jcutrell

It’s so disheartening that you can have this much of a laser focused understanding of what you’re looking for and not be able to find it.

This sounds so exhausting.

I’m all for listening to enriching content while doing dishes etc… I have a vested interest in this as a host of a podcast… but sometimes, you just need to hear the dishes clink, the train wheels rumble, or the sound of the air conditioner while you sit idle.

You need space for your brain to expand and recover. Don’t fill every second, or you will regret it in short order from massive burnout, and in my opinion, increased levels of anxiety and a sense of never quite being “done” with anything.

Everything is easier and harder than you think it will be.

It’s easier because humans tend to overcomplicate matters, when usually the simplest thing will probably suffice until you have serious demand for something more complicated.

It’s harder because once you decide to do something simple, humans have a strong impulse to overestimate what they can do in a day, a week, or a month. I call this the sandwich principle.

Making a sandwich is easy - you probably know the steps by heart. So, how long would it take to make 500 sandwiches?

Using your gut, you might not think an answer like 2 hours is off. But if you do the math, you realize you’re probably way off. This is because the simplicity of the task fools us into thinking it will also go quickly.

Focus hardcore on outcomes, and define your metrics of success early (and redefine them over time). Hand these things to your product owners and engineers, and ask them to deliver a new version of value as often as possible. Listen to your tech leaders when they start talking about rebuilding and refactoring, and ask them if there’s a way to do it Little by little.

Take everything in small increments, even if you have big vision. You can still do it little by little, and you’ll learn more and get the value curve going much faster that way.

The health anxiety in me just found a whole new lifeline.

I don’t think we should look at these people as the paragon of parenting. It’s easy to imagine that every decision they made is some blessed path, but that’s just a halo effect.

It’s easy to engage in some magical thinking about Jobs or Gates as if they know something distantly ominous about screens that told them to ban their kids from them, that they kept secret from the public in order to sell the screens. I don’t think so.

I think it’s pretty obvious that “too much screen time is bad” for kids, but it’s not that simple either.

As a parent, I struggle to find the right balance for my kids, but I also don’t think it’s some weird sinister plot to ruin humanity, and I’m just a sheep for letting my kids veg out on YouTube and Minecraft on the weekends.

Same here. I assume progressive rollout

The problem is, it's _not advice._

People take different imperatives away from the same information.

What does it mean that red meat causes cancer? Does that mean that all things being equal, high quality red meat should be avoided? Does it mean that red meat is associated with other lifestyle factors that cause cancer? How well controlled are the variables? How was the meat cooked? All red meat, or just certain levels of leanness? Did the diet of the animal matter? What about their location? Was the meat itself tested for contaminants?

In most nutrition studies, the controls are extremely difficult to put in place, especially for things like cancer, because the tail is so long. Studies are almost exclusively observational in nature, relying on recall and cohorts that do or don't eat red meat, which has SO much selection bias associated with it.

Even if you got to the end and could say definitively that high quality sourced red meat is still carcinogenic in all of its possible cooked forms, that still isn't "advice." There are still benefits, and those benefits carried by something like red meat, and those benefits might outweigh the risks.

Honestly, what I want to know in a headline like this is "what changed?"

As someone who deals with health anxiety already, I have done my fair share of research on things like this. Aspartame, along with most other artificial sweeteners, have not been proven to be carcinogenic in many studies done over a 40 year period. Additionally, the hazard ratio of any of these sweeteners in comparison to the equivalent consumption of sugar is laughably small.

So, when something like this happens, I really want to know what the trigger was. My fast-brain fills in the gap with "there was a new breakthrough in research." But, this categorization doesn't imply that necessarily. Just that they are doing a review. But why now?

What is the best evidence out there for what behaviors, products etc are, at a personal level, more dangerous?

For example, I have a Breville Precision coffeemaker. How much plastic is getting leached into my daily cup of coffee? Should I go back to manual pourovers? What is the real hazard I'm risking? How does this compare to other behaviors I may have?

Are there other behaviors that I can moderate for high bang/buck ratio?

There are definitely people who land squarely in conspiracy theory land for this. For example, those who avoid literally all plastic, and won’t eat something that touched even the most stable forms of plastic, despite having little to no evidence of leaching at whatever temperature their bottle of water is at.

I think the point is that we don’t see the major spikes that the ubiquitousness of plastics combined with the alarm levels raised by headlines like this would theoretically produce.

If plastics are indeed poisoning us, the hazard ratio seems to be small enough that it would require significant research to quantify.

Compare to, say, the lung cancer skyrocket that happened in the 70s-90s from the 30-year smoking habits developed in the 40s-60s.

With plastics, either the lag time for effects is really long, the effects themselves are so spread out that any meaningful bump for a single one is hard to identify, or we are reducing other causes of the same issues in lock step.

Make sure you are asking about pickup trucks, not necessarily a moving truck.

I dislike the wording of this title.

It’s not about being “acceptable” - it’s about it being _necessary_ to afford. Sure, maybe they could go hungry for a few weeks… but this is such a predatory practice that preys on the psychology of student loans. “I’m already paying 60k for tuition… what’s another $800 for 4 books.”

I live on an airport - Id really like to do this.

For people who say they have nothing to hide, I ask them why they have locks on their doors, passwords to their email, and clothes on their body.

Someone should show this complete stain how much his average worker is working per dollar compared to him, and then take away his toys and put him in time out.

Also, some people treat their inanimate cars with more loyalty and love than a pet, so it’s not really that weird.

Fortunately workers can now say “I want to work from home because I like it better than your shitty office environment” and if the employer doesn’t like it they can go pound sand and find other workers.

Honestly this works as a very nice filter bubble for me. You want me to be on-site because you don’t trust me to be productive unless you can see me? Boy, I bet your Jira hygiene is a lot of fun to be subjected to.

I’ve made the permanent decision to not be forced to work in an office ever again. It will always be my personal choice where I am physically located: you probably aren’t paying me enough to control my location.

This is actually pretty insightful - I have done something similar with splitting my obsidian data into chunks using paragraphs and headers as demarcation, but this solves a more interesting problem of nuance! I like it.

Id like to propose Altman’s law: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit generated by linguistic AI is two orders of magnitude higher than it takes to create it.

I’m not sure what the bias is here - maybe halo effect? - but the issue at hand is that the antibiotics are being used in a scenario where they cannot be effective. They are, in that way, a placebo to the same degree that homeopathy is, despite any other properties outside of the acute situation.

Say I have some really great tasting distilled water. Perfectly pure, exactly what I need if I wanted to quench my thirst. Now, I also have an empty gas tank.

Should I put water or flat Coca Cola in the gas tank? They are both bad, despite the separately superior qualities of the water. Or, maybe a better comparison is putting diesel in vs coke. They are equivalently bad for the engine despite one of them being used for a similar but separate situation.

I think there’s a chance here to actually tell them the truth.

“This stuff is not studied to work. It is a placebo.” OP study says this can still be effective.

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Take this as a lesson - if you ever want criticism on HN, post something about messing with animations on a page. Scrolljacking is a cardinal sin around these parts.

On another note - is it true that this would mean the animation frame function will run infinitely (even though the render will not re-render under a certain threshold)?

This is true, but it also ignores the economic reality: your employer wants to get things done, but money is their constraint more than time. If they can replace you, they are obligated to do so.

This is a nice idea, but in economic reality, you won’t be getting anything done if your boss lets you go.

If you can point to a title that is not backed by subjectivity, I’d like to know about it.

The examples that tend to come up here are things like Lawyer or Medical Doctor. And yet, every person in those fields is still subjectively different from the next in terms of knowledge and qualification.

I’m not claiming nothing objective is being used; I’m claiming that the title application is subjective, because humans determine when the title is applicable - not some external source.

Lots of comments here are casually dismissing a ton of psychological research on this topic out of a sense of what looks like philosophical or intellectual superiority. That’s too bad; this is unusually prevalent in our industry. When do you earn the title of software engineer? When you’ve written code? When you get paid for it? When you’ve published to ACM? When you make a million dollars off of an idea?

Humans use labels all the time. A title is just a label with some shared cultural meaning. Anything else you load onto it is arbitrary, and withholding those labels until that arbitrary threshold is met is just as silly as assigning the title when nothing is done whatsoever.

And yet, you will then adopt the identity of a person who doesn’t limit themselves with titles and identities. It’s a bit of a paradox but it works with how our brains operate: we use heuristics to understand the world. So labels will be applied by your brain one way or the other, and you will either consciously or subconsciously adopt or reject those labels, no matter what your chosen philosophy on the matter is.

Titles are not applied based on objective realities anyway, which is actually the point.

“RPG” or “TTRPG” refer to role-playing games, most often set in fantasy settings. The article is playing off of the fact that role playing as a device can be used outside of those settings to gain insights and mental latticework.