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chairedon Cheap smartphones are about to change everything

I had to write code for Androids, and so I 'used' them quite a bit while testing. To this day, every time I have to use an Android phone, I want to claw my eyes out, mainly over the lousy touch response, and somewhat-stupider UI. I fully understand they're still good iPhone knock-offs and more than adequate for many. But as someone who now uses my phone as my primary computer (and for me iOS is now only just barely adequate for this), I honestly don't know how y'all do it.

chairedon I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

Thank you so much for writing this.

chairedon I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

I would say the opposite. From experience, a 'social services' office will not help, but will make his life more difficult. On the other hand, genuine kindness at least has a chance.

chairedon I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

One reason you might donate would be if you have compassion. Compassion doesn't need to be deserved in a Puritanical sense.

chairedon I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

Some find this type of labeling helpful. Some find it unhelpful. At any rate, we should probably tread carefully.

People with mental illness need jobs as much as, if not more than, those who pass for normal. I know. I have suffered from serious mental issues for 18 years. In that same time, I have enjoyed a long, exciting, and storied career; and I know that my employers have been grateful.

chairedon I'm About as Good as Dead: The End of Xah Lee

1 ) Perhaps this could be the start of Xah Lee learning some social skills. If so, good on him. He'll go a lot further with them.

2 ) Surely someone in this community can offer him a job writing documentation, at the least? Think of it as charity if you must, but he will probably deliver good value, and he would probably be happy to work cheap, if you're into that sort of thing.

3 ) I will donate $, since that's what I can do from where I am.

chairedon 2013 Founders’ Letter

On the issue of Google (and especially G+) and privacy, if one is only being even medium-dramatic, that's hardly a criticism.

chairedon Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

Eminem has spoken about how much he enjoys playing with words. One of the techniques he's mentioned is taking two words that don't rhyme and bending the sound of each about half way towards each other.

chairedon Rappers, Sorted by Size of Vocabulary

There isn't a doubt in my mind that if someone came along and said what the actual grand structure and meaning of reality is, most people on the Internet would dismiss it as college stoner thoughts out of hand.

chairedon Why I won’t work for Google

He could work for a corp that is small enough that it still seems like it is made of decent human beings.

My interview experience with G was more than enough to ensure I never seek to work there again.

And, the trauma of having all my media accounts force-Hoovered into G+ left me little choice but to revoke the last little bit of admiration I had for this once-cool-as-beans company.

chairedon Here’s the Agreement Oculus Broke, According to ZeniMax

This jackassery is like if DEC had gone after Microsoft for hiring Dave Cutler et al.

If every company always pursued every technicality allowed by our stupid laws, none of us would be free to change jobs.

edit: Apparently I couldn't have picked a worse example :| However, thinking about the similarities, I'm struck by the sense that these companies are basically seizing on a plausible excuse to extract millions from each other. But these actions diminish the autonomy of these programmers, reducing them to property.

chairedon The reality show: Schizophrenics used to see demons and spirits (2013)

My last "visionary episode" occurred a couple of weeks before the Higgs was confirmed, and the Higgs field featured very prominently in the visions. Compare this to how the Higgs must also have featured very prominently in the waking consciousnesses of the scientists working on it at the time, perhaps even in some of their dreams. But the way it appeared in their consciousness is considered more useful, and for a given set of values, it is.

Western industrial society loves the states of consciousness that are good for doing work and making money. It's pretty friendly towards drunkenness. It grudgingly and indifferently tolerates the states that are good for making popular music. It is terrified of pretty much all the others.

I refuse to use the word 'psychosis' because it is so disparaging. The visionary state itself was indescribably wonderful. The physical effects of not eating or sleeping for the duration were bad, but temporary and fairly easy to fix. The subsequent reactions of others, including and especially so-called professionals, were devastating and made my life a living nightmare for about 9 months.

I'm currently reading Trials of the Visionary Mind by psychiatrist John Weir Perry. His views match my experience. I feel the stigma in Western society around non ordinary states is extremely damaging. It may be good for "the machine" or whatever you want to call it, but I know for sure it is very damaging to the lives of affected individuals, and I don't think it's good for society at large.

chairedon Follow up to the investigation results

A company founder doing damage control isn't even close to equivalent to a badly treated employee speaking up about being treated badly. The respective motivations are completely different.

chairedon Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?

Hey, it's all relative. I have no personal life or relationships to speak of, and no projects. Sounds to me like he's doing ok.

chairedon Poll: how many productive hours do you have in a day?

I find this depends entirely on what I'm doing. When I was working on a game full time on my own time, 12 hours a day consistently was easy, and things like eating, and my girlfriend at the time, were a nuisance.

At most of my day jobs, most of the time, I probably averaged less than an hour a day of productive time, with most days being zero.

chairedon Hello, Stranger

I'm from Boston. I saw spontaneous group conversations break out among strangers fairly often. Certainly, I would not think twice if it happened there. In eight years in Seattle, I have never seen it happen, not even once.

chairedon How Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are rushing to cash in on cannabis

Every time I meet one of their couriers in broad daylight, and they hand me a receipt, I feel like I'm just grazing a tiny part of history. It's not Rosa Parks level. It's a smaller matter, but it's still an important change for Western society, which legitimizes very, very few kinds of states of consciousness, and strongly favors the one that makes you most productive in a job.

chairedon Suicide Prevention Sheds a Longstanding Taboo: Talking About Attempts

I'm sorry, but as a long-time sufferer, I feel compelled to disagree with this viewpoint wherever I see it, to represent people like me. I've been suicidal and depressed on and off for about 20 years. From in here, it doesn't seem anything like an illness at all. The flu is an illness. This is having lived through an absurd number of absurd events, emotionally draining and also traumatic in the long-term. It's having been abused. It's having exhausted yourself pouring all the energy you have into being your best, excelling, achieving, pleasing everyone, but having one dream after another expectation shattered, and having to learn a new framework for living with it. It's cumulative rejection. It's guilt over things you can never undo. It's finding no pleasure in life, only monotony, the grind, suffering, disappointment, and loneliness. It's wondering what's wrong with you that everyone you know got married, have kids, own homes, advance in their careers, buy nicer cars, but your life is still just like a single college student's.

It's not quite my brain, and it's not quite my mind. It's my life, which in a sense is my mind. Which may or may not be my brain. I think that current psychiatry is confused about which level of abstraction is the one to target - not too surprising, since it's circular, almost strange-loopy. Also, people, even most professionals, don't really know what to do or say when the problem really is your life.

chairedon Suicide Prevention Sheds a Longstanding Taboo: Talking About Attempts

When it happens to a high-profile figure, people grapple with the issues in the public sphere. It raises awareness.

chairedon Suicide Prevention Sheds a Longstanding Taboo: Talking About Attempts

1. I'm surprised how often the simple matter of difficulty is skirted. I've been wholeheartedly and single-mindedly motivated to off myself in the past, and it is hard to do. I don't know how to get a gun, and if I had one, I wouldn't know what to do with it. Jumping from height requires enormous courage to override the instinctive refusal to do it. Hanging requires tremendous endurance of pain: hanging your whole body by your neck hurts!!!, and you do not go out right away. As far as the pills that would actually work, I would not know where to get them.

You could say if I was truly motivated, I would learn how to overcome one or more of these obstacles. Well that's a moving goalpost. I maintain that I was motivated to try whatever I had at my disposal, and I was not able to determine whether it was actually possible.

chairedon Suicide Prevention Sheds a Longstanding Taboo: Talking About Attempts

I'm not saying what he said was valid, but I am saying that neither being offensive nor being a generalization needs to have a bearing on truth value.

Another: All else being equal, women get a lot of attention and praise, while men generally have to compete harder for such things.

chairedon Study: Majority of engineers believe they will become millionaires

According to Google ngram, the word millionaire peaked around 1910, when a million dollars was about 25 million 2014 dollars.

chairedon When Life Gives You Lemons

People are so conditioned by doublespeak PR, they get the icky feeling from plain talk.

chairedon How I Came to Write D

"I confided this to a colleague, and he suggested a lunch with him and the local C guru"

This stood out to me as the #1 difference between me and successful people. I always notice it in every article or bio of someone successful. Something that has never, and would never happen to me at any point in time, but in the bios, it's always there:

The first person I mentioned my idea to suggested a lunch.

chairedon The Hypocrisy Of Sam Yagan and OkCupid

You think that we haven't considered the relationship between morality and popular opinion, and that we should give more weight to popular opinion? And that if we did, we'd see it makes a better basis for morality than models that highlight equality and enumerated rights?

chairedon Low-level is easy

Most of my enjoyment of programming comes from the coolness of math, logic, and simulation. Most of my hatred of programming comes from the brittle, messy, confusing, uneven frameworks laid down before me by other programmers. My career consists of maybe 10-20% of the former. The rest is the latter. Consequently, I've really hated, and I mean hated, doing this for a job.

Another way to look at it is, just as in all other spheres, I enjoy the abstract intellectual part and hate the human part.