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padolsey
4,466karma·578submissions·June 29, 2011
about
padolsey.at.hn
I'm James. Living between Beijing and London. I like coding. Also plants. Stroke survivor & disability advocate. My dog's a whippet/iggy cross and is called Ducky. He's a beautiful lunatic.
* website: [j11y.io](https://j11y.io) * building: [nope](https://nope.net) * bsky: [@j11y.io](https://bsky.app/profile/j11y.io) * contact: https://tally.so/r/waYPvE * twitter: [@padolsey](https://x.com/padolsey) * book recommendations: [ablf.io](https://ablf.io) * me = founding eng @ [collective intelligence project](https://cip.org)
My work email is my first name at cip dot org.
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My meet.hn token: meet.hn-10d164d4-bf7f-4431-898f-e02b34b836dc
recent activity (578 total)
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Seeing knots as curiosities of topology seems to miss the entire point of knots: to fasten something with varying attributes of tightness, slippage, tension, time, application constraints (E.g. throwi…
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Twitter at scale is far more complex. With Tesla's telemetry it's just writing to a datastore, with less fuss around latencies, data duplication or consistency. There's no need for mill…
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You're not wrong if you align with categorical imperative views on ethics. If however you see the scaled utilitarianist perspective (disentrenching systemic -isms and gaining more equality), then…
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Yes. Not to mince words, as others frequently do, but that's basically what's happening. The alterntive, so-called "pure meritocracy", is a farce because the implied implicit "…
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Thanks for your input.
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Oh gosh, you have my respect. You've gone right in with the apex challenge there; to de-bias the sam harris readership! It's important to note that the recommendations are an *attempt* at a …
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> they are problems none the less I think this depends a lot on who the syntax is tailored towards. This compact stuff reminds me of APL and aspects of Perl. There's nothing wrong with highl…
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Can someone explain what this is? Not much context and it's at the top of HN. Whoa.
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> Over-measurement is often worse than not measuring anything at all. Yes. Not only is "time spent" or "code written" or "features implemented" or even "user en…
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> It’s also a great reminder of what you can achieve if you focus a considerable amount of time on something. Is it? 50 years for a bunch of cement? Is it a great reminder? I'm so confused b…
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I think it's unbelievably ugly and pointless tbh
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Culture is created therefore by literal dirt on the bottom of my shoe. By the very nature of being. Well, that's great. But eventually the word loses all meaning. It becomes a filler for "th…
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Agreed. I love art that challenges our perceptions of reality, society, even that which questions urbanism as a form of aesthetic pursuit. But this is just absolutely poo. A self-indulgent stain of hu…
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OOC what are the most pronounced ideologies you observe in it?
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Have you interviewed at a FAANG-like company before for a L5+ position? You may be surprised by the process.
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Strange to presume all domains are equivalent. Stock-picking and math-savant-esque talent are very distinct from almost every domain where one would value tenured expertise: surgery, aeronautics, civi…
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> human brain can hold ten years of programming information to be absolutely absurd. Wow, so this seems to completely discount the very idea of expertise? Do you believe it simply doesn't exis…
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Hmm, this isn't really a "howto" post. It's the authors' disdain and insecurities masquerading as one.
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I'm probably one of those people who waxes lyrical about bookstores but don't really find myself in them nowadays. To me it's a special experience tho. I experience them like museums an…
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Agreed. But I also understand the anxieties. I'd say a very significant % of programmers are not creating complex systems; they're coding up mostly CRUD UIs that have a great deal in common.…
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That's beautiful. Thank you.
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Too tired to type a cogent paragraph. Just that I have seen lives saved by SSRIs.
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Why not both? We always seem to try to dichotomize and categorize incredibly complex systems for some reason. Surely there are many components to the symptom clusters of depression and anxiety. Life c…
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Can you articulate how your brain allowed you to escape from that trap? Did K affect you on some low-level inarticulable level? Sincerely curious. Nihilism is a struggle for me!
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WFH is wonderful because you can go from sitting in lotus to standing with a gentle sway to lying down to barefoot yoga all without raising any eyebrows. Eg. I love lying on my belly with a pillow pro…
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Ok, very curious of others' metrics and hueristics for actions that are defensible. Mine are probably composed of: - Net degree of suffering imposed (+ nth-order suffering imposed on eg. fami…