Not heard this used before so nice to learn something, thanks!
Is it said in a neutral sense like yardstick or is it an ideal to aspire to like exemplar or paragon?
1,273 karma · joined August 16, 2023
Is it said in a neutral sense like yardstick or is it an ideal to aspire to like exemplar or paragon?
I see Musk more on the Tony Hsieh / John McAfee / John DeLorean type trajectory: the drugs, the ego, the need for attention and probably a few indictments as things fall apart.
It's worse than I expected. Musk is out of his gourd. I don't know if it's the drugs or actual insanity but I don't just see an asshole but someone losing touch with reality. It's not autism or even "outsourcing his politics", he is barely coherent. This man will likely need institutional help.
This was not an anonymised vote giving the chance to safely support what you believe free from interference... this was to declare for the King or the Revolution knowing that if don't choose who prevails, you will be executed. It becomes a measure of which direction the people believe the wind is blowing rather than a moral judgement. Power becomes about how a minority can coerce/cajole the impression of inevitability not the merit of their arguments.
I will be curious to hear the inside story once the window of retribution has passed. Unions hold proper private ballots not this type of suss politicking.
Sadly I've found it causes knee pain. This is despite a long history of leg training with no knee issues. It's a real shame but just the old story of not focussing on a single exercise/movement too much I guess.
(what isn't)
Studying revolutions is revealing - they are rarely the invevitable product of historical forces, executed to the plans of strategic minded players... instead they are often accidental and inexplicable. Those credited as their masterminds were trying to stop them. Rather than inevitible, there was often progress in the opposite direction making people feel the liklihood was decreasing. The confusing paradoxical mess of great events doesn't make for a good story to tell others though.
2. Click the top or hit escape to show the menu and open up the preferences.
My current settings are:
- Colors: off-white background and dark grey text - I tend to pick these per device given different brightness / temperature of the display
- Page Layout: margins - left/right: 100px, top/bottom: 75px
- Fonts: I get Libre Baskerville from Google Fonts. I believe I choose a different font on Windows because each OS's rendering is slightly different. For me it's a matter of getting the font-weight just right so that it's not oppressive to the eye, distracting or hard to read but just right and it's a combination of the font, colour, size and how the OS renders. My goal is that it feels like the words on the page just fall into my eyes without effort.
- Style: This is where you can write css. (complaints about how bad my css is will fall on deaf ears!) The hack job I have on this machine is:
p
{
line-height: 1.5em !important;
font-size: 0.854em !important;
padding-bottom: 25px;
text-indent: 35.868px !important;
}
div
{
line-height:1.5em;
padding-top: 1em;
}
line-height: 1.5em;
Some ebooks have hardcoded styles that force ugly formatting. Fortunately Calibre lets you edit ebooks so you can just open them up and delete their custom css.
3. A few other things I remove are i) columns from the grid view like rating/publisher/series ii) categories on the left like language/format - I only use author/tags. Once you remove all the things you don't use, it's a neat minimal app.
I created a script that dumped my library of 1000s of books to .txt and then grepped them.
sudo apt install libxcb-cursor0- dark theme and switch the icon theme to monstre
- remove toolbar buttons you don't use like help/donate/news etc. so that it's quite minimal and streamlined
- edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
- no splash-screen
The preference pages remain a bit of a headache to navigate but it's not like you are fiddling with those too often and importantly, it does have plentiful configuration to do what you want.
And if you run into a problem, you'll probably get a response from Kovid faster than any company. Overall, thank you Kovid for years of hard work!
A fitting typo!
Show HN: FerenGUI - the ui framework for immoral arch-capitalists
Every dark-pattern included as standard components. Upgrade to Pro to get the price-fixing and hidden monero miner modules.
If he didn't manage to keep OpenAI consistent with it's founding principles and all interests aligned then wouldn't booting him be right? The name OpenAI had become a source of mockery. If Altman/Brockman take employees for a commercial venture, it just seems to prove their insincerity about the OpenAI mission.
I like the stories of unique art/music that was created because someone was trying to clone something exactly... but despite their best effort, they just couldn't get it right and ended inventing something new that people loved anyway.
We just have to make sure we are pretty bad at the cloning!
He will have said it multiple times in his career e.g. Love's Executioner (1989) - I (perhaps misleadingly) quoted a later book that let me chase the source. As an existential philosopher/psychologist writing self-help books about death I can imagine he might be the modern populariser because people struggling with death/mortality might reach for his books. They contain many ideas/aphorisms about death intended to help.
Irvin D. Yalom - Love's Executioner (1989)
> You know, there is no one alive now who was grown-up when I was a child. So I, as a child, am dead. Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead—when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that old person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
Irvin D. Yalom - Staring at the Sun (2011)
> I have let go of the wish, the hope, that I myself, my image, will persist in any tangible form. Certainly there will come a time when the last living person who has ever known me dies. Decades ago, I read in Alan Sharp’s novel A Green Tree in Gedde a description of a country cemetery with two sections: the “remembered dead” and the “truly dead.” The graves of the remembered dead are tended and adorned with flowers, whereas the graves of the truly dead were forgotten; they were flowerless, weed infested, with tombstones askew and eroded.
Alan Sharpe - A Green Tree in Gedde (1965)
But when at last the threads of memory rot and the
rememberers themselves are tombed, then the liberated
dead move in silent flit to the old open field of the truly
buried, and there in sight of the living they relax and at last
rest.
Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd meter of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice—in it and in my rhyme.First time I have ever used caps-lock for it's intended purpose. It's surprisingly liberating. I RECOMMEND GIVING IT A GO, IT'S LIKE THERAPY. Maybe we should go in the opposite direction and add even more dedicated keys for all forms of cringe-mode typing - leetspeak, texting, emoji-poisoned, valley-girl, German etc.
GPT powered politeness toggle maybe?
The NHS ADHD waiting list in my region was over 6 years but using RTC, I was diagnosed in around 6 months with no extra cost and prescriptions costing the NHS standard. Places like ADHD360 and PsychiatryUK focus on high throughput / low cost so the amount of time and qualifications of the practitioners won't match hand-picking a private psychologist but you can't argue with the cost.
He knew the spec bump wasn't going to be enough. His conclusion on the colour: "I am glad there is a new... darker... colour available, but it's weirdly not for me". If he liked the colour, he would have kept his order.
Colour alone was enough for MKBHD to order one but at least he had the sense to cancel after using a review unit for a few weeks and basically getting early buyer's remorse... mostly because it wasn't dark enough to be exciting to him and felt like another grey.
Abstinence is not an inevitable consequence of a stable life - plenty of kids from comfortable backgrounds discover they really really like drugs. We need to accept that "getting high" is a basic human motivation that won't go away. The existential realities of the human condition is enough to seek escape. Some of us are born with dopamine regulation issues that doom us towards substance use. Despite being sober for a long time I still had bad cravings for alcohol and nicotine but an adult ADHD diagnosis and medication quieted that insatiable hunger for stimulation... by regular administration of stimulants! The hereditary aspects explained a lot about my family.
IMHO the real solution should be to design better drugs. Consider it the "Steam" argument - we need to outcompete the damaging drugs with products along the lines proposed by David Nutt. e.g.
- no overdose risk or organ damage
- cheap and make available for free so no crime required to acquire
- easy reversal of the effects e.g. with a common product like OJ
- no dependence issues
When you discuss investing in this research, you quickly discover that many of those who claim to be solving tragedies of addiction are actually trying to enforce an ideology that considers getting high to be a moral crime. Even if there were no personal or societal harms they still believe drugs should be violently prohibited. Their ideology actively seeks to cause harm. Of course they are hypocrites getting their stimulation from drink, food, sex, religion, abuse/control of others or whatever they manage to carve out as acceptable.
Odd considering Bristol is a popular place for filming TV/Movies because it's cheap and has a wide variety of modern/historic/shitty types of location that can work for period drama, gangsters or finance bros. ITV just has to do things in a shit way.
I don't think they care much about pro desktops given the pretty embarrassing MacPro. They just don't mean much for the bottom line compared to consumer lifestyle devices.
I expect they would be happily rid of the customer segment - annoying power users wanting low-level access and customisation. They keep their machines for too long and don't give much upselling opportunity for subscriptions, fashion accessories, house and family trinkets.
There was quite a funny effect that at a certain level, you tended not to leave the space stations at all. The world was dangerous and losing your ship was a pain in the butt so seasoned players rarely launched and instead socialised and played each other in the training simulation that was inside the game.
I felt the hint of a general principle: if you create a realistic world with risks, chores, costs etc. it has no value. It's not what people seek. People will need to create games within the virtual world to find leisure. The virtual world becomes an irrelevant shell of indirection you need to escape just as you want to escape the real world.
For example, if I want to update company information, the wizard type thing for it rejects my auth. If I use it's password reset function, it successfully changes my password but then rejects my new auth. Instead I have to find a log-in page for an entirely unrelated action and then navigate from there to the page that will let me edit what I need.
I reported it and they just gave some flannel that it was a temporary fault but it still behaves like this years later. The system is crap and their response to bug reports is crap too.
Not sharing this as a serious alternative, just sharing this as something nerdy and cool. It's a little more involved than coin collecting lol... but this guy making his own Carnyx (Celtic war horn) ticks many of those boxes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWTFIDAbDtY
A Carnyx being played:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRIQp4qZrrE
Engaging with history in very practical ways like this is very cool. I'd love to make my own Round House one day.
Mmm. That does remind me of the quite nice social interaction some types of collecting gives. For example, a neighbour was a thimble collector so whenever visiting somewhere, we would look for a thimble. It gave us some entertainment as a tourist, like a treasure hunt, and then the nice moment to give it to the neighbour and show we were thinking of them while away.
It can go wrong though. I've known a few friends who have become associated with "a thing" because their family saw they owned one of "the thing" and now it's the exclusive theme of all presents but they don't have the heart to correct them and reveal all their presents were unwanted!
It's purely acquisitive and about the buying and getting and just seems quite sad and empty. Those afflicted become slaves to the companies pumping out items purely for this class of consumer. For example, "limited editions" and such are not rare because the product warrants it, it's just designed scarcity to press the buttons of the collectors and extract the most money from them. Or it's bidding wars on vintage items like wine where huge price inflation happens just for the collection kudos not the virtues of the item itself.
For example, I like fountain pens, but I can't really read r/fountainpens because it's mostly people building huge collections of pens and getting excited about buying a new pattern or colour of pen they already own. Nothing makes me sadder than seeing their full collections of 100s of fantastic tools that will sit idle for the vast majority of their life until the owner passes and a relative has to liquidate things they don't understand.
It looks like a dysfunction to me - a stimulation seeking addiction which is not satisfied by the next acquisition and will never fill the emptiness, the need, the dream, of the collector. I know people will be super defensive about their collecting but I would love for that money and energy to be redirected towards higher degrees of self-actualisation. It feels like a failure to scale the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and get stuck in a loop down the bottom. Instead of creating novelty or growing, there is something safe, comfortable and unchallenging to just acquire.