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> 16. That sleep, that probably evolution first made a low-energy mode so we don’t starve so fast and then layered on some maintenance processes, but the effect is that we live in a cycle and when things aren’t going your way it’s comforting that reality doesn’t stretch out before you indefinitely but instead you can look forward to a reset and a pause that’s somehow neither experienced nor skipped.
This is pretty understated. We live in a strangely beautiful world such that our experience of time is shaped like so due to the interplay of energy on the surface of the earth
I mean you _can_ in theory yeah but practically when I find myself in a cycle (or multiple) where things don’t go my way that that “reset and a pause” can also be easily interrupted, shortened or messed with in some way.
Would be great if the stressors didn’t affect sleep though.
Many days I worry that HN has lost its humanity and then something with a bit of levity and weird shows up and I am relieved.
I experience a similar sensation. I even feel it for my own self. Sometimes I go weeks, months just thinking about AI, productivity, hustling, taxes etc and then suddenly something with a bit of humanity and weird shows up and I am relieved. It's not completely lost (for now).
Opposite reaction, this article reads like it was written by a care bear.
Remember blogs on the old web when the author would plaster his name in a huge font on every page along with his photo, and have an extensive bio about himself and perhaps even his resume?
Well this author has gone to the opposite extreme: There isn't one shred of info that I can find about him. I liked his writings and was curious who he was in real life, but there's nothing. Stands on its own merits like Death Note, Bitcoin, or Truecrypt.
This is a great post. I’m thankful that many of the comments here reminded me why this website’s comments section is not worth reading, ceaseless negativity. Not wasting any more time reading them!
This was the only comment I disliked reading here...
But I think HN’s comment section is the only one worth reading!
50/50 for me. I've had significantly impactful reads here, leading to experiments with new IDEs, to-do systems, ADHD management techniques, and insight into political ideologies I disagree with.
Whereas on Reddit for example it's just yelling at each other all the time.
You are free now.
How ironic.
This one in particular stood out:
> we also have lots of crazier tricks we could pull out like panopticon viral screening or toilet monitors or daily individualized saliva sampling or engineered microbe-resistant surfaces or even dividing society into cells with rotating interlocks or having people walk around in little personal spacesuits, and while admittedly most of this doesn’t sound awesome, I see no reason this shouldn’t be a battle that we would win.
Are you sure that the potential for society to start enforcing these things upon us is a reason to be thankful?
Sounds better than human extinction from bioweapons.
A hopefully tongue-in-cheek entry, or I certainly hope so. Or the guy (or lady) who wrote this is an arrrr ZeroCovidCommunity regular on reddit.
2. This is "regression tends to the mean" which my dad used to say with a smile when we discussed his excellent degree and his offspring's (including my) average degree.
I don't think it's regression to the mean. It looks more like mutation-selection balance.
If it was regression to the mean then it would only apply to parents above the mean. Mutation-selection balance applies equally to everyone[0]: genetic load increases in each generation, and selective pressure brings it down again.
[0] which is to say that mutations occur at random, not equally distributed but nearly always there, and they tend to bring every group down because mutations overwhelmingly tend to be bad
Natural and sexual selection are meant to be unforgiving. Humans have found ways to cheat: we should make a reality TV show where we put civilized humans in nature to see what happens
I know absurdist humor isn't for everyone, but man it cracks me up. So bravo to the strange and the weird, and that it holds this crazy place together!
"Cheddar cheese and pickle. A Vincent Motor-sickle. Slap Bang Tickle"
- Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 1
I found this to be a disturbing read. Do not recommend.
What specifically disturbed you?
Right? At least we can be thankful that there is no US holiday devoted to this sort of thing.
Same. Not quite sure what it was going for.
Thanks to the author, I needed this today.
Yes, it’s weird and eclectic and not at all mainstream, but those of us like that got to stick together!
Eating cardamom as I read this. My go to spice to keep mouth busy and flavorful and stay away from junk food.
> That if you’re a life form and you cook up a baby and copy your genes to them, you’ll find that the genes have been degraded due to oxidative stress et al., which isn’t cause for celebration, but if you find some other hopefully-hot person and randomly swap in half of their genes, your baby will still be somewhat less fit compared to you and your hopefully-hot friend on average, but now there is variance, so if you cook up several babies, one of them might be as fit or even fitter than you, and that one will likely have more babies than your other babies have, and thus complex life can persist in a universe with increasing entropy
In an ideal world. But in our current world I find that economical stance in the world influences amount of children more than if you’re “fit”. E.g. the poor(er) people of the world and the ultra wealthy of the world are having more kids while the middle class is having less, sure they have to meet some kind of ‘fit’ threshold but not the kind implied IMO.
Hadn't thought about this one previously ... "That if you were in two dimensions and you tried to eat something then maybe your body would split into two pieces since the whole path from mouth to anus would have to be disconnected, so be thankful you’re in three dimensions"
Another option is endo/exocytosis. No rule that says the path between ingress and egress has to be open all at once.
I can recommend this nonfiction book on the topic: https://archive.org/details/planiversecomput0000dewd
> That of all the humans that have ever lived, the majority lived under some kind of autocracy, with the rest distributed among tribal bands, chiefdoms, failed states, and flawed democracies, and only something like 1% enjoyed free elections and the rule of law and civil liberties and minimal corruption, yet we endured and today that number is closer to 10%, and so if you find yourself outside that set, do not lose heart.
according to V-Dem Institute [0], 72% of population live in autocracies.. does it include the US nowadays?
This whole thing reads strange. I’m not thankful for any of the presented reasons to be thankful.
> 21. That every expression graph built from differentiable elementary functions and producing a scalar output has a gradient that can itself be written as an expression graph, and furthermore that the latter expression graph is always the same size as the first one and is easy to find, and thus that it’s possible to fit very large expression graphs to data.
> 22. That, eerily, biological life and biological intelligence does not appear to make use of that property of expression graphs.
Claim 22 is interesting. I can believe that it isn't immediately apparent because biological life is too complex (putting it mildly), but is that the extent of it?
Reasons to be glum:
[...]
#20. That not every symbolic expression recursively built from integrable elementary functions has an integral that can also be written as a recursive combination of elementary functions ...
>That every symbolic expression recursively built from differentiable elementary functions has a derivative that can also be written as a recursive combination of elementary functions, although the latter expression may require vastly more terms.
Lisp programmers disagree from the first lesson at learning Lisp.
> That sexual attraction to romantic love to economic unit to reproduction, it’s a strange bundle, but who are we to argue with success.
Given that marriages fail at roughly a 50% rate, and easily half of married people are miserable based on my personal anecdotal data, I have to question the metric of “success” here. You also don’t have to go very far back in history to decouple these factors!
For this holiday season, I am grateful for no-fault divorce, and companionship sans hierarchy.
Went down the rabbit hole.
And having found: https://dynomight.net/thanks-4/ #18
Can't agree more. Thank you
I had never thought about the puzzle-piece solution to the 2D digestive tract problem before. That’s amazing! Maybe being 2D wouldn’t be so bad after all.
What a cool piece/person/perspective. We need more of this unorthodox thinking in the zeitgeist
Point number two seems dubious at best. At least 50% of all offspring would need to be as fit or more fit than the parents to have any hope for the continuation of a species. And it’s probably a much higher percentage than that due to mortality before procreation.
Will someone please explain 14 on Gregory of Nyssa?
Fit can mean hot in English slang
Yeah! Screw you, cobalt-60! And I'm sure glad I'm not two-dimensional, but maybe I could poop through my mouth like a sea anemone.
Reads like the canon of The Neoliberal Elite Human Capital secular religion. Banal, a-historical, and assumes a lot of things as certain just because.
Point #2 ("somewhat less fit... on average") is totally inaccurate if the parents are statistically average in the modern/Western world. It's accurate if the parents are extraordinary, in which case all children will likely be less extraordinary. It may be accurate in conditions of high infant mortality.
I'm not sure if point #29 is supposed to be a joke. If it's a joke, it's in exceedingly poor taste. Polybius had it figured out more than two thousand years ago: Democracy is an unstable cyclical thing, and nothing to celebrate. If you want proof of this statement, look around you.