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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • 10/10 explanation. I would add two things.

    First, there is a massive amount of variation in “normal” people. I’m personally of the belief that we spend too much time classifying people and that can set unreasonable expectations. Just because someone was/wasn’t diagnosed as <x> does not mean they will neatly fit in that box.

    Second, there are cultural norms and elements that interplay here. I am a New Englander living in the Midwest. I consider my communication style to be direct and frank, which means that I try to objectively say things as they are. I grew up being interacted with this way. This style of communication is somewhat contrary to the norms of the Midwest, which can result in people interpreting me as being confrontational and lacking empathy.


  • I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that’s been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, “well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let’s ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function.”

    It really seemed to amount to, “I didn’t come up with this, therefore I don’t support it.”

    Ah, corporate politics.



  • I’m sorry - what strategy finally got us gay marriage?

    Gay marriage is presently legal in the US at a federal level due to a Supreme Court ruling, not a law. It seems inevitable that this will change given the present makeup of the court, similar to abortion.

    I am all for LGBTQ rights, but until something is passed by Congress the current situation seems precarious.




  • 100%. Transitioning from making all decisions for your kids to becoming a trusted advisor is something you need to do intentionally over time. Let your kids make low impact decisions when they’re young. Offer guidance as needed, not all the time. Simple examples include what to have for a meal/snack, where to go for a play date, etc.



  • And building credit is useful to set yourself up for future purchases - a condo/house, car, whatever. The whatever here is bigger than it semese, as having a decent credit score can let you finance all kinds of things at a pretty low rate, if not 0% even today. If you’re saving any extra money in an investment/retirement account, and can pay off your 0% financing offers in full by the time you would start to owe interest, financing at 0% is a great deal even if you have the cash on hand to pay outright.







  • I suggest something where you get to work with a wide range of the populus. Opportunities are basically all service industry jobs: waiting tables in a restaurant, working retail, working in a hotel, etc. Learning how to interact with wide swaths of humans is an invaluable skill that will serve you well in your future professional career. I would focus on building social and emotional intelligence.





  • The old “privacy focused” setting made speech processing local. The new “privacy focused setting” means that processing will happen on a remote server, but Amazon won’t store the audio after it’s been processed. Amazon could still fingerprint voices with the new setting, to know if it was you or your parents/parter/kid/roommate/whomever and give a person specific response, but for now at least they appear to not be doing so.

    This all seems like it’s missing the point to me. If you own one of these devices you’re giving up privacy for convenience. With the old privacy setting you were still sending your processed speech to a server nearly every time you interacted with one of those devices because they can’t always react/provide a response on their own. Other than trying to avoid voice fingerprinting, it doesn’t seem like the old setting would gain you much privacy. They still know the device associated to the interaction, know where the device is located, which accounts it’s associated with, what the interaction was, etc. They can then fuse this information with tons of other data collected from different devices, like a phone or computer. They don’t need your unprocessed speech to know way too much about you.