agent008t

British Sky News seems ok - he was talking about Australian.

DW is also ok.

But overall, the Financial Times seems the best imo - they mostly just give the facts, and they are very careful to make sure the sources are credibly and specify it when they are not.

A quick browse of some Russian forums (ixbt, rsdn) shows a significant, loud support for the official Russian govt line. Subjectively, how does it look to you? Do your coworkers, neighbours, relatives appear to be supporting the war?

Why did it get worse after? Was it really not better in the first few years, before children?

Not really. Humans are not designed to be happy and satisfied (and if you are happy and satisfied, why would you be setting any goals?), and they like to ascribe meaning to their dissatisfaction. A lot of times that can result in looking at past decisions with regrets, thinking that you should've done this or that. The fact that we have a very skewed vision of our own past does not help.

Recognizing this, being more in the present moment, cultivating equanimity are some of the ways of dealing with it.

If it was so easy to 'get a girlfriend' in high school, you wouldn't have all these people giving this advice. They are suggesting it precisely because they feel like they missed out themselves.

Most people here probably spent a lot of time in front of a computer as teens and were not very 'popular'. Now they are relatively materially well off, and wish they could go back and redo their teenage years with their newfound skills/knowledge/wealth.

All forms of media also greatly amplify the fear of missing out, having missed out, and makes it seem as if everybody else is/was 'doing it' and having fun.

In reality, if they did 'party it up' back then, now they would probably be recommending you do the opposite and dedicate all your efforts to studying.

The truth is, no matter what you do, you can and probably will have regrets.

Also, you could have a country with a very libertarian government - few laws but good law enforcement and 0 crime - but with a very traditionalist, homogeneous and judgmental population. So while you will not be breaking any laws, and there will be no violence against you or your property, the locals will disapprove of you and you will not have a good time.

Would that make such a country free or non-free?

You are describing the experience, not the experiencer. The experience is indeed the sum of your body's processes.

In the evening after work but before dinner. Ideally would do it in the afternoon, around 4pm.

Any serious exercise in the morning is both more miserable and makes me tired for the rest of the day.

This thread suggests that becoming a dad is not unlikely to throw you into a 2-year deep depression: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240609

"Even with this realization, there were lots of times where I sat on the couch the first year and just felt like I was drowning and life was over. That happened in the second year as well, but less after the child was 18 months. And by ~2.5, it's a lot better!"

That's hardly a good outcome for anyone, let alone someone who misses the joy of life they had in their 20s.

It may be a good idea to ask this on /r/fatfire. There seem to be some actual people that may be in your situation on there that may give their perspective on this issue.

But overall it sounds like you should take reasonable precautions and then 'forget about it' and carry on with your life. At the moment, it seems like instead of the wealth giving you freedom and security, it is instead restricting you and filling you with stress and anxiety.

Deciding to have children when you are lost and miserable on the off chance that it will solve your problems sounds like a terrible idea.

With this reasoning, you might as well just get as big a mortgage as you can get instead. It will also give you a "meaning in life" - freeing yourself from the debt burden - and keep you busy for the next 30 years. At least you won't be gambling with a newly created life.

Just try a simple experiment. It will only take 10 minutes.

Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is to observe the physical sensations produced by natural breathing in your nose for the 10 minutes. Give it your full attention and not miss a single breath, and really feel how each breath in and out feels at the tip of your nose as the air passes it. Easy, right?

Except you will probably find that before long, instead of having your attention on the breath like you fully intended, your attention will be on some thoughts. Where did the thoughts come from? Were 'you' thinking them? Or did the thoughts just arise and steal your attention, despite YOU fully intending to be paying attention to the breath for the 10 minutes? What is then your relationship to 'your' thoughts?

The fact that we experience what is being fed to 'us' by the various hardware devices, and not reality itself, is not controversial. The question is, what is the nature of the 'experiencer'?

Why is it bound to your location? You are just getting sensory input from a particular set of devices: eyes, ears, tactile, brain (thoughts/feelings/memories). But 'you' are not any of these. 'You', the observer receiving and experiencing all these readings, can be anywhere.

With meditation, you can get a clearer sense of what is really 'you', and what is just being observed/experienced by 'you'. But 'you' are not your body, or your thoughts, or your memories, or your feelings. Distilled, the 'you' of all living things could well be exactly the same - it is just what is fed to them by the hardware differs.

What's more interesting, is that somehow very few new nice areas (towns, cities) have been built. Take almost any area in London with anything built after the 1950s, and in many cases the new buildings make the area far worse, not better. Kensington is still the size it was, and there are hardly any new Kensingtons available - and a lot less affordable for an average professional.

London is wealthy enough for there to be no 'bad areas'.

Glad I'm not alone in loving that song and those 2 albums (Universal Migrator). Absolutely amazing.

That song in particular really captures the feel of walking around old Amsterdam for me, going to see the painting, and having the Dutch Golden Age come to life. Amsterdam is one of my favourite cities, and Ayreon has a lot to do with that.

I am astonished Ayreon is not a lot more mainstream popular.

What about the Georgia 2008 scenario?

Also, what happens if at the same time as Russia moves in on Ukraine, China moves in on Taiwan?

Was the latency noticeable annoying? Or was the robot arm not entirely 'real-time' anyway, so it was not an issue?

It should also be noted that it is not surprising that avoiding the present suffering - through escapism, binging on dopamine etc. - will make you feel better in the short term.

Learning that just sitting with the pain is ok, and you do not have to suffer from it - that you do not need to do anything to escape it - is a useful skill/realization to have in its own right.

Font rendering is bad; makes web browsing uncomfortable.

But then, aren't symptomless screenings also discouraged? Because many screenings have risks of false positives, and you end up having to do more (possibly dangerous/invasive) screenings as well as stress out about it needlessly?

In particular, this is often brought up when preventative cancer screening is discussed.

It is more of a lamentation of the fact that people's opinions of things are significantly affected by the perceived popularity of those things. I guess the benign explanation is that people are more likely to invest time into something that is recommended by many people they believe they have a lot in common with, but I think it runs deeper than that.

I suspect it applies to a significantly lesser degree to the HN audience, who know well that unpopular things can be well worth investing the time into and so for whom popularity is less of a useful metric; if anything, popular things tend to appeal to the lower common denominator and so popularity is often a negative indicator.

The interesting thing to me is its popularity. Back in 2007, the same people that are now singing praises to SG would not have looked twice at Kaiji. In fact, I bet that had SG not been popular, the very same people would not watch it or allow themselves to enjoy it.

In other words, it seems to me that it first had to be publicly announced as 'popular', before people would consider watching it thus actually making it popular.

Sounds like none of it would've been a problem if you hadn't had kids? Were your 20s, without kids, not better than your 30s with kids but with all these self-imposed problems?

To me, it seems like the lockdowns were an amazing opportunity to 'wake up' and reevaluate things - what we want, what motivates us, what is meaningful. Feeling uncomfortable seems like the first step in that process - just like when you sit down to meditate for the first time. In fact, there seem to be a lot of parallels between meditation and lockdowns - getting rid of distractions, and just sitting with yourself, your feelings, thoughts, perceptions.

Unfortunately, and shockingly, it seems like this unique opportunity has been squandered by our societies, and we mostly just rebuilt our lives exactly the same way as they were before, learning nothing.

The problem is that the US, and California in particular, has no shortage of brilliant engineers from all over the world willing to come and work there and to do research.

As such, there is no incentive to make the best of home-grown talent. There is no skin in the game.

I still think the whole divide over Brexit was less about the principle of it, but more about whether you are more aligned with the current EU political leanings or with those of the current UK ones (reflected in its Tory leadership).

If you are more aligned with the EU political leanings, you would want them to be able to force the UK government to do what you believe is the right thing. If you are more aligned with the tories, you want them to be free to do their thing without being told what to do by the EU. And that seems to correlate highly with whether you think Brexit was a good or a bad idea.

An interesting thought experiment I like to ask people to do is whether they would change their views on Brexit if the political leanings of the EU and the UK were flipped. I.e. the EU views were more like ones they disagree with (e.g. more right-wing perhaps), and the political leanings of the UK were more like what they agree with. For example, if the UK wanted to have more funding for science, but the EU frowned upon that regarding it as unfair competition, or something along those lines.

Fine, but my point is there is no reason for Brexit to be a net negative when it comes to the funding of PhDs - if anything, it offers an opportunity to be more effective at funding.

Same when it comes to the specific issue of access to talent - nothing in principle stopping the UK from making it extremely easy for talent to come to the UK.

Was the UK not a net contributor to the EU budget? And therefore, why cannot the UK fund PhDs more effectively than the EU? I would've thought being less removed from the universities and research groups would make funding more effective.