srf0638
16d ago
As someone with an occasional craving for frothed-milk coffee drinks, moka pot coffee with French press-foamed milk scratches the itch reasonably well.
Is that really any different than the supposed halcyon days of web 1.0 forums full of cranky grognards?
(Maybe I just haven't judged my specific audience here and you don't think of that as a golden age of online discourse, in which case, fair enough. But I feel like "lurk moar" is generally good advice, and I'd rather get good information and a bit of cranky abuse than bad or trivial information with a "hope this helps <3".).
Very probably true. I'd just rather not get too confident about the virtues of a life we haven't actually lived (if you're not one of the confirmed wife guys around here). Or maybe more precisely, even if it is the best life a guy could reasonably live, he might still expect to feel a certain amount of Bourdain-esque existential despair from time to time, if he's the sort of guy who's predisposed to feel that way. Wherever you go, there you are.
srf0638
1mo ago
Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying....
Have you tried it? I can well believe it's the way to go on net, but it's not like nobody has ever felt overpowered by quiet desperation on that path either.
Absolutely bonkers take in a finance thread. Obviously there are scenarios you can't hedge against with conventional financial instruments, but there are also a lot of scenarios you can. Edit, to lump everything into one comment/thread: you think furniture and jewelry will somehow hold value when VT won't? Fine china and furniture haven't even held their value now, boomer estate sales being unable to give the stuff away when it represented a sizable outlay at time of purchase is a minor twitter cliche.
(In any case, I for one would a hell of a lot rather have more time and autonomy than more stuff. I suppose the short time horizon strategy is to retire earlier and with less saved, so fair enough.).
radiologist
I recently got a cheap knee MRI at a local facility and wanted to double-check the radiologist's report and maybe learn something about how to read MRIs. So I uploaded the .zip of obscurely formatted images to Claude (highest-powered free model as of a week ago, on high setting) and asked for an opinion. It did a great job of parsing the file and coming up with a plausible-sounding stream of orthopedic gobbledegook, but failed to identify a partially torn quadriceps tendon, which was far and away the most significant finding in the radiologist's report and is generally consistent with symptoms and history. When I nudged it a little bit, it seemed to pick up on the quad tendon, but when I asked it to highlight the finding on the relevant frame it identified a random location on the IT band as the quad tendon. I wasn't quite sure myself at first, not having a ton of experience with either AI or reading MRIs, and I got Claude fairly confused by asking about the difference between sagittal and coronal before I figured out what was going on. (All this took several days, since I was hitting my token cap fairly quickly on high setting.). Super impressive natural language processing, but I'm not sold on its radiological abilities, and I seem to recall hearing quite a while ago that the days of human radiologists were numbered.
srf0638
2mo ago
While Football is ultimately too lightweight to reach that height, they share the one singular virtue that all great nonfiction writing has—the ability to interest the reader in a subject they didn't expect to find interesting.
I felt just this way about Mark Bowden's Bringing the Heat, speaking of football.
srf0638
4mo ago
Any recommendations for pre-pregnancy genetic/carrier testing?
(Fiancee was looking at Natera but pretty sketched out by lawsuits, etc. Both of us have enough Ashkenazi ancestry that we'd want to test for the common Ashkenazi recessive disorders.).
srf0638
5mo ago
No particular connection to Pittsburgh, but I really like these posts. The length, detail, and readability remind me a little bit of Robert Caro.
srf0638
5mo ago
I guess it's a coherent worldview as far as it goes, but, like, how absolutely cloudcuckooland insane to hear "you can just do things" and think "this is bad" with a side of "they should be going to therapy instead". I mean, would it be better to not just do things, to sweat and whine about our condition, lie awake in the dark and weep for our sins? This is particularly baffling when a lot of "you can just do things"-ists are doing things that are in fact fake and gay, and pointing this out seems like a much more penetrating critique of the implicit ideology! "Narcissists driven by an intense psychological need for approval" also seems like a TLP/Internet use of "narcissism" to mean "stuff I don't like", though this is arguably orthogonal to the point.
srf0638
5mo ago
This was funny, but:
The highly agentic are people who just do things.
(neat)
They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way.
(yep, sounds good)
When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it.
(hell yeah)
AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger.
Wait, what?
(In fairness, I think he shows a little more self-awareness later on:
Absolutely anyone could have done the same things he did. In 2020, when Eric was subcontracting coding gigs out to the Third World, I was utterly broke, living in a room the size of a shoebox in London. I would scour my local supermarket for reduced-price items nearing their sell-by date, which meant that an alarmingly high percentage of my diet consisted of liverwurst. There was nothing stopping me from making thousands of dollars a week by doing exactly what Eric was doing. It didn’t require any skills at all—just a tiny amount of initiative. But he did it and I didn’t. Why?
But it still seemed like an odd sentiment.).
srf0638
5mo ago
You are in a position of "fuck you".
Surely not, or if so with one very significant exception.
srf0638
6mo ago
I used to think this way, have relented somewhat--I probably still take quite a lot fewer photographs than most people, but I no longer avoid it out of principle, and sometimes when I'm on the road I make a point of trying to get photos of nice views, interesting fungi, cute animals, etc., for my gf. Shooting film is a nice compromise. I dare say sketching would be as well if I could draw worth a damn.
srf0638
7mo ago
innate
I'm not out to claim that "genetics don't matter" or something, but off the top of my head at least two of those attributes sure seem trainable.
Fiber type: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30006671/ (and see the fairly extensive animal literature as well e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s004410050647)
Tendon strength: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18556433/
I am pretty sure "CNS drive" is also fairly trainable, but my eyes glaze over every time I see the phrase and I'm not sure it's terribly well-defined.
srf0638
7mo ago
Yeah, those are basically the off-ramps I'm thinking of, and they're probably my best choice on net. Just hasn't panned out quite yet.
srf0638
7mo ago
I will just say that it's really, really uncommon for Easterners to care that much about Jews, as far as I can tell.
I've known quite a few Chinese guys who were super interested in Jews, seemingly as a sort of fellow model minority type population, and it seems to me I've seen references to this online as well. I also saw a reference to that one billionaire who was just in the news for having a hundred kids via surrogates having expressed similar fascination with Jews and Judaism, though I can't track it down at the moment.
Re: distant (if even feasible) 100x100 on 100sec swim goal, have commenced lessons, doing lots of kick drills, often with a snorkel. Starting to feel good body position when prone, still struggling with body position/fore-aft balance when rolled approx 45 degrees to one side. Flip turns have gotten a lot better and more consistent. It's kinda fun! Hard to say whether it's a meaningful cardiovascular load at this point, but it's something different, anyway, and I've certainly heard guys claim that swimming enough seemed to have some carryover to e.g. bike and run.
Re: Patrick O'Brian and what to read after you finish Aubrey-Maturin, I recently read Beat to Quarters, the first-published Hornblower novel. It's okay, definitely not as fun as O'Brian. There's a sort of dynamic where Hornblower is internally tortured by self-doubt but externally distant, steely, and always right that annoys me a bit and vaguely reminds me of certain animes.
Re: last week's "plan F" thread, I'm starting to engage with a sort of inverted version of this in a not entirely theoretical manner. tl;dr got a degree, hated the white-collar world, took a blue-collar job with lots of time away from home in remote locations for ~8 years, met nice girl, now want to be home more. There are offramps within the field that would probably work for me but I haven't been able to take one in the last six months or so of trying. My academic background wasn't professional, as such (econ, math, phil, UCs) and I didn't really stay in touch with anyone from the programs. I've been semi-seriously looking at nursing school, there are some accelerated programs that would theoretically work for me, but I'm not at all sure that it's something I even want to do and I would have to take a fair number of pre-reqs before applications close in May or June. I think they'd accept online coursework for most of it (and am about to reach out to confirm) but it feels awfully committing to drop a couple grand at Modoc County Community College or whatever to laugh my way through Anatomy and Physiology.
/deerdiary
srf0638
7mo ago
My books of the year (read, not published) short list:
Wanderer, Sterling Hayden. Last days of the tall ships, Hollywood, OSS partisan shenanigans in Yugoslavia, sailing to Tahiti with the kids in a custody dispute.
We Will Never Be Here Again, Svein Tuft, yeah, it's a sports book, but Svein's a pretty interesting guy.
In Search of the Forty Days Road, Michael Asher. Burnt-out ex-SAS man retraces historic camel trading routes in Sudan. Scenes of buying his first camel and a sword straight out of D&D.
Once an Eagle, Anton Myrer. Sprawling and overlong but it gets going pretty good eventually. Supposedly very influential in the US officer corps.
srf0638
8mo ago
If you guys aren't familiar with Leukotape, it may interest you. Non-elastic medical tape that actually stays stuck to skin. Typical off-brand drugstore stuff sweats off in maybe a couple hours, for me, but I've had Leukotape stay on for five days (I realize this probably wasn't a good idea) and take out some hair when I pulled it off.
Not quite that extreme, but https://www.themotte.org/post/3791/smallscale-question-sunday-for-june-7/450717?context=8#context
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