4 ms·

I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem

by arjie 3mo ago

I live in San Francisco and life is quite nice. There are many obvious ways that this city is shitty that I’ve noticed other civilizations don’t have a problem with but also I’d say the overall experience is positive. Neither offline nor online reality is defacto unpleasant. As far as the disillusionment sense, I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. The key, for me, is to curate one’s feed. On HN, for instance, I usually block the majority of repetitive boring posters using a chrome extension. The majority of these people have very low context sensitivity which annoys me. There are also abrasive people or generally sad people, both groups of which are safely blockable because they have a comment style where P(token|context) = P(token). There is no surfeit of humans on the Internet and no surfeit of interesting information. Almost all humans can be safely excluded from my feed and I can still get information. By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost?

marginalia_nu 3mo ago
> By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost? Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.
- arjie 3mo ago
  Thank you. Emailed!
johnnyanmac 3mo ago
>I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. Well, it's subjective so I can't speak for you. But personally I want to try and find the good in people and in life. And I see a lot of good. But that doesn't mean I'm blissfully unaware and won't notice (and call out) the fact that jobs are on the down and down in my country, we're looking at a generation who cannot get their foot in the door whatsoever, that leadership in the country is actively taking a wrecking ball to society, that prices for everyone working is rising faster than their paychecks, and so much more. I personally don't actively look for misery. I just can't keep ignoring being punched in the face constantly, even if I'm not going to blame any one person for the punch. Especially after 3 years of trying to find full time career placement in times where I would at worst spend 3 months job searching.

by arjie 3mo ago

marginalia_nu 3mo ago

> By the way, I know you from your search engine. This might be an out there question but do you offer your search index as a downloadable structure? If so, how much does that cost? Shoot me an email and we can discuss, but the index is somewhere in the ballpark of 20 TB, so there are some quite significant logistical obstacles.

arjie 3mo ago
Thank you. Emailed!

johnnyanmac 3mo ago

>I think that’s an active selection bias. I think people (including me) like to feel angry and so we go out there looking for and finding people who will give us that. Well, it's subjective so I can't speak for you. But personally I want to try and find the good in people and in life. And I see a lot of good. But that doesn't mean I'm blissfully unaware and won't notice (and call out) the fact that jobs are on the down and down in my country, we're looking at a generation who cannot get their foot in the door whatsoever, that leadership in the country is actively taking a wrecking ball to society, that prices for everyone working is rising faster than their paychecks, and so much more. I personally don't actively look for misery. I just can't keep ignoring being punched in the face constantly, even if I'm not going to blame any one person for the punch. Especially after 3 years of trying to find full time career placement in times where I would at worst spend 3 months job searching.