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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I think of it like the Stanford Prison Experiment. As a human, we are meant to play roles in a hierarchical structure.

    So if I put you in a role, certain parts of your personality are going to come out subconsciously. You become the right person to fit the role.

    Pretty much like you said- if you are given wild amounts of money you start to justify it and become someone else.


  • I think it’s an interesting thing. My parents had me at a much younger age, with much less money, in a country with a much more chaotic economic situation.

    We had a peak of 10% inflation in my state (Florida) in the last couple of years. The year I was born, my country was going through 2,000% inflation.

    Yet my parents provided regardless and here I am, just fine with my little brother doing just fine as well.

    So I think ultimately if me and my girlfriend really went for it, we would make it work. But she wants to have a mortgage, be able to pay for nannies and daycare and whatnot. We’re just not there yet.

    I agree with you that the economic situation needs to improve. It’s like the powers that be are actively trying to suppress the population growth.



  • If I were a Martin Luther King Jr or something maybe I could lead a mass movement. Unfortunately I’m just a notch above mediocre.

    I think this discussion is actually an interesting one though, and they’ve been talking about it since biblical times. There’s a part of the New Testament where Jesus is preaching and a rich man comes up to him.

    “Jesus, I want to follow you. What do I need to do?”

    Jesus says

    Sell all of your possessions, give all the money to charity and then follow me.

    Essentially, disconnect entirely from the system and give up all your luxuries. The rich man cried. “It is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to fit through the eye of a needle”

    We like to think we are poor but even just living in the bottom quartile in a Western country we are part of the richest people in the world. Are you willing to give up running water, electricity, electronics, a car, eating meat, etc? I’m not. I’m not going to heaven, but I’m also not losing sleep over it.



  • Make more money. Your income should be going up over time in line with inflation. This is easier if you don’t work a dead-end job and are willing to change jobs every once in a while.

    Basically if you work in a retail or food service job, your main priority in life should be to get out of that industry and into something else. Even something as simple as working in a warehouse or construction will get you a lot more $$$ with much more leverage for raises and forward-moving promotions.

    Me and my girlfriend both work full time and we are able to more or less easily afford rent and food. It helps to have two incomes. Although I will say, it’s sad that she got pregnant with twins and we ultimately decided we couldn’t keep them because of the financial situation. I wanted them but she didn’t feel like we were financially stable enough.

    So yeah, people gotta learn to live like it’s a third world country. It’s not the 1950s anymore where everyone can work whatever job and make ends meet.




  • CD-RW is superior. It’s more expensive but you could use it as many times as you need. So if you were for example a 13 year old who loved to distro hop Linux distributions… it’s very useful to be able to rewrite whatever you were doing.

    The price difference is quickly made up for with the re-usability factor.

    Although I don’t understand why anyone would burn a CD anymore. You can buy flash drives with a ton of storage for really cheap these days. You have all sorts of cloud options. You can even rent your own VPS for less than $5 a month.


  • He stated that the idea that China denies it is false. They have successfully integrated the event into their national narrative. Party members openly speak about Tianenem Square and use it as a lesson for how to better govern going forward

    Was it a brutal crackdown on protests? Somewhat, yes. But soldiers also defected and sided with the protesters, and the protestors also killed some soldiers.

    It’s a complicated event and an important part of modern Chinese history. Yet most people only learn a tiny part of it and assume the rest.

    The book series “three body problem” by a Chinese author started the process of opening by mind about this stuff. In this book, he openly criticizes the cultural revolution and anti-intellectualism in the Chinese government during that time period.

    I thought all forms of dissent were banned. But it turns out the party today doesn’t see itself as the same as before. So while you can’t criticize the current one, the one from 30 years ago is fair game.

    There’s a lot to say here about the US perception of China versus China in actuality. Propagqnda is powerful and fills in the cracks for what people don’t know and seems unusual to them.


  • Fiction I think is much more important than non-fiction. It explores the human condition and the nature of reality. It’s been shown that people who read fiction more are more empathetic. The reason is clear - reading puts you in the mind of another. It allows you to visualize their perspective.

    This is not only good generally because empathy makes the world a better place, it’s even good in a machiavellian sense because the better you understand humans the better you can manipulate them.

    There’s a quote by Twain I believe where he says something like “Fiction is much more real than non-fiction. Reality doesn’t have to make sense, but fiction does”


  • Conversations are more about listening than talking. I suggest reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” for a more in depth overview. Essentially, become genuinely interested in the person you are talking to.

    Try to understand them. Try to figure out what is important to them and ask questions with these interests in mind. By being interested and asking questions that the other person wants to answer, they will do a majority of the talking and will feel like you are a great conversationalist.

    Of course, sometimes this is easier said than done… and it must be done genuinely. You must be genuinely interested. There are subconscious cues you communicate when you are interested in someone, and everybody loves being the focus of someone else’s deep and genuine attention.

    Once you’ve done this and built up rapport, then you can give personal anecdotes or get to your sales pitch or what have you.

    Some other general tips are - speak slowly! Don’t go overboard obviously but slower is more confident and puts people at ease. Say the other person’s name when appropriate. Everybody loves the sound of their own name. Compliment people on things you genuinely appreciate. Nobody likes flattery but everyone likes being appreciated.


  • What sort of things do you use BTT for? I use it too on my MacBook with Apple silicon. Although I view it as a consolation prize. Most everything I use it for I can do with a bash script + hotkey in Linux on my desktop.

    Then again, maybe I’m just not creative enough. I understand BTT has a wide range of options to allow for complex shortcuts. But practically speaking, I don’t know if I can use 95% of those options.


  • Well, you should get roughly 7~8 hours of sleep so you go to bed around 11pm. Thankfully I don’t have any issues falling asleep.

    If you slept in a lot and have a few extra hours in the bank, you could push that 11pm to like 1am or so. Just try to return to a normal sleep schedule ASAP.

    I wake up at the same time every day. I usually go to bed around 11pm and wake up at 6am. Even if I go to bed a little later, like 1am or go to bed sooner like 10pm… I still wake up at exactly 6am. Once you do it long enough, your body just wakes up naturally. I always wake up a couple minutes before the alarm.

    People really shouldn’t sleep in excessively on the weekend. If you have a healthy sleep schedule Mon-Fri and then go to bed at 5am Friday and Saturday night… you’re essentially undoing all the healthy sleep habit you build during the work week. Sleeping in a little is OK… so instead of 6am wake up 7:30am or something.

    If the problem is you can’t fall asleep, there are the common tips. No screentime an hour before. Try reading a book in bed, that always puts me to sleep within 30 minutes. It’s easier to sleep if you’re eating healthy and exercising. Increase your A/C so that it’s around 70 degrees F and get under the blanket. And if you just desperately need to sleep because tomorrow’s an important day then I don’t see a harm in taking a benadryl. Just can’t make a habit out of it.


  • Yeah I think you’re right and it’s sort of the result of a long game of telephone. Soy is a complete protein but it’s a lower quality protein. For example whey protein, which comes from milk and therefore an animal product, is much easier for your body to process and use.

    Studies have shown that while both are complete proteins, whey’s amino acid profile for example is superior for muscle growth. A few of the amino acids in soy your body can’t really use that well.

    This simple fact slowly becomes “soy is dangerous” as one person tells another and shares a link on Facebook and so on.

    People really need to learn to just search up research articles and read a few studies. It’s not that hard to do and it’s generally the most reliable way to learn about something.


  • I’ve just been here since the API change. I’ve been more or less happy with it. Some things are dissapointing, like there being just as much of a hive-mind mentality as reddit. But I guess that’s probably just inherent to online vote-based communities.

    I also wish there were an easier way to find new communities - and good ones. I don’t want to browse shitty memes. I want stuff where people are participating in good faith genuine discussion about meaningful topics.

    I’ve found some of that here so far.

    At the end of the day though, this is open source and decentralized. It’s everything a social media should be. To me, anything less than that is a waste of time. There is zero reason to spend your personal time creating content for a company to profit off of.



  • Who cares what people online are saying? Most people just like to hate on the popular thing to hate because it makes them feel like they are sitting at the cool kid’s table at lunch.

    Obviously consider the limitations of what you’re using for the project you’re using it for. But do the analysis for yourself. Don’t avoid something just because people don’t like it.

    For example Javascript gets a lot of flak online but it’s one of the most popular languages and in my opinion, it’s great for what it does. I prefer coding in JS over Python even if JS has those idiosyncrasies that makes it the subject of many memes online.

    Ie

    '2' + 2 = '22'