u/CdrCosmonaut on challenges finding community

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1glkm5y/what_is_going_on_with_masculinity/

It's basically impossible to form meaningful relationships these days.

Everyone lost their "third space." There is work or school, and home. Not too many people go to clubs, or social events anymore. Why would you go out and be uncomfortable when you can be at home, on your couch, and use your phone?

It's cheaper, it's safer, it's easier to stop any interaction that you don't enjoy.

If anyone reading this hasn't tried online dating, go make a profile. Try to approach anyone. Especially as a male. Try to make a friend. Try to get a date.

Interactions are nearly worthless. People barely respond. Bare minimum in effort and time. One sided conversation is the most common conversation.

This all culminates in making each person more and more insular. Everyone is more isolated than ever before. Those ever important relationships are dwindling to nothing at an alarming rate.

Metro prepares to crack down on bus fare evasion

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/metro-prepares-to-crack-down-on-bus-fare-evasion/3775169/

A major fare enforcement campaign is about to ramp up on Metrobus. WMATA has been getting tough on fare evasion on the rails for some time now, but the transit agency says it's now turning its attention to its buses.

More than 70% of bus riders aren't paying the fares right now, Metro officials say.

WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke has a direct message to bus riders: Pay the fare.

"We've heard loud and clear from people. It's something that we are working on. So, starting the week after Thanksgiving, we are going to go after the bus system much more significantly," Clarke said.

Uniformed officers, plainclothes officers, video monitoring, special police and Metro Transit police will all be used in this effort.

Clarke says most of this enforcement will happen without the bus operator getting involved, protecting them from confrontation.

A space station fell to Earth. An Australian boy brought it to San Francisco

https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/the-skylab-race-to-san-francisco-18074888.php

After its launch in 1973, Skylab was a successful observatory and laboratory that saw three separate crews climb aboard to conduct experiments over 24 weeks. But by 1979, with the country’s interest in space already waning, diminished budgets and a delay in construction of a shuttle needed to refuel it, the only solely American-owned space station in history was left derelict, and would eventually fall back to Earth.

While the agency insisted that injuries were very unlikely, it did add that if citizens of any country heard that the space station was falling nearby, they should maybe hide out in the lowest floors of their homes.

Skylab was the size of a three-story house and was expected to break into about 500 pieces upon reentry anywhere in a wide band around the Earth that covered 90% of the population. In late June, NASA said that Skylab would hit around July 10 to 14, but that NASA would only have a two-hour period of notice to pinpoint where it would land after the space wreck pierced the atmosphere.

Optical illusion from Yurii Perepadia

https://www.instagram.com/p/BqVQ1fjBF2E/

The AI Productivity Paradox: Why Aren’t More Workers Using ChatGPT?

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-ai-productivity-paradox-why-arent-more-workers-using-chatgpt-a1dfe96a9460

Dedicated time for exploration is a luxury most PMs can’t afford. Under constant pressure to deliver immediate results, most rarely have even an hour for this type of strategic work — the only way many find time for this kind of exploratory work is by pretending to be sick. They are so overwhelmed with executive mandates and urgent customer requests that they lack ownership over their strategic direction. Furthermore, recent layoffs and other cutbacks in the industry have intensified workloads, leaving many PMs working 12-hour days just to keep up with basic tasks.

This constant pressure also hinders AI adoption for improved execution. Developing robust testing plans or proactively identifying potential issues with AI is viewed as a luxury, not a necessity. It sets up a counterproductive dynamic: Why use AI to identify issues in your documentation if implementing the fixes will only delay launch? Why do additional research on your users and problem space if the direction has already been set from above?

WMATA Schematic or Map

https://i.imgur.com/fER7aki.png

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gouvit/youre_being_targeted_by_disinformation_networks/

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users. 

How I ship projects at big tech companies

https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

The most common error I see is to assume that shipping is easy. The default state of a project is to not ship: to be delayed indefinitely, cancelled, or to go out half-baked and burst into flames. Projects do not ship automatically once all the code has been written or all the Jira tickets closed. They ship because someone takes up the difficult and delicate job of shipping them.

That means that in almost all cases, shipping has to come first. You cannot have anything else as your top priority. If you spend all your time worrying about polishing the customer experience (for example), you will not ship! Obsessing over UX is praiseworthy behaviour when you are an engineer on the team, but a blunder if you are leading the project. You should cherish the other engineers on your team who are doing that work, and give them as much support as you can. But your primary concern has to be shipping the project. It is too hard a job to do in your spare time.

A Real Estate Queen and the Secret She Couldn’t Keep Hidden

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/realestate/alice-mason-nyc-real-estate-broker.html

Alice Mason was throwing one of her black-tie dinner parties. For years, she’d been hosting events that New York City’s social pages fawned over, but she didn’t expect that this one would disrupt a secret she’d kept for much of her life.

A Manhattan real estate agent to the elite, Alice typically held six dinner parties a year, almost always with 56 attendees — half women, half men, not too many couples. Her guests, as one socialite put it, were “the A-list of A-lists”: Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Alan Greenspan, Norman Mailer, Estée Lauder, Mary Tyler Moore, Jimmy Carter.

“The key to my parties is the small tables,” Alice once told The New York Times. “That way people do not have to talk only to the people on their right or left. They can talk to the whole table.”

Memo shows 76 percent of grades in A range last year, prompting faculty discussion

https://williamsrecord.com/468144/news/memo-shows-76-percent-of-grades-in-a-range-last-year-prompting-faculty-discussion/

Professor of Political Science Justin Crowe said he believes that grade inflation has decreased student learning. “Many faculty — certainly I include myself in that — have seen that grades are something of a motivator for students,” he said. “It’s important to give students honest feedback so they know what they’re doing well, what they’re doing less well, [and] so they can decide whether they want to put the work in to do better.”

Crowe added that he’s observed that grade inflation increases student stress around grades and discourages academic exploration. He noted that a B+ is now in the bottom third of grades awarded to students. “That puts so much pressure on any individual paper, on any individual course, and it sends students’ anxiety and stress through the roof, because there is effectively no margin for error in a world in which the only good grades are A, A+, and A-,” he said.

Holding poor performers accountable can lead to better government

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/10/holding-poor-performers-accountable-can-lead-better-government/400568/

One place government should mirror the private sector and improve, however, is how it manages its employees. My organization’s polling trust data, for example, shows that over one-quarter of Americans view holding employees more accountable for their performance as one of the top two actions the government could take to become more effective and trustworthy.

Large private sector companies like Walmart, FedEx and Home Depot invest in their people—establishing clear cultural values, employee development programs, and performance appraisal, enforcement and reward systems —and they have incentives that help remove poorly performing employees. 

Unlike the private sector, the current process for addressing poor performers in government is difficult for managers and confusing for employees. While most employees are doing good work on behalf of their agencies, some are underperforming and some need to be fired. This happens in every industry across the private sector. 

There’s Something Very Different About Harris vs. Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/opinion/trump-harris-election-day.html

But there’s another axis that politics can polarize along: the basic worth of institutions. To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.

The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military. This network is sometimes called the Cathedral and sometimes called the Regime; Trump refers to part of it as the Deep State, Vivek Ramaswamy calls the corporate side “Woke Inc.” and JD Vance has described it as a grave threat to democracy.

Writes and Write-Nots

https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:

If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.

Cathedrals: Enormous Sacred Space

https://apricity.me/2024/10/22/cathedrals-enormous-sacred-space/

Joyful indeed, they smiled and hugged, celebrating the journey’s end. The singing was full and exuberant, their ebullient mood infectious. There was no energetic or frenetic shouting that I associated with Protestant charismatic worship. It was a measured exuberance. This time, being present at a cathedral—an ancient structure that I mostly associated with secular history and practices foreign to my Baptist roots—stirred my spirit. Next to the old gigantic stones, my heart was warmed. I cried tears of fond memory. The fervent faith of youth can be naively hopeful and sunny (pray and the world will bend to your prayers), but it also can be inspiring. The Spirit punctured through my assumptions and experiences, and touched me.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

Many of the objectors indeed thought that there would be some other way to get to the same outcome without any of the ickiness of a class action settlement. A refrain throughout the fairness hearing was that releasing the rights of out-of-print books for mass digitization was more properly “a matter for Congress.” When the settlement failed, they pointed to proposals by the U.S. Copyright Office recommending legislation that seemed in many ways inspired by it, and to similar efforts in the Nordic countries to open up out-of-print books, as evidence that Congress could succeed where the settlement had failed.

Of course, nearly a decade later, nothing of the sort has actually happened. “It has got no traction,” Cunard said to me about the Copyright Office’s proposal, “and is not going to get a lot of traction now I don’t think.” Many of the people I spoke to who were in favor of the settlement said that the objectors simply weren’t practical-minded—they didn’t seem to understand how things actually get done in the world. “They felt that if not for us and this lawsuit, there was some other future where they could unlock all these books, because Congress would pass a law or something. And that future... as soon as the settlement with Guild, nobody gave a shit about this anymore,” Clancy said to me.

How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/magazine/cheerleading-jeff-webb.html

Varsity’s market power has made the cheer world a paranoid place. In my reporting for this story, dozens of people spoke about the company in conspiratorial tones better suited to a spy thriller. My sources were at least right that the company was paying attention. Not long after beginning my reporting for The Times, a managing director from Teneo — the high-powered public-relations firm whose clients have included Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund — contacted me. I soon found myself dealing with separate P.R. agencies representing two private-equity firms, Varsity and Jeff Webb himself, who invited me to interview him. “I don’t think I’ve done a great job marketing myself,” he told me. “I would rather let the deeds speak for themselves.”

Varsity had been hit with a raft of antitrust and personal-injury lawsuits, which provided an unprecedented glimpse into Varsity’s operations: Thousands of pages of documents and emails showed how Webb, a former cheerleader himself, built a company so powerful that its market position has not been meaningfully challenged by the many lawsuits and controversies. In July, KKR, one of the largest private-equity firms in the world, bought Varsity and its affiliate companies from Bain Capital for a reported $4.75 billion, a clear bet that Varsity’s control of cheerleading will survive the current scrutiny. Since the KKR sale, a sense of foreboding hangs over the world of cheer: Is there any scandal big enough to shake Varsity’s grip on American cheerleading?

Being the adult you needed as a kid by giving out snacks

https://v.redd.it/d54afvz80vud1

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/people-think-they-already-know-everything-they-need-to-make-decisions/

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.

Anand Menon on racism: the UK has made progress, but this year’s riots show there’s a long way to go

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/10/04/anand-menon-on-racism-uk-has-made-progress-but-far-right-riots-show-theres-a-long-way-to-go/

Writing this, I’ve come to realise how appallingly selfish I’ve become. How my relative security made me blind to the insecurity of others. In my anxiety not to appear hypervigilant, I’d not called out as clearly as I should have the careless and provocative rhetoric, the talk of immigrants as vermin, the scaremongering about an “invasion”, the lazy elisions of “British” and “British-born”.

One of the big changes between then and now is the presence of social media and the ease with which fake news can spread (like claims the Southport murderer was an Islamicist who had arrived in a small boat). This has resulted in the paradox pointed out by Sunder Katwala that, in a society with ever-fewer racists, there might be wider experience of racist abuse and threat than was the case 20 years ago.

I’m still sensitive. So, too, I imagine, are all those who were on the receiving end of the casual, cruel, continuous racism of the 1970s. I hope my recollections about my childhood help explain why.

The $1,000 Wheelchair

https://newmobility.com/not-a-wheelchair/

How the YouTubers from JerryRigEverything are Making Affordable Wheelchairs Without the Red Tape