nefitty

I haven't used this app. I had to make my own similar tool.

Anyways, timeblocking changed my life. It was a slog at first. I started off by logging what I actually did.

"Sit on couch - 12:15 - 4:30" "Walk dog - 4:30 - 4:45" "Sit on couch - 4:45 - 7:00"

Seeing the patterns I had fallen into was like looking into some sort of chronographic mirror. My fourth dimensional beer belly had gotten pretty big.

Put my ballot in the "What gets measured gets managed" box.

Hahaha that might definitely be the case sometimes

I didn't have health insurance for a long time. I had it growing up through my parents, but there's always this weird sense of "fix yourself, don't waste resources". It may have been a holdout from the scarcity of services my parents grew up with in rural Mexico and Central America.

I got hit with a really bad chronic disease that I've been dealing with for over a decade. It manifests in so many weird, seemingly unrelated ways because it's systemic. As I traversed the world of professional medical treatment, I initially felt the rapture of attention. "Oh my God, doctors are like magic. They are literally just focused on making me feel better!"

As I continued, and initial treatments lost efficacy or side effects became intolerable, my hope became overwhelmed with a feeling of resignation. I was thoroughly convinced that doctors can fix things, and that is the signal everything and everyone in society communicates. "But why am I still fucked up? Why am I on treatment #7? Why am I on procedure #3? Why am I out thousands of dollars and seemingly in the same spot I was when I started all of this?"

I gave up. I stopped going to doctors. I stopped looking to them for answers. In the middle of this year's long resignation, I happened to hear an interview on NPR with a doctor. She said, "I think doctors really need to be more open with the fact that there's things we can't fix. There's things we don't know. Trust disintegrates when people approach us expecting miracles, and we fail to temper those expectations. It's hard to tell someone, 'I am an expert at X but I have no idea how to fix X." That was revelatory to me.

I felt anger when doctors would prescribe me Tylenol or antibiotics or off-label depression medicine. "How the fuck are antibiotics going to fix this?!" I realized that those reactions were because I'm the kind of person that needs to know the chain of logic that leads to a conclusion. I would be so much more amenable to unintuitive treatments if the doctors had taken a second to tell me, "JAMA concluded that a combination of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are as effective as tramadol. In addition, I'm going to prescribe you these OTC's because you're young and you have a high risk of opiate abuse." Oh, that is such sound logic that I'm 100% on board with following your orders.

Since I realized that, I now know what to ask and what to research when being treated. I know what my brain needs to be convinced. I know my mind's extreme hesitance to take information on faith. I gained more compassion for conspiracy theorists and radical subjectivists. Yeah, they filled their brain with bullshit from Facebook, but maybe the authority figures they relied on failed to recognize the frames from which they operate.

I don't know if reading about my experience helps anyone. Ultimately, I realized that "be your own advocate" is a tremendously powerful way to operate. For the most part, authority figures and elites aren't trying to bullshit us into complacency. They have to juggle efficiency and effectiveness, and sometimes our individual pecadillos get lost in the mix. The things societies have achieved are because individuals joined in collective efforts, and flat-out ignoring or rejecting that momentum can lead to unnecessary strife and suffering for us individually.

If you're on HN, you're probably super smart. Try to decode what your brain needs. If your conclusions seem to be in contradiction to the world's signals, maybe slow down and entertain ways of convincing yourself of what the signals are telling you. Your mind is powerful, it can hold contradictory facts. Trust in that.

I think we should normalize expressions of awe and curiosity about other people. It's hard to do without sounding ridiculous. A model that helps me is, "I like the state that that person's brain is in. I'll let them know. If I'm lucky, my communication of appreciation might shake out some generalizable knowledge that I have not encountered before."

A good set of people to practice this on is doctors, teachers and Twitter users you admire.

I'm totally on the crypto hate train, but it's funny that this website is focused on criticizing "the next web". I sat for two minutes watching the little loading ellipsis animation. Then I pressed the non-intuitive flat monkey button and something loaded but I had already lost interest.

Here's a more robust implementation that checks the actual responses from each mirror, instead of just whether it is a "preferred" mirror according to Wikidata.

https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub

Managers are literally the ones that are supposed to take the blame.

Ok, I'm not just here to bitch. Here's the code for my implementation of Sci-Hub mirror checking: https://observablehq.com/@iz/sci-hub

I made an iOS Shortcut based on the same code. To use it after installing, access it from the iOS Share screen when you're on a relevant site. It will look for preferred mirrors from Wikidata before running.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/080b9f68c96a4491898b804547e...

Always review a Shortcut's actions before running it.

My god, why did you mention wikidata? SPARQL is the most obscure fucking thing I've ever encountered. I've been sitting here for an hour trying to find how to get the data of a specific page!

I guess the rest API will do, ugh.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28277749

Oh that's an awesome idea! I'm fluent in Spanish so this technique will probably make my Spanish and English brains way smarter.

This simple fact dismantles a pillar of crypto evangelism.

No, you, can't exist outside of society and its influence, even if your "money" is digital.

There's a tweet thread on someone's journey with this that you might dig. Your comment reminded me of it:

"REALITY DISTORTION FIELDS & the HUMILITY OF ACCEPTING YOU'RE BEING INFLUENCED" https://twitter.com/CurziRose/status/1477788648812662784

I love that you synthesized that comment on the fly then actually took the time write and share it.

In the back of my mind I have a maybe-never project brewing that would entail finding Wikipedia pages that only exist in one language. English would of course have many unique pages. I wonder how many non-English page translations would be rejected on notability grounds, just due to sheer cultural differences.

My mind went immediately in a satirical direction. I often ignore that actually being there, in the physical space where something that intense happened could be psychologically difficult to handle. The internet gives us enough distance to make things so much more abstract.

Haha I get that. I love MacKaye and Rollins.

As I was growing up I found that "straight edge" and "hardcore Christian" overlapped too much for my comfort. I chalked it up to kids trying to exude a rebellious attitude within the safe confines of the Christian narrative. That didn't seem as authentic to me as the kids who started anarchist punk or satanic grind bands.

Basically, there were some behaviors that served as the narc test. Straight edge kids had a self-declared pass because of their morals. "I don't drink, see? I have an x tattooed on my hand." Those morals conspicuously seemed to align with what "good Christian kids" were taught to believe. This was outlined in stark relief as I realized more and more bands around me labeled themselves as "Christian".

I hadn't revisited that conclusion in a long time, but a cursory glance signals to me that the logic is still sound. It seems like it was my own allergic reaction to cynicism, which I think MacKaye et al might at least respect.

One of the most impactful signals we can give to others is writing information and promises that arise between us.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm writing down that I promised you that book so I can get it for you for your birthday."

"Oh, that's awesome. Thank you."

That makes sense! I never went to college and have never really been in "tech". Of my several dozen close friends, only one went to college and he definitely became markedly different than us as his studies went on.

I was sort of forced out of that identity by COVID lockdown and domestic imperatives. I used to be proud of how many cans I could pound in a session before I got kicked out of a bar. Now, if I or anyone else do that, it's a huge pain in the ass.

I still don't trust people that have never been drunks, though. There's something about the forceful rejection of social norms involved in becoming an alcoholic that I find resonates with me. It's akin to the punk ethos. The problem definitely is when people mistake being a drunk dickhead with being punk.

I did accidentally traumatize myself by focusing on one marker that basically said "You have an increased risk for degenerative disease x". I had a full-blown psychosomatic attack, and I convinced myself that I was going to die in 5 years. After I calmed down I realized it was probably anxiety. I learned a little bit more about statistics in medicine and realized that my layman's understanding of chance is probably way different than what genetic markers point at (I have no idea what the actual numbers are, but maybe they consider 1 in a million an increased risk, for example).

My ultimate goal is to address some weird ADHD-style issues and an autoimmune disease, holistically. When I go to a stomach doctor he gives me stuff for my stomach, but never asks about how my brain feels, about fatigue, about my skin, etc. I don't blame doctors for specialization.

I've given up on expecting them to be able to "fix my car". That would be silly to ask of an actual mechanic. What I'm doing instead is studying, tweaking and fixing what I can through lifestyle and careful supplementation. Basically, I'm starting with filling the tires with air, changing the oil, etc. Then once I realize my car is still violently wobbling, I'll have a list of what I've fixed myself, and the mechanic can focus on more complex wobble factors.

I'm annoyed by all the people that are going to downvote my comment.

I may petition dang to remove downvotes on the premise of reducing commenter suffering.

Yeah, same here. I've been able to learn new tools quickly with SRS, for example GraphQL. My usual method is to wrestle with the tool until I get stuck. SRS for GraphQL gave me a much better framework for what to ask when I got stuck.

I'm going to try memory palaces for programming ideas. I'm thinking of sequential book-style information. For example, what I think I will do is hook each paragraph or section to a landmark by concocting a question about the section. That might help with the "synthesis" portion of comprehension.

I imagine that this will result in either shit rote-knowledge, or an abundance of new ideas and connections.

Btw, I successfully impressed my wife by memorizing a 15-digit number of her making in a span of less than 5 minutes. If anything, this is going to be a cool party trick lol

Wow, this site has a lot of self-study resources. I've been sort of chicken pecking at books about learning to try to extract ideas, like stuff by Barbara Oakley, etc.

Even the Wikipedia page on "evidence-based learning" only discusses three things: spaced repetition (Anki), n-back training and some weird ambiguous behavioral thing called errorless learning.

I've also continually scoured HN and Reddit for tips.

Does anyone have any hidden knowledge to share? My current experiment is a tweak of memory palaces. I take a route in my city that I know well, that I can picture myself traversing. I then mark monuments on the path. I then mentally attach items to the path. Finally, I take a screenshot of the path and manually label each milestone with the associated piece of information.

So far I've managed to memorize 19 items related to Javascript proxies this way, after a single session.

Wow, it's available for only $199 at https://mannkitchen.com/pages/pepper-cannon

"But, will there be too much pepper?"

"No. There will be the exact amount of pepper you want, ground more consistently, in a fraction of the time."

> "In light of the crisis in Ukraine, Mandiant is preparing for Russian actors to carry out aggressive cyber activity against our customers and community. Russia regularly uses its cyber capability to carry out intelligence collection and information operations, but we are particularly concerned that as tensions escalate, they may target organizations within and outside of Ukraine with disruptive and destructive cyber attacks."

https://www.mandiant.com/resources/protect-against-destructi...

Thanks kind stranger. And the people who downvoted me for asking, eat my short.

Jesus. How much do those pilots get paid? Like $60k/year?

What is SAM?

I'm not really clear on why people are surprised about these thefts. Isn't train robbery a western film trope? Maybe we've culturally forgotten trains, but they're the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. Train chicanery was even an integral part of the civil war.

That's the independent study part. I wish I could be more help but that research is time and money intensive, and not guaranteed to be fruitful. It also involves review of multiple studies, sometimes several dozen. Then it's about seeing which ones are relevant to an individual's specific genetic mutations.

I'm currently going through dozens of reports from SelfDecode, and that's after massive amounts of work on their end. I think I'm out a few hundred bucks so far, but it is an amazing service. I will soon seek their genetic consultation service, which is about $1k, and their lab testing service.

The article says EBV is prevalent and is probably necessary but not sufficient for MS. If I was in that position I would look at my gene test results for any markers that correlate with MS. The more of those markers, the more intensely I would prioritize following relevant interventions.