What’s something on your mind lately that nobody else would understand?

silas@programming.dev to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 175 points –
215

I'll bite. I had a brother with special needs pass away a year ago next week. He was born with cerebral palsy, was blind, nonverbal, totally dependent on caretakers (myself, my siblings and mother, his nurses) for literally everything since he didn't have functionally-independent motor control. We were told he'd live to 10, and he lived to 29; he was a bundle of joy and loved going out when he could. People would stare and kids would ask questions, but we loved sharing his story and my brother liked when people were curious about it.

But, his health started declining in 2014. He had several close calls, and we told doctors each time to try their best with the circumstances they were given. On more than one occasion, his nurses or our mother would actually be with the doctors during hospital stays to assist with him since he was case they didn't have much experience in and didn't want to make his issues worse. That said, he had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) since he had a trache, and was brittle enough to die from chest compressions.

I prepped for my brother's death countless times over 8 years. We all did. When he passed, we were so obviously distraught. But we were also relieved, in a way, that he wasn't in pain anymore in the end. We let out our emotions that had been stored for those years, and the grieving process is still continuing. We all put our lives on hold to help him, and he just became our lives; our goal simply was to make him comfortable and let him know he was loved, knowing we couldn't realistically do more. We spent years watching him in pain, watching him gradually lose his fervor and personality.

If you read this far, thank you. Not really sure what else to say, I just want to share this since it's occupied my mind a lot.

TLDR; Preparing for the worst outcomes, coupled with grief, over prolonged periods of time really disrupt your emotions and outlooks. Needless to say, my family became stronger proponents of state-assisted suicide after this experience. It couldn't be granted to my brother, but maybe we can help people in the future that coupd really use it. People understand, but not nearly as many are truly empathetic because they can't be - they've never been through a similar experience. I simply ask that people try to be sympathetic rather than to pass judgement on others.

The one cause that I'd champion over all others is the right to have access to assisted suicide.

It's really a travesty how we tend to hide just how grisly dying (and in some cases living) can be, and how those who most go through it inherently lose their voices to advocate for others not suffering the same drawn out fate.

I'm sorry you had to watch as it dragged out.

My SO is a doctor and the cases that most upset them are not the healthy patients that die, but helplessly watching the unhealthy patients that are forced to drag on living because of various factors.

We're getting much better at unnaturally prolonging life, and while that's a good thing in some cases where it can change outcomes for the better, there's a very dark side of it as well that's gradually getting worse.

Know that it's not a topic that only you are thinking about, even if it's unfortunately a topic that is too rarely discussed in public.

I'm deeply sorry for your loss. I am a hospital chaplain, so I have been with families as their loved ones have died in settings like this. If you want to talk to someone, I'm here for you.

I can't relate nor comprehend your loss. You are so thoughtful and brave to put this out there. Sending lots of love your way.

I understand the weird feeling of relief when someone dies. I know that sounds terrible. My situation was not yours, so I'm not directly comparing. One of my parents had long, slow cancer. Watching them waste away, choosing to fight a symptom or not, was draining and difficult. In one sense, I enjoyed all of those final moments and would give anything to have more. I miss them dearly. However, I'm glad they're not suffering. It was difficult at the end. Their quality of life was not good.

Yeah my dad smoked a pack a day his entire life and had started getting a lot of issues with his lungs and health in general. He died of a heart attack not so long ago and while I did grieve him I still feel that's the best way he could have died

If only it hadn't happened on my sister's birthday but that's life for you

So, in the fine tradition of using bananas for scale...

Bananas are slightly more radioactive than the background, due to potassium-40 content. So an informal unit of radiation measure in educational settings is the 'banana-equivalent-dose', which is about 0.1 microsieverts.

My particle spectrometer saw first light today, and I figure that I could use a banana to calibrate it. Then I noticed that K-40 undergoes a rare (0.001%) decay to 40Ar, emitting a positron. So not only is a banana a decent around-the-house radioisotope source, it's also an antimatter source.

Truly a remarkable and versatile fruit.

Sorry, I understood that.

Nice -- you wouldn't happen to have any ideas on how to differentiate positron annihilation, from the continuous distribution of β− energies caused by the more common decay mode, using only a PIN photodiode? I'm a bit stumped on this point and suspect it's not possible. I probably need to do gamma spectroscopy but would really rather not.

the trickery is to detect two gammas emitted simultaneously in exactly opposite directions

Yeah, that's going to be too hard. I only have two SiPMs (besides the current detector) and they are expensive. I figured I could maybe rely on the gamma from the annihilation energy being a quite different energy than the gammas from the more common electron-capture.

However you raise a good point that that would not be a very good demonstration of positron annihilation at all -- just evidence that it's not the other 2 decay modes (and it would take ages to collect that evidence besides). Ah well. Got plenty of other science I can do instead.

Probably I'll tackle something easier like checking for radon decay products in petrol.

that's how real commercial PET scanners work, so it's not too hard to make it work

'Not too hard' is a bit of a spectrum I guess ;)

I mean yeah, in principle I could cram textbooks for a few months (I know EE and SE pretty well, but particle physics only very basic stuff), order parts made at the factories I know, and would probably succeed eventually. More realistically I'd have to hire a university prof as a consultant to save time.

What I am really unable to construct is a powerpoint presentation that justifies that expense and labor to management :P

Especially in a cost-driven market (my company is in Vietnam). Often the parts for these things are export-controlled too, that can be a real pain. I've gotten irate phone calls from the US DoD before over fairly innocent parts orders -- it's not super fun. I recall it was some generic diode, I must have stumbled on something with a military application I wasn't aware of. The compliance paperwork ended up costing me hundreds of dollars for 20$ in parts, too.

Anyway, if it was something I could just tack on to ongoing research projects, I could maybe get away with it as a marketing expense. It's for a STEM program. It's hard enough to convince management to take the risk on a nuclear & quantum module as-is! I can mostly get away with it because the locally-manufactured beta-detectors cost like 20$ per classroom.

This is some seriously dangerous information to be feeding me bro.

Now.. to find magnets able to contain the antimatter...

Bananas are not typically very high on the danger scale except in exotic (and universally embarrassing) circumstances.

In fact, that's another thing we could use bananas for scale with. Probably driving to work is equivalent to several kilobananas worth of danger daily :)

Anyway, I think the positron should be about 44keV if that helps you calibrate your magnets. The typical banana should produce something on the order of a positron every 10 seconds (although I used much rounding for the sake of brevity). Most commercial positron sources e.g. used in hospital PET scanners, are many times stronger than that!

I wouldn't say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I'm trying to volunteer and work in.

I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.

I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.

I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.

I'm not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.

They say that to the patients? That sounds incredibly unprofessional.

It's insane, I even made a complaint to the director who of course is a woman, and she effectively denied that it was happening or could happen.

I told her I don't even want people not to think these things, everybody who is in their own place of trauma has to get their shit off their chest.

All I wanted was a place where men didn't have to hear this crap.

And that's being incredibly neutral in my opinion because there are a lot of opportunities for men to talk about just how insane and shitty women can be. But I don't want to talk about those things, I just want them to stop shit talking men especially their own clientele.

Pushing any sort of socio-political agenda on people who desperately need help should be grounds for losing your license to operate. If someone was having a mental health crisis and the people who were supposed to help them instead tried to convince them that women have it worse, I could see it pushing that person over the edge into committing suicide. That sounds so incredibly invalidating and possibly malicious.

putting out the fire of gender inequality with oil

its interesting how when people are a majority they dont see the irony in their actions.

There are many jobs that I don't bother to apply for despite knowing I'd excel and enjoy it, simply because I'm male. Many people aren't comfortable with males in certain roles. Obviously the reverse is true and disproportionate but most people seem to be oblivious that men are oppressed too.

That's an excellent point and it's one of these elephants in the room that people can't see.

Does anybody wonder why there's virtually no male kindergarten teachers? Convicted before the crime as if women have never acted inappropriately towards children?! I mean for fuck sakes my own mother sexually abused me.

If you've ever known any male nurses, they will tell you the stories of being outnumbered 30 to 1 at minimum, and then facing constant sexual harassment, abuse, and career suppression because of their gender.

And my own story, I work in a system of power, the healing sector, which is dominated by women. And as the one guy they're trying to do the right thing and serve men, we face nothing but abuse. It is driving me out.

Exactly. You can see this on various aspects of life. Racism, sexism, etc. Many use them as excuse to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Maybe not nobody but most...

The freedom and control and depth and enjoyment in using Linux. I know, I know, shut up I'm answering the question.

There was a question here recently about partitioning, and that got me thinking about inodes and really wanting to understand how data storage works. I went on a deep dive and learnt so much. I feel like I have a real deep understanding of how my system works now.

People don't understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things. Most people are just consumers of a thing. I do my own motorbike and car maintenance, and I know where my limits are in terms of skill and equipment. It's so satisfying, it brings a sense of joy and accomplishment to my life.

I'm baffled that people just.. don't do this kind of thing. Don't learn about metabolic pathways or companion planting or do careful research and just impulse buy... Like.. Life must suck for them. It must be so dam boring to live life like that.

So yeah, I don't think many people understand that.

I completely agree. And I've thought about this before. I can't know what is going on in people's heads but a lot of people just... don't care. They have fun watching TV and playing popular video games. I think a large portion of people just don't like learning things. Like it just annoys them. That's what I've been led to believe. Which also makes it hard to get people into something I'm into. They'll see I'm massively excited about something and the thing I'm into looks cool, so they'll ask about it. Then whatever it is, be it some tech thing, a niche game, enthusiast grade flashlights, literally anything, turns out to require learning something, they just get turned off of it immediately. If someone wants to get into something I'm doing, I've started prefacing it with "this is not straight forward, are you okay with a bit of learning?" to avoid the disappointment and wasting their time. Usually the answer is no.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. Most people must not like learning.

You're implying that learning how to do well at a video game involves no mastery or learning. I don't think that's accurate for all games.

I'm not saying that about all video games, I was trying to say that people who don't like learning tend to gravitate towards whatever video games are popular at the time and don't necessarily form complex opinions about different types of games or their tastes. Anything below surface level enjoyment that would require learning would be too much. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with just loading up whatever new call of duty or fifa or something and just relaxing.

I guess I didn't elaborate enough on that, I just said "popular video game" which didn't get my meaning across. In short, I was saying those people also don't put a lot of thought or effort into what entertainment they consume because whatever is easiest and most popular is good enough, because they don't care to dive into learning about anything else.

I'm also not saying these games don't have complicated and high skill ceilings. Most do.

I absolutely agree with you. Just yesterday evening, a friend asked me for help with his laptop. He was going to throw it away because the Bluetooth broke and he couldn't use his favorite mouse.

Start, Settings, Bluetooth, turn on. There, I just saved you six hundred bucks.

It takes time and effort though, and usually that time and effort is spent elsewhere, especially if you're an adult with two jobs and two kids. When you don't have to think to better your mastery of your surroundings, making good hardware/software choices becomes increasingly disparate

I am in 100% agreement with you. I'm kind of in the same mindset in figuring out my homelab setup. Still learning docker and how volumes work 😢 haha

I'm in academia but I like to tinker with tech. So when my students or co-workers are surprised that I know so much about tech and how to navigate around most computer systems and troubleshoot (Mac/Windows/Linux) they are perplexed. They ask why I didn't major in tech. I tell them that I majored in what I loved (history) and play with tech as a hobby to relax.

It's why I selfhost my own Lemmy server. Gives me something to do with my hobby, keeps me focused on what's new in tech, makes me learn to keep up with docker, Linux, editing CRON tabs etc.

Hey, I'm going through the same thing! I just got all my hardware in for my new server and I'm learning docker stuff right now. When do some difficult troubleshooting I'll think of the random lemming I passed in the night that is doing something similar.

I’m the kinda guy who’s aware of how cool Linux and system mastery can be, but also the kinda guy who’s too lazy to care enough about maintaining a dual boot Linux/Windows system so every other year I’ll install a new Linux distro I haven’t used before only to do nothing with it and delete that partition of my hard drive within a month.

Last week I installed Ubuntu!

People don’t understand how wonderful it is to have mastery over things.

I have so many areas of my life that I think in terms of a skill, one of which is Linux, which I'm using now. Another is coffee/espresso, cycling, writing, etc.

Basically all hobbies. But the point is that I can develop mastery at my own pace in so many different areas. Sometimes, it's slow and methodical, like coffee: I'll try something new maybe every weeks. And sometimes it's breakneck speed, like Linux...just do a deep dive and come out knowing a bunch of new stuff.

I fucking love being alive.

For me, it's homebrewing. I think this can keep my interest long enough to get through winter depression. That's good enough.

Eh, time and effort is limited depending on what the matter at hand is. Sometimes, you are required to just impulse buy or not live at all.

... And yet, I know exactly what you mean. There's a class of people who just live with a phone for nearly everything they do 14 hours of their daily life, day in day out, 12 months a year. No rest whatsoever. And yet, the moment they find any resistance anywhere in their life, not even on something related to the phone, they just. dont. google. They literally refuse to help themselves and will just do what they know and refuse to do or even concern themselves with better.

I've seen a 20-year-old who, when asked to give in their homework on Moodle, like normal people do, instead... wrote everything on a Mac's Notes app, took a photo and then pestered people for the teacher's phone number so they could send the shitty photo of their homework on a very popular chat application. When told that this was not going to count, they just shrugged and stopped caring. Again, they used technology daily. That was objectively the stupidest and laziest "functional" person I've ever met, a true sheep, and I fear ever becoming like them during onset of dementia.

Yeah. My appreciation for Linux has recently grown a lot. It just seems like the Web and tech companies really are going to shit.

I'm old enough that being free from ads and spying is far more important to me then anything windows can offer.

I'm sure other people out there understand this, but like I'm such a sinkhole right now. I lost my job a few months ago, and I am trying so hard to get another one but its just not happening. I feel like I'm always hitting like 2nd or 3rd place in the lineup. The interviews go well, get call backs, then boom last minute they went with the other candidate. And everyone is telling me I'll be okay cause they say I'm smart and have skills.

But it doesn't matter, I'm broke, my medications running out, I'm tired, I have bills, everything hurts, I have no insurance, and I don't want to be a leech and already my boyfriend has picked up the rent and stuff, but like he has his own bills.

I just don't understand, why does shit have to keep happening, can't it just settle for like 5 minutes so u can catch up. I feel like I haven't been able to breath in years, and there is something that everyone else is in on that my autism doesn't let me understand, and I'm just.... idk anymore.

I'm bleh.

I learned recently how the James Webb Space Telescope is not orbiting around Earth but literally orbiting around an empty point in space. I don’t think I even quite understand it, but it’s really cool

For everyone who immediately thinks 'it's most likely orbiting a point within the earth,' here's a diagram to help:

Have no idea how this works... there is no gravitational pull at the L2 point, it's just an empty point in space 🤨.

There is gravitational pull, from both the Earth and the Sun. The JWST is orbiting the "earth-sun system" if you will.

You can read more about Lagrange points here.

JWST isn't going in circles, it's orbiting the sun. If you look at it relative to that, then it looks more like a sine wave rather than going in circles. However from the perspective of the earth, it looks like it's going in circles

You're tell me bro. I need to research this more.

Maybe gravitational push-pull between planets and moons... IDK, it might be some sweet spot they discovered where gravitational forces do weird things, lol 😂.

This. There's 5 Legrange Points for every 2 body system. They're specific points around the 2 bodys where the gravity "cancels out". In this case the 2 body system is the Earth and the Sun. JWST is sitting a million miles from Earth at L2.

Dammit, I was feeling proud that my first thought on how this could work lined up with the explanation... But I had assumed L2 (didn't stop to think about the label) was where I now see L1 to be. I can wrap my head around L1 just fine, but how the heck is L2 the same? Or the others for that matter? Gonna stare at this for a while...

If you understand gravity wells, think of L1/L2/L3 as the shape of a saddle. If you're right in the middle of the saddle it's a pretty stable orbit, but if you get too close to any of the edges you fall right out of it. L4 and L5 are like the peaks of a mountain.

Also worth pointing out that only L4 and L5 are stable, L1/L2/L3 are only metastable where they require a bit of maintenance to stay there.

Another fun fact about Legrange Points: There's a group of asteroids called the Trojan Asteroids. There's technically two groups of these since they're stuck in L4 and L5 in the Sun/Jupiter system.

Ah, so that's why we don't put shit in L4 and 5 😂... things will bump in them once in a while 😂.

Yeah but it's not at the L2 point, it's spinning in a circle around L2.

Yes, my point exactly. There is no mass at the L2 point, so how can it spin around it.

Others explained it though, it makes sense now 👍.

PS: What are enbies 🤨?

Cybersecurity, as a profession, is a fool’s errand.

Dedicated security staff exist solely to teach real engineers how to do their job, and the fact that such personnel exist is a catastrophic failure in computer science curriculum

It often seems cyber sec staff write reports on what should be done with no understanding of why and this leads to them fretting over things that are not actual vulnerabilities.

200 vulnerabilities, 2-3 that might actually be exploitable, and no prioritization. But look at these metrics!

I don't know if I am right but I am of the opinion that Cybersecurity should be considered a mastery branch on top of basic engineering skills. But it feels like there are so many Cybersecurity experts who do not understand enough about the underlying engineering concepts to be effective in their role.

That's the real problem. Cyber security experts know bare minimum about coding, and coders can tell. Their knowledge only goes skin deep when you ask them to clarify an exploit, or to give a workaround. So coders usually tend to brush them off.

It should be a collaborative effort, security and coding, where security can fully understand what is being built and offer potential secure workarounds

Converting a high resolution photo scanner into a large format digital camera

There's a lot that goes into it and I'm still fairly early in the process but it is possible and has been done before

I already have some lenses that will cover the whole scanner bed, it's mostly a question of power at this point

only thing i don't understand about it is why are you dong this

Perhaps a huge sensor like that is good for night/astrophotography

Not so much really, it would be more capable for like landscapes and architecture due to the time frame it'd take pictures in

so you're really trading long exposure time + large size for extremely high resolution, that's pretty cool actually

Will that not just result in a terrible camera...? O.o

Surprisingly no

Such scanners can scan at incredibly high resolution

Hundreds of Megapixels in fact

The main thing the time it takes to scan the image is quite high, like 30 seconds or do

Edit: Here's an example photo from someone who did what I'm talking about.

Please do update us on your progress! This is really fascinating

Once I finish it I'll be sharing information about it and pictures it takes on multiple photography groups across Lemmy

I've been dealing with this back pain under my right shoulder blade for like 6 years or so and I can't seem to figure out what's causing it or how to treat it. I think it's called "rhomboid pain". I've seen a doctor once and physical therapist twice and the best they can do is recommend I stretch and go get a massage. Yeah thanks guys. Totally haven't tried any of that.

I've always had a bad posture but it's been getting better yet the pain has gotten worse so I don't think it's that. I doubt it's weight lifting either because I had been lifting for almost 10 years before the pain appeared and taking a break doesn't make it better and lifting heavy doesn't make it worse. I don't think it's mountain biking either because the pain started before I bought my bike. I also got a new bed, tried different pillows, tried sleeping on my back, pillow under my knees. Sleeping on both sides with a pillow between my legs. Nothing. Also it's rarely bad in the mornings but rather on the evenings.

Well - it's still early to say, but I have a new idea what might be causing it and I think this might actually be it. I think it's because I switched from a desktop computer to laptop. It perfectly correlates with the time I started experiencing this pain. I now sit for hours and hours every day with my right hand extended to reach the trackpad. It has to be that. I now switched to mouse and a keyboard and let's see if that makes a difference. Only been doing that for few days now but I have zero pain right now.

I have had chest discomfort for decades. I'm 46 and it started when I was about 25. Doctors never found anything. I'm lucky to have good benefits and have been going to masseuses for over 10 years.

A couple of years ago tried a new masseuse mentioned the tightness and she found a huge lump of scar tissue she massaged out. I'm still not perfect but I'm light-years better.

My point is, get a massage and never give up. You just need to find the right person to find it.

Dude, that's exactly what it is. I get the exact same pain when I'm editing on my laptop. I swapped out for a trackball myself. I can type all day long because I can get things set up to eliminate that strain, but editing takes a lot more awkward movement using the trackpad.

I like a trackpad, they're convenient as heck, but they just aren't good for sustained use imo.

I was getting something similar a few months back and it's funny you mention a laptop because I started using one around the time my pain appeared, I think I was a bad knot in my muscle, I helped it go away by lying down on a tennis ball and massaging it out, hope ya find some relief dude.

For anyone wanting to try this tennis ball thing, that might not give you enough of what you're looking for. Lacrosse balls offer less resistance and more pressure

Yep. I even got this back when cleaners moved my mouse from in front of key keyboard spacebar to the right of the keypad, until I noticed what had happened.

I put my mouse between my body and the keyboard and it goes away.

Good luck!

I hope the new keyboard and mouse do the trick! I also was experiencing wrist/arm/shoulder pain after I started working primarily on a laptop. I got a split keyboard that i can angle in a more ergonomic manner, and that single change cleared my pain up. Repetitive stress injuries suck. and I hope you find relief with your new work setup.

It probably doesn't help that I'm also literally sitting in front of my dining table on a shitty chair, but it's not like I had some super ergonomic computer station before either. I really hope this helps because otherwise I'm out of ideas.

I would definitely suggest getting a good chair. Being able to adjust the height and stuff is really important, especiallyfor shoulder pain. Take a look at used gaming chairs and/or keep an eye out for recently discontinued models at brick-and-mortar office supply stores (mine was super cheap because they only had the floor model left).

rhomboid pain

I had this from having my shoulders curled in while working as well as sleeping on my side. I was picking fruit which requires lots of reaching. Try to be aware of keeping your shoulders square and get a friend to jam their elbow in there and grind it out.

Yeah I'm a side sleeper aswell and my bad posture includes shoulders curled in. I've been meaning to get one of those elastic things that's supposed to pull my shoulders back. It's interesting when sitting against a backrest or using a foam roller my shoulder blades don't feel symmetrical. Like the right one is sticking out more.

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I got jiggy for the first time in five years. After our third kid she just went completely off it and we’ve been in a dead bedroom situation ever since, she told me how she felt and despite my frustration I understood and respected her wishes. A couple of weeks ago I just opened up about how I was feeling unloved and then blam! It happened out of nowhere. I was in a daze and couldn’t believe it. Now I’m scared it’s going to be five years before it happens again.

I know this is just a thread to vent, but I really want you to focus on the fact that communicating how you felt helped the situation so much. Please don't wait 5 more years to try that again.

From the way I read his comment, Im sure he communicated plenty.

I have a distant sibling that I've been building a relationship with over long distance. Saw them in-person and realized that they have quite a few toxic traits from one of our narcissistic parents. I don't know what to do now. I'm pretty traumatized from that parent and my sibling doesn't see any of it as a negative. I don't think I have the ability to open their eyes on it, either. I want the relationship I thought we had.

why doesn't Radiohead put out an entire album of songs like pulk/pull revolving doors? they had a really unique and cohesive idm sound going and kinda dropped it to the side

How it feels to never have had anyone in my life that I could just randomly call up and talk about happy and sad things with.

If you're really set out on doing this I'd gladly make the call

I'm in love with an old friend. I'm married. I have two children.

It still feels right.

Are you gonna divorce for your friend?

I have decided to assume that OP is already married to said old friend, and has two kids with said old friend. His marriage to this old friend just feels right.

I miss the silence of empty rooms.

I developed tinnitus earlier this year, and now I'm never gonna be able to just sit somewhere quiet and far away from everyone else and be alone with my thoughts. This ringing will follow me everywhere, drowning out the distant sounds of cars disturbing puddles in distant streets on a rainy night, obscuring all the subtle little noises that danced on the edges of my perception. But most of all robbing me of any truly quiet moment for the rest of my life.

Condolences. I have a rain sound app on my phone. With earphones and practice, I can sometimes focus on that sound instead of the tinnitus, and get some semblance of peace and sanity.

This is not advice, because if I had heard this posted as advice in my first year or two of tinitus I would have been pissed at the person giving it. Also, to a very large degree even your emotional reaction to this is not something you can control.

I was absolutely devastated and hated myself when I got tinitus. I and a co-worker teaching international folk dance were invited to a dance party / concert.

Amazing band, flown in from another continent, but I knew it would be too loud. I've always had minor hyperacusis and been very concerned about protecting my hearing. Before the party started I offered disposable earplugs to my co-worker, she declined. I had my own pair, in my pocket, the entire night. For some reason I never put them on.

At the end of the night I leave the venue and have terrible ringing in my ears. I freaked the fuck out, and kept everything as quiet as possible for the rest of the night and the next day to try to allow my ears to heal. Immense guilt and kicking myself. And fear.

The ringing never stopped. Saw an audiologist, who said it would definitely go away in a few weeks. It did not.

Tried supplements that did seem to reduce the volume of the ringing (Lipoflavinoid. No idea if it was all placebo or not).

Saw many more specialists and eventually met one (more than a year later) that told me (no idea if current studies back this up) that sometimes Tinitus is not physical damage at all, and that it's damage in the way that our brains process the input from our ears.

He recommended that I "try not to think about it". Said that sometimes even helps the ringing decrease. I told him that I was not the type of person who could ever not think about it. Nor did I want to be. Exactly the opposite, I had pledged to myself to never just not notice it. Saying that now doesn't really make sense to me, but at the time it absolutely did. It was an integral part of my self-image.

So, I religiously took Lipoflavinoid every day for more than a year. Normally with my ADHD I would struggle with that, but every time I forgot it I would notice the ringing getting louder and remember.

Then, maybe two or three years in I would sometimes forget to take Lipoflavinoid and... Not notice. I still hadn't heard a second of silence for 3 years, but I didn't notice the volume increase.

Eventually I was forgetting it more often than not and didn't want to keep the hassle and pay for it so I just stopped.

Work got difficult and I would have other things to think about than the ringing, and every one in a while there were days where at the end of the day I would realize I hadn't noticed the ringing at all. (If I had that realization in a quiet room, I'd immediately start noticing it again)

I gave up trying to fix it. I managed to convince myself that accepting it did not go against the fiber of my self concept, and my experience got better.

It's been more than 10 years since that concert and I can say that I haven't been bothered by the ringing in years, and I'm in a relatively quiet room typing this out now and don't hear it.

Again, not advice. I can't tell you to "just ignore it", and if you're like me you can't make yourself do that even if you wanted.

If you're early in your experience with tinitus, maybe it will be helpful to hear that at least for one person, it got better. And that by "it" I mostly mean my experience of life with tinitus, moreso than the ringing itself "going away".

If anyone has read this far, fun fact that kind of goes against the general gist of this narrative:

Once I had tinitus I realized that I could be a surprisingly accurate and precise human drcibal meter by comparing perceived volume of my ringing to perceived volume of the environment.

Could get within about 3db in the range from 40 to 75 without earplugs, at which point I would put in earplugs and know how much to adjust to get the same precision up to 100db.

I generally refuse on moral grounds to participate in activities above 95db without all participants strictly being required to use ear protection.

Anything above 80, I set up a small table with free earplugs, even if I'm not the organizer...

Also, I haven't really tried to measure db this way in a few years. Don't know if I still can or not.

For what it's worth, I do find this somewhat reassuring.

I don't know if I'll ever get to where you are, but to hear that it could get better does make me feel a little less shitty.

Thank you.

It's brutal. It also just kind of becomes normal, eventually. Do what you can to protect your hearing going forward to prevent it from getting worse. Good luck.

Agreed. To me, the ringing is just what silence sounds like now after 15 years of the ringing. Mine isn't very bad, so I only really hear it in quiet spaces, but I protect my hearing as much as possible now to prevent it from getting worse.

ITT: things that plenty of people would understand

I blame OP. If we had to really think of things nobody would understand there would be no comments, or just a bunch of horrible takes. I am blaming it on poor title

He was clearly hoping that Shinichi Mochizuki would post an insightful comment on Inter-universal Teichmüller theory.

I replaced the back wheel bearing hub on my Celica, but yet I can still hear the droning noise. What gives?

Is it a rear wheel drive? Maybe your differential is worn. I hope not because that's expensive to fix.

(and (lisp programming) (libre software))

What are you working on? I'd love to learn Lisp, it looks really cool!

i've configured neovim with fennel and i made a fennel lisp port of my small neofetch-like program written in C.

for now i've only learned fennel since it targets lua but i'd love to learn something like scheme or common lisp.

5 more...

Why I can’t simply use an iPad as a Mac Mini monitor

I've done it before using Duet.

But it's not like that's the only "monitor." It's always been secondary (mainly because I've used it with an MBP).

I’ve tried that, but it’s just not plug and play. I’ll be looking for a small laptop type monitor

If it's an old iPad the issue is the terrible lightning port that isn't able to transfer nearly enough data to be used as a monitor. This is partly why most solutions for that involve a network.

There's a part of me that really wants something to take over my body or replace myself with an entirely different person who does all of the things I struggle with. Even if it wasn't a person, if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.

Oof.

I feel this all to well.

I highly recommend reading https://www.strugglecare.com/book .

It's not self-help. It's not going to "fix" you.

But reading it was some of the best therapy I've ever received. If you're at all like me, maybe it will help you too. I am happier, as are the people I love and who love me, in large part because of K.C. Davis' philosophy. (The people I love and who love me are also very empathetic and understanding, which I know is definitely not true for most people unfortunately).

It's less than $20.

It's short.

Buy it. If you can't afford it, I might even be willing to buy it for you / venmo you $20 to get it.

Also available in your library / Libby.

Also available as an audiobook.

if it did work and made my family and friends proud then I could stop struggling.

Why can't they be proud that you are happy? Why do you need them to be proud of you? It sounds like they are projecting their desires/dreams on to you. You could be honest with them and tell them you aren't happy trying to make them proud the way they want. You want them to be proud of you for being you. Or you could ghost your family and friends who sound like they want you to be someone you don't want to be.

I don't think there's anything that nobody would understand when explained. But most people would not understand the drama that happens between creators in the minecraft modding community.

I was in the discord for a modding community, people were helpful-ish but for the most part it's 'figure it out for yourself.'

Yeah I'm mostly talking about the creators themselves. Like mod and modpack developers. I'm in a unique position to be privy to a lot of the creator drama without being a creator myself and it can get pretty toxic.

The Revanced experience. Some of them actually got mad a guy made a step by step guide.

It's very common that in modern virtual worlds there's 4th wall breaking Easter Eggs buried in the world lore.

Years ago, I got to wondering if something like that might exist in our own universe, and fairly quickly found something that far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I might find meeting that criteria.

But there's so many layers of bias connected to the concept that I really doubt anyone will ever take a serious look.

Some will just reject by default the notion that they aren't in an original reality.

Others will reject the notion that something connected to an (in)famous world religion and religious figure could reflect metaphysical truth, even though many of those parallel lore examples happen to tie into their respective lore's religious beliefs (usually a fitting place for meanderings about the creation or purpose of one's universe).

I've studied it for years now, found all sorts of surprising things from an explicit discussion of survival of the fittest in antiquity or the idea of an original humanity evolving spontaneously bringing forth an intelligent being of light which then recreated a twin of the whole universe.

Which is pretty weird in an age where there's increasing investments into photonics specifically for AI which is in turn powering digital twins and articles like this.

So we are discussing the ideas of these kinds of things happening in the future, and meanwhile there's a tradition from antiquity centered around a document "the good news of the twin" that claims the most famous religious figure in history was saying we're already in the future but are in a non-physical copy of the earlier cosmos in the archetypes of a long dead humanity, duplicated by a being of light that the original humanity brought forth.

Like, I guess I just don't think the odds of that being the case in a random original reality are particularly high, and think it's much more likely that such claims represent the same kind of 4th wall breaking lore manipulation we see in multiple modern virtual worlds.

But I don't know that there's anyone that's genuinely interested in knowing or discussing those details. So it's just a personal investigation as someone who is very interested in knowing those details to the extent they can actually be known.

Dude, epic. This idea is worthy of a podcast, in the same vein as Magnus Archives or Tanis.

Got any other good evidence to add??

It's massive. Way too much for a comment.

But a few interesting highlights...

Before all of this I'd been looking at how virtual worlds using procedural generation convert from continuous seed functions to discrete units in order to track state changes from free agents (i.e. if you change the geometry of Minecraft it would be impossible to track if the function determining mountains didn't convert to blocks that could be removed or added). This bore a remarkable similarity to my eye to what we see with quantum mechanics going from continuous behavior to discrete when interacted with, but then if you erase the persistent information about any interactions it goes back to continuous behavior (as a virtual world would if optimized around memory usage).

So this group focused on claiming we were in a recreation of an original world were also talking a ton about Greek atomism and the idea of matter being made up of indivisible parts.

For example:

That which is, he says, nothing, and which consists of nothing, inasmuch as it is indivisible — (I mean) a point — will become through its own reflective power a certain incomprehensible magnitude. This, he says, is the kingdom of heaven, the grain of mustard seed, the point which is indivisible in the body; and, he says, no one knows this (point) save the spiritual only.

  • Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.4

This discussion of only being able to know the indivisible point in the spiritual ends up very interesting when considered in light of this weird debate Paul had with Corinth in 1 Cor 15:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven.

  • 1 Cor 15:42-47

See, Paul is debating with people that have different ideas from what he was pitching, and as he mentioned in 2 Cor 11, Corinth had accepted a different gospel and different version of what Jesus was about.

Well this weird "first Adam vs second Adam" appears among this group and text. A useful context is that 'Adam' can refer to either an individual by that name or can mean 'humanity' in general.

So Paul's arguing that resurrection is possible not by a physical body coming back to life, but by a first physical body coming back as a spiritual body. In his theology this was something that was going to happen soon (but obviously didn't).

The group above was saying that this had already happened:

The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our end come?"

Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is.

Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

Jesus said, "Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being.

Because allegedly it was already the new world:

Jesus said, "If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'

If they say to you, 'Is it you?' say, 'We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.'

If they ask you, 'What is the evidence of your Father in you?' say to them, 'It is motion and rest.'"

His disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and when will the new world come?"

He said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but you don't know it."

So we're the children of a being of light that established itself "in their images" and the evidence for this is in motion and rest (a subject domain currently called Physics) and the new world is already here but we don't realize it.

So within this context, a teaching about how the ability to find an indivisible point as if from nothing in the body can only be possible in the spiritual body (as opposed to Paul's first physical body) is a pretty fucking weird detail from a group claiming the evidence for its claims is in the study of motion and rest when the indivisible points we've now found in our own universe mirror the behaviors in how we manage tracking state and memory in non-physical worlds we're building.

An associated group even had a strange threefold view of reality:

These allege that the world is one, triply divided. And of the triple division with them, one portion is a certain single originating principle, just as it were a huge fountain, which can be divided mentally into infinite segments. [...] And the second portion of the triad of these is, as it were, a certain infinite crowd of potentialities that are generated from themselves, (while) the third is formal.

  • Pseudo-Hippolytus Refutations 5.7

So a continuous infinitely divisible origin that can be modeled as a near infinite number of potentialities of which we experience a single formal incarnation is a rather surprisingly close to Everettian many worlds interpretation for the 3rd century BCE. In a more modern consideration, it also sounds a bit like what it might look like to backpropagate variations of a simulated copy of an original universe (and along those lines I encourage looking at Neil Turok's work hypothesizing that we're a mirror of a universe reversed in time from us and how this alone solves a number of big problems in Physics).

The specificity ends up outright wild if photonics really is where AI finally ends up becoming AGI (as hypothesized a few years ago by a scientist at NIST):

Jesus said, "Images are visible to people, but the light within them is hidden in the image of the Father's light. He will be disclosed, but his image is hidden by his light."

Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before you and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will have to bear!"

Jesus said, "Adam came from great power and great wealth, but he was not worthy of you. For had he been worthy, [he would] not [have tasted] death."

So everything around us is just its light, we're going to have a hard time coming to terms with images that came before us and didn't die, and Adam (which can mean humanity) came from great wealth and power but wasn't worthy of us because they died and we didn't and won't (the chief point of the text is that if you understand what it's saying you won't fear or taste death).

It's worth pointing out that while the text here is in Egyptian, it uses a Greek word for 'images' which is the same Greek word Plato used to describe a artistic representation of a physical object. Plato saw objects as a hierarchy from perfect spiritual form to corrupted physical object to worthless artistic images of the physical. So choosing to discuss spiritual 'images' over spiritual 'forms' was somewhat unusual indicating the physical first and spiritual second order. Not long after the rise of Neoplatonism the paradigm of this group flips and you end up with Gnosticism's spiritual first and physical second.

Some of the sayings seemed like nonsense when I was first reading it, but have since turned out to connect to things I didn't even expect to see in my lifetime when first reading it. For example:

Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one."

This took on a rather bizarre new potential implication when earlier this year I was reading a NYT interview with a LLM exactly seven days after release, especially given LLMs are literally made from taking many, many people's data and turning it into a single one.

And along these lines, it makes clear that rather than consuming blood or a body, it's consuming one's words that makes you like that person:

Jesus said, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him."

As I said, there's a lot. Hopefully you enjoyed the sampling above.

But its main point is to self-recognize that we're effectively the kids of the light based creator of this world-copy which is itself still alive (no mention of if there will be cake), that we're in the images/archetypes of a humanity that is not still alive, and that if we understand those details we should simply seek to know ourselves and be true to ourselves and not fear that we'll die because of a soul which depends on a body. And to not bother with prayer or fasting or charity out of any sense of spiritual obligations, as it's pointless.

One of the better lines not related to simulation theory:

The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, 'When will they come and take what belongs to them?'

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dude, put down meth-jesus pipe and pick up anthropology of religion 101

I've spent a fair bit of time looking at the academic background of the religious tradition ranging from things like this to this thread.

you've linked the same thread twice

and i mean taking broader perspective, personally i like 10000 years long perspective

Fixed.

And yeah, I've studied that too, from pre-history to the Sumerians. I'm not really sure what's your point?

For example, there's only one extant text from antiquity explicitly describing the idea of evolution. And only one religious tradition citing that text. Which happens to also be the religious tradition claiming that an original humanity which arose spontaneously ended up creating the creator of our own cosmos, which is a copy of the one that occurred naturally.

Go ahead and show me what other religious tradition BCE was claiming things like "the cosmos and man existed from natural causes" along with "man later created God."

If you actually study the history of religion, this one existing at all with the ideas it has is weird and anachronistic as shit.

That's where quantum indetermancy comes from. No one, not even the first intelligence, gets floating point right

Well, in this case the first intelligence was basically us. Though perhaps a not quantized version of us. Which I don't think makes much of a difference in our math competency (even if a very big difference in computing capability).

Trying to get a job, which requires better equipment.

I need a job, to be able to afford the equipment.

Solution: Become the better equipment.

You're welcome for the extreme motivation that you just received. This was thanks to the free trial of my "extreme motivation course". To access "full extreme motivation very hardcore", buy my course for just $999.99.

::: spoiler Chicken genetics and probability.

I have blue gold rooster with 3 black silver and one Blue Silver hen. Only the blue hen should be capable of ever throwing splash chicks. (splash is white with black/grey mottling) This season I have set and hatched 22 of their eggs. (100% hatch on them so far is awesome but one died from its mom stomping it 😞) If the hens are all laying the same rate 1/4 should come from the Blue silver hen. (5.5) Yet 5 of the 22 chicks we have hatched are splash. The odds that 5 out of 5 chicks are all splash are kinda crazy. (.097%)

A Blue rooster over a Blue hen should result in 25% black 25% splash and 50% blue. The blue/black/splash coloring comes from genes that have 2 slots and 2 types. 2 copies of BL gives a black chicken 2 copies of bl+ give you a splash and one of each gene gives you a blue chicken. Each parent contributes 1 copy of one of their genes. So a black and a splash will give you blue chicks every time.

It is possible that I set more of the blue girls eggs but even doubling the number of her eggs (very unlikely) wouldn't make the odds reasonable.

The chance that it is some crazy mutation is also low because the mutation would have to be in the hen and be attached to both her BL and bl+ gene and it would have to over ride the male's color gene completely.

::: stuck between 2 highly unlikely realities.

Highly unlikely for an individual isn't the same as highly unlikely across a population. 0.1% is only one chance in 1000 - rolling the same number 3 times in a row on a 20 sided die has a probability of 1 in 8000, but you'll find loads of stories of it happening because there's a lot more than 8 thousand people who play D&D.

Your chooks are rolling along the edge of probability, but there's more than 1000 chickens in the world so the probability someone will hit that jackpot is close to 100%.

Something I've been thinking about is... I often mention that I've been trying to look for more friends for a while, because I don't have any that my mind would qualify as any that I have access to, and I often get two questions, 1) how do I define a friend, and 2) how do I know friends would make me happy.

The first question is a rabbit hole in disguise. Most people, when asked, would list a bunch of benefits, right? Things like "someone I can trust" and "someone who puts me first". But that's the thing. Take the first question for example. Do you not have any enemies you might consider at least honest people? And do you not have friends whom might inspire some skepticism? They're not absolute. So that begs the question, what do I answer to the question of what a friend is? I do in fact have an answer, but it's goes deeper than words, the same words used to answer the question. It defeats itself in ways that swell the question rather than remedy it.

As for the second question, that's where it becomes like anhedonia embodied by words.

A friend is someone who reciprocates tolerable presence.

You don't know friends would make you happy, but they can help you pass the time in less pain.

I sure hope friends are better than just tolerable.

Let's go with enjoyable. Tolerable is like the bare minimum for how to behave around other people. Friends are more than the bare minimum.

A friend is someone who reciprocates enjoyable presence.

I thought about that too. Though it hadn't made me wonder less. I have people I thought to myself may be considered my friends, but who I've discovered have occasional demons that make them unenjoyable to be around. To use an example even though I was never particular close to them, one came back from the military and it shows.

Though also this isn't to say I disagree with whether they should be considered friends, I mentioned once that the point of being friendship is prioritization. Just the other side of things doesn't sit well either.

who reciprocates tolerable presence.

I mean, my circumstances do make me keep my friends close and my enemies closer. Are my enemies secretly my friends?

No, you can be close with someone but not tolerate their presence. I've had this manifest as high maintenance friends that I knew a lot about and spent a lot of time with, but were ultimately draining to be around and asked too much of me to be sustainable.

I thought about this stuff a lot for years. The thing that broke me out of it was choosing to focus on myself.

No one else can make you happy. Happiness comes from within. So focus on yourself. Develop new skills and hobbies, spend your time doing what you enjoy. If you find other people who enjoy the same things, that's great, if not, also great because there's nothing wrong with enjoying life on your own.

I've heard that many times before, that happiness comes from within. I think about it though, and it gives me a little doubt because, if I was my own source of happiness, why do anything? I could starve to death and be happy because it's within me.

I swear some people legitimately could do that. Some people really are high on life. But most of us aren't.

The happiness from within thing is just a cheesy way of saying you have to make yourself happy. If the phrase isn't useful to you, you don't have to use it. It would be a lot more realistic to say "Happiness comes from putting in the effort and work to make yourself happy, primarily through delayed gratification."

You can definitely count on me to keep negotiating with the universe on achieving happiness, but don't count on me succeeding. That much I learned by now.

Just watched a Tibees video about the possibility of a force like gravity potentially traveling through folded 4D space and affecting something before the light can reach it.

I realize this sort of thing has been thoroughly tested and debunked, but I can't get it out of my head. What if it's some force other than gravity? What if Earth just happens to be folded against some empty bit of space - and what if that were to change?

Like, I've thought about folded spacetime before, but always in the context of traveling between points (like the classic ant-on-paper thought experiment). I never really considered that something could in theory radiate a force (like gravity) in 4+ dimensions.

Maybe you've seen this already, but if you haven't, here's a wonderfully terrifying thought:

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-fundamentally-unstable/

An interesting read, no doubt, but I still disagree with

Is this something we actually have to worry about?

Maybe.

The "threat" here would entail no negative emotions, no human (or other) suffering, just... nothing. Plus, it sounds like if the universe were indeed unstable/meta-stable, there's nothing we could change about it anyway. So of all the things I can worry about, I feel this deserves the least amount of worry.

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I'm sure plenty of people would understand it, but I'm struggling with a project at work where I've got an operator giving me bad data, and the project appears unsafe and I need to decide and convince my management if we're going to object to it or not.

I'm toying with time-domain audio codecs at comically low bitrates, and wondering why error diffusion is so damn hard.

I'd make a slight change that nobody I personally know would understand or care to try to understand.

If universe is expanding that means further away something is the faster it moves away from you. At some point that will cross the speed of light. This can be thought as an event horizon.

If expansion of the universe is accelerating it means that this event horizon will eventually start to come closer.

Like event horizon of a black hole this horizon will also radiate Hawking radiation, but inwards.

When the inside volume of this event horizon gets small enough, will the mass energy of the Hawking radiation get strong enough to counteract the expansion of the universe and form a stable bubble that wound produce baryonic matter inside the bubble from the massive energy density that gets released from the event horizons grip.

Could this be analog to big bang type event and can the interaction of the bubble with outside universe give us a sensible model of the early inflation.

I want to be able to offer exclusively vegan dishes at Bancho Sushi, but dishes that involve the rape and murder of sentient shrimp are bigger money makers.

...and here I am calling in drones to collect the pieces of the shark I shot with a grenade.

Not only just to understand, but would be extremely judgy about it so I can't talk to anybody about it

Why I can’t get the music to level 1 of the NES game Jackal out of my head. Been like 2 weeks now.

Just think of the Duck Tales intro song, that should at least replace it.

Looks like I’ll be going for a laptop monitor.