Which is why we need open source tools that are vetted by the community. No one can actually track everything that is run on their browser, so the best we can do is to outsource it to people we trust.

Hmm, the question there would be: how do you decide which things are related to "technological growth"? Are humans manually tagging different data series as related to those things?

I'm not just talking about people being mean, though. I can be cordial with just about anyone. It's a matter of having enough commonalities to forge real friendships.

I've considered living in a small town, but... I worry about my ability to make friends with people there. I'm a really weird person, and only seem to be able to find people who are weird in the same ways if I have a really huge population of people to select from. (Or if the town is selected for people who are like me, I guess.) I have this association with small towns of like... gossip and exclusion if you don't conform to what everyone else is like there.

Do you think you're more normal than me, or is it not as bad as I think?

Oh my god this though

Bay Area:

“We should get lunch.”

English:

“I’ve identified your value relative to me and wish to start the process of exploiting your talents.”

The hardest part of this would be getting the data. What number would you say most represents "technological growth"? Has anyone been tracking that number for the past few centuries?

Somewhat related, a friend of mine made this graph. He scraped Wikipedia to find what nations were each other's "predecessors" and "successors," and formed a directed graph showing the breaking up and reformation of nations throughout history. Made possible by the human curation provided by Wikipedia.

Probably some of this type of data exists on the Internet if you take the time to trawl for it.

This is really interesting to read and reflect on. Honestly, I'm not sure these values are particular to Pixar, so much as they are an "America in general" thing.

Also, this was striking:

Although he causes all this, and at no small cost to his daughter’s mental health, Riley’s dad is not depicted as a villain. He loves his family, they love him, and together they work through the deprivations caused by the move. The narrative does nothing to condemn this state of affairs; indeed, it is Riley’s burden to accept them.

I don't think the fact that the move is treated as Riley's burden is all about capitalism per se; it's about the fact that adults in our culture don't generally take children's interests into account, or consider their problems important. It's always "they'll get over it," even when something is making a child very unhappy.

How can you be sure that you are getting the best results and not a biased list based on manual interventions and tweaks?

You can be sure that you are getting a biased list based on manual interventions and tweaks. Fundamentally, this is how every aboveboard search engine has to operate, unless they're willing to literally fight sovereign governments. US government demands censorship? Google has to comply. They don't have a choice.

OTOH, some tech companies (including Google) have shown a somewhat disturbing trend toward being... shall we say... more cooperative than they have to be with government surveillance and censorship.

As a woman who has asked a number of guys out... Confessions are awkward. Asking people out is less awkward. (Though it can have bad effects on a friendship sometimes too. IME closer friends are less likely to have their friendship destroyed by it though.)

Also, it's just kind of a pet peeve of mine when people give advice about "women" when what they're saying is really "for best results, treat this woman as a person." A lot of things aren't that specific, you know? There are some generalizations you can make about people of different genders, but IMO a lot of the best dating advice is of the form "treat this person how you would want to be treated, were you in that situation."

And I'm pretty sure having someone confess their love to you, when you don't feel the same way, is just uncomfortable regardless of your gender. Whereas having them ask you out is a little bit easier to move past because it's a smaller escalation of the relationship.

| People want to be taken out on real dates. They don't want the pressure of someone who's in love with them from minute one.

FTFY

I have had this problem too. I'm an atheist, and generally believe that there is no particular higher purpose to my life, except what I choose as meaningful. And there's a lot of freedom in that, but it can also be scary.

The best way I've found to make it less scary is to think about it this way: Take things one day at a time. I might have a general feeling of malaise and "nothing matters"... but if I think about it, I usually find that there is, nonetheless, something I'm interested in doing today. Something that could improve someone else's life; something that would make me feel happy or inspired; something I could share with someone I care about. To my mind, meaning in my life is built out of a long accumulation of small moments like that.

Also, reading Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan gave me some very useful perspective on the idea of "purpose."

Also, lifting weights sometimes magically cures this sense of meaninglessness with no further effort on my part. Try some standard depression advice; it might help.

I deleted my save. I have escaped doom for today.

Oh god. This game is so much more than that, though. There's like a powerful tech tree and stuff...

But it's evil. Don't start. You'll regret it, like me.

Moto X. Got it for Republic Wireless, and it turned out to be a great phone. The "rotate twice to bring up the camera" gesture shortcut is amazing, and has definitely gotten me some photos I would have missed otherwise.

Plus Republic Wireless is cheap.

Side note:

"If you tell someone, 'Hey, scientists have just found out that Pluto's not a planet' no-one cares. They just say, 'Oh wow - it's a meteor? That's great.'" But, he says, telling people about food myths is like attacking their identity.

I think this scientist maaay have missed the boat on the Pluto thing.

Relatedly: Whether someone is the same person after digital uploading - now that's a hard question.

Here's something in the Economist saying that college rank is not directly connected to future success.

But some other sources suggest the opposite.

Regardless of the evidence on averages... you are not an average. Lots of people from low-ranked colleges end up doing well financially. (Particularly if you study STEM.)

Oddly, many of the polyamorous people I know don't actually care much if poly marriage is legalized. This is basically because most of them practice hierarchical poly; some people have "primary" relationships and also other relationships, and some of those just end up marrying their primary.

Also, group marriages present some difficulties in implementation.

Same! I've only encountered one other person who's ever read this book, but I love it.

I'm kind of amazed by the degree to which websites like Reddit have gone mainstream. An op-ed in the New York Times about internet drama?

Really drives home how huge it has gotten.

I'm new here too, but my impression is you should just post whatever you want and people will choose whether to follow you or not. Or follow individual tags of yours or not.

Tiling window managers are awesome! I never was able to find one that played nicely with a pretty GUI environment, with Gnome 2 + Xmonad being the sole exception. And Gnome 2 feels a bit outdated these days.

What I really want is a tiling WM + something like the Unity Dash where you get automatic Super+1, Super+2, etc. keyboard shortcuts, corresponding to the position of icons on the dash. Basically something with graphical cues that go along with the keyboard shortcuts. But I could never quite make it work.

I really liked Gnome 3, but found that it could be slow and buggy, even on my brand-new medium-end desktop.

The correlation between helicopter parenting and anxiety could easily be explained another way: perhaps parents with anxious children tend to do more "overparenting" because they're concerned about their kids.

But my instinct says that the main point of the article is right, anyway.