realsimplesynd

I recently interviewed a dentist. You may find the text insightful. Note that this is not necessarily representative of the experience of all dentists. My reasons for doing so are listed on the “about” page of the linked website.

Brave is such a great browser, it’s one of the few software products that makes me feel really happy when I use it

> “ Instagram’s algorithm might suggest more extreme dieting accounts with names such as “Eternally starved,” “I have to be thin” and “I want to be perfect.” “

I know people who cut themselves because of Instagram and not feeling adequate enough. I think there’s a similar version of this with competency for males. The feeling that you will never be good at what you do or that you need to do something to get there just hasn’t been exploited yet.

Checking out the Wikipedia page, it seems quite useful, but more observational (like, liked people do x, and that seems a contributor to their likability not a product). I don’t know how to translate that into a poster, though.

I don’t know anything about this company (which people seem to not like), but SLAM for WiFi is looks pretty cool (and even somewhat useful).

COVID “jabs” seems demeaning to one of the fastest scientific kicks in history. We’ll remember the vaccine research the same as the moon landing.

> the MIT culture of credit theft

This makes me think about who we revere as scientists and who we compare ourselves to.

A lot of success in life is out of our control. Conditions produce outliers, not diligence and hard work (Outlier X probably did work hard, but the conditions were so for their nervous system to act as such).

If you have a good understanding of how to hack YouTube (or other social sites) that seems plausible. Some list video channels appear to have crossed that mark (I bet a well trained GAN or GPT-3 could easily reproduce content of that quality—it’s not about talent of any sort). Though actually doing that could be considered unethical, as it would be contributing to the wire heading of children (who else watches list videos?) to an algorithm obsessed with watch time optimization.

This feels like the digital equivalent of a tsunami. A monstrous tidal wave that’s almost kind of beautiful despite the carnage. 17m rps is insane!

I may be biased, but I really love RSS. Did you know that Aaron Swartz worked on the RSS spec when he was 14 years old?

I've heard it used as an explanation for our species level sense of camaraderie and cooperation. A near extinction event may have been one of the best things to ever happen to us. (I don't entirely agree, but it's an interesting thought)

> “I realized that those ants were badasses and terminally cool”

Ants don’t seem to care about legacy: one ant is pretty much the same as every other one and each life isn’t that important to the functioning of their community. All they seem to care about is the good of the colony and doing their job well. Ants are amazing creatures.

I hope the creatures we are ants to see us the same way.

Turns out there are perks to being vegetarian and having cultural inhibitions about cow meat :)

Jeff Atwood explained this behavior as stemming from the fact that when you work with a computer all day, you kind of become one.

Source: https://youtu.be/KZkYSSE8HHI

Forgive me if I read the article wrong, but maybe this has to do with randomly changing diet having a negative effect?

I think optimal diet is subjective. Reason and experience are more important than other people’s data alone.

There’s something about extinct/ancient common ancestors of humans and other species that’s so interesting and exiting.

Person in US school system here. I’ve had to use Chromebooks for school, and all I can think about is what Richard Stallman would do if he were in the US school system right now.

I wonder if there is a correlation between being super good and having a disdain for awards or not.

I really wish I started with lisp, the unity of the whole language teaches you that you’re not just telling a computer what to do, you’re making abstractions on top of the base language.

I love this philosophy, because every time I reread a book, I always find something new that I missed on the first pass through.

Kind of like training a deep learning model, in a sense.

If anyone is interested in an extremely secure linux distro: https://tails.boum.org/

> Governments seem to be universally terrified of even the slightest possibility of anyone in the world having a private conversation.

How secure do you think face-to-face conversations are? (not sarcastic or anything, just genuinely interested on measuring security of conversations)

In Frank Herbert's Dune, the main hero, Paul Muad'Dib, name means "the little mouse"

> 6. All bitches bleed during proestrus.

The word “bitch” has changed so much in cultural meaning during the last 50 years or so that somehow it feels more offensive to call a female dog a “bitch” then a human.

How is “bitch” used in veterinary hospitals?