jbrains
@jbrains@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on How Long is Too Long for a Reply? 1 week ago:
For answering a question, no limit on elapsed time, as long as you answer can actually be helpful.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 2 weeks ago:
Idiots began to demand perpetual growth and other idiots began trying to make it happen. And then it became institutionalized. And then the idiots forgot they were idiots.
- Comment on Why does information want to be free 2 weeks ago:
It doesn’t.
Humans want information to be free. Hoarding information is like hoarding any other resources. It causes power imbalances. Free information means that power is more evenly distributed.
- Comment on On Jeopardy, does getting the Who/What/Where/When/Why part of the response necessary? 3 weeks ago:
Some contestants phrase every question with “What is…?” Matt Amodio is well known for doing this. He won many times.
- Comment on Not to get all religiony but why in the old testament God was all fire and brimstone and fatal consequences? But the new testament God is all about forgiveness and such?? 3 weeks ago:
It made sense to scare people into being reasonable. That was the Old Testament.
Once they acted less stupidly, it became safer to let people be as they are. That was the New Testament.
- Comment on I'm burnt out, already changed jobs, what else can I do to go back to my normal self? 3 weeks ago:
Burnout has lasting effects. The only effective antidote is rest until rest actually leads to recovery once again. I have struggled with actually resting, as opposed to merely pausing, but feeling anxious about the next batch of commitments to try to live up to.
The quality of your rest is likely to determine what happens next. Rest the best and deepest you can.
Peace.
- Comment on do you use non violent communication at the workplace? 3 weeks ago:
Yes. I focus on making direct requests and on trying to understand the unmet needs of others. A large part of what I do is train people to believe that they can say “no” to me without arbitrary repercussions.
- Comment on Well then 4 weeks ago:
So… Just like general-purpose software development? I hope you get to work without LLMs.
- Comment on do you apologize, even if it's not your fault just to make the other person feel validated? 1 month ago:
I teach programmers to say “Oops” when they make a mistake, rather than apologize. It’s epidemic.
- Comment on How to relax and most importantly stop thinking about the things i could be doing? 1 month ago:
You’ve already had several good suggestions here.
I learned that when rest no longer leads to recovery, that is burnout and maybe even depression. Pay attention to this feeling and take it seriously. Good luck.
If you’re thinking about what you could be doing, you might have some unhelpful conditioning related to “being productive” and other such myths of how to live “correctly”. You might be able to think your way out of that way of being and you might need to talk to someone to do this, such as a therapist.
If you’re worried about forgetting something that you need to do later or about some deadline sneaking up on you, then writing things down and setting reminders could help. I did a lot of this and it trained me to literally forget things that I didn’t yet need to start working on without risking missing deadlines. I found it very freeing. Something like that might help you.
I hope you find some peace from something in these replies.
- Comment on Finally a washing machine that understands me 2 months ago:
Äntligen! Ett tvättmaskin som förstår mig!
- Comment on How did you decide what you generally wanted to do with your life? 2 months ago:
You don’t have to commit to any one thing in this life. I’m doing very little at age 51 that I was doing at age 27.
- Comment on When will we have reached enough productivity? 2 months ago:
- Comment on Why do females got to be so hard to talk or flirt with? 2 months ago:
If you have social anxiety, then why are you blaming women for being difficult to talk to or flirt with?
- Comment on Who discovered/"invented" fire? 3 months ago:
Les Oulhamr fuyaient dans la nuit épouvantable. Fous de souffrance et de fatigue, tout leur semblait vain devant la calamité suprême: le Feu était mort.
- Comment on What are the differences between 1) probabillities, 2) possibillities, and 3) plausabillities? 3 months ago:
Plausible is more like conceivable.
It’s possible that when I slam my hand on the table, it will go through the table, but it’s not plausible. We can’t imagine it actually happening, even though we know it can.
- Comment on Hell yeah bröther 3 months ago:
You don’t mess with the Zohran.
- Comment on Is there something like a spreadsheet for hierarchical data structures? 3 months ago:
Visidata, maybe.
- Comment on Is there a medieval equivalent of the youtube channel "Primative Technology" 3 months ago:
Watching the fire in the hearth, no?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 months ago:
The whole notion of “deserve” here is nothing more than a silly story we tell ourselves because other people teach us to believe it. It’s real, but you can change it. So maybe try changing it.
Instead of “I deserve a boyfriend” or “I don’t deserve a boyfriend”, try thinking “This is just a dumb story. It doesn’t mean anything. I either have a boyfriend or I don’t. That’s it.” Maybe it changes something in you. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it takes time and many repetitions. It doesn’t cost much to try.
Peace.
- Comment on "Can i ask you for a favor?" Is it rude to say no? 4 months ago:
“Sorry, I can’t help you.” Why? Because sometimes I hand out random favors, but not today to you.
- Comment on “Production” to describe multiplication? 4 months ago:
“summation” is also related to summary. All these words are related to reducing a collection of things to a single thing. A sum reduces a collection of numbers to its total. A summary reduces a collection of thoughts to its essence. A summation is effectively a synonym for a summary.
The word multiplication describes the operation applied to each pair of numbers. The word production would refer to the act of multiplying an arbitrary collection of numbers. Just as it would be for addition and summation.
It would fit the pattern.
- Comment on Why is it ok to replace -ed at the end of a word with -t in some cases? For example, why are "vexed" and "vext" both acceptable, but "thrilled" and "thrilt" aren't? 4 months ago:
Scrabble is not a language game, but instead a spatial and arithmetic game using arbitrary strings of letters. Don’t look to it as a reflexion of the state of English as she is spoke.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 5 months ago:
Thanks for that. Indeed, that makes me less confident in their suitability to teach those subjects, but I worry about a sensational conclusion about their general literacy.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 5 months ago:
I would want to repeat that study with novels written in the past 25 years before concluding too much. Yes, the participants had access to a dictionary, but I imagine that needing to decipher certain parts, such as foreign cultural references and familiar words with unexpected meanings, interferes with the brain’s usual functions for turning words into images in the mind’s eye. And this even ignores the folks wtih aphantasia like me.
- Comment on Can you read and understand this passage? 5 months ago:
Yes, although I’m struck by some of the words, particularly this sense of 'wonderful ".
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
Political discussions online rarely lead to satisfying resolutions. As a result, political discussions bleed into everyday discussion in the desperate hope that something, somewhere, will magically make sense.
Similarly, when businesses have meetings that don’t actually resolve matters, every meeting becomes a desperate chance to discuss things that matter in the hopes they’ll be resolved, so then every meeting that needs to happen will happen during every scheduled meeting, even wrhb ostensibly unrelated. This continues until meeting culture changes and even overall communication culture changes.
It seems natural and reasonable in such an environment for many people (like you) to want to disengage. Why continue doing something that never seems to lead to resolution?
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 5 months ago:
First, thank you for the thoughtful and detailed reply. I find it helpful.
Plain text accounting (and all the variants) sounds great, right until you need to use it to generate invoices, or depreciate assets, or do a monthly Business Activity Statement, or convert a currency, track repayments, etc.
All of those things require that you write software to achieve that, which means that now instead of solving problems and writing software for my clients, I’m burning hours writing software so I can run my business
Oddly enough, I feel the opposite: I’m so glad that I have the freedom to use other tools to do what I need and that I can simply write some custom software to achieve that. I always felt locked in by QuickBooks and now I can do anything from messing around in a spreadsheet to writing what I need with jq. Plain text as an interface means that the sky is the limit for flexibility.
It has also made my company’s financial information more accesible to me. Previously, I’d given it over to bookkeepers and accountants and only seen out of date financial statements when it was time to file taxes. Now I know what’s going on whenever I want.
It has also turned bookkeeping into a programming exercise, which made me more interested, not less. I don’t have clients waiting impatiently for me to produce features for them, so I can enjoy this wro instead of having it feel like a distraction.
I’ve been writing software for over 40 years and until last week I’d never heard of it. That’s not something you want in business software.
I feel that!
Because I’m still running a 25 year old accounting package that doesn’t run on current hardware, isn’t supported, doesn’t run under Linux and has all my data hostage.
Our motivations definitely seem compatible, even if our constraints and preferences don’t.
Thanks again. Good luck.
- Comment on What programs do you wish a good FOSS alternative existed, but doesn't or most of the FOSS alternatives simply aren't good? 5 months ago:
I’ve been using Plain Text Accounting for the past two years and have mostly enjoyed my experience. I’ve found hledger both well documented and well supported. I don’t know the space very well, so which applications and/or packages have you tried?
- Comment on Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately? 5 months ago:
I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.
Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.
There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.