It has nothing to do with stupidity. Stop painting people as idiots because they exist in one of the most information hostile environments in human history.
This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.
I have a slight fascination with sweeteners. About five years ago I imported a kilo of "Neotame" sweetener from a chem factory in Shanghai. It was claimed to be 10,000-12,000 times sweeter than sugar. It's a white powder and came in a metal can with a crimped lid and typically plain chemical labeling. Supposedly it is FDA-approved and a distant derivative of aspartame.
US customs held it for two weeks before sending it on to Colorado with no explanation. When received, the box was covered in "inspected" tape and they had put the canister in a clear plastic bag. The crimped lid looked like a rottweiler chewed it open and white powder was all over the inside of the bag. I unwisely opened this in my kitchen with no respirator as advised by the MSDS which I read after the fact (I am not a smart man).
Despite careful handling of the bag, it is so fine in composition that a small cloud of powder erupted in front of me and a hazy layer of the stuff settled over the kitchen. Eyes burning and some mild choking from inhaling the cloud, I instantly marveled at how unbelievably sweet the air tasted, and it was delicious. For several hours I could still taste it on my lips. The poor customs inspector will have had a lasting memory of that container I'm pretty sure.
Even after a thorough wipe-down, to this day I encounter items in my kitchen with visually imperceptible amounts of residue. After touching it and getting even microscopic quantities of the stuff on a utensil or cup, bowl, plate, whatever, it adds an intense element of sweetness to the food being prepared, sometimes to our delight. I still have more than 900g even after giving away multiple baggies to friends and family (with proper safety precautions).
We have been hooked on it since that first encounter. I keep a 100mL bottle of solution in the fridge which is used to fill smaller dropper bottles. I've prepared that 100mL bottle three times over five years, and that works out to about 12g of personal (somewhat heavy) usage for two people in that time. Probably nowhere near the LD50.
I carry a tiny 30mL dropper bottle of the solution for sweetening the nasty office coffee and anything else as appropriate. Four drops to a normal cup of coffee. We sweeten home-carbonated beverages, oatmeal, baked goods (it is heat stable), use it in marinades, and countless other applications.
I don't know if it's safe. The actual quantity used is so incredibly tiny that it seems irrelevant. I'd sweeten my coffee with polonium-210 if it could be done in Neotame-like quantities. Between this, a salt shaker loaded with MSG and a Darwin fish on my car, I'm doomed anyway.
This syndrome is called "eternal child" (puer aeternus) in psychology.
You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.
So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).
Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".
When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.
You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".
Many things lead to this. A society that gets fooled by clowns. Dehumanization of people from other groups. A system where the checks and balances are more of a convention rather than enforced and one part of the government has too much power to change the other ones. The two party system in general. A long ongoing process to erode democracy and trust in many institutions caused by forces from within and outside. The internet allowing everyone to find and organize with peers for even the most insane ideas, looking legitimate to outsiders because of group sizes we normally hardly see in person. And probably a dozen other reasons each being a tiny problem but resulting in a catastrophe together.
My personal workflow with memorizing with Anki using LLMs is as follows: Read textbook material first. It's important that you understand what you are learning.You cannot just breakdown information into atoms and expect to understand how it works together (for example: you can learn that there are monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats,
saturated fats and trans fats. But without reading beforehand about them from a textbook or other source, you will not understand how they differ (in chemical structure, biological function etc). After I understand the material, I feed LLM the documents (textbooks etc) and give it the following prompt:
>I want to generate flashcards from the provided textbook document using the attached PDF. Each flashcard should contain a question and a corresponding answer formatted as pairs in plaintext code block. The structure should be: "Question","Answer"
>Extract key concepts, definitions, and explanations from the textbook. If in the text imperial unit system is used, convert it to metric. For mathematical symbols and equations, format them using inline MathJax syntax because I will be importing the copied text to Anki. Ensure questions are clear and concise while answers provide a direct yet comprehensive response.
After the text is generated, I check out the accuracy (in 95% of cases the cards are accurate) and I import them into my decks. The rest is good old school Anki memorizing.
- Have an AI chat model come up with an answer to a problem.
- Have it write a report discussing the details of the problem and why it's answer is correct, directed at a person or AI model who has no knowledge of the initial problem or technical field.
- Have a second AI model with no knowledge of the problem grade the report, and write it's own report either (a) asking for clarification / more information about the problem that the original model didn't provide or (b) pointing out an inconsistency in the argument posed by the original model. Give this report back to the original model and ask it to write it's own report back with either the necessary information or changes.
- Repeat until either the second AI model is convinced by the first AI model's explanation or the first AI model has implemented all the changes requested by the second AI model.
It's super clunky but has given pretty good results in the cases where I tried it lol
Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you have time and money to add stuff to it.
Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month.
Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better later this year.
Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie streaming services with Emby.
Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list.
I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my remaining subscriptions once I am done.
I knew those protests were going to fail as soon as I heard on the news that police were throwing down their weapons and joining the protesters.
The way to defeat a dictator is not by painting yourself as a defenseless victim. (That is only useful as the first step to gain support.) The way is to show him you have a greater potential for violence than him and if he doesn't flee, he will be punished (usually killed, sometimes tortured first).
They had huge numbers and if at least some police were on their side they were on the right track to escalating the threat of violence. At some point the dictator would have either broken or the violence would have materialized. But that requires the good people to keep their weapons and use them.
We own a modest flat in Spain. I’ve moved a year’s worth of living expenses to EUR. I can have my family out of the country in 72 hours. Total cost was under $300k USD.
The best time to have a plan is before you need it. If you wait until you need it, you’re too late.
If you're not just making slow progress but literally unable to make a single bit of progress, my goto strategy is similar to what writers call a vomit draft.
For writing it conventionally means means writing words without stopping to plan or edit, no corrections allowed, the rule is you just have to keep typing, no matter what. It's about something being better than nothing, creating momentum, and also avoids being too critical because you literally can not stop and make edits to old work.
Remember the only rule is keep typing. Even if it means typing random nonsense for awhile.
I do all that but I sometimes make it even more extreme. I make it the goal to produce truly terrible version of the the thing I'm trying to make. Full of cliches and tropes in writing. Amateur coding mistakes if it's a technical project. Not just bad but legit so awful that I would truly embarrassed if somebody else saw it. Like literally, what would so shoddy I'd be afraid to have someone look at my screen right now. I mean literally ask yourself what work is so bad you would be humiliated if your advisor saw it. Make that your goal.
But it still works. After you have something even it's an abomination, it gets your brain thinking about it and working on it, and it's so much easier to make the obvious improvements, and then more, and eventually you are just doing things normally.
This article is very out of date and irrelevant now. The Chi-fi market has changed drastically in the last 4 years. You can get very neutral sounding IEMs from China now, V-shaped, U-shaped, sparkly, heavy bass, etc.
One of the best-sounding, lowest distortion I've tried is also the cheapest, the Truthear Zero 2, available on Amazon for $25.
I can't recommend it enough, hire a professional organizer to setup your house work area etc and then have them teach you the hacks to make it stick and be efficient. It does cost a little bit of money of course, but it is SO worth it.
My wife isn't necessarily a professional organizer but has done it for people and a few companies. She is one of those super organized people (and creative about it) and she kicked my ass about my bad habits. She still calls me the stacker from time to time, because I used to keep stacking shit on my desk for months and then go through it to organize it. What sucked is like half the pile would be trash by that point and I missed dates for things etc. She thought it was ironic because a number of my clients have given me compliments and sent me emails that say I am so organized and my code and project deliverables are so clean and well thought out. They just never saw my desk before.
She changed the workflow for me and has basically made me WAY better. When I get stressed out I will tend to stack still sometimes, which tells me it isn't yet 100% ingrained but I am working on it. But I know it has mostly worked because now the irony is that I get stressed if I see stacks or things aren't in their place, so its good.
The biggest habit to change is don't say I will get to it, just do it now. That was (can still be at times) one of my biggest issues.
On the household things, my wife uses the daily & weekly routine. About an hour everyday spread out throughout the day is dedicated to doing little tasks so they don't stack up. Like wiping down the sinks in the bathroom after we are done in the morning, it takes 3-4 minutes but then they don't get dirty and require extra time to clean. She also planned out our cleaning schedule. So like my 16 year old does his laundry on Wednesdays, she does my daughters laundry on Thursdays, and ours on Friday. Sheets and towels are left for Saturday. She does that with everything so that no day does any one of us spend more than about an hour throughout the day doing any of the tasks. At first I thought it would suck but after a while it has turned into the greatest stress relief and efficient plan for us.
I think all US folks reading this should volunteer at their county's Registrar of Voters (or equivalent agency for their county). Spend one election working at a polling place, and another election working at the RoV HQ. See what it's like to go through the training, and what things are like on Election Day, and in the days leading up (for places that allow early voting, drop-off, etc.).
Radon sensors might be dedicated and expensive, or they might just count clicks in the gamma spectrum.
If you have a basement | enclosed space in a granite rich area then you'll probably get radon gas pooling in that space unless it's sealed and|or vented.
You're unlikely to have an unspecified gamma source (lump of uranium, limp of potassium, lump of thorium) in your basement so ...
A generic geiger counter (click counter) should give a reading (low) outside your space in the open air, and another reading (higher) inside that space .. that can vary with time (as gas is expressed, pools, vented).
That generic click difference is almost entirely radon .. you'll be taking readings within 20 feet, one inside, anothe outside.
So you can easily get away with a cheap geiger counter to indicate if there's an issue .. if there is, you'll need to either:
* minise time spent inside space, and|or
* vent the space (fan blower, + pipe to outside)
* accept a cancer risk ~ a pack a day smoking if you use space as an office.
Source: a couple of decades geophysical surveying making radiometric maps of entire countries.
The single most cost-effective thing I did was replace the garbage hollow-core interior doors with nice hefty solid-core doors. Hollow-core doors are common for interiors since they're cheap -- but they also act effectively as sound amplifiers since they're just two vibrating planks with a small air gap.
Solid-core doors -- even ones filled with dense fiberboard (vs pure solid wood) are VERY effective at reducing sound. And they're cheap -- you can get a nice basic one for ~$100. If you pad the door frame with $5 in closed-cell weatherstripping and put in a $10 door sweep at the bottom (creating a nice seal around the door), you've eliminated one of the lowest-hanging fruits of sound transmission for very little $.
Next on the list: Green Glue. If you don't mind a bit of messy DIY stuff, you can make your own drywall/Green Glue sandwich for a very reasonable amount of $.
Doors & Walls cover about 80% of sound issues, and it doesn't have to be expensive.
Heat pumps are obviously great in many ways. But fitting one is a big deal - they are quite expensive, they take a lot of work to fit, really require extensive additional insulation, and there are all sorts of caveats to them that mean they aren't a straightforward replacement for a boiler.
So i'm slightly mystified that we basically don't hear anything about fitting drainwater heat recovery [1], in which the lukewarm drain water from your shower is used to pre-warm the incoming cold water. It's extremely simple, pretty cheap, simple to fit, and can recover ~50% of the waste heat, of something which is tens of percent of the energy consumption of a household.
By all means, get a heat pump. But get a heat exchanger on your shower first!
I agree that treating your first-reflection points is a massively important step (and maybe the most important step you can take) when balancing your listening position, so I'd like to offer a brief correction to your second point, so as not to misguide others who are new to this:
Yes, treat your first-reflection points with material that absorbs as much as energy as possible. However, scattering (aka diffusion) should be a waaay lower priority at your first-reflection points. In fact, if you're absorbing with enough mass at these points there shouldn't be much high or mid-range energy left to scatter. And for the low-mid and low freq energy that isn't being completely absorbed you'd need a hilariously-large diffuser to scatter wavelengths of those size. So don't even worry about diffusion paneling of any kind on your front walls. Just absorb, absorb, absorb at your early-reflection points.
I personally use several 5.25" GIK Acoustic panels with another 5" air gap between the back of the panel and the wall. At my listening position I have them placed on the wall to my left, my right, and have several panels hanging above my head with as much of an air-gap between them and the ceiling as I can allow to absorb the ceiling-reflections. There's more nuance to how I determine the exact positioning, but that's the general layout.
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I'd also like to reinforce the idea that for anyone who needs to make critical audio decisions you should absolutely be investing the time, money and effort to get your room treated/tuned to it's full potential. Otherwise it will undermine every decision you make until you do. You simply cannot make good decisions without A) excellent monitoring (speakers) and B) A properly-tuned room. To ignore either of these is to deceive yourself. Consider it your highest priority before you even consider spending money on additional hi-fi audio gear beyond your speakers. If you can't hear your speakers honestly and with minimal interference from the room then there's little point in focusing on the finer details.
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If you really want to hear how your room is affecting your audio then play a low and steady note (say a 60 Hz sine wave) and then walk around your room while it's playing. Listen for how dramatically the volume of this single note will fluctuate as you change position. It will likely vary from overbearingly loud to near-total silence. Now consider that every other note that you can possibly hear - from the lowest sub to the highest buzz) will also be subject to these kinds of boosts and dips in volume. Then you'll have some sort of idea of what you're up against.
Won’t even pretend to have read the article, but I’ll recommend the last book to really make me existentially happy and which helped me out of a bout of depression: The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem. If you liked Gödel, Escher, Bach then I suspect you’ll enjoy it. It’s whimsical but quite deep.
Good speaker placement, a good listening position, and then covering the first reflection points in your room with 4" of absorptive paneling from a company like GIK acoustics. Doing so will cut down on room mode interference in your midrange and your high-end (300 Hz - 20 kHz) while dramatically tightening up both the stereo imaging and the time-domain response (ringing/echo) in your room. This applies to your listening position only.
SPEAKER POSITIONING:
In 9/10 cases I would push your speakers against the front wall firing longways down the longest dimension of your room. You can safely ignore most people warning you about SBIR reflections if the topic arises.
With your speakers against the back wall, space them symmetrically between the walls to the left and right of your listening position, but avoid placing them in positions that fall 1/4 or 1/3 of the width between your side walls.
For Example: If your front wall is 8' wide, your speakers should not be placed 2' from each side wall (1/4 of the room width) and they should not be placed 2' 8" off of each side wall (1/3 of the room width). Place them somewhere in between these nodes to minimize destructive interference from room modes.
LISTENING POSITION:
With your speakers against the front wall, place your listening position (your chair) in between both speakers in the spot that is 38% of the room length off the front wall. So if your room is 100 inches deep from front wall to back wall your chair should be located 38" away from the front wall that has your speakers.
Ideally, your listening position should be dead center between the walls to the left and the right of your listening position.
For Example: If your room is 8' wide your listening position should be located in the center, 4' from the walls to your left and to your right.
COVERING YOUR FIRST REFLECTION POINTS:
Covering your first reflection points means hanging at least a 4' x 4' cloud on your ceiling and hanging an equivalent amount of coverage on both the wall to the left and to the right of your listening position. Specifically these should be placed at your first-reflection points.
When ordering absorptive panels don't bother with features like diffusor panels or any hard reflective surfaces. They're mostly pointless. Just get the simple soft absorptive panels (4" thick) and don't worry about the add-ons and up-sells.
Covering your first reflection points will dramatically improve the performance of your listening position from roughly 600 Hz up to 20 kHz. If you mount the panels off of the wall with an air gap equal to the panel thickness it will extend your midrange coverage by an additional octave. So mounting your 4" thick panel on the wall with a 4" air gap behind it improve it's performance by absorbing as low as 300 Hz (instead of 600 Hz). This is good. There is no additional benefit for mounting with a larger air gap.
Locating your early reflection points for your ceiling and side walls is beyond the scope of this reply, but you can look up other explanations of how to find them in your room.
FINAL NOTES:
This (very rough) guide will only treat the midrange and high-end in your listening position (from 300 Hz - 20 kHz) and only for your listening position. Building a room that can manage low-end cancellations and also sound balanced in every position (not just the main listening position) is not a trivial thing, and cost-prohibitive for 99% of people. So you'll have to accept that these solutions are out of reach unless you want to tear down your room and rebuild it.
The fact is, learning acoustic principles to do this yourself is not something that is practical for 99% of people. So don't drive yourself crazy trying to sort it unless you feel very well-versed in physics AND professional audio.
Unfortunately the acoustics space is full of hacks and cargo-cult acousticians who don't truly understand the physics or the practical needs of listeners. It's a lot of voodoo and a great way to waste money unless your designer really knows what they're doing. Unfortunately most people aren't qualified to understand what they need, which makes it that much more difficult to find clarity in an already tricky problem-space. Our team has almost given up trying to make a dent in the field, but the fact is a lot of clients don't know what they don't know and hire people whose expertise is at best outdated and at worst complete nonsense.
> My key takeaway from this article is that the best place to go see the Milky Way is deep in the Amazon rainforest… where the tree cover is nearly 100% and there isn’t a single road for a hundred miles.
My entire life, but especially in graduate school, I've had horrible sleep. Both falling asleep, and staying asleep.
I did multiple sleep studies, used sleeping medications, took supplements, tried to meditate, etc. and had no luck.
I went and did CBT-I, where they had me change my sleep hygeine (all your standard recommendations of "no TV in the bedroom", etc). But the biggest thing was they had me start off by going to bed at 1 am and waking up at 5am every day for a week or two. I'd be so insanely tired, I would start falling asleep quicker and staying asleep less interrupted (this was recorded on a worksheet). Then they had me go to bed an hour earlier, record it. After a while, we found my optimal schedule (bed at 11am, wake up at 630am), and I stick to it no matter what, every single day.
It's solved my sleep issues, full-stop. I get tired by 11 pm, and wake up at 6:30 am feeling just fine.
FWIW, grad school - with no solid schedule - was disastrous on my sleep. Moving to my 9-5 corporate job has made scheduling my sleep a whole lot better.
Thought processes and mental events are conscious only to the extent they receive illumination from Purusha. In Samkhya, consciousness is compared to light which illuminates the material configurations or 'shapes' assumed by the mind. So intellect, after receiving cognitive structures from the mind and illumination from pure consciousness, creates thought structures that appear to be conscious. Ahamkara, the ego or the phenomenal self, appropriates all mental experiences to itself and thus, personalizes the objective activities of mind and intellect by assuming possession of them. But consciousness is itself independent of the thought structures it illuminates.
Focus is a learned skill for everyone. A common myth among ADHD people is that deep focus and extended concentration come naturally to normal people. Truth is that spending 8 hours per day focused on deep work is not automatically easy for anyone. Everyone has to work on building that skill. ADHD people just need to work a little harder.
Some tips:
1) Structure your environment to enable sustained attention. Be aggressive about turning off push notifications, unsubscribing from e-mail lists, leaving Slack channels that aren't relevant to your work, not accumulating a lot of browser tabs, and sitting somewhere out of reach of distractions.
2) Balance attention with activity breaks. Pomodoro timer apps are great for this. Start with 10 minute work intervals if you have to, but build discipline around respecting the timer. Stretch the work interval to 15 minutes once you've mastered 10. Then push to 20, 25, and 30 as you build up your focus. Treat it like going to the gym to get fit. Don't beat yourself up if you have to reduce your work intervals on tough weeks.
3) Be deliberate about time waster websites. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and HN are okay in moderation, but you have to realize that each time you check these websites impulsively, you're worsening your focus abilities. They can't be your automatic mental escape when focus feels difficult. In the fitness analogy, these are like junk food. Okay as an occasional snack, but they'll take a toll if they make up too much of your screen time. Set aside time before work, at lunch, and after work for checking up on social media. Block them on your work computer.
4) Physical exercise. It's cliche, but it works. It doesn't have to be difficult. Taking a 10 minute walk around the building 2 or 3 times a day does wonders for organizing your thoughts and getting away from screens for a while.
5) Find supportive ADHD resources, avoid reinforcing resources. It's easy to find "woe is me" ADHD communities on Reddit and social media where people vent about their ADHD problems. Venting and empathizing with others feels good, but it reinforces all of the wrong behaviors. You need to focus your energy on resources that help you improve. Good resources include working with a therapist (check your company's insurance, probably cheaper than you think) and spending time around people who have high organizational skills.
6) Be accountable to other people. With ADHD, it's tempting to hide your progress and blend into the background. Avoid that temptation. Send weekly updates to your manager about your progress, without fail. Knowing that you need to show your progress every Friday provides some healthy pressure to focus and perform. Going back to the fitness analogy, consider this like being accountable to a gym partner. Accountability is good for you.
7) Eat healthier. This doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. Buy a bag of baby carrots and snack on that at your desk. Drink water, eliminate soda. Minimize sugars. It feels cliche, but it really does help.
8) Build your identity around being a software developer. Don't accidentally build an identity around being an ADHD person. Don't let your issues define you. The diagnosis is only helpful as a way to help you improve yourself. Don't let it become a crutch or an excuse for underperformance.
This isn't some natural state that's unrecoverable. The people you describe have been given a highly addictive media environment tailor made to engender outrage and drive behavior. It shouldn't be a shock when most people cannot resist it. The first step to changing it is not writing them off or insulting them for being had.