I was laid off, and only a couple of my former colleagues reached out to me. People I had talked to for years and helped, some significantly, didn't even send me a message.
Consider that at one point, I had put myself out there to ask for more promotions and higher compensation for my colleagues.
I didn't feel particularly offended, but in my next job, I will definitely not help my colleagues as much and will think about myself 99% of the time.
It's disappointing to see grown adults who are so fearful, ungrateful, and reveal themselves to be rather miserable people, but that's the way the world works.
Funny thing is that i had a negative experience helping someone who was laid off. I reached out, offered help, provided excellent reference for them, covid hit and hiring froze for that particular company, followed up a few times, ghosted, never talked again.
It's you last phrase, that's the way the world and people works. It's people with their own troubles, insecurities and character. The most important bit is be yourself. If you are "built" to think and help others, keep doing it. If not, whatever.
I don't think there have ever been any particular incentives to become a full-time writer. Most of us have read articles or books (Graydon Carter's) that have recently talked about the huge sums paid to some journalists 20 or 40 years ago, but the ratio of aspiring writers to well-paid writers has always yielded very high numbers.
It's the same in all creative professions, and even more so for those that grant visibility. I think most would be fine considering this activity as a part-time commitment, instead of chasing something that has little chance of coming true. Of course, you can't be a part-time athlete and aspire to greatness, but I don't think the same applies to writing, for example.
Now, we are in the realm of anecdotes, but the novel “Il Gattopardo,” which I consider to be among the top three Italian, and perhaps European, novels of the 20th century, was written by an amateur who did not even send the manuscript out to be considered for publication. It was discovered after Tomasi di Lampedusa's death by Giorgio Bassani, a talented writer who did not write full-time and who had incredible success with some fantastic novels, such as "Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini" (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).
The post-humous discovery and promotion of previously unknown works by unpopular Authors has always represented a major component in 19th-21st Century Publishing.
John Kennedy Toole is probably the exemplar of this, in that 'A Confederacy of Dunces' was unpublishable during his lifetime, but became the picaresque national narrative after a large push by Walker Percy to get it published a decade after Toole's death. It ended up winning the Pulitzer the following year.
Stoner, a novel by the American writer John Williams, is a lesser known but no less apt example. In 1963 Williams' own publisher questioned Stoner's potential to gain popularity and become a bestseller. It sold fewer than 2000 copies, and was out of print a year later.
After subsequently being discovered and championed by literary luminaries like John McGahern, it was republished and translated into several languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies across 21 Countries. By 2013, the book had achieved international best-seller status. I'd urge anyone with a love for academia, literature, or modern bildungsromans to give it a go. To me it's effectively 'American Gothic - The Novel'
Society's desire for regulation of behavior ebbs and flows.
Not limited to the US:
prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever;
The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation;
Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times.
In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.
I don't know how long people will be willing to pay so much for something that is complex and expensive to develop and test, but extremely cheap to produce, to the point that we are talking about a few dollars a week when buying peptides on the gray market.
In terms of safety, empirically, it seems extremely safe for a molecule with such a strong and reliable effect. I bought some peptides and the most frustrating part of the whole endeavor was buying 5 ml syringes: local pharmacies require a prescription, but I managed to buy them on Amazon.
When something is so easy to produce and distribute, we will have many more people buying peptides on the gray market (cheaper) and syringes on Amazon (faster).
I expect there will soon be a crackdown on the gray market, or at least an attempt at one, but how effective can the government be when no one has ever said, “I can't find cocaine tonight”?
I am referring to the gray market: you buy the peptide in powdered form, reconstitute it using bacteriostatic water, store it in the fridge, and inject once a week. The protocols are well known.
Some people titrate (adjust the dose up every two weeks), others stay at the same dose as the initial one (1-2 mg per week), and some fit people use half of the initial dose (0.5 mg per week). Retatrutide/GLP-3, which has yet to be approved for human use (FDA is expected to give the thumbs up by the end of the year), is used, I'd venture to guess, by millions of people at this point.
I don't think that the "I drink wine because it is healthy", is the main driver of people's drinking--not even the fifth.
After all, I have yet to see a sober person picking up drinking wine because it is good for their health.
Let's have a sober conversation on this: I drink a glass or half a glass of wine most nights because I like it.
I think some people who like wine, would drink less often if they considered it bad for you. But since "it's good" you might as well drink every night.
I have never heard of them, those are the mythical beings nobody has ever seen.
If it were true, the opposite would be likely true as well (I don't like red wine, but I drink if because it is good for my health).
The negative effects one could operate on are putting on weight, not sleeping as well at night, bad breath, sleepiness, but not a fear-mongering article in which it is said that any amount of alcohol increases the risk of dementia.
I am talking about a glass of wine; if the current regime is a bottle of wine a day, the whole equation changes.
It's the same as cigarette taxes, abortion laws, and so on. People claim nobody changes their mind because of it, but statistically the impact is significant.
You cannot compare the cigarette tax to a study saying that even minimal alcohol consumption increases the risk of dementia. If you increase the price of wine 5x, I am sure fewer people would drink, but that's a very wild extrapolation, context-wise, of this conversation.
The same applies to abortion laws: not even in my wildest dreams would I compare their effects on abortion rates to the effects on behavior that the results of the study discussed in this thread would cause.
I guess I was imprecise with my language and did not think about the father-in-law effect. He surely responded extremely quickly to the study just published. However, I would advise waiting for further studies, replications, etc.
Let me rephrase it: I doubt that the results of this study will change the minds of a significant number of people who enjoy drinking a glass of wine every now and then.
It is even more worrying that what is defined here as "growth", and in other contexts can be interpreted as "quality", when absent or reduced, leads to a vicious cycle of ever-decreasing quality over time.
Contemporary novels, especially those depicting modern times, are mostly terrible. I recently read a review of one such modern novel in the Financial Times—-the review was very promising—-and decided to buy and read it. Meanwhile, I am listening to audiobooks of classic, mostly forgotten novels from the last 100 years in my native language.
What a difference! One could say that there is a selection effect at work, and that would be fair, but the prose, ideas, and creativity are of such superior quality in those classics compared to modern novels that I wonder how and why people read them. Some of the classics are certainly dated, but you can still understand their purpose, their vision.
I see the same phenomenon in music and movies, most of which are pseudo-creative works designed to make money in the short term. Movies and music that is quickly forgotten, shared on social media for a couple of weeks and then gone, forever.
Although it may be natural to say “kids these days,” I have the impression that the easiest fruits to pick in terms of creativity have been picked in the last 100-150 years, during which more people have participated in creative fields, and in the end, there is not much else to say or experiment with. I mean, one of the most popular film genres today is the biopic, which often features people who are still alive or have recently passed away. In these films, screenwriters and directors sometimes feel the need to tweak certain facts and timelines to make the whole endeavor a little more creative.
I recently commented on a video in which one of today's most popular singers did not sing during their concert, but simply danced (badly, half-naked) with playback doing 90% of the work. Some were surprised by my astonishment, saying that this is how concerts by these new artists are today. That's the vicious circle: people don't even expect singers to sing anymore.
Technology, on the other hand, continues, at least for now, to push the boundaries.
In the moment, you can be easily mistaken that something is good, or the best even if the marketing team of that something is really going hard at your wallet. But the only way, and they know it too well, to assess quality is to simply...wait and see later.
In fact, I wrote about the selection effect, but that "it was better before" is not holding up in my example, at least the one I had in mind.
Some decades in the past were not particularly good in terms of literary output (I am very familiar with literature in my native language and know much more than average in two or three other languages), but the last decade has been incredibly poor. And I suspect that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find original ideas. As time goes by, the average technical competence of artists almost inevitably increases, but the same cannot necessarily be said for creativity, for example.
>And I suspect that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find original ideas.
That is a bias in itself, as originality should naturally grow with the number of people alive. The best time to catch one in a million ideas should be when we are more and more billions, no ?
No, they are different things. Physicists of today are technically much better than those of 50 years ago; basketball players, soccer players, musicians, they are all better, on average, than their colleagues of decades ago, for obvious reasons.
I was imprecise when using the term "creativity"--what I wanted to say is that the human experience is varied but not infinite. How many more Mission Impossible, special agent, whatever, can be perceived as "original"?
The interesting part of the James Bond movie is who is the next Bond, the costume, maybe the Bond-girl or the location, but the plot is of very little interest; it is all already watched.
I have seen 2,000 kidnappings in movies, one million people dying in all sorts of ways (and never seen a shooting irl), I don't know how many affairs, failed marriages, aliens coming and going I have watched; it becomes increasingly difficult over time to propose plots and ways of narrating that don't evoke a "already seen" feeling.
After the peplum films of the 1950s, there was a hiatus in terms of ancient Rome settings. Then came Gladiator, Rome, and Spartacus, which were exciting. Now, when you watch Gladiator 2, it feels like you've seen it before, at least to me. Maybe if they stopped making these films for a couple of decades, they would become novel again.
The comment is fairly condescending, and I don't think it is up to the standards of HN.
Of course, you may like whatever you want, but if you compare Pink Floyd and Zeppelin to the current landscape, I don't think we find an equivalent quality and vision today. And not because current musicians (outside the playback- and autotune-heavy artists of today) are bad, but because of the hanging fruit I was referring to.
Movies today? Books? I am not finding great quality, but it is possible that, compared to others, I have a more refined palate.
But since we don't know where those false negatives are, we want radiologists.
I remember a funny question that my non-technical colleagues asked me during the presentation of some ML predictions. They asked me, “How wrong is this prediction?” And I replied that if I knew, I would have made the prediction correct. Errors are estimated on a test data set, either overall or broken down by groups.
The technological advances have supported medical professionals so far, but not substituted them: they have allowed medical professionals to do more and better.
However, it is also because, in matters of life or death, as a diagnosis from a radiologist can be, we often seek a second opinion, perhaps even a third.
But we don't ask a second opinion to an "algorithm", we want a person, in front of us, telling us what is going on.
AI is and will be used in the foreseeable future as a tool by radiologists, but radiologists, at least for some more years, will keep their jobs.
It's not true that “you should build your own,” especially in the beginning. There's no need for complex customizations when the student knows little or nothing about the language.
Start with excellent, generic decks already created by others and thank them. You can suspend cards, delete some, add new ones.
Especially in the beginning, it is necessary to eliminate any friction, any reason that could stop the work on the skill (“it's so boring to create my own cards”).
After you know, say, 1k or 2k words, you can think about the next steps.
Lately, I've been listening to audiobooks of books I've read in the past, some of them several times.
I've found it to be a great pastime and a useful exercise: the content is experienced differently; some parts have a different effect when read than when listened to.
I also noticed that, after listening to an audiobook, I pick up certain expressions that I then, without thinking about it, use in conversation, something that I did not notice doing when reading the book.
There is something that Ugo Pirro, the famous Italian screenwriter, wrote in his book "How to write a movie", about the re-, which can also apply to re-reading books:
"The memories of each of us, after all, are transformed, fade and shatter, are redrawn and combined when they collide with the immediate experience according to the philosophies that are embraced, the experiences and emotions that have carved their own interpretative model of existence. So what strikes us today, tomorrow may hide, perhaps overwhelmed by other data recorded by the imagination, and then reappear unexpectedly in a day, a month, a year. The time of imagination, in short, is always another, it eludes chronologies, it relies on disorder"
I didn't feel particularly offended, but in my next job, I will definitely not help my colleagues as much and will think about myself 99% of the time. It's disappointing to see grown adults who are so fearful, ungrateful, and reveal themselves to be rather miserable people, but that's the way the world works.
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