jak22
15hr ago
My own experience in life is definitely different than yours in a lot of ways, but I think its important to lay out some of it so you know me somewhat. For example, I come from more of a center-left background, and my childhood traumas are of a different nature than yours. But more importantly, I'm curious about some of what you said in this reply.
on church
requires some beliefs that I think don't work Which beliefs are those? And do you think you have to hold whatever these beliefs are to go to church and meet people there?
on dating apps
like the belief in the "true self" and the discovery of your "self" sexually Can you expand on what you mean by this? Like are you worried that you will have to start adopting these beliefs to use dating apps? Or is there some other hangup?
jak22
17hr ago
Hi!
You've clearly had a hard time in life so far. But putting that aside, it sounds like you have managed to find a job out of college, and that's awesome! That's worth celebrating!
You framed the issue as "Traditionalism vs Liberalism" to start. But it sounds to me like your current issue, and the reason your posting, has more to do with learning how to navigate romance. Would you say the current struggle is that the only two frameworks that you've seen for navigating romance is that of the traditionally liberal and conservative worldviews? And your conflict is that you see major flaws in both? If that is the case, I have thoughts that you might find useful, but first lets make sure we've identified the root problem first. If that isn't right, let me know where I went wrong in my interpretation of your problem.
jak22
19d ago
So by stuffy, its a combination of hot and just dusty. But the main thing is it just doesn't feel like there is a large amount of airflow coming from outside, as it just always feels a little hard to breathe and my nose always feel dry. I never had this problem in my old apartment.
As further evidence of air not coming from outside, I'm in San Francisco, and when I walk outside, it be chilly out. And the moment I walk into my apartment I get a blast of warm air, which strikes me as like I'm not getting enough outside air inside. And this was not the case in my old apartment whose temperature mapped pretty closely to the outside temperature.
As for vents in the new apartment, I see a few vents in my apartment, and I asked a maintenance guy if those were vents that came from the outside but due to new management in my building, the maintenance guy had only been working here for 3 days and had no idea what kind of air vents were in my apartment. So it is unclear if these are for heating, cooling, both, or to just have more airflow.
The only thing were fairly certain is there a large Amana AC/Heating unit next to the wall near the outside. Kind of looks like this one on Amazon, we think this air comes directly outside, but we can't confirm it.
As for dampers, I have no idea where to check for that, would that be at the opening of the vent? Or would it be somewhere in the ductwork?
And for filters, we did find some filters on the AC Unit, which we did clean out cause it was pretty nasty, and just generally cleaned out the AC unit writ large. And the air does feel cleaner, but I still don't feel like I'm getting enough airflow if that makes sense.
jak22
20d ago
New thread for a different topic unrelated to chairs. I just got a new apartment and the ventilation in here really sucks. Like it is super stuffy.
I've already bought an air purifier, and my air c02 monitor is on the way.
I've already asked the apartment landlords to come in to clean out the vents, because i think that's a big part of the problem. But I would love to get some thoughts here from people who faced this problem in the past.
jak22
21d ago
Oh nice, it looks like the key search time is "office liquidation", and one came right up.
I'm going to see if this one can get me a nice chair, if not i'll see if there are others near by. Thanks for the recommendation. I'm going to try this!
jak22
21d ago
I'm currently looking into investing into a nice office chair for my work from set up. I'd like to spend at most 500 dollars. Does anyone know what the best chair is for that price range? And I know body type matters, so I'm tall and on the skinny side, if that helps.
Thanks in advance!
jak22
8mo ago
when I entered into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and saw the light shining down onto Christ's tomb from a skylight. I was immediately filled with a sense of wonder, and a conviction that there was something about the place that was divine. Yet not a minute later, my mind was filled with sneering skepticism about the engineering of the building being designed to give me that experience. The backlash to that backlash was a moment that I think changed my life: I no longer wanted to be the kind of person that would dismiss profound spiritual experiences because I could explain them mechanistically.
I have a very similar set of views / experience to this I'd like to share.
I became an atheist when I was 11. Like most of my fellow gen Z's who converted to atheism, I snuck my nose up at all things religion. Beautiful churches started to feel like their was deception seeping through the walls. Thankfully I've always kept my child-like curiosity, so I was never hit with the overt cynicism a lot of kids my age had, but that's a different story. My overall cynicism has begun to wane over the last few years. But I had an absolutely striking experience while in Japan this last year that really made me start seeing the wonder again.
I was at Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto at around 8 at night by myself, and I wanted to see the full shrine before the bullet trains closed at 11 because my hostel was in Osaka. So to be able to satisfy both conditions of:
- seeing the whole shrine, and
- Not sleeping on a Kyoto sidewalk late at night
I decided to run the shrine rather than walk it. But as I started to run, I noticed these beautiful sub shrines with saisen-bakos. There was something about just running bast these beautiful pieces of architecture like it was just a background really bothered me. Like I was missing the real point of the shrines, and possibly a very fundamental human experience. So instead of running by each of these shrines, I decided to to stop at each and every one of them (I think there were about 30 of them) to do a Shinto prayer that a local friend of mine taught me.
At first, doing this felt extremely awkward, like I was trying to fake religion or something. But then as I decided to do what every self-help Youtube video has told me to do, say something I'm grateful for. So each shrine became a combination of a Shinto prayer and a gratefulness prayer. And at some point, this process of running and praying became extremely meditative. And I started to feel a connection to what my pre-11 year old self would of called God. I still don't believe in a Christian god per say, I'm more of an Agnostic at this point, but I do think I felt what people across all religions feel when they go to their religious place of worship to pray. That moment had a pretty profound effect on me, and my appreciation for religious spaces is tremendously higher than it used to be.
jak22
8mo ago
I can see how a Philosophy PHD would maybe help for a AI Research role, but I would assume those roles would be hiring more for CS or Stats PHDs no? Is there something about Philosphy PhDs I'm missing?
Also, I would like to avoid going back to school if I can. As I think I do already have a pretty robust skillset that could already be productive in these roles, I think it's more about the signaling game for me to find my way into these roles.
jak22
8mo ago
I work for Deloitte Consulting. Deloitte recruits pretty heavily out of the college I went to where I graduated with a major in Business Analytics and minors in Computer Science and Statistics. And I did a pretty heavy amount of personal projects in that time that I had listed on my resume. Some of which include:
- Kaggle Competition - Computer Vision Analysis on Cancer Detection through images
- Senior Project - Trying to predict crypto prices from news article's title's sentiments (This was prior to chatgpt being a thing)
Within Deloitte consulting they have a few a lot of different tracks they hire out of. But the recruiter I talked to was looking for 2 types of candidates, engineers and business consultants. Having my major be in business made me think they would want to hire me for the business major, but the recruiter looked at my resume and said, "no, your an engineer, we're going to try and hire you as an engineer". The interview process there wasn't too bad and I passed pretty easily. Although when I started working, I quickly realized that Deloitte doesn't have too many clients who hire for software engineers, and the ones that do, Deloitte passes the actual coding work off to a team in India to save cost. So given my goal was to find a role that would let me code and would be a role that didn't get outsourced to India, I found 2 possible clients who would let me do that.
- One of the FAANG Companies doing Data Engineering work
- Doing Cloud Integrations (AWS, GCP, Azure) projects for banks.
I chose option 1, and I've been doing that for the last 3 years.
As for pay, They started me at 80k, 3 years later I make 115k.
jak22
8mo ago
I have been working as a contractor for a FAANG company as a Data Engineer for the last 3 years. And I really need a change of pace. I would like to ideally do work in AI Safety research, but barring that I would like to do Ai/SW Engineering where I work on a real product. Does anyone have advice on how I can break into those roles?
I wrote a larger explanation of what I want at a job on my substack: https://substack.com/home/post/p-154032964?source=queue But in general I'd love to get thoughts on how to make that transition.
Tis the power of asking questions, and thank you for being willing to open up so much. This response I think gets us much closer to somewhere useful. And their are a few places where I think you can explore further. But first, to re-echo @FiveHourMarathon above:
This is such an important point, and he elaborates on it well so I won't divulge further, I just want to emphasize how important I think that is.
But onto some specific comments and questions regarding church and romance:
On Church (traditionalism)
Disclaimer: I'm not religious, so the following will be an accounting from people who are/have been close to me in my life...
Agreed, this is something I have really respected about religion (despite not being religious myself), they really do foster community which is so powerful.
I once had an ex-girlfriend who was an Episcopalian, and she told me that at her church, there are active members who don't believe in God but come every Sunday for the community. And the community accepts them. It is very likely that this is a very weird church (it is in SF after all), but the core point here is I do not think you have to have all the same beliefs as the congregation you are in to go to church somewhere. Obviously some baseline stuff is required, i.e. actually believing in God is probably needed at most churches. But every belief doesn't have to be the same. And if the church you find does have a problem with some view.... find a different church. I'm sure some people more religious than me would disagree with this, but I think you can be choosy about what parts of religion and the bible work for you. It doesn't have to be that you believe every word to go to church.
In my world view "faith" and "the existence of a loving god" are too very different things. One is a question of belief (I think a loving god exists), and the other is a question of truth (A loving god exists). I too have doubts as to the latter, but that doesn't mean that people's faith doesn't provide vast amounts of comfort to them irregardless of the truth value to the former.
On dating apps (liberalism)
So, more women than you think will ok with this. Modern media likes to frame women as these "sexual beings", and while those kinds of women do exist, they aren't omnipresent. And more women than you probably think would be ok waiting until things become serious to have sex. And if you play it with the right charisma, this can even come across extremely romantic.
Main thing here The VAST majority of women don't do anal. Anal is very much a product out of porn, and is mostly done because men who have watched too much porn ask women to do it. Most women won't ask for anal.
I think this is another one of those beliefs that really only exist in the outside fringes of liberals. I.e. only the most liberal people (men or women) I know actually believe something like this. Most of the people I know, including my liberal friends, believe something closer to what you said about only wanting to have sex with someone you think you'll want to marry. My personal rule of thumb, is sex is only something I will do with someone who I am in a relationship with, and deeply care about.
Definitely -- My favorite quote from any teacher I ever had was from an old english teacher in high school who said "feelings are ephemeral". I think about that quote so damn often. Because life is, at its core, ephemeral. (God I love that word)
Last question
So here's a thought, and again this comes from a place of curiousity. Why do you believe that sex makes you permanently uglier? Is it a byproduct of your religious upbringing? Or from something else?
Again, thank you for being so open, and I hope some of these, thoughts, questions and observations can help you even a little bit.
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