fellowniusmonk (u/fellowniusmonk)

fellowniusmonk commented on When a Street Kills a Child, We Put the Parents on Trial strongtowns.org/journal/2... · Posted by u/h14h

potato3732842 · 5 days ago

>I lived ON a four lane 55mph road that was a heavily trafficked arterial road and crossed it all the time at 7.

And you just waltzed across it when it looked clear or you used marked crossings, timed it with the lights after practice with your parents, etc.?

I'm not saying there aren't ways to cross this road and that a 7yo can't be taught a couple of them, but to just turn a 7-10yo pair loose-ish on it seems foolish.

>Roads 100% are community killers,

There were a bunch of contributory factors leading to this kid's death. You're just as ignorant and wrong as the prosecutor who thinks this is all the parents fault.

>It's insane that people put up with such extreme infantilization and isolation,

Surely you see the irony here (by which I mean you are unwise for having a self-contradictory opinion)? You're basically saying that "people can't handle these roads". They clearly can. 4-lane boulevards with medians are all over even the most walkable cities in Europe. And some of America's worst cities for walking are grids that lack bigger roads (i.e tons of 2-lane grid). The devil is in the details.

fellowniusmonk · 4 days ago

I literally ran across it when it was clear, we were over a mile from the nearest crossing.

We should have safer roads, we should stop hating ourselves and our fellow citizens, parents should not have to hover around their kids constantly, the burden of parenting has gone up an insane amount since I was a kid and there isn't a well justified reason for it.

fellowniusmonk commented on When a Street Kills a Child, We Put the Parents on Trial strongtowns.org/journal/2... · Posted by u/h14h

potato3732842 · 5 days ago

At 7? Really? I was allowed to roam dilapidated industrial sites and ride my bike on the streets around at age 7-10 but I wasn't allowed anywhere near a 4-lane boulevard with high speed traffic like that. Heck, the highway I wasn't allowed to cross didn't even have four lanes.

There's a pretty big difference between random streets and a 4-lane arterial road like this one. I would take great care crossing it as an adult and I would only consider letting a kid cross it with explicit instructions to use a marked crossing or wait for traffic to stop for them and practice doing it accompanied.

fellowniusmonk · 5 days ago

I lived ON a four lane 55mph road that was a heavily trafficked arterial road and crossed it all the time at 7.

Roads 100% are community killers, it's insane that people put up with such extreme infantilization and isolation, no wonder deaths of despair and chronic loneliness is on the rise. We've cultivated our own sad fragility.

fellowniusmonk commented on Study: Social media probably can't be fixed arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

AuthAuth · 12 days ago

I've been wanting to setup something like a 3rd place that tries only to break even. I'm unfortunately not a very social person.

Because these 3rd spaces are open to anyone and probably bringing people in from internet commmunties. What do you do when someone comes along and they're not breaking any rules but its clear that no one likes them? I've seen it drive entire groups away but because the person has done nothing wrong I cant/dont want to just say "fuck off kid no likes your weird ass"

fellowniusmonk · 12 days ago

A 3rd place isn't a friend group.

It isn't a single conversation or room. It isn't a single relationship cluster.

And someone is paying the insurance bill. Ultimately that person gets final say. A successful 3rd place can have tension, but not fools (in the economic sense, a person whose decision making and choices actively destroy the groups financial opportunities and stability. Theoretically a very clumsy person might be banned.)

There's a lot to unpack, I mean social dynamics, group polity, these really start with understanding what you really want to see brought into the world and why.

These things take fluidity, nuance and effort to get off the ground. Sometimes they just get lucky too. It's hard to tell ahead of time, proximity is important, population density is important, parties are important.

Getting initial traction is the hardest part, most groups die before they get a chance to have problems, that's why tying the groups space to a stable economic engine like an anchor company or a mission agency is so critical for repeatable success. Same with a small friend group as initial anchor, they just can't all be clique people.

The one thing that's very important is to always frame the space as a place for creating and experimenting, celebrate the amateur and the pursuit of mastery, getting started with a group of taste makers instead of doers will 100% kill your group.

Getting started with hypernetworkers who don't do things will kill your group. They'll show up and they are important later on.

All of these people have a place eventually but they can't form the dynamic core. The whole goal is to eventually have a place for every type of person so they can contribute to the whole and find the space where they can be celebrated, but a group has to be larger before certain types of people can bring their core skills to bear.

fellowniusmonk commented on Study: Social media probably can't be fixed arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

barbazoo · 13 days ago

That sounds interesting. How did that work, did you rent a place for coworking and then opened it up for the social aspect?

fellowniusmonk · 13 days ago

My tech (I was founding engineer and CTO) company took over a co-working space and expanded it, we ran that portion of it at break even.

We intentionally set out to create a social club/co-working space. A lot goes into it. I'm a non-theist who comes from a multi generational group of theist church planters (like 100s of churches, just over and over), it's a multi factorial process with distinct transitions in space-time and community size, where each transition has to be handled so you don't alienate your communities founding members (who will be very different from later members) and still are able to grow.

People don't do it because they can't see the value while they are in the early mess of it. You have to like people to pull it off, you have to NOT be a high control person who can operate at high control at certain developmental stages. You have to have a moral compass everyone understands and you are consistent with, tech people like 0 trust. You have to create a maximum trust environment which means NOT extracting value from the community but understanding that the value is intrinsic in the community.

You have to design a space to facilitate work and play. It's not hard but you have to get everything right, community can't have mono culture and it must be enjoyable/uncomfortable, and you must design things so people can choose their level of engagement and grow into the community. It's easier once it has enough intertia that they understand they are building a thing with real benefits.

Even things like the flow of foot traffic within the space, chokepoints narrowing, these kinds of thing all effect how people interact.

fellowniusmonk commented on Study: Social media probably can't be fixed arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

SkepticalWhale · 13 days ago

I'd like to see more software that amplifies local social interactions.

There are apps like Meetup, but a lot of people just find it too awkward. Introverts especially do not want to meet just for the sake of meeting people, so they fallback on social media.

Maybe this situation is fundamentally not helped by software. All of my best friendships organically formed in real-world settings like school, work, neighborhood, etc.

fellowniusmonk · 13 days ago

I ran a co-working space social club that resolved this issue for many introverts in 2015-2017.

This is at core a 3rd places issue, haven't had the capital to restart it post covid.

fellowniusmonk commented on Why tail-recursive functions are loops kmicinski.com/functional-... · Posted by u/speckx

SJC_Hacker · 13 days ago

> Yes, you cannot hide the callstack when taught with pencil and paper.

Recursive functions were mathematically defined well before the callstack or the von Neumann architecture was a thing. Godel, Church and Kleene did alot of work on them in the 1930s (and I believe even prior to that infinite series were defined recursively although functional theory had not be worked out), this was before ENIAC (1945) which would be just barely recognizable as a general purpose computer and didn't have anything like CALL instruction.

So I don't understand this notion of "hiding the callstack" comes from. If one cannot understand recursion without invoking the callstack, well thats just them. But I don't see how its absolutely necessary or some universal

fellowniusmonk · 13 days ago

I have no complaints about how recursion is taught in mathematics courses.

I'm being quite clear that I take issue with how the concept has been taught in many programming books and courses.

You can see the ignorance and confusion in this very thread.

fellowniusmonk commented on Why tail-recursive functions are loops kmicinski.com/functional-... · Posted by u/speckx

SJC_Hacker · 14 days ago

I don't see how it would be gatekeeping.

Recursive functions are a mathematical concept, like the "imaginary" number, or "trascendental" numbers. Or negative numbers for that matter.

Simple example, the Fibonacci sequence. FIB(1) = 1 FIB(2) = 1 FIB(N) = FIB(N-1) + FIB(N-2)

There's no programming language or "physical" implementation needed in order to calculate FIB(N) for arbitrary N. Pencil and paper will do for small numbers

fellowniusmonk · 14 days ago

Yes, you cannot hide the callstack when taught with pencil and paper.

But in computer programing it is often hidden.

And then you are misleading people about recursion and not helping them to build mental models that map to the physical/hardware process.

This isn't a big deal or anything, it's hardly worth talking about but it is literally a true thing many don't realize and that does empirically negatively effect education of the concept.

fellowniusmonk commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein

username332211 · 14 days ago

The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful.

It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change their mind even as the prosecuting attorney was being charged with misconduct. Compare that to Socrates' behavior during the trial of the admirals in 406 BC.

Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.

I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.

fellowniusmonk · 14 days ago

Philosophy is interesting in how it informs computer science and vice-versa.

Mereological nihilism and weak emergence is interesting and helps protect against many forms of kind of obsessive levels of type and functional cargo culting.

But then in some areas philosophy is woefully behind, and you have philosophers poo-pooing intuitionism when any software engineer working on sufficiently federated or real world sensor/control system borrows constructivism into their classical language to not kill people (agda is interesting of course). Intermediate logic is clearly empirically true.

It's interesting that people don't understand the non-physicality of the abstract and you have people serving the abstract instead of the abstract being used to serve people. People confusing the map for the terrain is such a deeply insidious issue.

I mean all the lightcone stuff, like, you can't predict ex ante what agents will be keystones in beneficial casual chains so its such waste of energy to spin your wheels on.

fellowniusmonk commented on Why tail-recursive functions are loops kmicinski.com/functional-... · Posted by u/speckx

Jtsummers · 15 days ago

> Recursion isn't physically real, any book that teaches the abstraction before explaining either the call stack (for non-TCO recursion) or in the GOTO context

Do you also believe that loops and functions should only be taught after the call stack and goto are taught? Neither of them are real either by your measure.

What a silly sentiment.

fellowniusmonk · 14 days ago

Loops and functions can be physically represented as a stand alone, they can be physically carved onto a mechanical surface and observed.

They don't smuggle anything in conceptually, their abstraction doesn't leave anything critical to their structure out. They are real and can be physicalized as stand alone objects.

I see you've never tried to teach a software class to children or other learners, historically recursion is _very_ poorly taught by those who already understand the concept, but I'm not saying you have to care about that, a lot of people think there are too many programers already.