I got my hair shaved again at the sides, the day AFTER meeting A Cute who MIGHT have been enticed to pet it had i possessed any foresight whatsoever
the question is, if i got a body pillow of wittgenstein, is that a ludwaifu or a waifugenstein
*modest citizen voice* oh, just doing my part to serve the invisible hand
be the efficient market you want to see in the world
what… does this mean
it stands alone as a shitpost (i’d hoped) but here’s an explanation – excerpts from a personal record I wrote in June 2015. I reread it a few days ago.
An account of the day I and four friends went out collected discarded books from all over campus after people moved out (to resell them for a profit), and were very impressed by the excess.
[Friend Matthew] and I met up for lunch on Saturday, the day after everyone who wasn’t staying on campus over the summer moved out. At the beginning he asked me if I wanted to go around campus picking up books people left in the move-out, because he’d made a hundred bucks last year and he knew he could make more. Sure, I said. I didn’t really have anything to do.
We went to his dorm first and picked up a few textbooks. Hardcover is a good sign. Engineering and science textbooks are the best, and course readers for specific classes that people will take for sure next year. … Then we went to my dorm, where we also made a modest haul, picking up several books that were sure to go for at least ten.
Over the course of the next hour three more people joined in — next door neighbor N, my roommate L, her best friend from out of town R. We hit up the frats because they were in a series, and struck sort of copper — fratpersons throw away a lot of stuff. There were so many minifridges everywhere we went where there’d been seniors. I had a smallish suitcase that filled up fast. L picked up a discarded duffel bag sort of thing and started putting books in there. R had a bike crate. There are always a lot of them lying around after move-out. We got maybe twenty books, all fetching more than five dollars, probably averaging eight or ten if we sold all of them. [I turned out to be wrong about this, most of the books we picked up weren’t easily sellable.] So far so good.
Then we hit FloMo.
WestFlo is mostly upperclassmen, and it’s four different interconnected dorms. People threw away SO. MUCH. STUFF. There was the obligatory minifridge or two, and someone had left behind a ukelele case. “Nice,” said L, picking it up. “But of course it’s empt —"
She opened it. There was a ukelele inside.
There was a sense of awe now. L plucked out a few notes. “Who the fuck throws away a perfectly good ukelele and its case?” someone said.
That was a recurring theme, who throws away this perfectly good ___? I felt keen regret that I hadn’t done this last year. We’d racked up several hundred dollars of books by then, and probably there was someone who was like us but on a higher level who might be doing the same with the minifridges. [Friend Matthew] talked about the efficient market hypothesis, where you can’t really win in the market because if you have a piece of good information (such as “there’s a ton of valuable trash lying around all over campus”) then soon everyone else will have it too, and you lose your advantage. And also, I think, that if there’s a niche in the market that needs filling up (which is the same thing as an advantage) someone will do it.
“But look,” I said. “I don’t think that’s right. In the real world people DO get information that doesn’t get to other people for a while. Look at us.“
“Eti,” he said. “We are the efficiency."
@spiralingintocontrol reblogged the post I made about brain freeze at my last job with a link to a blog post they’d written about the same thing that struck eerily true. And if it’s anywhere near as widespread as it seems to them, I – this is worrying??? (bolded mine)
You’re isolated. You’re not talking to anyone about your work. You don’t really want to talk to anyone about your work, and as days pass, you want to less and less. Why? If you talk to someone about your work, they’ll realize you’ve been banging your head against the wall for weeks. They’ll know.
For now, though, it’s enough to make you miserable that you know: You’re not getting anything done. Your goals don’t make sense to you, you’re not sure what direction to go in, and you don’t really have the power to move the project in any particular direction. You get a few things done each day, but feel demoralized by their sparsity and their insignificance. And the longer this goes on, the less you want to ask for help or input of any kind.
Some people call this a symptom of impostor syndrome. I don’t think so. To call it “impostor syndrome” implies that it arises out of a mistaken belief, when, in truth, it’s not mistaken. You’re not wrong to think that you’re not getting things done, and that you’re not very good at your job. Of course you’re not—yet! You’re very new to it, and being good at your job involves plenty of soft skills you didn’t pick up before your first (or perhaps second, or even third) professional programming job.
For another thing, this isn’t all because of you, either: Your supervisor isn’t prompting you to ask questions, and isn’t bothering to get more detail from you on what’s going well and what isn’t. They’re not making sure you’re not blocked, or spinning your wheels.
The trouble arises when you get into a cycle: you feel bad about not knowing what to do next, so you don’t ask for help, so you try to do everything yourself; you don’t have a lot of success, so you still feel bad and don’t want to ask for help; next thing you know, it’s been a month and you haven’t spoken to another human being, except to tell your boss “Things are going okay,” with a glossed-over description of your progress so far.
This is not healthy.
anyway this is a good post and the subsequent advice is also good.
a thing that’s shown up in a lot of my fiction settings in the past few years is:
group A and group B coexist in a society, with A on top. Group A has been on top / has taken over pretty recently, maybe it’s been 50~150 years. There are tensions between them, and lots of shitty things come out of A’s dominance over B. Group B is comprised of two or more groups, and they fucking hate each other. The subgroups have been coexisting for much longer and have so much bad blood and any unity that tries to emerge in opposition to A is prone to breaking apart. Any given person from group B likely hates the other subgroups a lot more than they hate A, and if there’s narrator hopping going on, there’s at least one narrator where, when you’re in their story, you zoom in so closely that A isn’t even relevant anymore – oh yeah, those people, sure, they suck, back to HOW MUCH I HATE THE NEAR ENEMY.
A is almost certainly encouraging the strife to some degree, but even if they weren’t, the B peoples have been killing and invading and robbing from each other for centuries, and they’d still be pretty nasty in the absence of A.
be the efficient market you want to see in the world
I enjoy the dual meaning of “alcoholic”, a person who is addicted to alcohol && whose physical ethanol content would have some effect on anyone who consumed them
Wow. the sheer… relief of not [sitting at my desk, not really knowing what I’m doing or what I’m supposed to do, and unable to move forward on anything because my brain is frozen up and unable to solve problems or intelligently contemplate problem solving]?
I’m on my second actual day of being an intern and - listen, I don’t know anything that’s going on, but I have a list of todos that I actually know how to do, even though it’s all stuff like ‘look into this tool’ and ‘finish this mandatory training’ and ‘listen to this one hour lecture on how to –’ and ‘someone brought up X at the team meeting, and it seems important, so I’ve set aside an hour to get a conceptual understanding of it’. And I’m not completely productive, sometimes I fuck around for five or twenty minutes (like now, writing this!), but it’s “because I’m a normal person and normal people are sometimes distracted”, not “because the opacity of my work terrifies me so much my brain freezes up when I think about it and I can’t do it, I can’t”.
NOT SPENDING EIGHT HOURS A DAY SLAMMED BY ANXIETY AND GUILT IS EXHILARATING!!!!!!
YES this is what it’s really like!!! haha I remember having this exact euphoria when I first started my job it was like holy shit I can actually do this stuff and it MEANS something. There’s an actual POINT to this and I get to know what it is! what is this strange utopia into which I have stumbled??
“my brain is frozen up and unable to solve problems or intelligently contemplate problem solving” “the opacity of my work terrifies me so much my brain freezes up when I think about it and I can’t do it, I can’t”
this was like… my entire school experience, and it’s so miserable. My theory about this is that I just can’t really do stuff or learn stuff if I don’t know what it’s all FOR? It can’t just be like, I’m your boss/teacher and I say you should do this, so go. I just stand there bewildered like, go… where? What? there’s like infinity ways to do this thing that you said, which in my brain means you gave me infinity jobs which is A LITTLE DAUNTING? MAYBE??? I must have a cohesive end goal or I’m sunk. Even if it’s something like “figure out what that guy meant in the meeting about [topic]” is just SO MUCH BETTER than “learn about [topic]”. Because the first thing is ONE job and the second thing is INFINITY jobs!
I don’t know if you have the same, like, triggers (? for the blank frozen feeling - not that this is the only reason it happens for me, but it’s a major one) as I do, so if this doesn’t resonate, um, sorry for going on and on about it. But if it does, THERE’S A BRIGHT SPOT TO ALL THIS, which is that our type of inherent curiosity and need to ask questions about what we’re doing and why is like… REALLY marketable. Not wanting to commit to something until you’ve pestered as many people as possible about “why this and this and this” honestly makes you so much better at this job. And other smart people will absolutely respond to that and appreciate that, and omg I think you’re gonna do REALLY WELL and I’m glad you’re starting to think that too.
ahhhh jeez, I’m so sorry, last summer was really rough and I can’t even imagine going through that for the entirety of school. I fucking hate the INFINITY JOBS feel. I think it’s responsible for a big chunk of problems I have at classes I find hard at school, and most of the problems I had at my last job. (Differences from you: I personally don’t need a cohesive end goal, I just need to know what the next few steps are, or at least know that the next step will illuminate the one after that. I also don’t have the problem of needing to know what X is for to do X, I’m an obedient monkey that way – this is probably why I find school easier than you did. I’ll probably never be the kind of person who pesters people to know ‘why this and this and this’ before committing to something because of that and a really strong aversion to talking to anyone, although maybe I’ve just never been comfortable with people in a work environment yet.)
The thing that really makes infinity jobs for me is not knowing what I’m missing to do the thing. If I have a set of tools and knowledge {A, B, C}, but they’re nowhere near enough to get the thing done, my next task is to find the tools I’m missing. But I don’t know if that’s E or F or G or all of them. So the Next Thing is to just go down the list of all the potential things I’m missing, which is a huge fucking timesuck and the thing I really need may not even been on my potential list. So, brain freeze.
The logical thing to do here is to sit down with someone who DOES know, but say, I have {A, B, C}, I’m missing something to do this task, tell me what those elements are and how to acquire them. I found this hard because:
(1) I didn’t have the understanding of {A, B, C}. I had A but couldn’t describe A. I knew what I could do thanks to A, but I couldn’t put/describe A in the context of a larger framework because I don’t know anything about the larger framework. An exchange that might occur from this problem: I get asked if I know/have experience with A, I say no because I haven’t heard of A, the person sounds incredulous and says 'you’ve never done [specific task that A enables you to do]??’ and I go 'oh, THAT. Yeah, of course!’. I made a post recently about not knowing what a server was until recently, which stems from the same problem. I don’t have the words to express what I know and don’t know. In everyday conversation about CS I say 'the thing that X’ – I have knowledge about 'the thing that X’, but I don’t know what it’s called and how it relates to other stuff. I don’t have the vocabulary. I really should fix this but it also seems like an INFINITY JOB.
Because I didn’t have the vocabulary to express what I had and didn’t have, I found it difficult to express what I was missing, and really embarrassing to even try - I knew I’d sound idiotic. Also stuff happened where, like, my manager would ask me if I had knowledge/experience with D, and I’d say yes because he’d advised me to brush up on D beforehand and I’d gone and read a few articles about what D was. But the quarter right after the summer I took a really vaguely named class that gave me a solid grounding in D – all it took was a couple of lectures. But I didn’t know where to find those lectures. I didn’t even know I didn’t know D. My state was: “I’ve read a few articles about D and sort of get it, and deep down I’m confused about it but since I’m confused about EVERYTHING and resolving my confusion about anything is an Infinity Job, I must label what I CAN as 'known’ in my head.”
(2) My manager had TECHNICALLY GIVEN ME THE TOOLS, in the form of giving me two thick engineering books on unit tests and engineering patterns, and I thought, okay, the next step is to read these. And you know what, I never did. Of course I didn’t. But I never asked for better, denser tools because hey, I have the next thing, I’m not going to ask for another next thing. And I got blocked there forever.
(3) Lack of basic training / setup help, maybe because Microsoft assumed everyone was competent enough to do it on their own? Facebook gave me basic eng training for one day, which was mostly step by step videos on soure control and using the internal tools, I fucking love it. What PARTICULAR COMMAND do I need to set this up? If you have trouble, there’s a tech desk right behind you! In contrast – lmao I’ve never admitted this to anyone before – last year I was blocked for my entire day my first day because I had to download something that should have taken an hour, but it turns out the process stops if you have any text selected. Guess who accidentally clicked on one character and stalled the whole thing. I got the setup done with the help of the interns next to me and my manager messaging me from one building over. Everything I learned about the internal tools, I had to talk to someone before I could get an explanation / link to an internal resource. Like, come on, Microsoft! One day of training! It goes a long way!
The project Facebok gave me for the summer is also way more detailed – I have INTERMEDIATE MILESTONES and an EXPLICIT SCHEDULE which is really helpful. Last year everything was due, mentally, 'as soon as possible’ (I think they didn’t set any schedule because they wanted me to work at my own pace or something, but this totally didn’t work), meaning this was now also kind of an infinity job via divide by zero.
(Source: gothicprep, via cccccppppp)