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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I was simply pleased by your comment, to see how much you care about helping folks and moving the community forward. Seems like quite a lot of effort to me, far more than I’d be able (willing?) to contribute, and I’m just forever grateful for folks you like you and wanted to say something about it :)

    I appreciate the invite. I’m not at a point currently where I can put sincere effort toward much that’s non-essential, but if that changes, Rust is on my short list of targets for ways to spend some spare effort and time.




  • Do you feel like elaborating any? I’d love to find more uses. So far I’ve mostly found it useful in areas where I’m very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I’ve found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it’s really poorly spent time.

    I’ve also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.

    So both of those are essentially “interactive text summarization” use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don’t work with often. If I’m having a brain fart and just can’t quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use…etc. That one’s a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.

    With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that’s just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.




  • Just want to back you up here and say the deeper ethos sometimes DOES matter. People need to stop acting like a piece of generally good advice applies to every situation ever. The “stop gatekeeping” pendulum has swung a bit too far (although the principle is great and, incidentally, punk as fuck!).

    When did we decide everything has to be for everyone, and everyone has a right to participate in everything, just by virtue of existing? What would these folks say to someone who walks around in - e.g., Sikh cultural accoutrement - but has zero interest (and even a snobbish disdain) for the underlying religion? “Good for them, we shouldn’t gatekeep”? Fuck outta here.

    On the one hand, all culture and art is syncretic, full stop. I’m not saying punk rock is off limits in any way, that’d be absurd. But at this point it’s got what, like 40 years of maintaining a broadly consistent ethos or spirit? That’s remarkable, it’s valuable, and it’s only been possible because of gatekeeping - passionate community members putting forth effort to maintain the community identity. In a time when every damn thing of cultural significance is being hollowed out and commoditized for profit, we should all celebrate punk rock staying punk.



  • That’s the way these things have always gone and probably always will. Retarded, imbecile, idiot, these were all effectively clinical terms (or whatever best approximated clinical practice in their eras) - they didn’t hold an insulting intention initially. People co-opted the terms to make fun of each other, as we do, and so professionals had to shift the clinical vocabulary so they weren’t using commonly hurled insults when discussing patients. And that means new words people can use to make fun of each other, yay! Which of course they did, necessitating another rotation. Pretty hilarious if you ask me.

    The most recent example in my own life - my wife is in her mid 30s, and is pregnant - some medical professionals call this a “geriatric pregnancy”! But because some folks are getting offended by that term, they’re starting to use “advanced maternal age pregnancy”. Bit of a mouthful, I think they’ll get to keep that one.

    Anyway. Carlin had a great bit on this phenomena, he’s the one who pointed it out to me.



  • I think it depends a lot on the people using the words. People who don’t believe that the systematized slavery as practiced in the US produced long-lasting generational effects, for example, might say that treating people equally moving forward is best. Under that belief system, everyone starts on ~even footing and gets the same opportunities, so actually it’s less fair to make special cases for folks!

    In my view those folks are starting from a deeply flawed premise (and usually one they’ve arrived at in order to justify the worldview they already hold), so their conclusions are worthless. But I think they’d meet the criteria of advocating for equality and against equity, and sincerely mean it. It’s not hypothetical either, I’ve met people like this - depressingly many, in fact.


  • I wonder about that too. For context, I’ve done it, and I wouldn’t do it again without a harness and clipping in. It’s just such a trivially easy thing to do to protect yourself and the cables are not at all adequate for safety.

    For me, I didn’t use one because I didn’t realize I’d want it. I knew a ton of people do it daily, knew there wasn’t a lot of discussion or use of harnesses, and I assumed I’d agree with everyone else. And I think for a lot of others there’s that element, plus not even really knowing how easy it is to use one. You certainly are stuck with your decision once you finally make it to the cables, lol.


  • Not excusing the decision-making that led to this - but I’ve noticed myself that the scarcity of permits for some of these legendary hikes absolutely impacts decision-making. If this has been on your list for years, and you really don’t know when you’ll get another shot, you’ll be more willing to take risks you normally wouldn’t.

    The permits need to be limited of course, I’m not suggesting otherwise. The only real solution here is internal. One good idea for situations where you may have to make a decision while emotional is to establish the go/no-go criteria before the emotions hit.

    So for example, if pursuing hikes that have killed the unwary time and again, set some rules for when and why you ditch before you ever get the permit. Of course, then you have to stick with that pre-made decision for it to work.

    I think another factor about some of these is how many regular (as in, not-outdoor-athlete) people do them every day. It gives an illusion of safety. I’ve done this hike - I’m a former rock climber, very comfortable with heights and exposure, and the cables felt recklessly unsafe to me. I really can’t believe more people don’t fall, and I’d recommend everyone use a harness and clip themselves to the cables.

    Honestly between those two factors, the way our brains respond to scarcity / FOMO, and the illusion of safety caused by so much traffic…I think there are many people who believe they’d make a better call who would’ve actually done the same when it came down to it.


  • Ah, fair, and nope I’m US based but I basically have what I’ve concluded must be an abnormal desire for accuracy and specificity with language. I just prefer and appreciate nuanced, specific meanings. But I’m also well aware that vocabulary and grammatical rules are only ever just guidelines - language is a living thing defined by the people that use it, by the way that they all choose to use it - it’s all essentially just this massive consensus with a rich and detailed topology, and I love that part too. So I’m not even very consistent when it comes down to it, lol.


  • Asocial and antisocial are really quite different, though we (societally) confuse the two words - even a quick Google gives pretty mixed answers. If you aren’t playing games for the express purpose of ruining the fun of others, you sound more asocial than antisocial to me. Just throwing that out there in case it happens to be useful.