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Normal dude attending a protest because he is upset about the ICE incidents & the federal dishonesty around them, surrounded by very angry members of the far left: look im with you guys but uh are we sure about the whole abolishing borders &establishing a communist state thing..?

@zencephalon Rad! Been printing anything fun lately?

Need more factorio in my closet

Garden feels the most resonant out of these three & I think it’s because I’m inspired by the act of gardening AND it is a meaningful “project”. Gaming & skiing are both wonderful+joyful activities but they feel less meaning-giving to me since they aren’t really creating something

Coding is cool, lifting is cool, hiking is cool, & I do often enjoy them in the moment, but my main drivers are mostly finish project/get better job/get stronger/summit mountain. Maybe I should start gaming more. Ski season is coming up. I wish I had a garden to putter around in

Had a weird slow motion crash out the other afternoon and a big thing surfaced for me: I feel a big lack of things in my life where I’m inspired to do the thing itself rather than just the goal that doing that thing achieves.

So so funny to me how almost every single Subaru I see driving around makes That One Noise

@cookiecarver Beautiful 🥲 thank you for sharing this

my mom told me her friend’s daughter was visiting london. she wanted me to show her around. she didn’t speak much english. i didn’t speak much chinese i said yeah, no problem. i thought it’d be fun. we kinda owed the friend. she showed us around shanghai when we visited. now it was my turn all i knew about the friend’s daughter was that she was an art teacher. she was visiting for a week to chaperone a group of chinese teenagers for summer camp i got her contact details and texted her when she arrived. i had some ideas but i asked what she wanted to do. she said she wanted to see some “natural beauty.” i thought this was funny since london isn’t exactly known for its natural beauty, but i changed my plan anyway the plan was simple. a park for “natural beauty.” the national gallery because she taught art. italian food because apparently that’s what chinese tourists want here. and the london eye, because i had free tickets so off i went with this plan. we didn’t text much before meeting. we were spending the whole day together, so i figured i’d find out all about her then. i didn’t know what she looked like either. i was really going in blind the night before, she texted me saying she lived too far away and was thinking of not coming in. i thought she was joking and asked where she was staying. i checked the map and sure enough it was far, about an hour and a half away. she was afraid of getting lost, so i offered to pick her up. she’d come all the way from china. it’d be silly not to see the city centre we met near the uni where she was staying. she was about a head shorter than me, with big glasses, a cute fringe, and a warm smile. our glasses matched. i started speaking my broken mandarin and she nodded along. she spoke fast, so i switched to cantonese since i was told she could understand it too. her dad was from somewhere in guangdong so we communicated through a mix of charades, cantonese, and mandarin. sometimes it went so smoothly that she’d start speaking faster and i’d lose track. i’d tell her i didn’t understand in mandarin. i studied it for two years in college, so i knew enough but i spoke like a child. she mentioned that a few times. i wish i had studied harder in college, or at least continued studying it we made small talk. i think she understood some english but was too shy to speak it. she was the same age as me. she’d been to london before but i couldn’t tell what she visited last time. there was a lot of laughter, partly from the language gaps, partly from how ridiculous the whole setup was as we walked together, i thought about my time in shanghai with my family, how much better it was because we knew someone local. i wasn’t an expert on london, but i knew enough to show someone around for a day. london isn’t exactly unsafe, but it isn’t like china. i kept walking on the road side of the footpath, since i didn’t want her phone stolen. other than that, i had a good time. the day flew by in the park, we looked at ducks and geese. on the london eye, we saw the cityscape. it was a sunny day, better than i imagined. we took photos together to show my mom and her friend. she said we looked like we were related. i thought about how long term couples start to look alike after a while in the art gallery, she took photos of famous paintings: van gogh, monet, da vinci, rembrandt. she also took one of a group of children drawing together during dinner, she asked about my hobbies. i said i liked to do tai chi. she told me only old people did that. i told her we’re both going to be old one day. i joked that i was just getting a head start. i also told her i liked to write sometimes. she asked what i wrote about. i said i wrote about things that happened to me. i thought about whether i’d write about this moment. i don’t write about every moment. i know i could, but i try not to force it she told me about her hobbies and what life was like in china. she said she was lucky. she loved teaching, but found life hard sometimes. they don’t get many holidays over there. i thought about what it would be like if i were born and raised in china. i was born and raised on the other side of the world. i’m a banana we shared our pasta. she got carbonara, i got bolognese. both were good. she asked if i could cook italian food. i said of course, i don’t think it’s that hard. she told me she didn’t cook much. she lived alone, so it was easier to eat out. it was much cheaper there, she explained we were interrupted by a middle-aged woman at the next table who gave her a compliment. she responded in perfect english. i just smiled and ate my pasta she asked me to show her something i wrote, so i did. it was about the movie "perfect days," which is about the life of a japanese toilet cleaner. she translated it to chinese. she told me she loved that movie. i’ll never forget how she looked reading it, a bit teary-eyed, like she wanted to express something but couldn’t find the words. she didn’t need to say anything. i already understood on the way back, we listened to music on the bus, side by side, our arms pressing into each other in the small seats. it was a double-decker, and we sat in the top front row. we watched the grey english buildings roll by, sharing an earbud each. it started to rain. her playlist was a mix of chinese and english songs. they weren’t sad songs, but there were sad undertones as i hugged her goodbye, i wished her a safe trip. she was bringing the kids to scotland next. i told her to be safe and hoped she’d have a good time. she gave me a gift, one of those friendship bracelets. it looked handmade. i already knew i wouldn’t wear it, but i’d keep it safe my mom called later to ask how the day went. she’d seen the photos. i didn’t say much. i said it was fine. she said, “you can just be friends. you can never have too many friends. you can see her again next time in shanghai.” i said yeah, i guess so. i don’t know when next time will be, but i’ll remember to contact her then i looked at the photo of us together one last time. matching smiles. we did look very alike

Got into dnd mtg Elden ring and factorio all in the past week wish me luck

hanging with my trans friend later tonight and showing her factorio, slightly concerned i may be about to ruin her life

twitter but the followers of every account get a percentage of the account's monetization proportional to how early they followed them

@joodalooped Go, C#, this one called Shplait that one of my courses used (functional-ish, lot of cool pattern matching stuff), I enjoyed the little bit of elixir I messed with a while back. The one big-ish js project I did I found the type system annoying but everything else was cool

@lightxvision what languages do you enjoy?

Need to get a job that pays better than $20/hr asap (ideally one in IT/swe) and trying to gauge how cooked I am, would really appreciate any feedback (or pointers on getting less cooked): - 2 sems left in cs degree - 2yrs experience doing helpdesk/sysadmin (pt student employee)

@zencephalon What does learning taste look like for you?

@lightxvision I let the AI do most of the “coding” while I do all the planning and reviewing. In new languages now I work on learning taste where I used to work on literally typing the language

How do all you devs out there balance using ai to make stuff quickly&effectively with progressing Ur coding skills? Or is the thought basically that programming chops are irrelevant now (beyond some baseline) & one should just let ai handle that, & focus on system design stuff?

@joodalooped For specific tech skills, hard to say. I have a good foundation for algos/ds as well as computer networks (protocols, troubleshooting, general familiarity and intuition). But not an expert or exceptionally proficient in a specific framework or language.

@lightxvision ok that’s really good what are you highest percentile at currently?

@__drewface B fo sho, cards don't feel differentiated enough in A

do people have immediate A/B preferences on this screen? It's from my friend's deck building card game

@anonhashira No chest pain W

I've been jonesing so hard and have experienced almost no cognitive benefits, but I'm not getting random chest pains anymore

@zencephalon This is beautiful. Covering the earth in blessings. Thanks for sharing 🙏

Some notes on my metta practice after going on retreat and practicing metta intensely for 9 days. I had a lot of weird gaps about who I could send metta to, like YouTubers, podcasters, authors, pornstars, musicians, etc. They all deserve my blessings like everyone else. I worked a lot on healing topological defects in my heart-field. Anyone that I found especially hard to bless would indicate a rift. I sent a lot of blessings to Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jung Un, etc. Part of my resistance to sending blessings to Vladimir Putin stemmed from the limited nature of early metta phrases, like "May he feel happy and healthy". I felt conflicted because I want the Ukraine war to end and having this wish come true doesn't necessarily seem towards that end. Actually I wish for much for Putin. I wish he finds love in his heart. I wish that he feels repentance for his mistakes. I wish that he receives forgiveness for his crimes. I wish that he rejoices in the beauty of creation. I wish he will make wise decisions. I wish he will see the truth of the dharma, etc. By changing my metta phrase to "May he receive every blessing" and eventually to just "Bless him" I felt aligned in my good wishes towards all beings. I believe that wishing for a being to move towards their most beautifully wise and loving form will lead to more good. I like saying, "Bless Donald Trump and all his connections" where "connections" means any possible way my mind can think of linking people to Donald Trump, like if they've heard of him, if they've voted for him, if they've seen him, if they've lived with him, if they've loved him, etc. I imagine the being I bless at their birth, and then trace the curve of their life through space time and imagine all the interactions they have connecting them to other beings and all of those beings receiving my blessing too. Like a spotlight of blessing sweeping through space. And I do this for many dozens of people and their lines intersect in beautiful mycelial ways and I get hit by all of these lines. Thinking of 'connections' helps easily draw up more people to bless, since one person always leads to another. Thinking of connections also helps me create a feeling of same sidedness, since if I bless Zelensky I also automatically bless all the Russian soldiers and everyone on the 'other' side of that conflict. I found this very healing for any rifts I felt. It helped when starting out practice to think of an easy to love person, the practice gets momentum and sort of catches fire in a palpable way.

@zencephalon I gotta read it!!! Ok it’s going to top of list

@lightxvision I found the body way in easier. Path Notes of an American Ninja Master has the easiest route into jhana written down anywhere imo

Day 1 of trying Jhana yesterday. Watched an intro video then sat for 16min focusing on hands. They felt really warm &fuzzy&good & got some waves of warmth into my body, but that was the extent of the short session. Is there a preference for initial focus on body vs metta/breath?

Happy fall, time to break out the cinnazyn and Vince Guaraldi

@joodalooped Maybe for someone with 0/10 or 1/10 agency. I think someone with 4/10 agency, or someone who was high agency then got depressed/burnt-out, would absolutely seek to increase/regain agency though

@lightxvision low agency person would not seek to increase agency

I think there probably a pretty big market out there for “rehabbing agency” services/courses. Which is slightly funny & ironic to me because “sign up for my program to regain agency” has a pretty low-agency ring to it.