What does "being yourself" even mean? Obviously not "acting the exact same way you act when alone", since this would be impossible/weird/rude/illegal but also not "acting intuitively without overthinking", since the socially anxious person's intuition is to run away.
You know the meme that goes: "Be yourself. No, not like that."
It is possible for someone to have a goal of changing themselves into a person who can fit in socially, and be effortlessly comfortable while doing so. After building the underlying skills, they know how to navigate social situations well enough to intuit how much honesty and revealing is appropriate for a given situation, and can roll back "fake it until you make it". They can accept surmountable social penalties for the comfort of less self-filtering and chance to have more meaningful connections.
"Be yourself" means to change yourself, and then stick the landing.
That phrase is simply inaccurate. Your "self" needs to care less about opinions of others, and it should not be scared of making mistakes. "Be yourself" is typically parsed as "do not try to be someone other, do not try to be like movie actor".
> not "acting intuitively without overthinking", since the socially anxious person's intuition is to run away.
Yes, it is exactly that, but instead of focusing on "acting intuitively", focus on that "without overthinking". Overthinking is the problem to be solved. "thinking just enough" is the optimal target.
"being yourself" means choosing to believe that the you that is true is competent and capable of growth while the awkwardness is a temporary barrier between that is not reflective of your true nature.
I don’t mean like being “authentic” or whatever that means. In this conversation “being yourself” means literally you existing in that moment in your body.
I can’t tell you specifically what being “yourself“ means. But I can absolutely tell you that if you panic when you meet a stranger that you are not centered in your own experience. Your mind is elsewhere. You don’t know this new person, so all of the panic in the situation is panic that you brought with you from the past and is not relevant to the current scenario
For whatever reason your body believes that the stakes are very high. They might be, but even if they were, wouldn’t it be more adaptive to face the situation with the level head? Most people can do this 100% of the time and I bet that you could get there too
I don’t think most people can do this 100% of the time. I actually think if you can do this 100% of the time you’re probably a zen master.
I think most people over the age of 25 can do this maybe 80% of the time. And most of them can keep it under control enough that they only look a little dysfunctional, the other 20% of the time. (although I definitely know a few extroverts who don’t look dysfunctional, they look like the life of the party – but that’s them being dysfunctional and stressing out and trying to make everyone love them. That’s their 20%.)
This is baffling to hear dude, I literally canvas with 1000s of people before. All these people have no issues interacting with complete strangers in hostile areas withe ease. The amount of people doing this is in the tens of millions, from all walks of life too.
Definitely check out a therapist because this type of thinking isn't only toxic to yourself but it's not how the world really works.
You can blame million years of evolution for your bad life or you can change it right now living in the present moment. It’s fine if you don’t do it right now because later at a future present moment you can still make the choice to be happy. It might take some work but it will never be because of something that happened in the past. It will be something that you do right now. There are no exceptions or escape hatches
These cliches are just annoying to read at this point, everyone has heard this stuff a million times and yet...millions still suffer. If I'm being honest it just comes across as yet another form of bullying when socially well adjusted people say stuff like this to people worse off than them.
I can agree with you while still agreeing with parent poster that it's basically "git gud"-tier bullying.
Very very few orators can successfully pull off "just fix your problems bro" as anything beyond a generic kick in the pants for the people presently predispositioned to be motivated by one.
I regularly bully my close friends into being better people. It just so happens that I fell down the staircase of life much earlier than a lot of people do. I had to do most of my “midlife crisis” thinking in my early 20s because most of my family died and I had to come out as gay without any support.
Now that I’m in my 30s I have the joy of helping my friends along on this journey called life. Sometimes people just need a gentle nudge up the staircase. Sometimes they need to be carried against their will
I agree it can feel frustrating and inactionable but it's not bullying, it's a thoughtful well-meaning response. Actually if it makes you feel bad it's a signal it may be worth contemplating more.
That approach doesn't work for everyone. Everything you say could be correct, but if the person thinks their feelings are not being listened to, there is a chance they still won't take your advice.
One of my therapists said it was normal in her circle for people not to get onto someone's case if they're mentally unwell and have chores piling up, because it makes sense they don't have as much effort to give to all aspects of life. At the time I didn't understand this statement, because up until then my only contacts were people who, although they didn't go as far as "bullying" me into compliance, had told me in effect that how I felt about my life was irrelevant to whether or not I was fulfilling every single one of my adult responsibilities. What ultimately worked for me wasn't those contacts who said there were no excuses, but my therapist who decided not to frame my decisions in terms of "excuses".
For me this kind of thing hurts because:
1. There's not any room for compassion or slack. I'm not talking about people who take advantage of others' goodwill. Even if you try to help with this "no excuses" mentality, the other person could start to worry if the next inadvertent slip-up or setback counts as an "excuse" they'll be looked down upon for. This kind of thought will linger and reduce the effectiveness of the intervention.
2. Your feelings aren't listened to, or if they are it's only at a level superficial enough to obtain compliance. This is bad enough on its own. What might not be obvious is if the person has had a life marked by repeated instances of their feelings being shut down or not listened to, especially in childhood, this approach only backfires that much harder. These are emotional patterns that have been established in critical periods/over a long period of time that are being relieved at a much higher intensity than the average population. And most importantly, you can't know for sure if something like this applies until you get to know the person better, which is why a lot of one-off prescriptive advice towards strangers is ineffective.
3. The advice-giver is often successful/came out of hardship themselves, so by being looked down upon as irresponsible it gives the impression that you're being excluded from the in-group of mentally well/recovered people. Avoiding exclusion from a group is one of the biggest sources of strife today, as modern politics and social media indicate. And being mentally stable is often one of the most important groups to be included in for people who know they're depressed, so it hurts even more.
That’s all excuses. I’m not saying it’s right to bully someone who’s in the depths of depression. But the depression isn’t gonna fix itself and it certainly won’t fix itself because of something that happened in the past
i don't know what it takes to get out of depression, but "it isn't going to fix itself" doesn't contradict that the depressed person can't get out of it on their own. it's like telling someone stuck in a hole to stop whining because they are not going to get out of the hole as long as they do nothing. that's true, but they are also not in a position to see a way out, or may simply not be able to get out without help.
as i said, i don't know what it takes, but i do think that compassion, patience, and recognition of efforts and absence of any hint of blame by others are part of it.
Know thyself. The first step in being your better self. This pithy piece of advice has been repeatedly given throughout history no doubt predating its being chiseled onto the Temple of Apollo around 2500 years ago. Humanity probably has no better advice. Although "Never trust a fart" is a close second.
Nice, I had no idea that stat() every 1 ms is so affordable. Aparently it takes less than 1 μs per call on my hardware, so that's less than 0.1% cpu time for polling.
"Syscalls are slow" is only mostly true. They are slower than not having to cross the userspace <-> OS barrier at all, but they're not "slow" like cross-ocean network calls can be. For example, non-VDSO syscalls in linux are about 250 nanoseconds (see for example https://arkanis.de/weblog/2017-01-05-measurements-of-system-...), VDSO syscalls are roughly 10x faster. Slower than userspace function calls for sure, but more than affordable outside the hottest of loops.
Filesystem stuff tends to be slower than average syscalls because of all the locks and complicated traversals needed. If this is using stat instead of fstat then it’s also going through the VFS layer - repeated calls likely go through the cache fast path for path resolution but accessing the stat structure. There’s also hidden costs in that number like atomic accesses that need to acquire cache line locks that are going to cause hidden contention for other processes on the CPU + the cache dirtying from running kernel code and then subsequently having to repopulate it when leaving all of which adds contended L3/RAM pressure.
In other words, there’s a lot of unmeasured performance degradation that’s a side effect of doing many syscalls above and beyond the CPU time to enter/leave the kernel which itself has shrunk to be negligible. But there’s a reason high performance code is switching to io_uring to avoid that.
Oh cool, so using io uring plus pragma data version would actually beat stat on Linux holistically speaking? The stat choice was all about cross platform consistency over inotify speed. But syscalls overwhelm can be real.
“Beat” is all relative. It depends on load and how frequently you’re doing it, but generally yes. But if you’re doing io_uring, you may as well use inotify because you’re in the platform specific API anyway as that’s the biggest win because you’re moving from polling to change detection which is less overhead and lower latency. Inotify can be accessed by io_uring and there may even be cross-platform libraries for your language that give you a consistent file watcher interface (although probably not optimally over io_uring). Whether it’s actually worth it is hard as I don’t know what problem you’re trying to solve, but the super lowest overhead looks like inotify+iouring (it also has the lowest latency)
If you're interested you can use kqueue on FreeBSD and Darwin to watch the inode for changes. Faster than a syscall, especially if all you need is a wakeup when it changes.
Small correction on ambiguous wording - syscalls do not evict all your stuff from CPU caches. It just has to page in whatever is needed for kernel code/data accessed by the call, but that’s no different from if it was done in process as a normal function call.
Depending on implementation details of your CPU and OS, the syscall path may need to flush various auxillary caches (like one or more TLBs) to prevent speculation attacks, which may put additional "drag" on your program after syscall return.
Correct but you’d also still have that drag just from the kernel dirtying those caches in the first place.
But I was clarifying because the wording could be taken as data/instruction cache and there generally isn’t a full flush of that just to enter/leave kernel.
Come on, it's not hard to come up with this idea. And it's not even true, model trained on clothed children and nude adults wouldn't know how children's genitals look like.
I don't understand, what's so fundamentally wrong with this form of insider trading? Is the accusation that it makes degenerate gambling unfair? Is it necessary for degenerate gambling to be fair? The gamblers don't seem to care.
because the long term outcome is that truth will start to be defined by money. There's already been tales of journalists being harassed to change stories in order for over-leveraged betters to win polymarket bets.
I HIGHLY recommend going onto a sports subreddit match thread during a match and seeing what people say, versus the post match thread, a few hours after the match. The difference in tone is striking. While some people are probably just passionate, I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
> People who are "passionate" about sports have always been the most aggressive and vulgar.
Sure but I can't help but wonder if many of them have money riding on the games which makes their anger much more understandable. Perhaps those you grew up around were also having a bit of a flutter.
Oh, for sure, I don't doubt that at all! My only point is causality. I do not agree that it's betting companies fault (whether they are on-chain or not). If there weren't ways to bet, these people would invent them.
Agreed. I just personally think advertising gambling should be illegal. Obviously there's so much vested money that its hard to shift given that it props up a lot of sports revenue today. However we learned the horrors of tobacco advertising and I can't see why we shouldn't learn the same lessons about gambling. It can never be illegal because the black market would be worse, but we shouldn't encourage it.
Matt Levine pointed out in a past article that the real danger of insider trading are company insiders being incentivised to damage the company to make a quick buck.
> insiders being incentivised to damage the company
I'd like to emphasize that this incentive doesn't have to be an accidental find by the insider either: The "market" can end up facilitating anonymous crowd-sourced bribery by enemies or competitors, who create the potential for profit knowing that eventually an insider will take the other end of the implied deal.
Every time I see someone dismissing these kinds of issues--especially someone whose salary depends on not-understanding it [0] --I imagine how their tune would change if the shoe was on the other foot. For example, if someone created a "prediction market" where people could anonymously bet on unusual deaths or serious injuries of... prediction-market executives.
Artificially influencing a stock's price is illegal by itself, and there's probably about a half dozen other charges that could be tacked in this scheme, possibly including extremely serious ones like wire fraud which gets tacked on pretty much every crime involving digital tech.
Maybe there should be a maximum betting limit the same way there should be an election contribution limit — let's say something like 10x the federal minimum wage or whatever so if you are betting under USD 75.5, it is A ok but once you cross this number, we require public disclosures, no hiding behind LLC, natural persons only, KYC, the whole shebang.
Actually, now that I think about it, let's get rid of the minimum, there should be no minimum, all bets even five cents must be fully disclosed and attributed to natural persons, no hiding behind "corporations are people, my friend" nonsense.
beyond the general idea that we shouldn't normalize gambling, betting on some real-life events is horrid. think about insider trading on a polymarket bet for someone's death.
So, the typical "It's only okay when the elites do it." Although, it's almost certain that such crowdfunding practices will lead to a radical democratization of society as a whole.
Today, any bloody dictator, tyrant, or autocrat continues to kill people en masse simply because society lacks a sufficiently effective tool to guarantee the reliable transfer of funds to one of their henchmen should the issue with him be effectively resolved
EDIT: Oh, I initially thought that you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations but not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. Which is not what I said, I only said (implied) that it's not OK for other people to coordinate assassinations. I made no representation regarding whether I think it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations.
However, what I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more, because... if ordinary people could trade in assassination markets then they would choose to assassinate the government's assassins, and then the government would not react or respond in any way, so then the government would no longer be able to coordinate assassinations, and the general public would stop using the assassination market, and then the problem is solved. Is that right?
> you thought that I was saying that it's OK for the government to coordinate assassinations
Oh no, I think you misunderstood. I'm not saying you think this is acceptable. I'm saying the elites are ALREADY doing it. And you're expressing your extreme disapproval not of the phenomenon itself, but of the hypothetical situation in which not only the elites but also ordinary people would gain access to such tools (which, of course, would also be very illegal and unacceptable. Well, until these terms still exist).
> I now think you're saying is that assassination markets would lead to fewer assassinations rather than more
I think we are rather talking about an increase in the number of assassinations to a level that literally threatens the destruction of human civilization in its modern form. Purely because of the irreversible nature of this tool acquisition by society. It's just that at one point in time, society doesn't yet have access to it, and at another, it has, and now it's everywhere, for everyone, and there's no turning back. The entire planet is living in a new socio-political-economic reality.
But this does not in any way contradict the radical democratization of society.
people like hope. In Dickens era the hope was that you'd discover you were a long lost bastard child of some wealthy aristocratic family. These days, its that you win the lottery.
We shouldn't conflate permitting lotteries which give a lot of people precious hope, with enabling the disease of gambling addiction. Gambling addiction transforms its victims into desperate degenerate messes, who will do anything in order to reverse the outcome of their losses. By popularising gambling on reality (instead of a sandbox like sport) we're creating a future where such people will harass journalists, which further threatens our increasingly precarious relationship with truth.
Because there's pre-existing demand for lottery tickets that provides some plausible deniability for the money-laundering use case. If prediction markets were primarily used to buy insurance against hard-to-avoid expensive events, that's what money launderers would trade in too, in order to blend in.
Instead, most volume is in sports bets. People just like to gamble.
Insider trading by politicians means even more incentives for greedy people to pursue politics.
The system is already very much like that, we should try to go in the other direction, not make it even more attractive for corrupt individuals.
When someone in charge only cares about personal profit, it is only them that will benefit (and a couple of megacorps), to the detriment of millions, and humanity itself (look no further than the current events).
Gamblers do care about losing their shirt. Appified gambling is just remarkably effective at getting humans to keep playing. It'd be one thing if we didn't hook up all of the dopamine feedback loops that we've developed over the past decade to a gambling machine but that's not the world we live in.
But this is not insider trading, beause the insider event IS affected by the behavior of the gamblers. Normally the insider event should be uncorrelated and unknown to the gamblers
"Commonly, the basic functions that are allowed in closed forms are nth root, exponential function, logarithm, and trigonometric functions.[a] However, the set of basic functions depends on the context. For example, if one adds polynomial roots to the basic functions, the functions that have a closed form are called elementary functions."
It's only maths, don't expect things to be so black and white.
I'm not disputing that conspiracy theorists tend to lack rigor but there is a full spectrum of positions between "space is fake" and "one specific extraordinary achievement with high incentive to fake it is fake".
There's indeed a full spectrum of positions in this case, but they are all worthless in the sense that they add nothing to someone's understanding of reality.
You know some people grow up in untrustworthy environments and auto didact their way to something like first principles thinking and depending on things shaking out you might only believe what you've personally seen with your own eyes. And well, earth looks pretty flat in daily life.
What's wrong with comparing the achievements of different sub-ethnicities in Israel? What's wrong with talking about any real phenomena? Is the assumption that he must have a hidden bad-faith agenda?
It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.
> It's against the current ruling dogma to question that human beings are interchangeable cogs that are all ready to be placed into the machine wherever needed.
It’s because the machine is their god. Service to the machine provides your value, and by extension your right to exist. If someone is no longer capable of the serving the machine, they are discard. What that looks like exactly is not pretty
Some people are inherently incapable of proving more value to the machine than they consume. What is to be done with these “extra” people?
Who's they? The subset of politically correct types who reject the idea of universal human dignity and instead tie your moral worth to material output, but still keep insisting that everyone's equal? Honestly I don't think it's a large group.
reply