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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Inbox: “Would you advise a smart youngster to go into tech even if their passion were in X?”

Yes, for most Xes? Many people in tech successfully pursue passions which are not directly tech; a stable remunerative career is a good platform for doing lots of things.
Also I normally get this question from people who want to be intellectually engaged with X but don’t demonstrate a lot of desire to actually work in X, in which case you have the arbitrage opportunity “Take tech’s money, read X’s books/journals.”
I will also extend this argument to anything which involves heavy technical skill but which does not come with attractive offers. This means you, video game industry. Go work for AppAmaGooBookSoft, get off at 5, and play video games as much as you want with the $300k extra.
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
An interesting thread about "ugly food" (the theory that supermarkets largely don't stock cosmetically impaired perfectly good food, which is mostly true for some supermarkets, and therefore that this food gets wasted, which is not).

This has always been a curious theory for me, because it suggests that multi-billion dollar American companies would tolerate waste of (SWAG from someone who knows nothing about agricultural science) 60% of their raw inputs because they hate money or something.
(This is one of the many, many views on capitalism which views it as a superposition of people who evilly and rapaciously optimize everything which sparks joy out of life while simultaneously being nincompoops.)
Read 5 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
When folks ask me a question about our codebase internally I try to

a) answer the question
b) say "If I were trying to find the answer to that question with our tools, here's my entry point, here's the search query, and here's my mental heuristic for why I'd click on result #3"
This is trying to thread the needle on always, always being happy to give responsive answers to questions while also increasing people's ability to self-serve on them in the future.
Since it's publicly available, let me mention that the most common tool I use for answering these questions is livegrep and that I intend to boot up a livegrep instance on the first day of every startup for the rest of my life.

It borders on miraculous.

github.com/livegrep/liveg…
Read 5 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Strong endorse. Also, virtually regardless of your circumstances, the number you perceive as your need is low relative to achievable options in our industry, so you can end up capping yourself for no reason whatsoever.
e.g. Want to pay for a parent’s retirement? Trivial on an AppAmaGooBookSoft salary at the bottom of their ranges, so given that they have just saved your parent, why (they ask themselves) would they need to sweeten the deal further?
But the real reason to avoid doing this is that professionals are not needy people and therefore if you trigger someone’s “I am clearly talking to a needy person” heuristic you risk getting treated as a charity case rather than as a professional.

(Reporting not endorsing.)
Read 3 tweets

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Stonewall Jackson
@1776Stonewall
Tune in to Hannity tonight at 9 p.m. eastern time, says there's a breaking news story that's going to blow the fisa Scandal wide open. James Comey to be exposed. I do know that James Butler has been squealing like a pig
If you miss it, no big deal , I'll be watching and if there's anything worth telling I will post it. but Jon Solomon and Sarah Carter have done an incredible job, so it might be something good.
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Stacy McGaugh
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Dark Matter Hunters Pivot After Years of Failed Searches - WIRED

“Pivot” is an interesting choice of words. Sorta implies that one is pivoting from one thing (WIMPS) to something else. In which case the “something else” needs to be specified. apple.news/AfFMHcOI9QlK8e…
The whole dark matter search community reminds me of Daffy Duck in the episode quoted from IMDb here. [shockingly, I do not instantly find a gif of Daffy falling off said cliff.]
Reading this article does not inspire confidence. Sounds more like they’re poised to make the same mistakes all over again. Having spent decades in a fruitless search for WIMPs motivated by the WIMP miracle - an irrelevant numerical coincidence - might they decide to learn more?
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🎄🔶🌸❄️Sakura To Yuki No Seirei❄️🌸🦋⚢⚧
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So, I've waded through the Evangelical Alliance's new pastoral "guidelines" for interacting with trans people (ughh, the things I do to expose #transphobic #ciswits to the world), and let's just say it's time to tear this particular sh*t-bag a new hole.

1/n
CW: #Transphobia, #ConversionTherapy, #Zucker, #Religiously #driven #zealotry

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*sigh*

When such language gets reinforced by insisting...

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#PoorPeoplesCampaign
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At dinner, I learned more about corruption + racism built into society by our masters. A book we discussed (Zinn) was used as part of this "Left" resource's bibliography. I had to share. [A thread]

@BlackSocialists - thoughts on this resource?

historyisaweapon.com/indextrue.html
It very simply lays out the case that we are all being controlled. It covers hidden history of the United States including their (and, due to the systems created by our masters, our) racism. 

#racism #systemicracism #history
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Dr. Njoki Ngumi 🇰🇪
@njokingumi
Today, let's make a case for kindness as an intractable part of our sex lives as human beings. Why, you ask?
- wellness is almost impossible without it, and
- lack of kindness is the root/a significant part of the root of SO much pain in our sexual lives.
Leggo. /Thread
One definition of kindness combines several qualities: friendliness, generosity and considerateness, which can be the first antidote for ALL of the shame about sex we internalise, carry around and use to build our fragile moralities.
A lot of the things we first hear about sex come from places of fear, anger and avoidance from our parents, speculation, uncertainty, mockery or scorn from older siblings or friends, fire and brimstone from religion (especially for women/queer folk), etc.
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Christopher Federico
@ChrisPolPsych
The question of whether there is a "Trumpism" needs to be examined in the context of how ideological people are in general. 1/x vox.com/policy-and-pol…
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