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solipsism

1,170 karma · joined February 15, 2014

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solipsism··on It doesn't take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
Ah, yes, purposefully waste people's time. Fuck them, right?

I've seen this kind of attitude before, and it's usually justified with something about how the companies don't respect your time so why should you respect theirs. The thing is... the kind of people at these companies who don't care about your time are the kind of people who would do something like this.

solipsism··on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
I would argue that you understand the relationship between an alligator and a water buffalo immediately... Now your brain is turning it into language to come up with words like "predator/prey" or "hidden danger" or whatever. But the abstract relationship did not require language before your brain started to reason about it. I think it's the other way around.
solipsism··on The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
I'm multilingual. Growing up, friends asked me which language I think in. The answer is "neither". I can produce sentences in my brain in either language if I want, but it's strange to me that anyone would feel that thoughts are in any particular language.

I would feel incredibly limited if all my thoughts had to be synthesized into a language before they could be acted on. In fact, i often struggle to find words to express ideas that I can perfectly think about.

solipsism··on GitHub Copilot: First Impressions
Is this your idea of a positive comment? "It's happening no matter what!"
solipsism··on A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement
Speak for yourself. My family is busy, and we don't like to plan -- we just decide to do something and do it. So a scheduled routine would feel like a horrible anchor to us.
solipsism··on Neurons unexpectedly encode information in the timing of their firing
I'd have thought that I'd have heard of this if there were legit evidence

Changes to DNA would be the long term changes, not RNA. But yes, look up epigenetics, and especially DNA methylation.

solipsism··on GitHub Copilot is not infringing copyright
The fallacy is the god-of-the-gaps "logic" of assuming there's some hand-wavey phenomenon that's qualitatively different from anything we currently understand, just because reality has so much complexity that we are far from reproducing it. You're assuming there's a soul and looking for it, even though you don't call it that.

Intelligence is mysterious in the same way chemical biology is mysterious (though perhaps to another degree of complexity)... It's not mysterious in the way people getting sick was mysterious before germ theory. There's no reason to think there's some crucial missing phenomenon without which we can't even reason about intelligence.

solipsism··on Haiti’s President Is Assassinated
Undoubtedly. But saying conflicts with France significantly affected the outcome of the American Revolution is a far cry from saying the Revolution was essentially part of the conflicts between Britain and France, as if the Revolution was some kind of proxy war. That's just not true. France piled on, and the conflict with France helped set things up, but the colonies had legitimate beef with Britain and walked the path toward revolution without having to be nudged by the French.
solipsism··on Haiti’s President Is Assassinated
What's incorrect about the American "founding myth"? Please explain what role France played in the disagreement about taxes between the colonists and the crown?
solipsism··on Haiti’s President Is Assassinated
I'm curious to see the curricula that are teaching this incorrect rubbish.

What role did France play in the Boston Tea Party? I'm not aware of any at all. Certainly France jumped in once they saw the opportunity happening, but the idea that the revolution was really part of the conflict with France is just wrong.

solipsism··on GitHub Copilot is not infringing copyright
Also define "computational statistics". It'll be fun to try and fail to draw a clear line between the two.
solipsism··on The ‘flow state’: Where creative work thrives (2019)
I'm not the OP but I couldn't agree more with them.

To answer your question... no they don't. Or perhaps very, very rarely. It doesn't make sense to spend hours at a time on any of those tasks, and you can't anyway because someone always needs something from you.

solipsism··on Immutability is not enough (2016)
It's rather a non sequitur, as no one ever said immutability was enough.

You also need design, rigor, error handling, common sense, some caffeine, testing, and fast builds. All together... that's enough!

solipsism··on Google drops engineering residency after protests over ‘inequities’
You've missed my point.

When you get your first yacht, you'll start to notice all the better yachts with mini yachts. It's never ending.

solipsism··on Google drops engineering residency after protests over ‘inequities’
If you ever made it to Google, you'd immediately see the stratification within. The elites with their lake houses... the people operating at levels you never will be able to... the people bailing to start startups because Google got boring.

Fuck it and be happy. And while you're working on it, you should consider no longer voicing your negative thoughts. It definitely doesn't help, and there's a good chance it makes it worse. (Or don't, I'm not telling you what to do obviously)

solipsism··on TDD from the Factorio Team
The other problem here is that unit tests never break (since you've mocked everything that can break) and therefore aren't worth running; it might be more productive to write them for TDD and then just not commit them.

That's fine for code that never changes, or that has no logic in it. As soon as you want to change some code, you'll want a portion of the tests to require modification and a portion to stay passing.

solipsism··on Senate Unanimously Approves a Bill to Make Juneteenth a Public Holiday
Weirdly aggressive? What's aggressive about it? The thin skin around here is ridiculous.
solipsism··on I Miss the Old Internet (2019)
Pretty sure Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are exchanging ideas in the same way Jefferson and Madison did. These people all have something in common, though, even across time -- they were all influential, successful, well known people.

I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.

It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)

As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.

solipsism··on Forget going back to the office – people are just quitting instead
That kind of ad hoc WFH is very common, but it's different from a policy that permits N days a week WFH.
solipsism··on Taildrop was kind of easy
That's what it is not why. For most people the response to this will be "why would I want to do that?"

There may be good reasons. But they'll need to be explicitly spelled out for most users.

solipsism··on Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL
Money. The most common bottleneck is money and customers. Use whatever helps you get new customers faster.

Don't be scared of having to make changes in the future. Do the small amount of work it takes today to make sure your transition in the future is easy.

Transitioning from a SQL queue to redis it's only difficult if you have a bunch of SQL throughout your code. If you have that, you did it wrong.

solipsism··on Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL
What am I missing? With your description, nothing ever sets expire to 0. Can't look at the code comfortably as I'm on mobile.
solipsism··on Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL
But if we always do what's easiest, then we will make a bunch of horrible choices.

Other things that matter, often more than what's easiest:

* Flexibility. If you aren't 100% sure what you'll need, but need something in place today, it can make sense to choose an unopinionated, generic solution.

* Familiarity. Maybe you've never used Rabbit.

* Ops simplicity. Maybe you already have a bunch of postgres deployed. Adding a new type of system means you need new ways of monitoring, new dependencies, different deployment.

solipsism··on A Project of One’s Own
pg did not talk about riches in this essay, and especially in this paragraph. He talked about doing interesting work.

Yeah it make sense to focus on interesting projects when you are already rich.

solipsism··on How to Start a Novel
"was to remember" doesn't imply causality any more than "remembered" does.

"could not help but remember" would've been a much better translation, and even has the similarity that the usage is less common and more literary (i speak Spanish).

solipsism··on Why Russians do not smile (2002)
So.... by your definition literally everything is a cultural thing? If you aren't talking about this specific situation, wtf are you talking about?
solipsism··on Why Russians do not smile (2002)
I've worked across a lot of cultures too. If you believe it's normal part of "Hindu" culture to put your hand on co-worker's knees, to the point that they are avoiding you, then I'm afraid you don't know as much as you think you do.
solipsism··on Why Russians do not smile (2002)
You're setting up a straw man. In this situation no one is talking about two close friends walking holding hands.

We are talking about a man inappropriately touching his coworkers. Not coworkers who also happen to be good friends. Coworkers who are actively avoiding him because of it.

The LIE being told, and being upheld by you, is that this is part of "Hindu" culture. Anyone saying that is extremely ignorant about India.

solipsism··on Why Russians do not smile (2002)
You are talking about things you know nothing about. How familiar are you with various Indian cultures? This thing about putting his hand on coworker's knees, to the point that they avoid him, is very much not a part of Indian culture.

Yes, men holding hands is commonly seen.... when those men are close friends. There would be no people trying to avoid each other.

solipsism··on Why Russians do not smile (2002)
Why would I need more information?

A guy was putting his hand on his co-workers' knees! Often enough that people scurried from him! It's clear the implication is made that this is just a "Hindu" thing.

That's wrong. It's not a Hindu thing. It's offensive to say it is. And the idea that my comments saying so are being flagged is also offensive.

Comments like Eh... Can't we just bomb them as usual? ;-) are the ones that violate HN guidelines and should be flagged.

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