I have tried my best to stop arguing period.
I am not the poster boy you want for your cause.
I spoiled more days thinking about an anonymous poster on reddit than I care to admit.
What I do now:
Explicitly state what should be obvious: "there is rarely a free lunch. everything has trade-offs." This also _always_ neutralizes the conversation, because it's no longer about winner-take-all existential threat to my ego, it's about preferences across a continuum.
For example:
I was at dinner with friends, I was talking about Roblox and the founders discussion on Conversations with Tyler. We were interrupted by the waiter to take an order. Afterwards, we resumed and I said "where was I?", my friend said: "you were telling us why Roblox is bad." and I said: "I am a poor communicator, there isn't a bad and good, it's that there are trade-offs..." This gave everyone an opportunity to keep their respect and dignity without feeling like there was a judgment.
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Why did I spend so much time posting this to HackerNews when I should be working? Ego!! No one cares what you have to say, pricees, go back to work. Okay, I will!
We bought a Tincan after a company parent-erg conversation led to a coworker discussing her experience with the product.
Is it the game changer we thought it would be? No. We thought my daughter would want to call her friends as much as she wants us to call their friends' parents to have them come over. We thought my son would use it as much as he texts on his gizmo.
Having said this, they are getting experience, albeit infrequent, with saying "Hello.... I love you. Goodbye."
And, yeah, when it rings, there is a mad-dash to pick it up. There is something uniquely pre cell phone ("reminds me of the 80s") about the joy and wonder of "Who could be calling me (at this hour)?"
I remember when I re-met, online, a kid from my high school that I had picked on and bullied. Years later, we were grown up, matured, but I nevertheless felt bad for the way I treated him.
Why did I treat him this way? Well, I can't answer that exactly. However, I do know that my first impressions of him were force-fed to me by my peers. I never even got to know the kid I bullied. I just did it to feel part of the crowd, among other reasons that I work through with therapy.
Now, I take the different approach. My wife can have enemies. My friends can have enemies. But I stay out of gossip (which gossipers hate) and off social media. I can listen to my wife vent, I don't have the luxury of hating people or cutting people out of my life for trivial reasons.
I thought this article was meant to be a sarcastic take on the emotional toxicity pervading most of society today. It reads like the diary of a codependent sociopath, which makes for entertaining television, but a miserable life.
I had to go cold turkey and did about 4 keto fails. I had to stop saying “I will do keto to drop 20 pounds” (only to eat it all back in a month) and had to start saying “I am not a man who can eat sugar in any form safely.” I have been keto for 2+ years. Dropped 40 pounds, lost the violent hunger pangs, done with the sugar crashes and 3pm mind fog, no more mood swings.
My cholesterol spiked at 6 months and then returned to normal at my one year check up.
I miss eating for fun. A dozen donuts, here, three bowls of ice cream, there. And then hating myself for the rest of the day. But being in the best mental, physical, and spiritual shape of my life at age 44 is not a bad trade off.
As someone who has acted in a similar way, I would strike this up to mental health issues.
He feels he has the power in the relationship and gets his jollies off playing the big shot and trying to tear you to pieces. If this is a foreign concept to you then you are probably emotionally stable and not consumed by self obsession and fear.
Again, I have been this way in the passed, but have hopefully worked it out with professional help and happy pills :).
Normal people don’t act like this. They need help. But until they get help it’s best to avoid feeding the monster.
I just started using it again. I haven’t scene WS. I only saw conspiracy theories after the Trump assassination attempt, and it cleared up fairly quickly.
My perception is that people claim it’s polluted with white supremacy, but haven’t actually seen it unless they go looking for it specifically.
My memory is poor, but if I remember anything, it was the apprehension of the establishment over students using Wikipedia as a reference. How can we trust the source when "anybody" can make edits?
I am certainly not saying Wikipedia is scripture; however, those fears -- like so many tech fears before and after -- have turned out to be baseless.
Now if you'll excuse me, I must go and dust off my Encarta CD-ROM. I want to hear what an Elephant sounded like in 1995.
I remember reading that a journalist dig into some gossip about a business found there to be credible evidence of malfeasance, sold the stock short, published the article, and was convicted of insider trading. I cannot find any of the details, but I recall reading this somewheres. Insider trading is whatever the govt said it is, which is why Martha Stewart went to jail, and walk street bankers just pay fines.
I tried writing one of these about 10 years ago and failed miserably.
It was a generalized banquet hall/dinner/wedding seating chart.
The one that I was looking to write involved the following specs:
- friends and +1s sit together
- guests could sign up as a "group" (Tom's group) and sit together
- cluster people from the same area, or not even close to the same area
- some guests need to be prioritized as close to the front of the room/stage/guest(s)-of-honor
These were very difficult specs to satisfy and not getting it right was not an option since folks were paying $50 a plate with ~600 guests. The solution has always been to do it by hand.
I can still remember plugging my USB Robotics 14.4k modem in for the first time. We could transfer 1 megabyte in 5 1/2 minutes!!
Thanks for the memories.
Here's a shout out to all those who read 2600 magazine and tried to hack their local PBXs so that they could call some TDT support board, internationally.
I cut my podcast subscriptions down to the bone. Every night I go for a 3 mile walk and listen to a podcast. This year I want to go for walks and listen to my brain. Just the thought scares me.
Perhaps try nicheless.blog, I write there regularly. Given a 300 word limit, I can write one or two thoughts. The word limit necessitates merciless editing, if i care to have a coherent message to say to the reader.
I write about, literally, anything, at first. Writing is a muscle rarely used by anyone. It is a superpower that could be mastered, or at least harnessed, by everyone.
Currently I write about boring ole everyday subjects. Putting in the work. However, I am getting ready to try flash fiction, then perhaps a short story.
But also please regulate and support US dollar backed stablecoins. Folks in various other countries shouldn’t suffer from their own governments lack of fiscal restraint and sophistication. If the US dollar is going to remain the reserve currency, make it accessible for everyone around the world.
And then there was GoFundMe and GiveSendGo. I am not arguing the politics here. I am responding to the critique that crypto is a solution in search of a problem.
I want to donate to a cause that Justin Trudeau finds "unacceptable."
I want to send money to Ukraine.
I think this week we saw problems with tradfi in the developed and developing world.
And of course in the good ole US of A, I hear stories of civil forfeiture every other month.
Last year I started to handwrite notes, in cursive when possible, after 25 years of typing notes. My memory is quite poor. Handwriting notes has improved memory/recall/remembering by multiple orders of magnitude. At least it feels this way.
I am currently learning Spanish.
- Use Babbel to bootstrap conversational Spanish [learning enough to express myself, but also those quick wins that keep it fun]
- I handwrite the conjugations to learn verb tenses and moods [diving into the specific details]
- I use anki (spaced rep) for learning verbs and nouns [expanding knowledge]
- And I talk to native speakers, who have been more than happy to chat. [feedback loop]
I am not the brightest bulb in the shed and doing this with deliberate practice has gotten me pretty far in 6 weeks.
What I do now:
Explicitly state what should be obvious: "there is rarely a free lunch. everything has trade-offs." This also _always_ neutralizes the conversation, because it's no longer about winner-take-all existential threat to my ego, it's about preferences across a continuum.
For example:
I was at dinner with friends, I was talking about Roblox and the founders discussion on Conversations with Tyler. We were interrupted by the waiter to take an order. Afterwards, we resumed and I said "where was I?", my friend said: "you were telling us why Roblox is bad." and I said: "I am a poor communicator, there isn't a bad and good, it's that there are trade-offs..." This gave everyone an opportunity to keep their respect and dignity without feeling like there was a judgment.
---
Why did I spend so much time posting this to HackerNews when I should be working? Ego!! No one cares what you have to say, pricees, go back to work. Okay, I will!