jbrains
@jbrains@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on How Long is Too Long for a Reply? 2 weeks ago:
For answering a question, no limit on elapsed time, as long as you answer can actually be helpful.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 3 weeks ago:
Idiots began to demand perpetual growth and other idiots began trying to make it happen. And then it became institutionalized. And then the idiots forgot they were idiots.
- Comment on Why does information want to be free 3 weeks ago:
It doesn’t.
Humans want information to be free. Hoarding information is like hoarding any other resources. It causes power imbalances. Free information means that power is more evenly distributed.
- Comment on On Jeopardy, does getting the Who/What/Where/When/Why part of the response necessary? 4 weeks ago:
Some contestants phrase every question with “What is…?” Matt Amodio is well known for doing this. He won many times.
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 4 weeks ago:
It made sense to scare people into being reasonable. That was the Old Testament.
Once they acted less stupidly, it became safer to let people be as they are. That was the New Testament.
- Comment on I'm burnt out, already changed jobs, what else can I do to go back to my normal self? 4 weeks ago:
Burnout has lasting effects. The only effective antidote is rest until rest actually leads to recovery once again. I have struggled with actually resting, as opposed to merely pausing, but feeling anxious about the next batch of commitments to try to live up to.
The quality of your rest is likely to determine what happens next. Rest the best and deepest you can.
Peace.
- Comment on do you use non violent communication at the workplace? 4 weeks ago:
Yes. I focus on making direct requests and on trying to understand the unmet needs of others. A large part of what I do is train people to believe that they can say “no” to me without arbitrary repercussions.
- Comment on Well then 5 weeks ago:
So… Just like general-purpose software development? I hope you get to work without LLMs.
- Comment on do you apologize, even if it's not your fault just to make the other person feel validated? 1 month ago:
I teach programmers to say “Oops” when they make a mistake, rather than apologize. It’s epidemic.
- Comment on How to relax and most importantly stop thinking about the things i could be doing? 1 month ago:
You’ve already had several good suggestions here.
I learned that when rest no longer leads to recovery, that is burnout and maybe even depression. Pay attention to this feeling and take it seriously. Good luck.
If you’re thinking about what you could be doing, you might have some unhelpful conditioning related to “being productive” and other such myths of how to live “correctly”. You might be able to think your way out of that way of being and you might need to talk to someone to do this, such as a therapist.
If you’re worried about forgetting something that you need to do later or about some deadline sneaking up on you, then writing things down and setting reminders could help. I did a lot of this and it trained me to literally forget things that I didn’t yet need to start working on without risking missing deadlines. I found it very freeing. Something like that might help you.
I hope you find some peace from something in these replies.
- Comment on There are definitely people learning a second language being accused of AI slop. 2 months ago:
It’s much more likely that we sound like children than we sound like an LLM.
- Comment on Finally a washing machine that understands me 2 months ago:
Äntligen! Ett tvättmaskin som förstår mig!
- Comment on Second Page of Posts Failing to Load? 2 months ago:
This happens to me for All, but not for Subscribed nor Local. I’ve had it for a few days.
This might be related to a missing index on a database table, which makes some queries very very slow. I’m only guessing based on some light web searching and reading.
I hope it’s a relatively easy fix. Good luck!
- Comment on How did you decide what you generally wanted to do with your life? 2 months ago:
You don’t have to commit to any one thing in this life. I’m doing very little at age 51 that I was doing at age 27.
- Comment on When will we have reached enough productivity? 2 months ago:
- Comment on Why do females got to be so hard to talk or flirt with? 2 months ago:
If you have social anxiety, then why are you blaming women for being difficult to talk to or flirt with?
- Comment on The word literally makes me so irrationally angry 3 months ago:
Thank you for the example. Indeed, the context did not make that clear.
That makes me wonder what he thought he was saying. I infer something like “very few”. Or he genuinely though he had no bullets left and was wrong. I’d say that second case seems highly unlikely, but it wouldn’t totally shock me.
I wonder whether the word is the issue or the speaker’s intent: if the speaker insists in exaggerating, then no word they use is going to convey that they aren’t exaggerating. I wouldn’t think them likely to use any word to convey that they aren’t exaggerating, because they are. I think of it like a person bent on sarcasm: you simply need to detect it somehow, then filter every word accordingly.
That wouldn’t make the word “literally” literally ruined, but might instead merely indicate that we can’t rely on it as a safeword against exaggeration. 🤷
- Comment on The word literally makes me so irrationally angry 3 months ago:
I don’t remember the last time someone used the word “literally” and I couldn’t tell whether they meant it in the classic sense or in the modern sense, either as an intensifier or as filler. If you do, then I’d genuinely like to learn about that, because I don’t think I could imagine such a scenario. I might lack imagination or I might not be around people who use the word often enough to judge.
I genuinely believe you overstate the matter, especially in claiming that the word had been robbed of its previous meaning. I still use the word exclusively with its classic meaning and I never see confused faces when I do. 🤷
- Comment on The word literally makes me so irrationally angry 3 months ago:
You answered your own, like, question.
Really, it’s fine. Context makes it clear when we literally mean “literally” literally.
- Comment on Most Canadians now see US as a ‘threat,’ study reveals 3 months ago:
If by “now”, you mean at least the past 20 years, then yes.
- Comment on Who discovered/"invented" fire? 3 months ago:
Les Oulhamr fuyaient dans la nuit épouvantable. Fous de souffrance et de fatigue, tout leur semblait vain devant la calamité suprême: le Feu était mort.
- Comment on What are the differences between 1) probabillities, 2) possibillities, and 3) plausabillities? 3 months ago:
Plausible is more like conceivable.
It’s possible that when I slam my hand on the table, it will go through the table, but it’s not plausible. We can’t imagine it actually happening, even though we know it can.
- Comment on Hell yeah bröther 3 months ago:
You don’t mess with the Zohran.
- Comment on Is there something like a spreadsheet for hierarchical data structures? 3 months ago:
Visidata, maybe.
- Comment on Is there a medieval equivalent of the youtube channel "Primative Technology" 3 months ago:
Watching the fire in the hearth, no?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
The whole notion of “deserve” here is nothing more than a silly story we tell ourselves because other people teach us to believe it. It’s real, but you can change it. So maybe try changing it.
Instead of “I deserve a boyfriend” or “I don’t deserve a boyfriend”, try thinking “This is just a dumb story. It doesn’t mean anything. I either have a boyfriend or I don’t. That’s it.” Maybe it changes something in you. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it takes time and many repetitions. It doesn’t cost much to try.
Peace.
- Comment on "Can i ask you for a favor?" Is it rude to say no? 4 months ago:
“Sorry, I can’t help you.” Why? Because sometimes I hand out random favors, but not today to you.
- Comment on “Production” to describe multiplication? 4 months ago:
“summation” is also related to summary. All these words are related to reducing a collection of things to a single thing. A sum reduces a collection of numbers to its total. A summary reduces a collection of thoughts to its essence. A summation is effectively a synonym for a summary.
The word multiplication describes the operation applied to each pair of numbers. The word production would refer to the act of multiplying an arbitrary collection of numbers. Just as it would be for addition and summation.
It would fit the pattern.
- Comment on Why is it ok to replace -ed at the end of a word with -t in some cases? For example, why are "vexed" and "vext" both acceptable, but "thrilled" and "thrilt" aren't? 4 months ago:
Scrabble is not a language game, but instead a spatial and arithmetic game using arbitrary strings of letters. Don’t look to it as a reflexion of the state of English as she is spoke.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 5 months ago:
Thanks for that. Indeed, that makes me less confident in their suitability to teach those subjects, but I worry about a sensational conclusion about their general literacy.