Newtra

Wow, I just scrolled through the front page and it was 100% depressing/anxiety-inducing news.

I don’t think I want this in my life.

Why do I find “match-3” most offensive part of that thought?

Google also is responsible for the SEO industry. They made ads hugely profitable, then started directing traffic to sites that serve more of their ads, regardless of quality.

“zero commercial prospects”? That sounds exactly like the sort of movie I’d pay money for!

Saying goodbye to their life in France, where they were paying around £2,574 (€3,000) in taxes every year,

So these people who were rich enough to own a second home wanted to spend more than 50% of their time in France, but were paying the vast majority of their taxes back to the UK?

No wonder the laws got tightened.

There’s a weird divide between self-determined identity and external classifications. Often, a culture forms around the label and the external label stops being relevant because the term has more social/cultural implications than practical implications. Some people internalize the label as that’s how they wish to steer their future interactions, and others ignore the label and move on with their lives.

You can watch all of Star Trek, and some parts of society will label you a Trekkie if they find out, but it’s up to you whether you choose to identify as a Trekkie, or just go about your life not making a big deal about it.

In two languages I’m learning, German and Chinese, I’ve found it to suffer from “translationese”. It’s grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.

No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you’ll see/hear in day to day life.

As someone with untreated ADHD, I absolutely don’t feel I’m the highest level of control in my brain. I can make all the plans and decisions I want, but I can only gently steer what I ultimately end up doing and paying attention to. My “executive function” wields ultimate power and not only can overrule me, but also prevent me from having the thoughts I want to have.

Another indicator that I’m not the only consciousness in here: anxiety-inducing events like deadlines and exams can give me physiological symptoms even when I’ve forgotten about them. I’ll just be sitting there wondering “why is my stomach upset at me?” and only later realize it’s from stress for an upcoming test I hadn’t paid attention to.

They’ve had days to prepare this response. They didn’t rescind or explain the one thing that people universally hated, which means they’re just stalling and trying to save their reputation without actually changing trajectory.

We’ve seen this corporate bullshit so much in recent years. No more “benefit of the doubt”.

Though my lizard brain demands me to be around other people, most of the things that bring me genuine life satisfaction are just easier to do solo. When I’m at purely social events I also get this sense of dread that I could be making better use of my time.

The voice in my head is making contradictory demands, so I’ve learned to not feel bad for circumventing it. I have my own goals in life, instincts be damned.

I find that listening to people casually talking is usually enough to satisfy the lizard brain, so I listen to a lot of stuff in the background: YouTube video essays, Twitch Just Chatting streamers, etc. When it gets particularly demanding I’ll try engaging with the people, but usually I just let my subconscious listen while I’m focusing on more important stuff.

ooo, I love this. It reminds me of how nice C#'s LINQ is…

“Pipeline style” DB queries have some interesting advantages as well:

• It’s straightforward to write efficient queries for DBs that don’t include a query optimizer stares at Datomic
• You can split the pipeline into server-side and client-side steps when working with less capable DBs stares at most of NoSQL
• It would be much easier to transition from a pipeline API to a non-text-based API so that our ORMs/query builders can directly talk to DBs without the overhead of generating and parsing SQL.

I still use Google for ~95% of my queries because I like real sources, comprehensive documentation, and not having to read a wall of text when a one-line answer would have sufficed.

ChatGPT is a good replacement for Quora/Stack Exchange for explaining general knowledge stuff like other languages’ grammar and simple science, as well as finding authors/books/movies from descriptions when you’ve forgotten their names.

Bard is… kinda dumb. I gave it a few chances, but it was nothing compared to ChatGPT’s free tier.