Thanks for sharing this. I’ve still got quite a few chapters to go, but I wanted to comment this thought before I forget it: it’s so incredibly striking how powerful the small acts of kindness are. I’ve cried more at the little gestures of kindness than at all the cruelty.

You should almost certainly go to a tailor. It makes a world of difference if “professional” is your goal. It can be tricky to find a good one, but when you do, it’s incredible. It can be surprisingly cheap too (although building a wardrobe that has high quality piece that are worth tailoring can be quite expensive. This is best done gradually)

I think that this is especially true if you’re on the larger side, because a greater amount of body mass means that qualitative differences in where we store that mass will be more apparent.

Something I liked about going to a tailor is I could show them clothes that I liked versus ones I didn’t (or explain what had been bothering me about certain clothes). They were able to suggest alternatives.

Good recommendation. I tend to be most comfortable rolling up sleeves to my forearm, but I wonder whether this might also help.

Do you have a favourite pair of cufflinks?

Despite not owning one, I really like the Steam Deck because I suspect it has made my transition to Linux far smoother (for a while, I dual booted because I was fearful that gaming on Linux would be difficult.)

I don’t know too much about this area, but I do know that this kind of task involves a bunch of complex processing in the brain. The more “Mechanical” aspects of vision could be described as visual acuity (sharpness of vision). However, gauging whether something is wonky would be a visual discrimination task, which involves more work by the brain. It’s an area in which one’s skill can be improved through learning, and some occupations have a lower discrimination threshold (I e. They can detect smaller differences).

Thanks for sharing this. I’d heard of this before, but being reminded of it bolstered my spirits a little.

Damn, that’s pretty dangerous, right?

I don’t think we’re awful as a whole. To some extent, I need to believe this, in order to avoid breaking down and killing myself. However, I do think it counts for something that there are so many people who want humans to be better, and are doing what they can. I think that resigning oneself to humans being awful will lead to a world with more awfulness.

That was wonderful, thank you for sharing. When it’s done well, I really enjoy this style of prose.

This sounds like a good interview approach. In the sense that the interview is also an opportunity for the interviewee to evaluate their prospective employer, this would be a green flag for me.

“I’m looking for a role where I can make good use of the skills I bring to the table” (because implicitly, the 299 places that didn’t email back don’t have a role where you can fit in and be useful (even if that’s only true in the sense that they didn’t hire you so therefore you can’t contribute there))

Apparently the average radius of the Earth at its equator is 6,378,000m. This means that in a day, someone sitting on a couch at the equator would travel (2 * \pi * 6378,000)m, which equals 40053840m. There are around 86,400 seconds in a day, so the equatorial couch sitter travels at 464m/s (rounded to 3s.f). That’s 1040mph.

I think the average walking speed is 3pmh. Amusingly, the mph figure I calculated above is 1037 if rounded to 4s.f. rather than 3, so the speed difference between the walker and a couch sitter is literally a rounding error.

The conclusion here is something that everyone here already knew before I wrote this comment: it’s hard to make any sense of individual human health progress if we try to think of it on a planetary scale.

I know someone whose daughter is a particularly passionate teenager who enjoys going to protests. My friend long ago acknowledged the limits of forbidding his daughter from going to these things, and instead tends to go with her to protests. This openness has also had the beneficial side effect of his daughter trusting him more when he says “No, this one is too dangerous. I don’t feel comfortable with you going, even with me”. Despite trying to stay away from anything too dicey, I know there have been instances where things have escalated quicker than expected and they’ve been caught in the fray.

These guys aren’t American, so it isn’t directly relevant here, but my point is that someone being there with their child isn’t too outlandish.

My cat would sometimes act as if she was anxious for our wellbeing while we were eating (this started after she surreptitiously tasted some food that she clearly did not enjoy the taste of.)

“if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use.”

I think you make some compelling points overall, but fair use has always been more complex than this. The intent is taken into account when evaluating whether something is fair use, but so is the actual impact — “fair use” is a designation applied to the overall situation, not to any singular factors (so a stated purpose can’t be fair use)

I share your view. I hold back my desire for schadenfreude by realising that the greatest punishment would be if they grew to understand the harms of their actions and views. Empathy can hurt like a bitch

That is a cello. It’s just that the microscopic cello shop has a poor selection so it had to opt for a too small cello

This is super tangential, but I knew someone who had a miscarriage which caused a mental health crisis. Or perhaps more accurately, the crisis was caused by severe isolation and implicit stigma around her grief. She told me that after the crisis, she was surrounded by people who had experienced miscarriages too. She was baffled because this sure would have been helpful before the mental breakdown.

People are expected to be so strong that ultimately it just weakens us at the community and the individual level

I really appreciate this comment because I didn’t know about EXIF metadata for AI-generated images and I think you raise interesting points about long term management of our informational ecosystems

Yeah, this is where I’m at. I love it when people are weird as hell, even if it’s not inkeeping with my own aesthetic preferences