i once accidentally dated someone for a few months. its very difficult to explain how this happened, but the gist is that i thought we were hanging out, and she thought we were on dates, and it was just a very painfully highschool thing.
she was a little bit confused that i hadnt tried to pull any moves, at all, even a little. like, didnt even try holding hands because, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i did not know we were dating.
so, halloween rolled around, and she thought, you know, why wait for destiny, when you can grab it? so she hit me with a clue by four.
babylon, she said. babylon. my mom's gonna be out of town on halloween, and im gonna have the house to myself, and it's going to be kind of lonely. would you like to come to my house and watch scary movies with me?
you know, kind of a netflix and chill thing. except, and i cannot emphasize this enough, i did not know we were dating. also autism. so i took it at face value and said: oh! yeah! thatd be fun! and she thought she got her point across, but she didnt and it was a mess.
skip forward to halloween: my family has a block party every year, right? and at that point i was too old to really trick or treat, but we still wore costumes for our role in the block party, which in my case, was handing out cotton candy. so i took the first shift, and my costume was this homemade abomination minion thing. i had full yellow body paint, and goggles, and a bald cap, and overalls. the kids who saw it were like, uh, hm. overly realistic minion. and adults were like, oh, some kind of hills have eyes hillbilly with jaundice. very scary.
(it was not my best costume.)
my little brother swapped me out for second shift, and i was getting ready to change out to head to her house when i was like: no, she'll get a real kick out of this. this is one of the worst things i have ever worn. so i kept it on and just brought a change of clothes thinking i could shower real quick and change at her place after she saw my nightmare getup.
so i left after that, got there, knocked on her door, and she said come on in. so i went in, and there was this very long hall with an abrupt right turn into her living room where the tv was, and i went down the hall, and i made the turn, and my field of view went from beige drywal to her, on the couch, naked. naked in the paint me like one of your french girls pose. super naked.
i panicked. this was my first time seeing a real person like, full on sex naked,which is a totally different beast from other kinds of naked. you see one kind of naked and you think yeah, im ready for all the kinds of naked, but you arent. i wasnt at least. i really wasn't.
so my brain crashed to BIOS. she also crashed to BIOS, but for different reasons. of all the ways this could have turned me, having me show up in yellow body paint and overalls was pretty pretty low down the list.
so we sat there a while, and you know, she wasn't getting any less naked, which really wasn't helping me get my brain sorted out. it really wasnt much of a surprise when she got her bearings first and started asking questions.
"babylon," she said. "babylon. what are you wearing?"
and i was like, kind of rebooted, but i was nowhere near full functionality, so symbolic language wasnt loaded in yet. i had nothing running but my trusty autism.exe, so i said
"overalls"
and she looked at me like i was the dumbest person in the entire world, and i looked at her like she was the first naked person i had seen in real life who got naked specifically for me, and my upper level cognitive process went: "listen man, we are not going to get our shit together as long as 80% of your brain power is devoted to not blinking. you gotta get out of here."
and if id communicated that, maybe things would have been less of a mess, but instead i just kind of turned around and walked back to my car. i figured i could drive a few loops around the block, get my brain in order, and figure out what the hell we were gonna do.
the only thing i had said to her since arriving was, again, overalls.
first loop around, i was like: oh god fucking damnit. oh shit. oh shit. shes gonna get like, an eating disorder from this. oh no.
second loop around i was like: oh NOOOOO oh WHAT THE FUCK oh SWEET JESUS PLEASE. i dont wanna go back man. i just wanna bury this and forget about it. please. please. let this bitter cup pass from my lips.
and after my third loop, i went and i knocked on her door again.
she answered it this time, and i counted my lucky stars that she'd changed into some pajamas. she was all teary eyed which was the saddest thing ever, and we sat down in her kitchen and talked. it was pretty bad - i figured out we'd been dating, and she figured out that trying to jump from home plate to 3rd base is considered ballsy in baseball, least of all dating. no real winners there. and i can remember after all that, we sat there a bit a bit longer, just steadying ourselves, and i was like "well, im actually really glad we figured that out. guess i'll see you at school tomorow' and she said "WAIT. wait."
"lets watch shrek 2."
so we did and it was horrible. we did not look at each other. we did not say a word. we just sat in stony silence, while shrek 2 played in the background, and when it was done we shook hands. i think we might have been able to salvage that as a friendship if it hadnt been for shrek. as it was she turned white as a sheet and ran away every time she even got a glimpse of me at school, and that summer she moved to a new state to live with her dad. all her friends said she moved just so she wouldn't have to go to school with me anymore, and i dont actually think they were lying.
every time i hear relationship counselors talk about how important communication is, and i'm tempted to roll my eyes, i look back and go, alright. alright. theres probably some poor bastard, somewhere in the world, who doesnt even know that hes married.
im pretty sure this post just. isnt true. as in, i googled dangers of stagnant water and most sources seem to indicate its fine as long as you dont swim in it? which doesn't seem to have anything to do with equipping a respirator
But I was also curious so I looked up "Katrina cough" on wikipedia:
The Louisiana Office of Public Health conducted a case-control study of emergency department visits in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The OPH distributed a questionnaire to patients seeking treatment for cough, sinus drip, sneezing, wheezing, chest congestion, swollen red and puffy eye(s) and sore throat. According to the study, state epidemiologists found no increase in the rate of New Orleans-area respiratory illnesses. Although rates were found to be no different in comparison to state and country rates, the study showed that people with chronic sinus or respiratory symptoms were more affected by the hurricane.
State epidemiologist Dr. Raoult Ratard disputed the existence of any disease cluster associated with the hurricane in 2006: "There is no such thing as a single condition such as âKatrina Coughâ that would be different from the bacterial and viral respiratory conditions we would expect to see at that time of year...no such outbreak occurred because of Hurricane Katrina."[2]
so i think probably the author of this post is a member of an epistemic community founded more on personal narratives than on scientific naturalism.
but yeah the original post has almost 20k notes which is a good reminder of how easily unverifiable information can spread on the internet
I think left-handed people have struck a good balance of letting it be known that they're cooler and better than everyone else while not making such a song and dance over it that it's embarrassing
I am also a âsend me the articleâ person but yet again I SWEAR TO YOU this is not a generational thing, this is a âpreferred brain modeâ thing and the ONLY reason you think itâs a generational thing is that when WE got on the internet it was MASSIVELY OVER SELECTED for People Who Prefer Text so everyone you met ON THE INTERNET was someone who preferred text and people who didnât prefer text ACTIVELY AVOIDED using the internet because Too Much Text.
Now the internet as a MEDIUM allows much greater access for the many many people who do not like using text that much, and younger people are functionally FORCED to use digital spaces and also you probably donât spend a lot of time dealing with older people who WERENâT part of the I Prefer Text block back when the internet selected for them.
Signed: An Information Worker Who Has Both Massive Numbers of Coworkers and Patrons From Older Demographics Who ALSO VASTLY PREFER VIDEOS and Send Them To Me/Ask Me For Them/Discover Whole New Fields Of Interest Because Youtube Has Instructional Videos.
(I am so fucking serious you guys anyone who thinks Gen X "naturally has an easier time with text" has no fucking idea how many people their age actually loathe, hate and struggle with text and absorb and prefer video-media . . . .because you have nothing to do with them, because the disconnect is that big. I do. They come to my public library to ask me how streaming works because they just discovered that there's so much shit they can actually learn - yes, I do mean Generation X, yes, they do come to my public library to learn how to use technology because they did not know and only recently realized that Holy Shit, Video Shit Online Is Fucking Amazing - because it turns out that streaming videos especially in short bites of attention-span work great for them for learning shit! Amazing! Who could have predicted this! I even teach many of them how to use Text-to-Speech when they get this downcast face realizing that their thing is still Very Text Heavy online, because text is unpleasant for them.)
(Please stop assuming that your personal preferences and those of the population that was previously hyper-selected for you because the practicalities of the format demanded a certain kind of mind to use efficiently is a universal for a chunk of time.)
(But also meanwhile: please send me the text article, I absolutely am capable of reading and retaining like twelve times faster than anyone can talk.)
This has been yet another episode of "for the love of god the next time you're convinced something is a big generational change take thirty seconds and ask yourself 'is it perhaps that there was previously an excluded or hidden or otherwise unexperienced population of This Thing that I am now experiencing, rather than a New Phenomenon/Massive Change?'"
I work as a sort of "librarians' librarian" in a rural consortium and a super interesting branch off this was that we kind of overcorrected for this when creating our training! We started moving to video for a lot of our more practical stuff, especially when it was digital - thinking that would be the easiest way for the library staff we serve to absorb information, since most of them were very much not tech-literate Internet People. Nope! They, en masse, requested text; some, somewhat desperately.
We'd run into the exact same selection bias from a totally different source: in this case, the only person in a town of 500 who's willing to run a library on 10 hours a week for minimum wage is going to be extremely fond of print media.
the real danger of spending too much time with friends is you stumble out of ten days of happiness and good food like oh my god THAT was real life. my job means NOTHING
Claims of AGI ignore fundamental problems in package management
Recently, a number of public intellectuals have claimed that we're getting increasingly closer to artificial intelligence that can solve a wide array of problems as well as a human can. However, these claims overlook fundamental barriers in the field that we are still decades from solving. To discuss this, I turned to alcoholic grad student James Belmini at MIT.
"It's just these fucking packages, man", James told me, while pouring himself a glass of straight vodka at 3 in the afternoon. "The 'language comprehension' package requires pyflubnugget at version 3.8.6 or less, but this 'Superintelligence' git repo requires conkflonk of 1.1.2 or greater, which conflicts with pyflubnugget. So any speculation of the capabilities of true AGI is purely hypothetical, because it's gonna take at least 5 years to work this shit out."
Asking about James' thesis progress did not yield anymore information about the problem, but did cause him to pour himself another shot and down it wordlessly without making eye contact
I always disliked when people said things like âbe yourself!â or âyou just have to put yourself out there!â as advice for making friends, so itâs been pretty irritating to learn over the past few years that itâs basically correct. At least, itâs an attempt to express something true. I do still think the usual phrasing is overly broad and binary, to the point that itâs nearly non-actionableâI very much doubt that thereâs a âtrue selfâ hiding inside all of us thatâs separable from all our socialization and inhibitions, but if there is you definitely shouldnât let it out all of the time. Social norms exist for a reason, ignoring them completely wonât do you any favors.
So, hereâs my attempt to express what I think is one of the kernels of truth hiding in those aphorisms more clearly: if you happen to be someone who, like me, is able to accomplish ~80-90% of the standard social gracesâlike, youâre not hopeless at it, but it just doesnât quite come naturally to youâthen desperately clawing for those last few percent that will finally make you Normal is extremely counterproductive. In fact, you probably have more to gain by relaxing and going a little bit in the other direction. While social norms obviously matter, people can be quite tolerant of mild deviations, more so than I think is commonly realized. (Certainly more than I used to realize.) And being able to read the script and dance the dance is only one part of successfully socializingâthe other is, yknow, actually connecting with people, which always requires a certain degree of spontenaeity. Past a certain point (which admittedly can be hard to find), neutering your ability to hold interesting conversations by running everything you say through a filter just isnât worth the marginal gains to Correctness. An awkward interaction is frequently better than no interaction at all, and a little bit of weirdness can make for a good icebreaker. Surprisingly often, people will just roll with it!
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