• 10 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • What do you mean you “cannot scream”, exactly? In what way does the closest approximation to a “scream” you can do not qualify as a “scream”? Just pitch specifically? Can you sing higher than you can “scream”?

    Or if it’s not specifically the pitch, and if it’s something you’d like to change, I might suggest you look into… well… learning. Search for “fry scream” on YouTube. It’ll take some practice, but it’s certainly a way to scream. And as a bonus, learning to do it “right” can avoid straining or injuring your voice.




  • First thing to try is to get your sleep hygiene straight.

    No screens for an hour before bed, get your room dark (no night lights, light-blocking windowshades, and cover the lights on any electronics in your room) and quiet (ear plugs can help in a pinch), quit caffeine, get some sunlight in the morning (optimally before 10:00 AM), get some physical activity during the day, don’t eat for a couple of hours before bed. It also couldn’t hurt to do some meditation before bed during that hour of no-screen time.

    That meditation will probably particularly help if the reason for your insomnia is stress.

    (And try not to be overwhelmed by the above list. Any one or two items in that list that you do will probably help quite a bit. And try to think of this as a “long game” of incremental improvement.)

    If that all doesn’t work, you could try adding CBD maybe an hour or so before bed. Melatonin might be a tempting option, but be careful with it. Melatonin doesn’t stay in the bloodstream all that long, so melatonin supplements tend to be big doses in an effort to try to keep it in your bloodstream longer which… kinda works maybe, but not as well as you might hope. The result tends to be that you fall asleep quickly, wake up in like 4 hours unable to get back to sleep, and then are resistant to your body’s natural melatonin for a night or two. If you’re going to do melatonin, spend the extra money on time-release melatonin. The company “Life Extension” has a 750mcg 6-hour time release melatonin that is a good one to try if you do go that route.


  • There are many dimensions to each of our senses. Just taking super-vision as an example, would that involve seeing very small things, seeing things at great distances, seeing through things or around corners, seeing more colors and/or wavelengths of light, seeing in 360°, seeing more subtle things than others see (like being able to see when someone’s heart rate increases), processing what you see quicker (for quicker reactions), photographic memory, seeing things others can’t (like magnetic fields or temperature), greater “frame rate”, seeing in the dark, a HUD with information display, seeing ghosts, or something else entirely I haven’t even thought of?




  • Not sure I fully understand the question. Is this about parents trying to push their adult children to live their life a certain way?

    If so, I’d say children should be allowed to exercise as much self-determination as can reasonably be afforded from pretty much toddlerhood, of course taking into account the danger of physical harm or lasting trauma. (Like, let your kid be interested in art at 3 years old and allow them to pursue it seriously as they get older even if you’re a 4th-generation army brat. But don’t let them jump off your roof at 3 to see if they can fly.) It’s not so much that parents should “hold on” until a magic age is reached at which point they should “let go”. If the parents are trying to get their 30-year-old son to quit being gay, or pursue a career in law rather than performance arts, or not play video games, or whatever, they probably weren’t allowing for age-appropriate levels of self-determination when the kid was under 10 either and his raising could likely be described as an enmeshment sort of situation.

    If that wasn’t the nature of the feud at all, then who knows who if anyone might have been in the wrong. Like, telling your 30-year-old son to quit stealing money from their 85-year-old grandmother is probably entirely appropriate.






  • My grandmother who raised me always did the “I don’t have any money on me” thing. And I always followed suit until pretty recently. But I got to thinking more about it and eventually concluded that I should always keep a $20 or two in my pocket ready to give.

    And then the pandemic came along and I didn’t go out much. And now I work from home full time and don’t often go anywhere that I’m likely to run into folks asking for money. But I have put that into practice a few times and felt good about it.

    There was a woman with a sign standing outside the post office. I ignored her on the way in with the intention of giving her a $20 on the way out. And I made good on that intention. It was scary, but only because I’m kindof an agoraphobe. Heh.

    I do have the means to go handing out $20s willy-nilly. And of course with how infrequently I’m likely to pass folks asking for money out in the world, the rate at which I give is tiny. But I do give when that situation comes up.

    I’m not saying you should give $20s out to folks. But if your financial situation is stable, I’d say you should give what you can in those situations.

    And the fact that these thoughts/questions/concerns are rattling around in your mind are probably a sign of personal growth, so good on you for that.



  • A lot of what we take for granted in software now days was once considered “AI”. Every NPC that follows your character in a video game while dynamically accounting for obstacles and terrain features uses the “A* algorithm” which is commonly taught in college courses on “AI”. Gmail sorting spam from non-spam (and not really all that well, honestly)? That’s “AI”. The first version of Google’s search algorithm was also “AI”.

    If you’re asking about LLMs, none. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamned one. LLMs are a scam that need to die in a fire.