monktastic1
Joined 2,246 karma
https://www.lifeismiraculous.org
monktastic.prasad@gmail.com
- monktastic1 parentI think you're misreading the comment you're responding to. Its parent comment said that life can be a blessing or a curse depending on how you choose to look. They responded by asking whether the word "curse" is appropriate if it can be changed based only on perspective.
- Indelible, probably -- though I admit that both trying to eat and trying to delete that passage failed. (I jest -- "impossible to forget," of course.)
- Your account seems relatively new, so you might be unfamiliar with the rule to be charitable here. If you'd like to be snarky and lower the bar for discourse, Reddit is a much better place to do that (though ideally it would be kept out of public spaces altogether).
- Huh, I would guess there's a different mechanism at work. In my experience, movies playing on TV during the holidays tend not to get people's deep, persistent, undivided attention.
- My assumption here is that FAANG employees are not fundamentally different from the rest of the populace along that particular dimension (desire to inflate lifestyle). I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it. Of course many do not have that choice.
And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.
- Perhaps "retire" is the wrong word. One can still work (whether for pay or not) and improve the lives of the people around them without staying on the consumption treadmill. Very few actually do. Again, this isn't meant as a judgement — it's just highlighting that we each have a role to play in slowing down this insane freight train.
- I wouldn't be so quick to divide the world so neatly into victims and perpetrators. Every FAANG engineer I know, for example, could easily retire by mid-40s by keeping consumption in check. Instead, nearly every single one chose instead to "improve their lifestyles." Not blaming them, either, because it's cultural programming -- but until we all learn to slow down a bit and reflect, the madness isn't going to stop.
- Right, each county is coextensive with one borough: Kings (Brooklyn), Queens, Bronx, New York (Manhattan), and Richmond (Staten Island).
- I see. Thanks for the added context; that's much clearer.
- If this were true, then why even bother to make atomic clocks? Why would an article about the "most accurate clock" be interesting to smart people like HN readers if there's no objective measure of accuracy (or if it didn't matter)? The correct answer is in a sibling comment to yours: we base it on other things we know (or believe, anyway) to be constant.
- It being "nice" does not negate the fact that there's no way to pay for _only_ ad removal.
- BUD/S /s.
- > Yeah, I don’t get how you distinguish between a correct visual proof and a visual proof that looks right but doesn’t actually prove what it’s trying to prove.
This problem exists not only for visual proofs, but for standard written ones too.
- > a government department
Looks like the propaganda worked. DOGE is not a "government department" and there is very little visibility into how it's run.
- Like o3, which hallucinates more (as I learned from this piece)? https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/18/openais-new-reasoning-ai-m...
- A little annoying that they use zero instead of o, but yeah.
- Ha, I was in charge of data quality for Google Maps going on 15 years ago. Addresses were hard then, and I'm sure they're hard now. Alas, Google didn't want to invest in keeping this data high quality — a fact to which I actually owe my first promotion at the company (since taking over Maps data quality was a job that nobody else particularly wanted — nor did they want to move to Seattle, where Google wanted the team — but it still gave a lot of room for impact).
Sometimes I dream of going back, but the culture has changed too much (and not for the better, I hear).
- I think it depends on the self-awareness of the user. It's easy to slip into the mode of conflating an LLM with a conscious being, but with enough metacognition one can keep them separate. Then, in the same way that walking on concrete doesn't make me more willing to walk on a living creature, neither does my way of speaking to an LLM bleed into human interactions.
That said, I often still enjoy practicing kindness with LLMs, especially when I get frustrated with them.
- Huh, could have fooled me. My first experience of Austin was long stretches of ugly billboards (I think mostly on Burnet and N Lamar), and despite living here for years that first impression never left. Now that I think about it, without some kind of ban of course there would be way more billboards where I now live.
- Lol, don't know how my mind filled in those letters, but that was indeed my Portland experience so I'll leave it.
- Oh, thank God. I only visited Portland once, and despite being vastly different from Austin in climate and flora, the sea of billboards made it feel eerily familiar (and not in a good way). I expected it to feel more like Seattle, but that one thing made a world of difference.
- Yes, that's what it's saying.
- I'm confused by your comment. First, powers of two are 2^n not n^2. But what do you mean you missed the title and wondered what was going on? How could you expect to understand the contents without reading the title? Surely I'm missing something.
- Indeed, meditation is the best approach I've found as well. It can be seen clearly -- not as an idea, but a direct realization -- precisely why the mind's attempts to pin "this" down are futile. I don't have a better word for that experience than "miraculous."
- > I consider life and reality incredibly, painfully boring.
Interesting. The main benefit I've gotten from psychedelics (mostly mushrooms) is that all of life / reality is impossibly miraculous -- even, paradoxically, when it seems dreadfully boring. And also that I've somehow always known this, even when it feels like I've forgotten. It's always right there, just waiting (begging) to be noticed. It's the ultimate cosmic joke.
- So by your definition, anyone who isn't an orphan is a beneficiary of generational wealth? In fact, even orphans are, because they inherited genes, weren't left to die, etc.? I suppose that is a definition, but it doesn't seem like a useful one, especially in the context of this conversation. Or maybe I've just misunderstood you?
- It's hard to understand what you're saying here. Being better off than your parents implies that you are a beneficiary of generational wealth? Connect the dots for us.
- I also had one night of fever and incredible chills, followed by two days of no symptoms. No Paxlovid. (But then I did get bad cold-like symptoms for a week, and what seems to be long Covid...)
- But only in high-risk patients, it should be noted.
- Surprisingly not: https://youtu.be/0WlmScgbdws?si=k28GyfN5wXmSsf6i. Some things just work better in stand-up format.