elmomle

Nearly everybody has a center, though it may be so obscured by repression, their coping mechanisms, etc. that it would take years of deep work to start to find it. And most people in her shoes never do that work, so functionally the question may be moot.

Growing up in a very high-functioning and very dysfunctional family, I felt that a lot of people were missing the basic truth. Even the film seemed to circle it without really understanding it.

Elizabeth Holmes doesn't know her own center. She responds to the people around her; everything she does is to please her partners and/or the internalized expectations of her family. In the psychological parlance, she is an extreme fawner with narcissistic traits.

Such people are, in a sense, masters of deceit, but once you understand that they lack a real center outside of how others perceive them (and that they also have real feelings, even if their notions of love are profoundly confused), there's no longer an enigma. You know exactly what you'd looking at.

Just a couple of days ago, a customer rep at a company we partner with dropped a long doc that had basic reasoning errors once you got into the individual sections.

I would have much preferred if the rep had written a shorter document and reached out about things they were uncertain about. Instead thet wasted my and my team's time as we first tried to make sense of the document on good faith before realizing the problem.

I don't care if people use LLMs per se, but if this is functionally the result, then in this aspect of my work things would go much better if people did not use them. They are a great interface for talking to a machine, but due to the laziness they breed, they are a terrible interface for talking to other humans unless approached with a great deal of discipline.

Just to add context and not to comment on rightness, that was one of the early core purposes of policing--to ensure that a people in a particular public space (where either the people or the space are particularly vulnerable) are free from unwanted disturbance. Here is that exact concept shown in a painting from 172 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_(Jules_Breton).

This is fascinating, and there's a key inconsistency in the article that points to an unresolved mystery.

The author posits that sweet potatoes and tobacco moved into the highlands through intermarriage. Yet he later acknowledges that genetic evidence suggests no mixing of the highland people with the coastal people. So to me the mystery remains of how those crops got there.

It has been said that a person cannot serve two masters.

The incentive system in the West right now is structured such that corporate executives gain a great reward from serving their company, and little punishment from failing to serve humanity. If society is to flourish, humanity must be structurally prioritized.

Due to regulatory capture and general corruption, I don't think an approach that merely tries to punish corporations financially will ever work. If you have executive powers and commit or permit a crime against humanity in the name of your company, then you have declared your allegiance. A functioning society would punish this in the most serious way possible. Great power, great responsibility and all that.

There are many cities in the US where renting a scooter to travel a couple miles is as fast as (often faster than) waiting for and riding in a car, and costs perhaps a third as much. But I can't speak for whether this solar car is anything other than hype; those are different matters.

This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.

This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.

We can talk about this on a legal or a moral basis. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll focus on the moral basis. If company A offloads some of its work to company B, and company B commits atrocities in a foreign company to keep costs down on said work, is company A not morally culpable if it continues to work with company B? Is it different if we think in terms of two people as opposed to two companies (and if so, why?)?

There's a way of saying "we need to acknowledge that it's probably bad when either 'side' does this, due to our commitment to a deeper desire for truth", and the original comment ended up sounding more like "Well, liberals did it too". I think what we aspire to here is the former, which is helpful; the latter is polarizing and gets us further from core principles.

FWIW, I have a few professor friends who are generally liberal but were required to write yearly personal diversity statements by their administrations, and knew they were rewarded for putting pathos and hardship in their stories. They hated everything about it but felt that it would set their careers back to speak out against it. I think it's very valuable to have unpolitical discussions about these things, align on deep values, and come to a deeper understanding of how we can support one another--rather than falling into camps and pointing fingers.

Not to get all philosophical, but what does "content of character" mean apart from actions and words? If anything I'd say content of character is something we must infer from actions and words (and yes, actions are far more important than words, though in a public-facing position, communication arguably becomes a form of action).

There is a world of difference between (1) a random individual collecting a few people's faces and voices and (2) a huge corporation nonconsensually collecting that information at a mass scale (and with location!) in an age when identity resolution is automated.

The underlying idea here seems to be that if there's some chance of full recovery, one should not wish to be let go.

Is it better for 100 families to live for years with a vegetative loved one with the most realistic hope being that a few to emerge profoundly affected and never their full selves again, or is it better for those hundred families to get to grieve?

The pain of a loved one's continued quasi-existence, plus the difficulty of their life if they ever are to recover, make it so that the compassionate personal choice is to say "once the best estimated probability of my recovering robustly is clearly below P%, let me go". The value of P is a decision to be made carefully, and with deep consideration for ourselves, our loved ones, and for all of humanity.

Yet we have laws around child endangerment. I'm a big supporter of parental sovereignty, but I also acknowledge that if society operates the way it does, I can't immediately think of a good reason why "mental health endangerment" (which social media for kids very much is) wouldn't be included in the broader scope of endangerment.

It is also a class marker. I intentionally lived without a car in West Coast city as a younger man, and I learned to be very selective about whom I told. The vast majority of people would assume that the only reason for not having a car is not being able to afford one, and would judge me accordingly.

Exactly--they're paid a lot of money for their reputation, which is valuable in offering cover for politically difficult decisions. This was certainly net-negative for E&Y's reputation.

I want to poke at this a little. I don't think the ribs on the handle of a knife qualify as skeuomorphism, since they serve a distinct functional purpose independent of their origin (namely, better grip).

I do agree that "leather for every app" starts to deviate away from the definition of a true skeuomorph. One could argue that the iPhone was trying to evoke the personal organizer of yesteryear, and therein lies the skeuomorphism, but since the functionality of an iPhone was so much broader than a personal organizer, it may be conceptual smear to call that skeuomorphism too (but I still think a good argument could be made that it is skeuomorphism, since the functional form of a prior design is still being evoked intentionally for aesthetic / emotional cueing purposes).

I think there's more nuance to it. The big failing of progressive movements is that they seek, often from a position of disadvantage, to impose power over society too, but in the ways they feel are more just. The vast majority of progressives I know aren't very interested in listening to the other side, or implicitly believe that the other side is wrong and it's just a matter of making them see that.

But this ignores the humanity of people on the other side of the issue--people who may have legitimate moral and philosophical questions about very difficult and complex issues.

It does seem that acting locally, within the realm of actual human relationships rather than alienating impositions of authority, would likely result in much greater good in the long term.

Many Catholic believers are huge stickers for tradition. The previous Pope didn't go nearly so far as to allow female clergy, and he was not viewed with respect by many conservative Catholics. If the Pope declared that the church must allow female clergy, and if that didn't cause a literal schism, he would nevertheless lose the respect of most Catholics who didn't already agree with him.

If the Pope decides that it doesn't actually accomplish much good to force the issue when Catholics as a whole aren't ready for it, he could either try to advance women's rights without tipping the boat over, or he could just not bother.

This Pope is choosing to try to be a voice for good, and seems to do so from a deep desire for moral justice in an imperfect world. I'm grateful for that.

If communism is the cause, then why would this same mentality be such a massive problem in America?

Arguably, just to leave them alone, neither exploiting nor trying to "help". It sucks and it hurts, but outside interference does not seem to help a society heal itself. This has been argued by more informed people than myself-- https://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20wit...

Could it be that they haven't been so infected by the money bug that for now they still have a society oriented around happiness and maintaining traditional ways of life rather than economic attainment?

The US has been seizing fuel shipments en route to Cuba. What do you call that, if not a blockade?

He will say whatever it takes to get the result he wants. That's manipulative and, when pursued as a lifestyle, sociopathic.

Living like that is corrupting. When you treat humans like objects, the question of your starting intentions is really secondary.

Yes, and: the rot started long ago, this is just what it looks like when it goes unchecked. To quote Mencius:

Mencius went to see King Hui of Liang. The king said, “Venerable sir, since you have not counted it far to come here, may I presume that you are provided with counsels to profit my kingdom?”

Mencius replied, “Why must Your Majesty use that word ‘profit’? What I am provided with are counsels to benevolence and righteousness, and these are my only topics.

If Your Majesty say, ‘What is to be done to profit my kingdom?’ the great officers will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our families?’ and the inferior officers and common people will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our persons?’ Superiors and inferiors will try to snatch this profit one from another, and the kingdom will be endangered.”

That is so, but my understanding was that those later stories tie back to a lost epic (Iliupersis) that, while not officially attributed to Homer, was being sung contemporaneously with the other stories of the Trojan war cycle.

They'd generate a huge amount of ill will by shutting it down, and that in turn would likely lead to a nontrivial share of people moving away from Google core products (like search) out of pure spite.

I used to get lower back pain standing in concerts. For me, the pain had a lot to do with not properly engaging my glutes and core while standing still or moving slowly.

Yoga was very helpful--it taught me to use my muscles to carry my body rather than letting myself sink into my joints.

It was a very special time when the Internet was full of people's open, personal gardens. I feel fortunate for having experienced that because it showed me what's out there if I look, and I want to cultivate the pleasure of finding such things and sharing them with people I care about.

The sad thing that I haven't been able to resolve in my mind is that this is a cultural multi-party prisoners' dilemma among sovereign entities.

From a power-centric point of view, if my neighbors intentionally cast off modern technology, they are ripe for domination, economic exploitation, etc. The history of human civilization from the age of city-states onward is about navigating the need for protection from hostile, arrogating outside forces (and/or being one of those hostile forces).