So, you can’t see the woods for the trees. You honed in on the anecdotal example of industry trend, but didn’t refute the trend.

At PAX 2017, I was disappointed by the overwhelming number of battle royale games. There were a handful of games that stood out for story or in-person party play, but the biggest booths were all for MMOs and battle royale games.

I’ve long said that MMO games are so common because storytelling and world-building are hard. Also, Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is shit.

I’m guessing the downvotes are because people fail to see or deliberately ignore the generalization. Of course there are stellar story-driven, single player games still coming out, but 90% shit is to be expected.

My only shred of disagreement here (more of a qualification) is time-wasting. Of course games are for sucking down time. It’s one of the circuses in “Bread and Circuses.” But the same applies to novels, hobbies, and lush green lawns. :D

Another qualification I’ll add: I think we’re just getting more of everything with better coverage and more ubiquitous advertising, so it’s easier to see the shit games. It’s easier than ever to build a game, so of course the tide of garbage rises. But so do the standouts, unfortunately in roughly equal proportions. :D There have some great story-driven games recently as one other commenter noted. For me, “The Expanse,” “Cyberpunk,” and “Become Human” leap to mind (yes, I’m a very late adopter). Two of those are basically visual novels with choices, but the stories hit hard and get into complex moral and social issues.

When you’re ready, I’ll be out on the retirement home patio with a cold one waitin’ for ya. We’ll gripe about it some more.

Do you know any EMTs? I do, and it sounds like you might also. In the US at least, this seems the opposite direction of what OP is asking. Long hours, low pay when amortized over hours on call, high stress, but potentially great personal satisfaction. Also potential career track to other first responder/medical roles, which can be another plus, e.g. wilderness SAR, marine emergency SAR, trauma nurse*, etc.

If I have any of that wrong, I sincerely would enjoy additional context and discourse.

*A close friend from high school went the EMT->trauma nurse route. He has the temperament for it and absolutely rocks it. He is doing waaaaay better financially and spiritually than most of our social circle. His hours aren’t consistent per se, 3 days on, 3 days off plus any additional shifts he wants. He could have retired about 5 years ago, but loves the work too much.

Know people.

This aspect cannot be overstated. I landed my biggest* jobs because of my professional network. Moreover, I landed those roles during some serious labor market carnage: Dotcom Bust, Great Recession, and the current knowledge career uncertainty.

*Highest salary, longest running, best environment, most career growth, or some combination thereof.

The fundamentals are always going to be the same:

• Develop marketable skills
• Build out your professional network
• Develop ace communication skills, written and verbal; this pays dividends everywhere in life
• Strive to be either in the top ~15%* of what you do or bring a diverse set of skills to the table so that you can perform multiple roles; however, the latter tends to be an entirely different kind of job
• Be punctual
• Always continue with your professional development
• Be the kind of person with whom you would like to work

*This is not as hard as it sounds. Consider Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is shit”) and how much people phone it in; it’s pretty easy to stand out in most fields.

More specifically, I suggest “durable” career fields such as the trades (plumber, electrician, lineperson, crane operator, cement truck operator, etc). I mentor and tutor some high school and college students. There’s a lot of career uncertainty for the the foreseeable future, and the trades are not going anywhere. I generally suggest “do what pays the most and chaps your ass the least;” this is just a guideline and the kind of thing you need to figure out what your inflection point is. Whatever the fuck you do, avoid debt like it’s the plague.

Unless you land a proper apprenticeship, expect some serious long days for a few years, e.g. working full time and schooling/studying full time. Maybe you’ll get away with a less arduous journey, but if you’re mentally prepared to go full-tilt then you’ll be pleasantly surprised if the journey is easier.

Empathy by way of anecdote: I was a DJ and nightclub manager. I was surprised when I hit 25 and was somehow still alive. I decided to take this life stuff seriously and saw that there was most likely no path towards serious financial security. I went back to college for audio engineering, working full time and going to school full time. I did audio engineering for about five years. While audio engineering was cool, I thought it would be even cooler to write the software tools for audio. So I poured myself into independent study, using my nights and weekends to learn programming. And once I was comfortable with programming, I went back to college again for software engineering, again full time school + work. The journey was hard, but I was a senior software engineer within 8 years, manager and principal roles another 4 years after that. However, I never got a job writing audio software; it’s been all medical and financial software. “How do you make the gods laugh? Make plans.” So have a vision, but be flexible and open to opportunities.

Honestly, if I could have another go at it, I would have chosen marine electrician. Travel, boats + ships, technical + creative field, and get to pick and choose jobs I want to do.

Woo warning ahead: there are qualitative aspects to the journey. Know what you want, rather than what you are avoiding. If you don’t know where you want to go, you are going to end up somewhere else. But something cool happens when you know what you want, know it in your bones, and commit to taking the steps. The universe delivers. Maybe not the exact thing you wanted, but some form of it.

Ah, yes, the kink-shaming of… being wheelchair bound? What? This has to be one of the weirdest straw man fallacies I’ve ever heard. Care to give that another try?

Which happens to be where Matt Inman (the artist) lives.

Absolutely don’t kink shame. But when a person’s political affiliation actively kink shames and marginalizes all people not cis heteronormative, the gloves are off.

I have a minor hand washing compulsion, but it’s not a germophobia thing. While I would prefer everyone wash their hands after using the bathroom, it doesn’t gross me out like some other things, like nose-picking.

Lots of excreta aerosolize or otherwise get everywhere. While hand washing is a low bar to improving hygiene, shit is literally everywhere. Want to see something scary (depending on your squeamishness)? Get a 350nm UV flashlight and check out your home. Hell, try it right after you do a deep clean.

My guess it’s even older than that. My bullshitspiration is that peristalsis enabled more complex digestion when our quadruped ancestors needed more nutrition options.

“DEFCON-4” leaps to mind (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087130/).

I feel like this says more about neuroscience than it does about LLMs. :D

But seriously, my teams’ and individual experiences with LLMs have been mixed, at best. Even with advanced prompt training, the tools are just not there yet for our work.

He made a step, perhaps a bit too long in a mistaken direction, but understanding didn’t and won’t stop with him. How everyone reacted to his theory was also part of the fault.

These are excellent points and spot on. We’re all looking for the silver bullet and elevator pitch, even those of us who know better. “Oh, just stop eating fatty meat, eggs, and salt!” Except it’s way more complex than that. To Keys’ credit, he also highlighted the importance of weight management/obesity, cardiovascular health, and “regular” exercise. The definition of “regular” of course keeps getting modified.

Too much fat is still bad.

Agreed, although too much of anything is bad. “The toxicity is in the dose.” Keys pushed replacing saturated fats with PUFAs, which became a whole different problem with industrial PUFAs becoming the norm. Industrial PUFAs are high in Omega-6 EFA while being low in Omega-3 EFA. Humans don’t actually need any digestible carbohydrates to survive, but we very much need fats and protein to live. Nutritional research has merely been negotiating on where the borders are.

But it doesn’t make the harm of cholesterol moot. Or do you now want to ignore the other data yourself?

We worry too much about exogenous cholesterol, when endogenous cholesterol is the real problem. Cholesterol is a lot like that joke about the guy looking for his keys in the middle of the street. “Did you lose your keys around here?” “No, but this is where the light is.” Cholesterol, especially back when nutrition policy was being set, was what we could easily measure, and that was a correlation that science pursued. Epidemiological studies are notoriously tricky, sometimes just a step above anecdote. And to discuss these things in any serious detail requires a couple book-feet of text, most of it being contextual qualification.

Regarding the importance of cholesterol as a risk indicator: What’s probably closer to the truth is balance of HDL to LDL and cholesterol to HDL, with triglycerides being a case-by-case basis. If I recall correctly >500mg/dL being the absolute level for concern and interventions, with >200mg/dL being considered abnormally high.

I think in the end, we all have to find what works for us at our given point in life. Because no silver bullet and there’s no way to discuss these things simply and quickly.

But ya know what has been proven to contribute to heart disease, atherosclerosis, dyslipidemia, NAFLD, hyperinsulimia/Type 2 diabetes, and chronic inflammation? Refined carbohydrates (Taubes, Lustig, et al).

I kinda understand the downvotes because we’ve had 50+ years of saturated fat fearmongering. But when you start digging into this long running, test-in-production experiment on human diet and health, it’s hard to avoid conspiratorial thinking.

Ancel Keys established a spurious link between cholesterol and heart disease. His Seven Countries Study was an early application of regression analysis. What is very rarely mentioned was that Keys omitted 5 countries (more? Can’t exactly recall) that didn’t fit the regression he wanted to show. (Ref: “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” Gary Taubes)

Keys’ contributions to lipid hypothesis fucked the metabolic health of millions for decades.

Regarding Keys’ centenarian expiration, go find a pic of what that dude looked like for the last few decades of his life. I’ll pass on the longevity and his diet plan.

And if you’re interested in how nutritionally screwed we are in the US:

• “Hacking of the American Mind” and “Sugar” by Robert Lustig, a Harvard endocrinologist
• “The Dorito Effect” by Mark Schatzker There are lots more to choose from, but that’s a pretty big starting point

• The American industrialized food chain
• Glyphosate
• Modern technology-centric lifestyles
• Dark patterns
• Most social media

I don’t know, man… My Gentoo evangelizing coworkers… those dudes fuck. One is in a death metal band, the other is a kick-ass turntablist, and the third is a free-climber. They all wear Crocs with socks and have to beat back the admirers with a stick.

I’m sure it’s the Gentoo that makes them who they are . 😆