Mostly afraid of people realizing I’m an academic. Em-dashes are a dead giveaway.

Next we ask how many women and other non-guys are on here.

middle aged cis guy here. Thinking of opening a WhatsApp account to see if it will give me cleavage.

An account on a personal website or maybe a kayaking forum from around 2000: a sea kayaker described paddling with friends off the coast of Nanaimo, BC (I think). He wanted to paddle a bit more when the friends headed for shore. When he decided to join them, huge swells had started to come from the north, making it dangerous/impossible to ferry (paddle crosswise to the current) without getting broached and dumped. So he surfed down the swells, trying to angle toward shore as much as felt safe. He described riding a single swell for a long time, maybe multiple hours, before the sea calmed down enough for him to get to shore, now many miles south of where he started. I remember his description of combined terror and thrill: he could get flipped and–in the big sea–maybe never get rolled back up, just hanging onto his boat hoping for rescue, but here he was, surfing down the face of what seemed like an eternal wave, constantly at the edge of his ability to keep a line.

I’ve looked for that thing over a dozen times, spent maybe 20-30 hours searching over the past decade. No luck, yet.

This is a guy from the 18th century speaking his thoughts about his time, which was quite violent. There is no reason to believe he was a prophet seeing 250 years into the future of the nation he helped create, or even that he was some kind of ultra-insightful historian who understood all the cycles of the world better than all the historians before or since his time.

He was just a guy in a time. A smart one, but just a guy.

It’s this super unknown band. Very underground. Nobody seems to know who they are. They’re called Apostrophe.

As a former Mormon I find this mildly interesting, but I don’t have much hope that large numbers of LDS people will begin to protest against the genocide. The pro-Israel thing is deeply embedded… as in, I’m pretty sure there are an awful lot of LDS people who will see the sacrifice of a million or two Palestinians, even if totally innocent, as a reasonable price to pay for God’s Chosen People getting the Land Of The Covenant to usher in the Second Coming.

Even deeper than that: Mormons are mostly herd animals. Dissent has been trained out of them (unless the dissent is authorized by the First Presidency).

This is awesome because I don’t want or need any of those things. If this is all that’s missing, I think I’m ready for a Linux phone when my android dies.

My partner tells me these things and I love her for it. It’s both information (I usually care about what happened with the cats) and like a dolphin pinging other dolphins to let them know where and how they are.

Language is an important part of how most humans bond. The amount and content of the language varies from person to person, as do their preferences for various aspects of communication. There are very few humans who can feel close to another person with no communication (and language is our most easily-identifiable and possibly our most important method of communication. Notably, even groups of humans previously thought to communicate very little–like nonverbal autistic people, for instance–communicate a significant amount, even when it is nonverbal. But most humans communicate verbally in addition to other ways.

I’m saying it’s normal and a happy thing that people tell each other about their day.

Not having true vectorization and having to regularly code that into Python helps even the odds.

This has got to be the best, most legitimately funny programmer/computer joke I’ve seen in years.

And that’s how it’s been understood for decades. The article creates a silly and false premise.

Yes, that’s always been more or less the case. However, the brain’s uptake/use of neurotransmitters like Dopamine has been understood for decades to have at least some specificity to it. We always knew we were shooting flies with shotguns, though.

Dopamine doesn’t flood the brain as once believed – it fires in exact, ultra-fast bursts that target specific neurons.

Thank you. Almost every word of the sentence above is very much not what college freshmen have been taught for 30+ years. Dopamine was never thought to “flood the brain.” For a few decades it’s been understood to have highly targeted action, restricted by various factors not least of which is the fact that dopamine is only produced in/near certain synapses.

Straw men are sometimes the most annoying men.

Rational hedonism rocks.

If you have a worldview that includes gods, spirits, fairies, the universe as an entity, etc., that worldview often also provides you with the “meaning” bit. It can be stifling, reassuring, motivating, or depressing, depending. That was me for a few decades. Without that set of beliefs there is no built-in meaning afaik. You can study the stars or atoms or human behavior or plants your whole life and those things will not reveal a purpose or meaning for you, the universe, or humanity.

In the absence (for me) of any built-in meaning or purpose, we make our own meanings. If your meaning is “nothing matters so fuck it,” that is the meaning you are choosing or accepting as some kind of default. Like many other people I choose meanings around happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number, as Spock (and probably some lesser figure) said. In this mechanistic universe we somehow came to be, and we can think and feel and understand and learn. That is almost unimaginably amazing to me. We are people, not just idk viruses grinding away. I choose a set of meanings that value people and their happiness. Life is miraculous and apparently rare. In that special group we, humans, are the most phenomenal thing we know of in the universe. I choose to value us.

The usual: in college, desperate for work in a saturated college-city market I worked for Vector Marketing selling Cutco knives–one of the more humilating periods of my life–and interviewed for several other “jobs” that turned out to be MLM sales (e.g., I think a knockoff perfume company called “observe l’essence”?). I also tried to sell cars. Holy shit the people I worked with were horrible humans (except 1.5 of them).

In a slightly less horrible vein I spent a summer (late 90s) in a call center for BellSouth.net, which mostly consisted of telling people to type their passwords in very carefully or reboot their computer. When someone found out I spoke Spanish I was given all Spanish, Portuguese, and even Italian customers, and released from all quotas and average call time metrics. This was good, because trying to work out what a Brazilian customer was saying on the phone was hard enough, but Italian (and maybe one time Romanian)? Took hours.

Oh, the scammy part of that was minor: we were in a faceless warehouse on the outkirts of Columbus, Ohio, but we were instructed to always keep websites open for Atlanta, GA and to talk about the weather, sports, etc. and pretend we were in Atlanta.

The oddest part of that job was that our floor of the warehouse/call center was shared with a brand new and kind of weird company that had just started running TV ads: priceline.com. We had breaks with priceline employees on a regular basis.

This reminds me of Foucault’s Pendulum :)

Yes, critical thinking is hard.