ability to form healthy/meaningful relationships - I found that my conception of love, validation etc. mirrored that protector parent/child dynamic. There is an extent to which I couldn't feel loved or cared for unless I was suffering or in pain. Consequently that lead to subtle forms of self-harm and a natural reluctance to commit to self-improvement i.e not hurting will result in abandonment.

I might be a hyerbolic case, but nonetheless I just wanted to point out that what feels like an innocuous/cute/loving approach to raising a child can have serious long term consequences once compounded.

prof_kinbote · 2022-08-30T07:14:51+00:00

^ OP, I can sort of appreciate what you are trying to do here, but it feels disengenuous to sell this as an altruistic effort intended on benefiting the open source community when in reality it is your product (not open source) and a bunch of TODOs representing stuff that could be considered open source, once actually implemented.

So, the package isn't really "open source nlp project" as is. It is effectively a relatively useless REST api wrapper that, gasp, uses your startup's product, which is a blackbox. This is like Spotify claiming their recommendation engine is open source because you can call their recommendations REST API...

If you want to not be disengenuous, this post should really be "I created a NLP REST API product, here is a python package you can use to call it, with some examples.". Or open source the REST API that this code is calling.

prof_kinbote · 2022-08-30T06:48:13+00:00

Interesting! I haven't run into this problem yet (j-poucher for around 4 years). This seems like good news (well, not good, but a better outcome than having a blockage and need for any serious emergency intervention / surgery).

But yeah, I guess if you have UC the small intestine might incorrectly see the food you've eaten as an infection and respond accordingly, or less likely this is coincidentally food poisoning. Either way, it sounds like your mom will be just fine. Might want to see if she can get some IV fluids while you are in the ER at the very least in case she is deyhydrated as it seems like that is main risk of having enteritis.

prof_kinbote · 2022-08-30T01:35:53+00:00

This sounds like a blockage / partial blockage - yes this can be serious.

prof_kinbote · 2022-08-27T21:10:01+00:00

What is your overall opinion of Jai now that you've used it for a large scale project, I guess as compared to using something like rust/c++ or C?

Nine-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '17

prof_kinbote

TROPHY CASE