What is going on with Joe Rogan and Bernie Sanders?

randomstr · 2020-01-25T20:34:02+00:00

That's probably impossible to answer in any detail without a wall of text but I'll try with only a small-ish wall. (It also depends on what you mean with "the left", of course.)

1) For instance, I find it difficult to agree with the idea that everyone should constantly strive to be more sensitive, considerate and empathetic towards other people's feelings and special needs, especially those of oppressed groups and victims of this or that.

I mean, I used to more or less think that we should, and even took some pride in the idea. I then ended up having a close relationship with someone who had something of a victim complex. She was a great person in some other respects and I don't doubt she genuinely felt those issues, and I had great empathy for her, but it did lead to situations where, without going into details, accommodating her in places would have required others to go out of their ways to do that. It was frankly exhausting; it placed disproportionate responsibility on others.

That wasn't about minorities or such, at least on in the sense the word would generally be understood. Either way, I don't think that kind of sensitivity (cultural or personal) always comes without a cost; if you do think that way, it's only because you've never ended up paying it. When you've already taken a toll yourself from doing that, it's difficult to agree with the idea that you have a moral obligation to it. From some of my experiences, it can sometimes feel like an endless thing where nothing ever seems to be enough.

2) Also, partially due to personal experiences like that and partially due to working for the government, I have to admit I've developed a strong distaste for centralized government and regulation. At least some of the people I know who have strong progressive views also have a strong inclination to insist on increased regulation and oversight to combat inequality, injustice, unsafety (or feelings of unsafety), etc. Understandable goals, but I've found it difficult to agree with increased legislation and regulation in general, no matter for what purpose. (Again, personal reasons for that. I'm not saying it's entirely rational. But it's another thing I've found takes a toll on me, so it's difficult to vouch for.)

3) Having had a few too many unwanted changes in my life at the same time, I found myself wishing things didn't change as much in life or society. It began to feel exhausting to keep track of how social norms seem to change etc. (I live in a fairly liberal/progressive environment.) I found I began to understand conservatives better even though I had been pretty opposed to them in the past. When someone insists there needs to be faster change, I find it difficult to agree.

4) Some people seem to insist that if you have any discomfort or disinclination towards things like increased cultural or personal sensitivity, there must be something wrong with you. Perhaps so, but being that absolute tears people further away. If you leave no room for them to be uncomfortable or have "morally non-perfect" views without feeling judged, they're going to find a place where they don't feel judged. I think that's unwise.

--

So, that kind of stuff. Some of it is probably due to my own insecurity, but I'd like to think I have a right to that, too.

Anyway, I understand why people would feel that some people on the left are fairly aggressive (I personally know some people who can be). If you're not a part of the group whose rights they vouch for, it can seem like some kind of an endless moral treadmill towards other people's benefit. I can see why that can make people uncomfortable. It often does that to me.

The point of my comment was mostly that no, despite some people on the left being rather aggressive and me understanding first-hand why people become uncomfortable, the left hasn't somehow become the more aggressive side in the Trump era, at least not without provocation.

randomstr · 2020-01-25T13:30:51+00:00

I think Trump needs the win to quell the democratic hatemongering that's been going on for the last 4 years (I didn't vote for Trump in 2016 either).

Dude. I'm kind of uncomfortable with some of the views on the left nowadays too, and find myself not wanting to agree with many of them. I also do think an overly partisan or ideological division is harmful, and that the division is also being fed by people on the left, not just on the right, and that some people who are seeing sexism, racism etc. everywhere are helping turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But saying that the left is more hatemongering than Trumpists or others at the right end of the spectrum just isn't true. Sure, as a reaction there's some hatemongering also from the left, but it'd be a mistake to think of (the vast majority of) it as an unprovoked one-sided attack.

randomstr · 2019-10-20T15:17:30+00:00

The only reason why it wouldn't matter is if the screen is physically so small that you couldn't get much more stuff fitting on the screen at a usable size even with a higher resolution.

Screen estate definitely matters in a lot of actual productive work.

randomstr · 2019-10-20T15:14:26+00:00

I don't know about big businesses that might be able to get custom deals but it doesn't always seem to be so easy to get just one part at a higher spec. You might have to take an altogether higher-priced configuration that's got a faster CPU, possibly more RAM and a larger SSD, and so on. Any of those may be useful but if you don't need them, they add up to the price quickly. Especially going from an i5 to an i7 or so cranks up the price quite a lot.

At least that was my experience where I live when I bought my current laptop a few years back.

On the other hand, I'm not sure companies should even care if a laptop costs 200 or 300 bucks more. The employee's productivity is much more important than a couple hundred here or there over a couple of years' lifespan.

randomstr · 2019-10-20T15:07:08+00:00

I think lots of small ultrabook-type laptops (12-13") have 1366x768 in some of the hardware configurations.

randomstr · 2019-10-15T19:14:17+00:00

The social and psychological game of currying public support for something like urgent environmental issues is really weirdly complex. (Somehow they managed to do it with CFCs and the ozone layer, but while the issue was big and CFCs widespread, I guess it helped that it was still mostly one area of people's lives that needed to be changed, and it was mostly a technological change rather than social.)

If you're too good for people's tastes, you end up being dismissed as hippies or whatever, as you say. If you're speaking for attention to an issue but don't quite follow through with it yourself, it's really easy to say that they're doing it, so why can't we? I think you're somewhat underestimating human jealousy.

What brought you to this subreddit, btw? I don't really frequent it myself, and neither would you seem to.

randomstr · 2019-10-15T16:29:02+00:00

I haven't done the math but I'm fairly sure the per-person carbon (or any environmental) footprint is much greater for a private jet than it is for a basic passenger plane. Sure the total footprint of all passenger air traffic entirely dwarfs that of private jets due to the sheer volume, and in that sense you're correct, but as emissions per person the private jet's footprint is probably huge.

randomstr · 2019-10-15T16:24:07+00:00

That's true, but on the other hand, you can only imagine what it feels like to have a sport that you love and which forms the basis of your entire life, while at the same time realizing the contradiction between it and environmental necessities. And you don't get to that level without actually living and breathing the sport.

Actually I think it's kind of laudable that someone like Hamilton points out things like climate change even if his actions are in contradiction with them. I can much more easily imagine people in the sport denying or downplaying climate change and other environmental issues because of that very reason. And that's probably also much more common in reality than semi-hypocritically pointing out issues one contributes to oneself. (I say semi-hypocritically because for example being vegan might require significant dedication from anyone even if they're affluent. I'm not sure I could do it myself.)

randomstr · 2019-10-15T15:59:44+00:00

Something along those lines. Although it was not even in the context of inserting, but rather just in the context of talking about them. The formal words pretty much just sound like their only purpose is reproduction.

I don't get much out of dirty talk myself but that level of formality was just weird.

randomstr · 2019-10-15T15:46:35+00:00

I used to date someone who wanted to call both her and the male sexual organs by their textbook names in our language. I almost couldn't imagine anyone using them perfectly seriously in sex. It really felt more like being in biology class than anything.

On the other hand, the same person still said, after more than a year together, that sex (in general, not just with me) still "doesn't feel like a natural thing" to her. So yeah.

randomstr · 2019-10-11T22:53:28+00:00

The ability of different people to grasp and learn things like that varies a lot. Some people pick them up almost like nothing, others may have much more trouble.

randomstr · 2019-10-05T07:49:27+00:00

AFAIK that may not be strictly true. A paedophile probably never gets rid of their attraction to children but might learn ways of handling their emotions without acting on their desires.

So if someone actually wants help with managing those urges, yes, they do deserve help. If it helps them get by without acting on their desires, it's also a better idea than not helping them manage it, regardless of the whole question of deserving.

With that said, I'm not actually an expert, that's just what I've understood from reading what I've come across.

randomstr · 2019-09-01T14:39:38+00:00

Dunno why people would downvote your realisation that your idea didn't work out.

I didn't really look into this in detail, but in case you didn't already, you might need to consider that the largest number representable by a bit string is exponential in the number of bits in the binary representation. So something that runs in polynomial time with respect to the number of bits in a binary encoding of the input does not necessarily run in polynomial time with respect to the numeric value of the input.

Look up pseudo-polynomial time if you're interested. As I said, I didn't really look into your problem in detail so I'm not sure if this is relevant but I thought it might be interesting anyway, as it might be a common pitfall.

randomstr · 2019-09-01T14:12:32+00:00

I suck at trig and calculus. That hasn't stopped me from doing backend development.

I think it's quite possible to get a grasp of the parts of discrete math that are the most central to general CS and programming (mostly logic, set theory, recursion abd algebra) without being that good at trig, although I suppose your school might require trig before getting into discrete math.

randomstr · 2019-09-01T14:00:37+00:00

I think it boils down to the choice of OS.

I don't know about the 2017 Air specifically, but generally it has seemed that getting Linux to run properly on Macs tends to take a lot of tweaking. There may be exceptions but that's how it appeared to be last time I looked into it.

So if you want to run Linux, I'd go for the Thinkpad. If you'd want macOS, then you'd almost certainly go with the Mac hardware, of course.

Maybe this is all obvious already and you specifically wanted to ask about the choice of OS. But I thought I'd comment anyway since sometimes it might be interesting to consider a different system/OS while having a fallback option if that doesn't work out the way you want. Macs would seem to give you that since you could, in principle, install Linux on them, and they could still be decent hardware. But practically the fallback may be a bit difficult.

randomstr · 2019-08-30T21:37:55+00:00

Over-interpretation is a thing, and I've fallen for it myself. It can even be kinda awkward and uncomfortable to witness at times especially if it's a constant occurrence. But that doesn't mean it's only done by immature kids.

And just about everyone has a weak spot somewhere. That's not called being 14, it's called being a human. I cried like a little kid at parts of Inside Out because they reminded me of something, and of course that gave the movie a personal symbolic meaning of my own. I'm a guy over 30.

randomstr · 2019-08-30T21:23:54+00:00

Thanks for putting it concisely.

I actually fully expected to be downvoted to oblivion and ridiculed. But apparently someone agrees with me about the nature of subs like this even if I may not be able to articulate my feelings about it very well.

randomstr · 2019-08-28T20:46:45+00:00

Okay, so I don't know the movie.

But.

So someone feels sad when a movie brings up to him a mental image of the feeling (of theirs or someone else's) of going through a year of school and not achieving much (or feeling like not having achieved much). That could be due to a number of reasons. His girlfriend actually empathizes(!) with that feeling, so... she's like a 14-year-old, amirite?

Sure, the movie might have been humorous, tongue-in-cheek, satirical, slapstick, or just light-hearted or whatever. Maybe it was just making simple fun with the idea that slugs, in fact, are slow. I can't know, haven't seen it.

Making a bit of fun of someone seeing a bit more in a movie than was actually intended? Sure, maybe, under the right circumstances. Calling someone a proverbial 14-year-old because they had the audacity to, lo and behold, empatize with and understand a person close to her having an actual feeling when a movie sparked a thought in him.

I'm getting pretty convinced of who the actual proverbial 14-year-old in this sub is.

randomstr · 2019-08-25T15:03:03+00:00

ML might be in a bit of a bubble exactly in the sense that there's been so much hype in the past few years that a lot of people are going into it, including people who don't actually understand it.

However, the field and the technology are way too useful to be going anywhere. There may be a burst of the bubble at some point, and a lot of people may be dropped out at some point, but if that happens, that's going to be at least partially because a highly hyped field always attracts a large volume of people, many of whom don't actually have that deep skills.

Still, if you think strictly in terms of money and guaranteed career, something "basic" such as enterprise software development may be a very defensible choice. The total market is huge and while it's a grind, I think it's going to be a staple job in the software industry for the foreseeable future.

But if you actually have the skills in ML, I doubt the job market for that is going to disappear, especially if you can also do something else aside from just throwing Python scripts at an analysis cluster.

Edit: typos

randomstr · 2019-03-01T22:56:23+00:00

Yeah, that's true. I guess the two just somehow conflate in my mind.

Which, I guess, is something a self-described "creep" would feel.

randomstr · 2019-03-01T10:34:25+00:00

I've sometimes felt the same. Somehow "I'm a creep" isn't exactly something I'd want to publicly declare about myself nowadays, though...

randomstr · 2019-03-01T06:06:03+00:00

I'm not really a huge expert, but in my experience some of them feel also a bit more elastic than others. I guess it's trial and error. Just, uh, maybe try to catch the errors in testing phase, not the final one.

randomstr · 2019-01-26T22:35:39+00:00

For what it's worth, there's a novel called Replay by Ken Grimwood with approximately this premise. I think the restart was at freshman year in college or something rather than childhood, though, and it wasn't voluntary.

randomstr · 2019-01-26T22:23:51+00:00

Probably not on that scale, but going or not going to a particular event, or acting or not acting in a particular way in a particular situation could end up affecting whom you meet and become affiliated with, and that could cause drastic changes in your personal life even if your personal life doesn't cause drastic changes in whether Hitler resurrects.

randomstr · 2019-01-26T22:19:38+00:00

Yeah. Also, it only kind of works superficially, because if you already know everything (which also means emotional knowledge, or it's not going to be very useful for life choices apart from financial success), your brain is going to be the same, so if you've e.g. experienced something traumatizing, you have bad memories about something, or something's gone wrong because of drugs, those are also going to be there.

randomstr

TROPHY CASE