Alright, it's not really a blog post about dating, per se. It's more of a blog post about becoming the kind of person who maxes out their dateability, no matter what their starting physical/mental/spiritual condition.
It's hard to explain what reading this post did to me. There are a few times in my life where I consciously decided to switch life trajectories radically and become someone entirely different. First age 8, when I vowed to become an idiot. After reading this was the second one, age 24, where I vowed to become a sexy idiot. I printed it out at the college library and reread it every day at breakfast - a strategy I highly recommend to my fellow nimrods. And, voila, age 25 when I, the jester, moved countries with no passport, no job lined up, and no plan, to go live with the woman who I would eventually call my wife.
It’s funny how people always try to conceptualize and talk about dateability when attraction is both subconscious and extremely ancient. The stuff we come up with is things that “make sense” yet there are exceptions all the time everywhere.
I have two that I keep coming back to and function as the ying and yang in my mental model.
* Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski. The first half I reread often because it is a short critique of technology/technique and the effect that it has on our life. Though not original, it touches on this feeling that we are enslaved to our tools. It also reminds me that "no, i'm not crazy" this world is totally absurd and the way we live makes no sense. Obviously, if you take this philosophy to its natural extreme you need to go live in the woods and suffer. Which is kind of larping.
* This is Water by David Foster Wallace. I reread this and hand out copies of this book to people all the time. For me it speaks to the part of me that knows that it is important to choose wisely what you focus your thoughts on, because if I don't the automatic monologue in my head will take over. It will start with complaining. It will continue with painting everything black. It will make me misrable and incapable of enjoying the beauty in life.
I am trying to break out of these two book being so influential because I feel like to grow I need to evolve a new understanding and have new ideas to toy with.
How has that worked out for you? To me, having a boss that screams "Close or you're fired!" is having a shitty job. Having an internal voice that screams "Close or you have no value!" is having a shitty life.
I came to similar conclusions a few months after my first job, carefully introspecting why I felt like shit working there, and introspecting that and understanding what I have to offer to society, and what people expect out of me. It has been very useful in dealing with people and advancing my career.
This is a great article, but arguably the world doesn’t have to be this way.
We don’t have to accept this as the status quo. Learning to both realize this that this article is true then reject this as “ok” and acceptable is the next step.
Sure, other people might not care about all these things, but you can make the world less shitty if you care about those things.
How should the world change so that your "thoughts and prayers" make meaningful impact?
They are meaningless things that religious people tell themselves make an impact, when it's the people handing out food that stops starvation not "thoughts and prayers".
Why the hell should I hire you when you want to learn Python but haven't done anything, when I can find people who can show they understand the fundamentals by making a hobby project or went to night school?
Why should the pretty girls talk to you just because you were safer than a bear in the woods?
It's exactly the same conversation that keeps coming up. They didn't destroy 3rd spaces so you don't have any friends. You don't go to those 3rd spaces that exist, or your being too lazy to create the 3rd space.
> Why the hell should I hire you when you want to learn Python but haven't done anything, when I can find people who can show they understand the fundamentals by making a hobby project or went to night school?
Or, paraphrasing a quote whose source I don't remember: "What's important is not what you can do; it's what you can prove."
So even if you're actually a Python expert, it doesn't matter unless you have something to show for it; cue job interviewers ghosting candidates who don't have projects that are public and open source.
I think the challenge here is that we as a society aren't going to reach consensus on this, thereby nullifying the point. As the article mentions, half of the people will take the scene one way, and the other half of people will take it another way.
FWIW, I take it a seemingly opposite way from you, despite not identifying as a "hustler" or "techbro" or even considering myself a "go-getter".
Underneath the societal scaffolds we build on top of it, nature is brutal. It's important to always keep that in mind.
I don’t have to change society to make the world a better place, though.
Just because someone else doesn’t care if Randy is a good dad or Jane is a pleasant person to interact with doesn’t mean that I’m limited from caring. Life doesn’t have to be transactional, we are encouraged to live that way - but there is no law of nature that says you have to not give a shit about people unless they can do something for you, there’s no law of nature that says you cannot appreciate people’s efforts.
Meh, the glengerry glen ross one gets forwarded every couple of years by hustle bros. IMO its total BS, its predicated on what I call the 'don't outrun the bear, outrun the fattest camper' ideology.
I know this will not be appreciated here, but, the problem with hustle mindset is that as labor you only have your time to trade for money. the hope hustle-bros have is that do it enough and they'll make it to 'capital class' and enjoy fruits of other 'labor class'. problem is in process of doing so they introduce additional rat-race and make thing difficult for other labor-ers while capital enjoys fruits of their collective competition for free.
This article made me question if the author was describing my life rather than their own, so I went and got checked for ADHD. 2 years, a diagnosis, and a medication regime later, I'm absolutely fucking slaying it and it was this article that sparked the change.
This was incredibly wonderful and helpful, and it feels like I could have written it word to word. Thank you so much for putting this out there, it found me and got me to book an appointment with a psychiatrist.
Ditto for me! I find meds efficacy kind of wanes once my brain gets used to it, but even just knowing led to a big shift in how well others can support me and make adjustments that make all the difference.
I count Ravikanth as one of my gurus. From working as a professor in a medical school to starting up a small microSaaS, I attribute it all to Ravikanth who condensed everything one needs to know into a few tweets, followed by its expansion on his podcast.
Now, I preach seeking of Specific Knowledge to all my students and the principle of leveraging bots through programming as well as learning marketing no matter which field you belong to.
As someone who FIREd, his assumptions of 5% real returns and 4% SWR may not hold in the future.
He himself also retired with a free and clear home and a free and clear rental home, which meant he didn't have to tap into his capital, not to mention $400k annual blog revenue shortly after.
But generally I enjoyed his articles over the years and a high savings rate combined with investing is always a wise choice.
I never thought about FIRE in those terms. Your comment (unintentionally?) makes FIRE sound like a self-help trend that primarily makes money for self-help gurus.
The theory sounds good but there's a difference between having to sell parts of your portfolio (which is volatile) and never touching the capital because you have blog/YouTube revenue.
A big part of "retirement" is feeling financially secure. I'm sure Pete (MMM) practices what he preaches for the savings rate part of FIRE, but when I quit my job, the lumpiness of my investment returns made me very uneasy.
Having a steady stream of income outside of your investments makes the "safe withdrawal rate" part of the theory kinda moot. (By the way, here's some nuance to Bengen's 4% SWR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7rH7h7ljHg)
Nowadays my FIRE stance has softened to "it's nice to have this pile of capital in case things go wrong" and frugality has always been my nature anyway.
Now, at age 41, for some reason I can't stand his writing, which I find pugnacious and lacking self-reflection. But at the time in my 20s, his classic early posts on MMM hit me just at the right time, and made such a deep impression on me.
Possibly his writing style is highly effective at introducing a new unfamiliar perspective.
I read his posts about the hedonic treadmill and general anti-car-dependence at the time that I was considering a (nicer) replacement for a car that had developed expensive problems.
I ended up selling the car and we've been a one-car household ever since... despite the addition of our kid.
Could you share the specific article you mentioned about the hedonic treadmill and general anti-car dependence? It sounds very insightful, and I’d love to read it. Thanks!
This one is rather harsh, but it made me think even more about my car use (I already lived within walking distance of a subway and a commuter rail station, so was ripe for further changing my habits): https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/04/22/curing-your-clown...
Basically, once you’re accustomed to a certain “luxury,” it can feel like a necessity, even if you were content without it before.
Flipside: once you’re used to doing without something, you may find that you don’t really miss it, even if before you had trouble imagining doing without (in my case, full time car usage - I grew up in suburban Texas)
I've bookmarked a few articles that I usually read one each week. This is updated and am planning to squeeze to the best single digit number of articles that I want to re-read often. So, like the top/best 9 articles that I want to re-read.
I wanted something where my documents (plain-text written in Markdown) are organized in folder and files, without the need for frontmatter, etc. The thinking is to be able to own the content but use any tool that serves the purpose.
I started these notes with Jekyll, then went to Retype, and now with VitePress. Seems to be just working pretty much out of the box. I had to have one plugin that generates the menu structure from the folder. Otherwise, nothing special or interesting.
I haven't written anything specific to a workflow (I think, I should) but these two articles should give an idea of where I'm going;
This is from a million years ago, so is technically a 'letter distributed via usenet', not a blog post. I would be impressed if somebody is able to find a copy of it again.
Like many young developers, I once aspired to be a game developer. But then I read a public letter by somebody at Origin Systems (possibly named Bill Armintrout?) who explained what a grind it is to work in the game industry and how [humorously] maybe he should just get a job working on boring business software instead.
I might have the details wrong; this was probably 30+ years ago! But it did make me aware that doing the thing you love for a day job can kill your love for that thing, which I have also seen happen to other people. So I focused my career on intellectually fulfilling work in a different industry, leaving me free to happily tinker with game development as a hobby in my spare time.
I moved to a foreign country a few years ago and I've still not managed to make any friends. I've never had an issue doing things alone but having to do almost everything I find interesting alone was a little sad at first. It still is, but less so.
As someone who has had to make friends in new places multiple times, key to me making friends in almost every case were:
finding mentors and work/industry contacts online and IRL and then meeting them socially to see where they go and what interesting things there are to do locally
meeting local journalists, writers, authors, and musicians and going to their shows, events, exhibitions, and sharing tips and scoops
riding public transit, skateboarding, bicycling, and walking around a lot, doing street photography of the environs and interesting people, their fashion, and pets, and generally drumming up a conversation with anyone to get them talking about people in their life, about their own life, their work, their hobbies lived reality, and material conditions
going to makerspaces and hackerspaces, libraries, and basically any large public gathering place/space/event that is even remotely interesting to me or anyone I’d like to meet, and making and breaking stuff in public
It’s basically the FORD method and a numbers game to make the odds work out.
F - family
O - occupation
R - recreation
D - dreams
There’s also one I recently learned called HEFE which is also useful.
H - hobbies
E - entertainment
F - food
E - environment
Being lonely is so good. Thank you for reminding me yet again. People laugh when I tell them that I enjoy myself more than being with anyone. But that does not change the truth—I enjoy myself, and I enjoy doing some of the things suggested in the video. I am writing this from a coffee shop where I am alone.
I cannot find it or remember who wrote it, but learning to recognize when things are out to get you (his example was Facebook). Nearly an hour into my first encounter with TikTok, memories of that post made me realize that probably needed to be my last encounter with TikTok.
The more compact one that gives a good mental model for deciding how to engage with something that seems like might be a trap (or obviously is a trap, but you have to engage with it, anyway): https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/
Coming across this article at an earlier more disaffected point in my life would likely have just pushed me towards the MRA side of things and away from what the author wanted.
> And then the dog just ignores it. Because he can. That’s the privilege that comes with having fur, with being a dog in Ohio. He doesn’t have to think about it. He doesn’t have to live daily with the cold. He has no idea what he’s talking about, and he will never, ever be forced to learn. He can keep making the lizard miserable until the day they both die, and he will never suffer for it beyond the mild annoyance of her complaining. And she, meanwhile, gets to try not to freeze to death.
This paragraph in particular is just calling me out directly as a clueless white male. And the next sentence just basically says be better, believe people. I’m not sure who the audience is that this is going to land for that needs to hear it.
Privilege is of course a real thing but, the discourse around it is entirely one sided. There is feminine privilege and black privilege, but if you’re a young man you won’t ever see any discourse regarding privilege framed in that manner even if they’re plainly apparent to you. The author only brings up male lack of sexual attention to demonstrate how oblivious men are to women’s issues.
In my opinion bringing up the concept of privilege does very little to further the significantly more important underlying progressive values of empathy compassion and understanding. Telling men they’re bad and clueless isn’t the way to way to win them over to progressivism.
This isn’t just limited to the concept of privilege but is pervasive through the progressive discourse and is why it appears young men are flocking to red pill and conservatism in droves.
The struggle I have having many white male friends who express their particular struggles that I might even agree with are a problem is that 1) Many of the expressed issues are problems brought about by them that I can't do anything about. Literally. They need to get their own camp to change it 2) where #1 doesn't apply, I find that they're not willing to take part any kind of advocacy work. Even just, you know, speaking plainly that this sucks and I hate it. Why did I have to pull this knowledge of out you. The struggle of other groups is well known even if they are berated for having that struggle. 3) Often times, when #2 doesn't apply they get upset that people don't immediately fix it. And then I get to look like thr asshole who points out that other groups take a decade to accomplish one agenda item. You trying once isn't gonna cut it.
It's not that I'm not sympathetic, but it just feels like my white male friends really disregard the timeline of how these rights other groups fought for came about. That's part of the privilege of the dominant culture used to having their wants tended to in a year or two, not over a generation.
Made me realize that it's ok to be a slow thinker, and there is nothing wrong with me. It has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Whatever genetic lottery gave me I have to play with it
Less about the specifics of the battles being mentioned, but rather:
1. Battles can be real even if they don't involve actual physical fighting. If I, like the author of this post, am a pacifist, it's best if I try to stay disengaged or uninvolved.
2. Many people play a certain role in a battle, and it's helpful to understand what role a person is playing as you interact with them. That is, are they a soldier, a general, or a diplomat?
I think at least some of the battlefronts talked about by this blog post were started by the ultra-wealthy in the US to draw the peasants attention away from Occupy Wall Street. That was the last "big thing" before identity politics took center stage. It pits us all against each other instead of pitting us against the rich.
China and Russia are likely responsible for some of these battlefronts, too.
While this is a plausible idea, I wouldn't underestimate other explanations.
Since about forever, some people became preachers or prophets who attracted crowds and destabilized entire empires. That was true even in the days when most people were poor and illiterate.
Current social networks give a lot of platform to such preachers, and find them an ample audience, because controversy drives attention and attention sells ads.
Quite logically, we get a lot more commotion and political radicalism than before such systems came to be.
I think they predate that by a lot, and I don't think it was anything to do with the ultra wealthy.
IMO people talking about political correctness often miss an important point though: that what's believed to be acceptable is largely derived from an actual philosophy that is changing over time, which develops and evolved as society processes new ideas in the background. That processing happens online and in communities, in books and essays, in art, etc... and then everyone becomes aware of its new conclusions over time.
All of the philosophical work underpinning the 2010s was very much around in the preceding decades in a less crystallized form, but it rose to prominence on the back of various crises and scandals. I can attest, for instance, that the underlying philosophy of social justice predates Occupy, because I first heard it in college in 2009-2010ish, and it wasn't new then. By that point it had a life of its own already, as people people subscribed to it (because it gave them a framework to feel like they were being a moral person).
Aside, I think people overpredict manipulation of culture by organizations and elites because they aren't sufficiently imaginative to see how it could happen organically. Ideas have lives of their own, largely based on the problems they solve for people: how to feel moral in their life, how to put into words their moral intuitions about justice and duty, etc, and (rarely, much less than people think, but definitely sometimes) how to have social power over other people.
Respectfully, I think your take that this "has nothing to do with the ultra wealthy" is exceptionally naive.
We know with absolute certainty that much worse atrocities happen in places like Russia and China. What makes you think that the US is immune to that kind of thing?
We don't have quite the same problems and they aren't so obvious.
But every once in a while, the curtain comes down and you get to see how things really are.
Wide-scale domestic surveillance. The US government chasing so hard after people like Snowden and Assange. Bernie Sanders being completely ignored by the Democratic Party in 2016. Epstein being mysteriously killed.
The US does not openly speak about its corruption, but there is plenty of it anyway.
While we are a democratic country don't forget that democracy is something you fight for every day. And if you look around, when is the last time there was a serious fight put up for democracy?
I'm not saying there aren't, like, various propaganda machines meddling with society. Just that people underestimate the power of dynamical systems to do things without coordinated action. Ideas coordinate on their own with requiring some sort of agent to be "pulling the strings".
> don't forget that democracy is something you fight for every day.
No it's not? Democracy is a steady state that we mostly ignore every day. Over time it tends off course and when it gets too astray we correct it.
Thank you. The best thing I've read this year, easily.
However, halfway the post instead of going all metaphysical and try to create a garden, isn't the logical conclusion that individual gains in the rat race trump any grand plan you might have? Is it about the balance between being the best rat and finding a community to create a garden? If you garden by yourself, isn't that just being a rat with extra steps?
After some more thought, I think the detour that is required before this gets all grand strategy is looking more in depth at the ratting strategy.
All the examples quickly settle on a static state, skipping the inertia of the dynamic state that precedes it. And it is in that dynamic state that the rats manage to get their gains.
There are many steps between "Tim decides not to use the purifier in his fish farm" and "So many people don't use their purifiers so that Tim doesn't have any gains anymore". That takes s long time, and after that it's something else. Because it's not the purifier that sets Tim appart, but his attitude.
I think this is a general trap, where the static state makes something look obvious one way, but the trick is in the dynamics of inertias, and the time it takes to reach the static state.
Don't know if I could pick a superlative example from that blog, but the post about telling someone to put their iron in the car so they can stop worrying about it being left on really stuck with me.
Great blogger, and I've only read a handful of what he's written. Most of it not lifechanging, but entertaining. e.g. silicon valley house party posts.
It's not particularly original, but is a convenient single name to corral existing ideas about intractable lose-lose scenarios:
Prisoner's Dilemma, but at the societal level. Defaulting is the logical move for the one-shot game, but it does not produce overall benefit, and is not best in the repeated game.
Local optimizations, under imperfect knowledge. Small local maxima can halt progress. Eventually Goodhart's Law takes over, incentives break down, then shortcuts, grift and corruption come to dominate. Self-preservation and expansion of elites or bureaucracies are always hidden objectives.
Destructive patterns such as: Bait and Switch strategies, like Enshittification of business; Divide and Conquer applied by those with power to keep power.
"Strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
Ultimately these all boil down to coordination problems. The touted solution is to encourage transparency, rationality and cooperation. But bottom-up never gets successful momentum, people don't agree on objectives; top-down always results in tyranny, abuses of power and fails anyway. Vested interests and bad actors always subvert promising initiatives.
I don't have time to read it right now, but on the topic, does anyone know easy ways to script directing e-mails?
I have used filters in Gmail, but they are annoying to create and maintain. Would prefer to use JavaScript to direct where an e-mail should go to or whether it should grab my attention or not.
Personally I'm against using any automation (aside from spam filtering) to keep your inbox clean. If I see emails I don't want, I delete them on the spot. If I see those emails frequently enough, I unsubscribe from their feed or mark as spa, if that's not possible. Over time, unwanted emails should go down, which will convert your inbox into a to-do list of sorts (if it's there, it needs to be actioned).
My work emails are in Outlook and I automatically sort into folders (and then I use search folders to see everything new).
But one thing which I was surprised helped me enormously was setting up some simple "canned replies" using Quick Actions in Outlook (my simplest is to send a one word reply "Approved"). I think this is because it seems to avoid the need for me to mentally "context switch" so much.
Filtering is still useful even in that system for sorting mail according to its context, so that one can entirely ignore everything from the context until you're ready to work on it.
E.g. if I run a book club or something via email, and all book club mail goes to a label or folder instead of the inbox, I can wait to look at it for when I'm doing book club work, instead of seeing it all the time.
The issue is mainly with my work e-mail, which is gmail. I get so much uncontrolled notifications from so many different places that I despise using e-mail.
I just archived 15,000 emails between 2 accounts about 2 hours ago. I hadn't thought about inbox 0 in years and kind of gave up on the idea, but sometimes it feels pretty good declare email bankruptcy and start over. Maybe if I did that more often I would stop setting up new email addresses with the thought that "this time I'll do better". All that has done is created fragmentation, which makes the problem worse.
I reread this every so often to remind myself as a software engineer that yes, we're all crazy, we're all driving ourselves a bit more crazy all the time, so give myself (and my coworkers) some grace.
Learning about Mappers and Packers was quite helpful for dealing with packers at work. That bit of knowledge made it almost trivial to keep them happy.
I had a lengthy response in my mind, but this attitude leads me to believe you probably won't find much value in it.
I'll just say that sometimes, someone can explain an issue or a concept in a way that really strikes you. Maybe it's a perspective on an important issue that changes how you view it, or maybe it's an idea that opens up an entirely new avenue of thought you hadn't considered.
Sometimes that random stranger can string words together to convey the right information to the right person that positively affects their life.
Sometimes it's a subtle change of perspective, or a model that clarifies your thoughts. At the time it just feels like clever words, but the words stick, and slightly affect the course of your life.
It is difficult to choose a one blog post among all. But I feel there are few type of post which changed my thought process are blogs written by experts in the field. I love reading how they think about something whether its a computer program or science or cooking or hobby they have.
Also more than just a blog I love reading author, if I like something about blog I go deep read their other blogs as well and if I feel the guy is worth following I just start reading their blogs and I do read repetitively.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications - By Martin Kleppmann
This book have all the knowledge one might need to understand distributed systems to a certain level. Many of the topics I refer from this book as and when I want to use those in real life applications. Recent one being 2 phase commits.
Maybe I'm too tired and missed the point, but usually when I read things about living more simply and not keeping up with the Jones, it's presented in a more romantic way than sleeping in the back of a $1,000 car and dog food. Is the point to make the reader feel better about the stress they have, because they don't want the stresses of the alternative?
>>Stoic meditation with reference to being homeless. Written to myself at a particularly low point; like many, I take comfort in considering how things could be worse.
Right at the top of the article... and putting your own shitty life in perspective doesn't hurt and can help to keep your sanity. Eating dog food in a trashy car is still better than drowning in the Mediterranean or in the Gulf or staying put in a war torn country.
It introduced me to the idea that most employees are "economic losers" who are "people who have struck bad bargains economically – giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks." (At least in the early - middle life cycle of a company).
It encapsulates this as "The Gervais Principle":
Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.
(The terminology is quite specific to the article - i.e. not sociopaths in the movie-cliche view).
I won't attempt to summarise the article here. Suffice to say it altered my thinking about future roles. Search HN for many prior discussions here of that post.
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/models-a-summ...
Alright, it's not really a blog post about dating, per se. It's more of a blog post about becoming the kind of person who maxes out their dateability, no matter what their starting physical/mental/spiritual condition.
It's hard to explain what reading this post did to me. There are a few times in my life where I consciously decided to switch life trajectories radically and become someone entirely different. First age 8, when I vowed to become an idiot. After reading this was the second one, age 24, where I vowed to become a sexy idiot. I printed it out at the college library and reread it every day at breakfast - a strategy I highly recommend to my fellow nimrods. And, voila, age 25 when I, the jester, moved countries with no passport, no job lined up, and no plan, to go live with the woman who I would eventually call my wife.
Now I'm her sexy idiot. Progress!
reply