ryan

Calorie counting through MyFitnessPal. I am unable to accurately gauge how many calories I’m consuming just by eyeballing it, and this is especially difficult given my TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is about 1350 calories. (I’m short.) The only way I’ve been able to manage my weight is by turning it into concrete understandable numbers.

I have a 3,312 day streak of calorie counting now. It’s the one habit I’ve managed to keep up, and while my weight has gone up and down I’ve kept track of it all. At my starting point, I weighed 150lb (obese by BMI), and I’m currently down to 118 (high end of normal by BMI).

How long until someone discovers an arbitrary code execution exploit in the simulation?

if camping’s so great, why did man invent House? 😏

(I’ve never actually been camping. I think I would like to one day though, both for the general experience and the ability to actually see stars, which I think would be neat.)

Y’all kids and your speedrun strats. Some of us have poor reaction time and need to perform safety setups.

I’ve never understood why people have such a hard time with the trolley problem. Obviously, if you pre-emptively move that lone guy over to the rail with the five, you can hit all six at once to maximize your score. Just requires a bit of setup.

Though the network engineer cries out, the parents do not come back to take care of the hatchling. The newborn must climb down the cell tower on its own and immediately begin searching for food, shelter, and a job in the telecommunications industry. The rapid fledging cycle of the network engineer means that only a handful survive into employment.

I always thought this was my ADHD talking, but from some googling… It could be this as well, or instead of. I’m definitely very monotropic and I also recognize the symptoms of Pathological Demand Avoidance in myself.

Unfortunately, at work I manage three different tracks which each have their own roadmaps and deadlines, so constantly shifting attention is required. It’s taken a decade of practice to get where I am – forcing my body and my brain past perceived obstacles and discomfort. It’s possible to train your brain out of certain desire paths with enough effort, but it’s not easy, and I wouldn’t say I’m cured to any measure. I’m just better at managing my symptoms and getting things done than I used to be.

I hate to say “it’s a bootstrap thing” but frankly there’s no magic cure, only increasingly difficult iterative steps that you achieve through a ton of practice. I do hope my neurodivergent compatriots here have been able to find jobs that work with their unique skills and brain structures, rather than against as I have found myself.

🥸 well you see, you own a digital license to watch the movie so long as we have it available, have you read our terms of agreement–

Agreed that this is scummy marketing, though. The only real way to own media (legally) anymore is through physical copies, and even then maybe there’s some provision that makes a DVD illegal due to license shenanigans… but no cop’s gonna bust down your door for owning an illegal DVD of Aquaman.

Self-reply: looks like Clozemaster Pro now has a ChatGPT-enabled “Explain” feature which is extremely helpful and breaks down the sentences. You can do this on your own with ChatGPT of course, copying sentences in and asking (I have done this), but it’s nice to have the option embedded in.

Which language are you trying to learn? There are different answers depending on that.

As someone learning Hindi, I’ve found that Duolingo is wholly insufficient in grammar and vocabulary (the entire course is far too short) and did not concentrate on listening comprehension. I’ve started using a combination of the following:

• Clozemaster for vocabulary in context of (sometimes pretty wild) sentences. (I’ve got a lifetime subscription to Clozemaster, it goes on sale during holidays.) Clozemaster has grouped “common words” and a combination of reading/listening skill and multiple choice / vocab word transcription / entire sentence transcription. It feels very overwhelming at first as you’re just thrown in but keep at it - start with reading and multiple choice and once you know the words and sentences in your grouped section start typing them out via listening.
• A combination of textbooks and websites to explain certain grammatical concepts.
• A listening-based podcast, example Innovative Language, for listening comprehension. (This also goes on sale regularly.)

It’s amazing how something so innocuous can provoke such a viscerally disgusted reaction in me.

Technology was a mistake. It’s time to return to the wilderness.

The 5 is a little taller than the 2, but it’s clear and easy to read so I’ll give you a 9.5/10, which should be added to your UNO score sheet under the “Draw Evaluation” section.

As I’m sure you know based on the official UNO rulebook, your Draw Evaluation scores will be averaged at the end of the game and then Average Draw Evaluation (or ADE) will be added to your other overall metrics such as ACH (“Average Cards in Hand”) and SAC (“Summed Attack Cards”, generally defined as attack cards you have played on others minus attack cards played on you, but some house rules assign different point values to different attack cards).

The metrics you choose to play with in any given game is of course something to be discussed with all players beforehand, but competitive UNO will of course utilize all standard metrics.

Did you know: the “Card Color Multiplier” metric isn’t a standard metric? It’s basically the Free Parking of UNO - very popular but not officially recognized.

LaTeX resume templates exist if you wanna get extremely fancy with it. Otherwise, any text editing document that allows some basic level of formatting and headers will do the trick. If I get sent an extremely beautiful and well-formatted resume to read, it’s a “good attention to detail” footnote in my mind but ultimately the actual content is much more important.

Since we’re on the subject of resumes though, an open message to anyone who might be reading… Don’t have an LLM help you write your resume. It’s extremely obvious and makes your resume worse because it gets real generic and wordy with it. I’ve seen them, I’ve not been impressed by them, it makes me think this person may not actually be able to write coherently on their own.

And remember, a resume is a personal advertisement for you - make it punchy, and keep to bullet points highlighting impressive things you want a recruiter and hiring manager to know. Include buzzwords as pulled directly from the job posting to get through automated screening. Highlight projects you’ve done and what positive effect they had on the intended audience.

Somewhat unrelated, but I do find it funny that farts aren’t considered acceptable, but sneezes and coughs are. Like, farts have an extra barrier in the form of your clothing (assuming you’re not at a nudist colony or bathhouse) and won’t make other people sick. I guess it’s just because they’re stinky.

I vote to normalize farting with an “excuse me”, and saying “bless you” to people when they fart.

While I get what you’re saying and I think sometimes emojis can absolutely be overused or used in place of textual clarification, I feel they also serve as an effective substitute for a lack of non-verbal communication. Generally speaking, “what people say” is only half the story, and “how they say it” (the nuances of facial/bodily expressions, tone of voice, etc) is the other half.

When writing narratives, we get away from this by means of, well, narration. “… he said, cheerfully”; “… he replied, with just a twinge of annoyance to his voice”; “she said, while averting her eyes”.

In first person communications like social media, we don’t really have an effective way to communicate that sort of nuance. We do have action asterisks shudders in horror, shorthand expressions to represent actions like LOL, and emoji 🤷‍♂️ as potential alternatives, as well as some community-driven linguistic nuance like Reddit’s usage of “/s” to indicate sarcasm.

We could also go all old-timey letter writing and say things like “while I find myself hesitant to reply to you in fear that you will consider it an attack, I do find myself with some concerns in regards to your comment and will elaborate below. I hope that you will not take these concerns as dismissive of your opinion in any way, as I simply mean to clarify some doubts and seek your own opinion on my thoughts as presented above.” (This might be an example of “overly eloquent” and there is probably a happy medium.)

I find the ever-evolving linguistics of internet communication to be really fascinating, if you can’t tell!

Reddit does work differently and they would have to implement the ActivityPub protocol in order to federate, which would be a lot of effort for them.

The bigger thing is, ActivityPub is an API protocol. So for example, by knowing your username and instance I could call a particular API endpoint on your instance and get, just as one example, all your “outbox” messages - everything you have posted, the tags, actors you have sent it to (people or communities), etc. The reason for the large recent Reddit exodus is that they shut down their API because they do not want people to be able to easily pull all their data. So they would absolutely never implement ActivityPub, in my opinion. They want to remain walled off.

Is it actually a Mandela Effect if you’ve just forgotten what a guy’s name is? I always thought it was more about mass confabulations.

A fascinating take on it. I’m still wary about Threads interoperating with the rest of the Fediverse, and how that may change the culture as well as the system over time (Meta would have the power and money to throw around regarding changes to ActivityPub implementation), but I also see it similar to email. And I’ve spoken about this before to the point I sound like a broken record …

But people understand the basics of email. They understand they can sign up for a Gmail account and send an email to anyone else. Maybe Threads will be our Gmail here, and introduce people into the idea of a wider open social media concept in a more familiar way to them, and they can branch out as needed or just choose to stay on Threads.

In any case, any given instance can choose to block Threads if they so choose.

I feel like the Fediverse hasn’t yet reached the Eternal September moment, and I’m happy for that. A smaller footprint means we get to have our own culture.

On the other hand, even though it means losing this culture, I would like to see greater general adoption of the fediverse and decentralized social media in general. Sure, there will likely be some big-name domains serving fediverse instances, the same way email is primarily served by Gmail et al, but anyone should be able to spin up their own instance and interact as well. I don’t believe Internet communication should be locked behind various walled gardens, and people should re-acclimatize themselves to a version of the Internet where anyone can host and contribute.

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