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Demonstrating attributes and competencies is hard?


Whenever I have to do a job application that's like "describe a time when you [demonstrated attribute]", it always feels incredibly difficult. Often, I can't think of a suitable instance. Do people relate? I wonder which of the following are true:

Maybe I just don't have these attributes/competencies, the apps are hard because I'm actually a bad fit?
-- But: sometimes I feel like I do have the attributes but I just can't think of a specific work-related time they came up.

Maybe most other people are better at remembering stuff that has happened during their lives?

Maybe these questions are calibrated for "you've had a 9-to-5 office job" and less so for my mixture of work/academic experiences?


A big part of this is that it feels a bit bullshitty somehow. like it's a very fake form of self-description.

in reply to Amber Dawn

I don't remember ever filling out a job application that asked questions like this, though I've been asked them in interviews. I obviously don't know much about your circumstances, but tbh I'd take this as a slightly bad sign about the place you're applying? Like, this question seems to me like the kind of thing that selects good liars (who can come up with / "adjust" an anecdote trivially) over people who have the property they're looking for (who have to actually sift through their history for something that matches). And so if the org is relying on this question at all, that's a slightly bad indicator about the kind of people who are likely to work there?


Guess what language has the second-largest Wikipedia, behind English.


Latin practice day 1


Ego in ¿Superstimulūs? sum - is that how that goes? probably not.
Ego nōn valeō - had a slightly rough time with a flu+covid shot today after coming off of a cold.
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think I'd want to say 'in Superstimulo' or just 'Superstimulo' (I don't know if you have got to cases yet but ablative seems like the best one? Though also the Romans didn't have social media so you can probably pick whichever you like)


Another cool #hamradio fact is that, since right now we're near a maximum in the solar cycle, around dusk and dawn you can basically communicate directly with any place on the planet. To communicate with daytime places, you use the 10m band, and to communicate with nighttime places, you use the 40m band. The pink speech bubbles on this map show people who reported hearing my 10m signal in the last hour. If I switched to transmitting on 40m, you'd see a similar set of speech bubbles but going east instead of west.

When the solar cycle is in a trough, only the nighttime signals get through.



A slightly horrifying / cool thing I learned from doing #hamradio and in particular the FT8 mode:

Every 15 seconds, thousands of computers let out a wavering, wailing tone into the void. Then there's 2 seconds of silence. And then they do it again. Since they're doing this by sort-of "pretending" to be sending audio signals, you can listen to it: soundcloud.com/vartchcodpiece/…

It sounds kinda like a mashup of whalesong and digital ghostly wailing. Wailsong, I guess.

What are they saying to each other, you ask? They're basically having the same conversation over and over again. I'll tell you how it goes:

"Hi, anybody there? I'm Alice and I live in Appalachia."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I live in Bermuda."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and I hear you really clearly."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I hear you not-so-clearly."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and goodbye!"
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and goodbye!"



First human contact on #hamradio today! Set up a low-signal digital mode called JS8, that basically gives you an extremely long-distance but also extremely slow text chat box (~8wpm). After ~hours trying to get a contact, I ended up texting with a guy in Colorado Springs who's been a ham for 50+ years!
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Ah, sorry. Just a silly comment — if you're limited to 8 words per minute, you need to choose those 8 words with care.
in reply to JP Addison

oh yeah I see - I thought maybe I had said something that might get a "Phrasing!" on Archer 😅


Found here: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1848229979785671003/photo/1


David Gentelman, My Town 7
Found here: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1848230231288529300


From here: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1848239291043815904/photo/1


Feeling mixed on the slutty/poly culture I'm in



in reply to Daniel Filan

Current plan is to buy the Lingua Latina per se Illustrata books and go thru them also listening to scipio martianus' pronunciations of them, but only actually do that if continue to feel like it a few days from now.
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think this would also allow me to more forcefully assert my contention that "Italian" is a woke larp.


a friend just told me about Framework laptops and it seems like a compelling philosophy of laptop design: it's modular and user-serviceable, and indeed they ship it to you in bits with a screwdriver 😅

Curious if anyone here has had any experience with them. Some reports on the internet that they have fan noise / temperature troubles?

in reply to Ben Millwood

I think with these things I often worry that I'm letting the philosophy / aesthetics of the purchase get in the way of the practicality

on the other hand, look I can get a programmable LED matrix embedded in it frame.work/gb/en/products/16-l…

in reply to Ben Millwood

I've used them; they seem roughly on par with an 80th percentile laptop PC, physically/aesthetically. Definitely not as nice as a MacBook or Razer laptop, but similar to a nicer Dell.

Compared to other ideology-driven laptops I've used (System76, Purism), they're much much much nicer.




I've had a pretty fun first week of actually using my #hamradio license! My computer has now talked directly to computers in fifteen countries on four continents! Still working my way up to talking to other humans 😅


Recorded a podcast with Divia while I was staying at her house but there was a glitch and the audio is not recoverable, so you all are never going to know which denomination is right about Christianity.


Early 90's NYT crosswords are built different. I've been working through the earliest Saturday puzzles that are available in the app, and I finally solved one with no assistance, after trying 9 others. I can ~always solve modern Saturdays; I wonder if the difference is more in the cultural context or in the absolute difficulty.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I'm now pretty sure they're harder. I've switched to doing Mondays, which take me twice as long as modern Mondays. I think roughly three to five clues are notably dated in a given Monday puzzle; the rest are basically the same kind of clue as in a modern puzzle, just usually later in the week.


At ProgressCon. Had to help explain to another attendee what a "soyboy" is. I guess that's a good sign?


new #hamradio development: I'm pretty sure that this screenshot indicates that my computer successfully talked to a computer in Japan:


I wonder if I should modify my policy of arriving at airports one hour before departure for domestic flights, shaving down that margin to 50 min or so. I feel like I never brush with missing a flight and I tend to spend a bunch of time waiting around.
in reply to Daniel Filan

Then yeah, seems reasonable – the biggest variance on wait times is typically security, TSA pre cuts that down a lot in most airports, and the rare cases that cause a significant delay there are likely to delay a lot of people, which means a good chance the flight will be delayed as well. And domestic flights are typically pretty easy to reschedule if you miss them, unlike international.

There are caveats if you're at an unfamiliar airport or checking bags, but I imagine you're accounting for those already.

in reply to Daniel Filan

I recently had the unfortunate experience of an unreasonably long pre-check line at Newark airport. There was a lot of "wait, *this* is the pre-check line??” There were even signs advertising that you could skip this line if you get "pre-check clear." Everyone has a fastpass, so they invented a fasterpass.

(I think it would've been ~30-50 minutes of total waiting in the line if I hadn't apologeticly wormed my way up the line, explaining to people that I was about to miss my flight)




I made it to the finals of the Fog of War Chess Championship!




Midnight Sun - Yoshitaka Amano: Icon Aloft (1990)
From this tweet: https://x.com/xe0_xeo/status/1847019755355439221


A Thousand Cranes (full moon detail)
by Kayama Matazō (1927–2004)
Found at this tweet: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1846685050236244376


in reply to Sam FM

I think the thing that happened to my Stardew game is I ended up romancing an NPC because I felt like the game wanted me to, but I wasn't really into it, I just wanted to grow crops. Now I have a girlfriend but I felt bad for stringing her along so I stopped playing the game :P
in reply to Ben Millwood

don't date unless you want to: good advice for Stardew and life in general


does anyone want to play Factorio Space Age with me when it releases next week


Some #hamradio updates:

  1. Because US amateur radio licenses are public and include addresses, you can see a map of everyone with a license. It's way denser than I would have expected in Berkeley:

    And hey, there's @Daniel Filan with his fancy Extra-class license a bit further down on the map!

  2. Today I managed to hear my first trans-pacific signal, from Nauru (a tiny island country 5,000 miles from here). Apparently it's what's called a "DXpedition", where a group of radio amateurs go on holiday in order to help other amateurs check "rare" countries off their lists. Unfortunately from their website, it looks like they're transmitting with more than ten times as much power as I have (or at least they brought equipment for broadcasting at that power level), so this isn't much evidence about whether I'll be able to have a full conversation with them or not.
This entry was edited (6 days ago)


mildly amusing UI hiccup in the Friendica 2FA options menu: github.com/friendica/friendica…

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I like this because it starts of feeling like it might be a joke about weird alphabets, but then falls to pieces in a kind of pleasantly absurd way.


AI Art Turing Test


I enjoyed this!

I got just over 50% correct, ie little better than chance. Clearly I don't know shit XD

Regardless of 'can you/can't you tell', my favourite pictures in this were all AI-generated, including both some I really thought were human, and some I correctly identified as AI.


astralcodexten.com/p/ai-art-tu…

in reply to Amber Dawn

I got 77%

I'm realizing a decent amount of real human art might involve strange out-of-place choices

in reply to kip

Correctly identified as AI: 18

Correctly identified as human: 19

Labeled human as AI: 4

Labeled AI as human: 7

(This might be off by 1 or 2, because 1 or 2 things in Scott's answer key didn't seem to perfectly line up with the test?? I think????)



Calling things unofficial names as a positive practice


in reply to Amber Dawn

Similar incident maybe not known to the Americans: they ran a poll to name a polar research ship, where people could write in suggestions. Someone suggested the name "Boaty McBoatface", and this won by a landslide. However, the powers-that-be boringly decided not to honour this :p (They called the ship RRS Sir David Attenborough)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_Mc…

in reply to Amber Dawn

There's a line in a Dessa song ("Dixon's Girl") that I particularly like:

"There was a snow storm in Jackson
When you and I met
At a club called Saint Sebastian's
But the sign said something different"

Why would a club in Mississippi be unofficially called "Saint Sebastian's" and officially called something else? Makes u think.

(St. Sebastian is the unofficial patron saint of homosexuality.)



Chronotypes as orthogonal to 'what do you feel like at different times of day'


in reply to Amber Dawn

I normally ~ can't get out of bed before 10am without fairly extreme inner violence. But also, my life feels much more wholesome on the rare occasions when I do organically go to bed early and wake up early.
in reply to Chana

More or less? Very rarely (maybe twice in the last five years) I've managed to get on a streak of waking up around 8am, that lasted maybe 5 days.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yeah interesting, I'm somewhat similar, inasmuch as if left without an alarm, I'll tend to get up after 9, maybe later, but I feel better when I get up earlier (usually 7.45-8.30 type of time). I solve this by using the Alarmy app, which has various tricks but the one I use is, I have to run downstairs to scan a barcode to make the alarm stop. This is very annoying and coercion-y in the moment, but I get over it quickly, and I do feel better that way, fall asleep more reliably, etc.


Managed to get my 100ft antenna up the tree! Briefly listened to some old dudes almost a thousand miles away in Vancouver, talking about their radio equipment
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Ben Weinstein-Raun tagged Ben Weinstein-Raun's status with #hamradio


Managed to get my 100ft antenna up the tree! Briefly listened to some old dudes almost a thousand miles away in Vancouver, talking about their radio equipment



I feel like a fun troll for modest epistemology extremists would be: "Wow, you sure seem confident in 'modest epistemology', for someone who isn't viewed as an expert on epistemology. I'm going to adopt the views of the most widely-recognized thinker who seems to have anything to say about this topic"
in reply to Ben Millwood

I mean, sure, but my mind unfairly translates that section into "yeah, you're right, but I can't be bothered to actually change my mind just because of something like that. Don't @ me."

He points out that many popular views are self-defeating, and is like "well surely all these self-defeating views can't be wrong!" But, like, yes they can? And also this is an especially apt case, since the question is directly about what-to-believe! You're not even really going up a meta level.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yeah I don't necessarily buy his counterargument either, just wanted to point out that it has been discussed :P

I guess in fact if you believe in epistemic modesty, deferring to the fact that most people don't believe in it doesn't actually fix your problem, because that tells you to not defer and follow your own beliefs, but then your own beliefs tell you to defer again. It's not just that it recommends that you don't use it, it's actively paradoxical.

I think you and I probably disagree about how much it matters to have an inconsistent / seemingly arbitrary "do epistemic modesty unless it's paradoxical, then don't" rule. I think I can make it sound more reasonable if it's something like "it's surprising if you alone are right while a large number of relevant experts are wrong, so usually reject this thesis, but in some cases this rejection is even more surprising / obviously incorrect, so in that case you have to stick with your beliefs".


in reply to Daniel Filan

There's also a statue of Columbus outside the court, as well as an obviously tilted lamp post. I wonder if they're going for an aesthetic of bad things.

in reply to Daniel Filan

Court houses have this kind of Objective Beauty that I find offputting. I think it's something to do with

1. marble floors are too noisy and squeaky
2. hallways are too echoey, makes you feel exposed
3. not enough windows
4. half the people there are miserable for various reasons

(I expect that people in a supreme court are less miserable than in the average court, but more miserable than in the average office building)



Some ads in Time Square:
- move to Thailand
- Kalshi live Trump vs Harris odds