Afton

Right?! 80 degrees and sunburns? No thanks, I'll take my 52 and overcast thank you very much. You think I live here by accident?

I wonder what the internet provider is in Forks,WA...

As a non-SF resident, doing useful research inspired by 'google the current DA' is pretty laborious. I found https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra... which seems sensible on the face of it, and doesn't sound at all like he's "ensuring that criminals run rampant throughout the city".

The general problem of media assuming good-faith information from police is widespread and SF is no different from any other location in the US (or Canada for that matter).

> It's only possible in jurisdictions where DAs and/or Mayors can get elected without an endorsement from law-enforcement, and look at SF for an example of what police do when one slips through the cracks.

As someone who doesn't live in SF, what are some of the examples? This is a good faith question, but I'm not really sure what I would google to know what you mean.

It's simple, it's not easy.

> other people are eating less and losing weight. No, they're not, and that's my point.

Look at smoking that you mention. Smoking was unbelievably common a few decades ago. It's now pretty uncommon (in North America). Why? Were people just failing in the past, and now aren't failing? No, we made public health decisions that have dramatically dropped the proportion of the population that smokes cigarettes.

IOW: Treating it as an individual failing may feel good, and may even be "true", but it's not a useful framing of the problem. Treating it like a public health issue is massively more likely to work than just wagging your finger at people and telling them to just eat less.

That last sentence "USA fat people are overall uninterested in being thin" is pretty tone deaf. I would say that they are fundamentally failing to achieve their goal. Many have given up since they've tried (however unsuccessfully) since they were teenager with no significant results. Note that I have known several very overweight doctors so it's not just a "those fat people are ignorant about what to do". Losing weight is not as easy as deciding to lose weight, and the evidence of that is how few people manage to maintain their weight loss.

Treating this as anything other than a public health issue, rather than a personal failing is ridiculous.

You think the answer to the headline is "no"?

I think you have a narrow view of philosophy. Very little modern philosophy has anything to do with that kind of question.

Haha, when I had been a software dev for a year, I interviewed at MS and they asked what my biggest success was. I said it was convincing an architect and 3 FTEs that they didn't need to spend 2 months on a 100% solution, given that we had all the pieces of an 90% solution ready at hand.

They did not seem impressed. I did get hired though...

More seriously, I've met several people who really struggled to get recognized officially for their work. One was someone who was just amazing at cross team collaboration. Specifically, we were a small group, doing an important strategic project, but we needed some work from other teams that were serving the companies larger, single product. It was hard to get them to free up a couple of dev-days, even when we had the explicit support up and down the management chain. She was amazing at getting the ICs on the team to get on board. But really struggled during review cycles because a fair amount of her work wasn't traditional lines-of-code/jiras.

Another example was a developer who was a king at driving customer solutions through the dev team. He was a developer, and even though he's probably responsible for millions in not-lost-sales, he struggled to get the recognition he deserved.

Anyway, just agreeing with some examples from my professional life.

It's funny because while I don't consider myself "good at math", I'd always learned math by learning the fundamentals, and deriving what I need at exam time, since I find memorizing leads me to (a) go insane with boredom and (b) if I don't understand what I'm memorizing, I might apply it incorrectly without it "looking wrong".

Calc II was a class where it just wasn't possible because there was too much to derive on any given exam. It took me 1/2 way through the course to course-correct and make flashcards and such nonsense. Unfortunately that was the last (non-discrete) math class I took, so I never discovered what happens next.

There is no optimum number. There are optimum numbers for specific goals. List your goals, your hormonal and diet context, some genetic factors, and then people could propose optimal reps for you.

Unfortunately, a lot of exercise studies use untrained people. How that extends to even moderately trained people is usually pretty problematic. I'd say "forget it, just listen to people that have been doing it for a couple of decades" is probably better advice.

The primary mover of all set-and-rep ranges is going to be goals and hormonal context, so make sure that when taking advice from someone, know what they think those two things are.

This is one of those 'true but' statements. I think it's actively harmful to provide it to beginners who don't have the context to understand what that means. Vanishingly few beginners are running a routine long enough or hard enough to suffer from this problem.

Goals goals goals. The implicit assumption is that your goal is to develop something specific over time. You want to get stronger, you want to get bigger, you want to increase your endurance, for example.

Since those specific goals are so common, they fade into the background. But if your goals are more or less one or more of those goals, then yes, do the same set of exercises 50-100 times (progressing weights/intensity/etc). That will stimulate improvements. Doing a bunch of different things every time is 100% better than sitting on the couch, but won't allow you to progress very much. You'll essentially only be progressing e.g. strength when you happen to overlap some motion with the right amount of increase to cause improvement.

But something that you'll do is better than a perfect thing that you'll get bored of and stop doing. Existence is the primary predicate and all that.

Incidentally, Starting Strength (the book) talks about this somewhat. He distinguishes between 'training' and 'exercising'. Training is about progressive overload. Exercise is about moving your body. If you want to change your body, you'll want to train.

Speaking for Microsoft in the 2010's: pretty hard. First you get pip'ed and have lots of uncomfortable discussions with your manager. You'll be encouraged to leave on your own. Eventually you'll be told to leave. They want a pretty iron-clad case to reduce the chance that you'll sue, since keeping you on for another year or two while they super-document your shortcomings tends to be cheaper than dealing with a lawsuit.

I saw it first-hand, I wasn't pip'ed myself. :D

Meh. I had a friend go to Amazon. He loves it there, and he's an IC, not a psychopath, just a genuinely nice guy. He doesn't deny the stories we hear, they just don't happen to/near him. And of course, he's done very well there over the last 5 years or so. So it definitely happens.

That seems like a strawman. The complaint is that he described himself as a professional engineer while his license had expired. As in, during that period, he wasn't a licensed engineer, and therefore shouldn't have called himself one.

Aren't you describing a Nissan Leaf? I can't really speak to the repairability, because even though I've had it 2 years, I haven't had to do anything but charge it. Oh, once I had to put more air in the tires. Great little car, with about a 70 mile range on my 2017 model.

Yes. E.g. https://www.hss.edu/conditions_understanding-addiction-versu...

Which makes you wonder how much drug use would be merely 'dependence' if we had free and easy access. I suspect it is a drug-by-drug case, depending on length of trip, relative incapacitation, physical dependencies (/withdrawal), rate of tolerance increase, etc.

Another option is that you have one of a handful of atypical neurologies for which caffeine is a form of self-medication.

Again, the problem is availability, and we've decided in this country (and most countries) that caffeine should be widely available. So it's not a significant problem, and is easy if slightly time-consuming if you need to update your context.

It's probably worth tying this discussion into applications to e.g. the war on drugs, but the language there tends to be so hyped up that it's too hard to have a good discussion about it.

I feel that addictions are only a problem if they are a problem. As far as we can tell, non-crazy-quantity coffee drinking isn't bad for you, might be helpful for some things, and tastes delicious.

The only downside is that I have to be slightly prepared if I am not going to be able to easily consume my regular doses of caffeine. And if I want to cut/stop, it takes about a week or so to do so comfortably.

As for the glorification, I think it's really a glorification of workaholics, and 'needing coffee to get through yet another pile of TPS Reports' is more a badge of honor than anything else.

Also Peter Watts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

I don't see how this is related. I subscribe simultaneously to 'qualia is a real problem' and 'free will is an incoherent term'.

I think whether you think a perfect simulation of a person has subjective experiences depends on what you think the substrate of that subjectivity is. If you think of it as a computational property then you'll be inclined to say "no, that simulation is experiencing things". If you think it is some kind of fundamental property of the universe, like pan-psychism, then you'll think the simulation is 'missing' subjectivity. Nothing in there about free will in my thinking.

Is this really how you view it? Like, you think that people are plotting how to induce scarcity in the market so that they will work harder?

That doesn't seem like a useful framing of the problem.

I do. Why am I wrong to advocate for them having pleasant conditions?

> fish fMRI studies

Link for those curious about this comment:

(Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction)[https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf]

Well, both, but they are fairly decoupled, just like for 'regular' software developers. Pay is based on willingness to move (and get that sweet, sweet signing bonus), and willingness to negotiate.

Essentially: If you are an amazing engineer, you will likely do well everywhere. If you are a 'good' engineer, and you want to stand out, go into QA engineering where you will be relatively better than a lot of people.

Incidentally, I think being in QA and being a good engineer is a recipe for a very good career. A surprising number of QA software developers are... just not very good developers. Working with a good developer that just happens to specialize in QA is an amazing experience.

I think that there are fewer likely culprits than you might think. Most lifting coaches end up heavily relying on only a few cues per exercise, because there aren't that many common pathologies. So something like this could be useful if couched in the normal "not medical advice" sort of way. Yeah, this might not apply to you, but if you find that you e.g. squat with too much forward lean, here is a small set of exercises to augment your workout that you should try for 6 weeks and see if it helps.

Something like that would seem useful to a lot of lower-mid weightlifters who don't have a real lifting coach.

The comment you are replying to explicitly gives an example where compound movements weren't generating results, because of compensation by other muscles. This is the sort of thing a real trainer would provide (but a big-box 'trainer' might well never notice, even if they had you doing compound lifts).

My experience with buying quarters was 'so-so' enough that I stopped. Even when the meat was good enough, I found that I felt like I was being ripped off. There is just so much opportunity between the farmer and butcher to cheat you, and you don't have any insight. Maybe it's just me.

I can really only imagining this working out consistently if you really developed those relationships, and for a purchase I'd make a few times a year at most, it didn't seem worth it.

Yup. This seems like the right spot to plug this excellent article that has made me many 10s of thousands of dollars over my career:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Good thing patio11 doesn't demand a percentage for the millions and millions of dollars he is responsible for people collectively getting in increased salary/comp.