Regarding dating apps, anyone participating should look up the old OKCupid blog posts. The guys who launched OKCupid were data nerds and they published some scathing conclusions. Oddly enough, those posts were taken down right after Match.com bought them.
I've read that Japanese companies focus on making great products and diversifying in order to expand. This is why Yamaha, for example, makes pianos and motorcycles. I believe that American companies hyper-focus on particular markets and try to squeeze every penny that they can out of them. Combined with the short-sightedness of quarterly targets and a lack of competition through things like regulatory capture, there's less incentive to create great products.
The article seems to boil down to, "I found a way to do the part I like." Obviously, the really unpleasant work on a product is usually down the line. Bugs, technical debt, keeping documentation relevant, and integrating new features.
This site used to talk all the time about Minimum Viable Products. The focus of startups was to get the MVP out the door so that you could see if there's even a market for it before you invest in further development, scaling, etc. I'm surprised that I haven't seen more posts here specifically about using AI to get an MVP out the door, with the awareness that there will be a lot of human labor down the line.
During the pandemic, I experimented with vaping marijuana to see if I could improve my sleep quality. It worked to a degree, but after a few weeks of nightly use, I began to experience what I think is depersonalization.
I would be walking with friends and talking about our day, while simultaneously thinking, "this isn't actually me doing this, this is just a surface-level interaction being carried out almost by automation." Between that and the realization that I "hallucinate", i.e. misremember things, overestimate my understanding of things, and ruminate on past interactions or hypothetical ones, my feelings have changed regarding what intelligence and consciousness really mean.
I don't think people acknowledge how much of a "shell" we build up around ourselves, and how much time we spend in sort of a conditioned, low-consciousness state.
Humans don't have this understanding, it seems. That their own "intelligence" isn't magic, isn't infallible, and is flawed in many of the same ways LLMs are.
I wish more people could feel this. Having used psychedelics a few times it’s illuminating to finally see the inside of your brain from a different perspective. I often wonder what would happen to the world if everyone had this experience. How many modern humans live their entire lives in the shallow mental states of survival, acceptance, or consumption? How would humanity’s course change if every adult got the gut punch of humility from seeing a slightly more objective reality?
One of the notable effects of psychedelics is that you come to strongly believe that everyone should try them and that it will be enlightening for them.
I listened to the audiobook version of Dominic O'Brien's Quantum Memory Power years ago. He explains this system, along with several others, like memory palaces. The mnemonics he uses for numbering are:
Combining it with the journey method helps remember longer sequences. The funny thing is that you might remember the number two by imagining a giant swan in the next room. When you don't need to remember it anymore, you imagine yourself throwing a grenade into the room and blowing up the swan. It really works!
Darren Brown's Tricks of the Mind is generally about his life history in becoming a mentalist, but it has a lot of fun tidbits about methods to get over traumatic memories, amp yourself up for things you don't want you to, defuse arguments/fights, and it was the first place I ever heard of memory palaces.
The only reason there would be madness, filth and ugliness in a rural area is if you left it there, because you are the only one living on your property.
My childhood friend's grandfather owned a silage plant. Ever smelled silage?
The local pig farm has created the worst smell I've ever directly experienced, and it's been a problem since the 90s.
These are just a few examples of filth and ugliness. As for madness, meth use and inattentive, drunk, or road-raging pickup truck drives with provide you that.
I see that you have the full experience. Has a person really lived until they have experienced the smell of a pig barn a mile away being cleaned out? Maybe "lived" is the wrong word but damn will it give you new nasal experiences that are beyond description. Around me, it was mostly the turkey barns, but I drove by enough pig barns that I know it's equally horrifying.
There's too much "trad life" larping on Instagram these days, and one of the many many parts of the experience that viewers miss is smell.
My experience from childhood in a quite rural area (500m from a large nature preservation area) is the same.
There was noise from constant tractors running around (for both cereal agriculture and cattle farming), even more noise from the nearby gigantic steel building company. People constantly driving around for any reason with stinky noisy vehicles (often poorly maintained). You would get bad smells from the cattle farmer muckspreading or the porc farmer cleaning out. Sometimes you would actually need to stay inside because the nearby cereal farmer thought it was a good idea to spray pesticide with a helicopter.
And that's before even talking about the "nature" part, like a swan chasing you because for some reason he thought you were a threat when you were just passing by, a random confused board wondering if he should charge you or just go about his life, gigantic carnivore fish that will bite you if you are not careful (silurid fish, they caught one over 2m in the river next to my house). You can add the random stray dog (or just common farmer dog) that may not be that friendly and agressive bulls that may catch you by surprise if you unknowingly walked on their territory (to take a shortcut or whatever).
I have learned the hard way that nature is a bitch and rather nasty most of the time. We built society/civilisation because otherwise we wouldn't fare very well alone or in small groups.
And the parts of nature we exploit for civilisation are not better than cities, in fact they are often much nastier (you get the nature default, plus the crap humans put on top).
I think people who have some sort of fetish for nature are low IQ or weird excitement with unnecessary risks. My experience living with/around the people there taught me that indeed, most of them are quite dumb and that's probably the reason they are here.
You seem to be confusing living in the country with living "right in the middle of animal farming and agriculture farms".
There are plenty of small developments (e.g. 100-150 houses with 2-3 acre plots with some basic amenities like road clearing) that are far away from anything you describe.
On the subject of dental health: Bill Burr, the comedian, worked as a dental assistant when he was younger. He gave a piece of advice on his podcast that I wish I had heard when I was young: if a dentist tells you that you have a cavity, get a second opinion.
Once that outer layer of enamel is breached, it will never be as resilient again.
I've heard things like you only need 15 minutes of sunshine per day to get your recommended dose of Vitamin D
The figure I read years ago was that it takes 15 minutes in short sleeves to get the necessary light exposure at the 45th parallel in winter. I'm right at the 45th parallel and I don't go out in short sleeves in the winter, so I imagine it's significantly worse for you!
Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss
I'll make the counter argument that -- although I value those things and try to provide them to friends in need -- all of those can be addressed by hiring someone.
On the other hand, I've recently received fantastic emotional support from a friend who moved away a few years ago. We've seen each other in person only a handful of times since then, but of all my friends, she happened to be the one with the experience and attitude to help me.
Incidentally, I'll add that I'm the type of person to provide those types of support to others, but the vast majority of my friends are not. That doesn't make them bad friends, it just means that I have a service disposition while they don't. I think there's a vast range of qualities that people seek and experience from friends and you're going to have a hard time objectively rating them on any sort of scale.
Yeah and you can rent a truck every time you need to haul something, but it's nice when your friend lets you borrow his - and his manpower/time. And yeah, you can hire an emergency remediation company, or chef, or psychologist for your friends, but that seems... impersonal to me?
I'm not trying to say there's no value to Discord friends, but I do think it's substantially less valuable to the human condition than real, in-person friends.
I mean, to be blunt, it sounds to me like you value people for what services they can provide to you rather than what friendship they provide.
Again, friendship takes many forms and there are countless ways to express it. You're judging others for valuing these expressions differently than you do.
This is how I can tell you don’t get it. It’s not about the value of your friends doing those things for you which you can hire someone for, it’s the value YOU get out of doing those things for your friends.
An online ad offering everything in the house for free left one landlord with quite a shock: By the time she realized what was going on, the house had been stripped of its light fixtures, hot water heater — even the kitchen sink.
But big crowds showed up early, while the family was out, breaking into the house and taking practically everything inside, in part because the way that the craigslist ad was written gave them the idea that everything on the property was up for grabs.
I've read that Japanese companies focus on making great products and diversifying in order to expand. This is why Yamaha, for example, makes pianos and motorcycles. I believe that American companies hyper-focus on particular markets and try to squeeze every penny that they can out of them. Combined with the short-sightedness of quarterly targets and a lack of competition through things like regulatory capture, there's less incentive to create great products.