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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • “Luckily there was a loophole in those rules that I (omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient) made.”

    If that doesn’t scream, “made up by the clerics trying to avoid contradicting each other and bringing the whole house of lying cards down as they went”, just keep sending money to your church. Because if a god needs anything, it’s obviously worldly riches and unquestioning loyalty. We need these churches to impress everyone with the power of our god, but he’s sleepy after making it all and throwing tantrums bigger than we can imagine because people were acting like the way he made them capable of acting, like cartoon villains in some cases, like a whole city whose first reaction to seeing an angel was “Let’s all rape it!” So that’s why you need to send your money without any questions!


  • I’m convinced the superstition is a misunderstanding over time of things that were, on their own, bad luck. Salt used to be expensive, so spilling some was bad luck because you would have rather kept it all for use instead of wasting it.

    Mirrors would have also been expensive, especially when they needed to be transported before the time of smooth suspensions. The whole 7 years thing could be from it taking around 7 years for one particular broken mirror to be replaced.

    Or the ones that invite accidents, like walking under a ladder (which usually implies someone is working at the top and might drop something, so odds of death are a bit higher under ladders). Or opening an umbrella indoors, where things are more crowded and you might injure someone or break something.

    Though the black cat one is probably just racism.

    Anyways, I bet that’s where they started and then humans being kinda (or very, depending on the circumstances) stupid and liking jumping on bandwagons they don’t always understand to fit in, left us with some people thinking those things cause ghosts to haunt you or whatever dumb shit superstitious people think happens.

    Though I do think it is a bit wasteful to just dump salt out on the ground.




  • One area that it really helps for me is executive function. There’s a lot of things that I’m capable of doing, even quickly, but I’ve got this mental block that just makes me not want to do it. But if I can just write out some instructions and have a system do the rest, it’s much easier to get going.

    I’ll still think through the problem and approach using AI to help coding at a “I need a function that will take this data in this format and do x, y, z to it and return that data in that format” level rather than something like a higher level description of my final goal.

    Is it faster than what I could do if I focused on programming and get on a good roll? I dunno, it might still be. Is it faster than me actually trying to program something in the reality that I often exist in? Fuck yeah.

    And even debugging and testing go way smoother. For one thing, I don’t have to deal with stupid typo bugs anymore. And for the bugs that still make it in, AI has been great at taking an idea of how to examine the data that would be a pain to implement and just doing it for me, especially if it involves some obscure API or language features since I don’t have to spend time finding its existence and then learning it (if it’s a one off, I won’t likely retain anything other than the existence part, which I can still get from looking at the AI generated code).

    So it’s pretty great for programmers who know their shit but ADHD gets in the way of using it in a timely manner. It’s better than an intern, which is good for me but sucks for those who need to learn. There’s a good chance AI’s semi-competence if hand held by an expert is going to lead to a big lack of talent as those experts age out. Though with how quickly it’s improving, it might not even need the hand holding by then. I’m not sure which possibility is scarier.


  • Yeah, the showing off is what I was getting at. The first experiment seemed more like an experiment and an accident but the demonstrations with the screwdriver seemed more like someone doing pull-ups over a fatal drop just to show how badass they are and accidentally landing on other people on the bottom when he slipped.

    Thanks for the in depth response though, this gives more context to this than I’ve had before.

    And just guessing on the other two attitudes before looking anything up (haha maybe wanting to challenge my intuition like this instead of just looking it up is one), one is probably related to laziness (eg assuming something is fine and doesn’t need to be checked when going through the pre flight checklist). And maybe the other is being too trusting or not assertive enough (eg colleague says something is OK, you don’t fully believe them but don’t challenge them on it). Am I close?









  • It is that simple but it isn’t easy. It’s like finding enlightenment from Buddhist parables. They don’t all click the same for everyone. Once they click, it can seem obvious, but before that, they can seem meaningless, trite, or misleading.

    From my pov, the image is accurate but not the clearest. It can only get you part of the way and only if it resonates with you. It doesn’t surprise me that it generates cynicism similar to the “gee thanks, I’m cured” responses to mental health advice.


  • My interpretation of the message in the meme isn’t so much a “present vs future thinking” as it is a “you don’t need to search for happiness because your brain determines your mood, not outside factors.” I’m not saying you should just ignore your issues (which would make things more difficult over time), but that you can be happy despite them. Happiness isn’t a goal, it’s a state of mind.

    As for the millionaire example, that they wouldn’t be living paycheck to paycheck is the whole point. It was intended to frame happiness/unhappiness in a different context that was easy to understand (he lost money he had spent a lot of time getting) but was still left in a position that most would be happy to find themselves in, but instead he’s probably miserable about it.


  • My line of thought for this is that stressing about whether you’ll have enough money to cover rent won’t make it any easier to cover rent. Happiness is more about mindset than circumstances. It is easier said than done, for sure, but if one needed to have 0 problems to be happy, there wouldn’t be many happy people.

    Consider a millionaire who checks the markets one day only to realize their portfolio has dropped by 30% wiping out all of their gains for the past two years and leaving them with only 3 million. They’d probably not be very happy with that, despite still being in a position that many would trade everything to be in.





  • It’s generally not as heavy because the layer is just reinterpreting API calls while the user code still runs natively. On a browser running JavaScript, it’s using an interpreter for every line of code. Depending on the specifics, it could be doing string processing for each operation, though it probably only does the string processing once and converts the code into something it can work with faster.

    Like if you want to add two variables, a compiled program would do it in about 4 cpu instructions, assuming it needed to be loaded from memory and saved back to memory. Or maybe 7 if everything had a layer of indirection (eg pointers).

    A scripting language needs to parse the statement (which alone will take on the order of dozens of cpu instructions, if not hundreds), then look up the variables in a map, which can be fast but not as fast as a memory load or two, then do the add, and store the result with another map lookup. Not to mention all of the type stuff being handled at run time, like figuring out what the variables are and what an add of those types even means, plus any necessary conversions. I understand that JavaScript can be compiled and that TypeScript is a thing, but the compiled code still needs to reproduce all of the same behaviour the scripting language does, so generic functions can still be more complex to handle calling and return conventions and making sure they work on all possible types that can be provided. And if they are using eval statements (or whatever it is to process dynamically generated code), then it’s back to string processing.

    Plus the UI itself is all html and css, and the JavaScript interacts with it as such, limiting optimizations that would convert it into another format for faster processing. The GPU doesn’t render HTML and CSS directly; it all needs to be processed for each update.

    For D3D to Vulkan, the GPU handles the repetitive work while any data that needs to be converted only needs to happen once per pass through the API (eg at load time).

    That browser render stuff can all be done pretty quickly on today’s hardware, so it’s generally usable, but native stuff is still orders of magnitude faster and the way proton works is much closer to native than a browser.