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Did it, as every year. Thanks for your work.
Similar experience, and not much of real advice. I mostly solve it by setting up obligations by myself. However, I revert to this only for stuff that is important. Examples:
I've announced and discussed doing some boring accounting and controlling for the hackerspace, and people now expect some specific results.
On anothor note, instead of procrastinating about finding a better workplace, I gave my notice. Once I was out of the job, I simply had to start looking.
Finally, I do not need to be perfect. More people than I expected have the odd day or two during the workweek, and knowing this I have reset my expectations regarding my own performance to something more humane.
I was doing this in the past to heavy-weight books for very pragmatic reasons: Gödel, Escher, Bach is worthless to me if the book would just sit around in a corner, but to take it with me and read it while commuting, I had to get the weight down.
Since learning this amazing trick, any book I read and that's inconvenient to hold has to fear the knife.
Depending on personal specifics, such stuff is also used in psychotherapy; overburdening oneself is not an uncommon problem. For me this helped even though such substitutions were all but universal, I don't know about how important it is in general, though.
I'm sorry to have not answered for so long, I had some busy weeks.
Depression: I'd suffered many months from a depression bad enough that I was not able to work the hours of a part-time job, let alone achieve any acceptable performance. I was using alcohol as replacement for other diluted variants of H2O. This was also not the first time of being depressed, and needless to say, such things can fuck up your life, and are generally not very desirable.
I recovered as well as I think possible: I feel well. I can work. I enjoy, and can concentrate on stuff t...
What do you enjoy most in software development, and why are you going to be looking for a job again soon? What's your dream SW dev job?
Cannot really answer what I enjoy most; I like almost every job that comes up, with only a few exceptions. I hate repeating myself, and I hate having to do things in a ... ... ... way against my better judgement. I prefer to work more time (as in effort and calender time) doing the architecture/design/coding parts, but I also prefer doing other stuff once in a while more than being purely a lonely coder.
I will give my n...
What's your motivation for veganism?
Moral reasons. All else equal, I think that inflicting pain or death is bad, and that the ability to feel pain and the desire to not die is very widespread. I also think that the intensity of pain in simpler animals is still very strong (I think humans did not evolve large brains because otherwise the pain was not strong enough). I also think that our ability to manage pain slighly reduces the impact of our having the ability to suffer more strongly and with more variety. But I give, for sanity check reasons, priority...
Thanks!
This was surprisingly simple: I got myself to want to run, started running, and patted myself on the back everytime I did it.
The want part was a bit of luck: I always thought I "should" do some sports, for physical and more importantly mental health reasons, and think that being able to do stuff is better than not being able, ceteris paribus. So I was thinking what kind of activity I might prefer.
I like my alone time (so team- or pair-sports are out), I dislike spending money when I expect it to be wasted (like Gym memberships, bikes, et al.). An...
No, not by myself. Wouldn't have the skillset for it, anyways. So I only try to introduce people to things like MIRI, to improve the chances that future discussions might not stop dead in fatalistic and nihilistic clichés. Effective altruism is an angle where I try to get a sense if a worthwhile elaboration is possible, as steering the arguments is somewhat easier when not starting with the most crazy stuff first.
Ask me almost anything. I'm very boring, but I have recovered from depression with the help of CBT + pills, am a lurker since back from the OB days and know the orthodoxy here quite well, started to enjoy running (real barefoot if >7 degrees Celsius) after 29 years of no physical activity, am chairman of the local hackerspace (software dev myself, soon looking for a job again), and somehow established the acceptance of a vegan lifestyle in my conservative familiy (farmers).
Value of information is zero. Do it if you are curious, or take the money and watch some movies with friends.
Also, in many European countries it means "pre- and post some different tax". Because one part is payed by the employer, and the other by the employee. Populism, Politics and Economics. Good results guaranteed.
Survey taken, as always. It sure was well prepared. It's worth starting it for the first option (ruining everything), and continuation is always just one click away...
You are right, of course. I did not want to imply that a vegan diet would have been feasible until recent advances.
The asking for forgiveness may indicate that people somehow thought of the act as killing, but that did not change their actions. Humans have had a distinctive influence on the local megafauna wherever they showed up. A cynic might write that "humans did not really care about the well-being of ...". We for instance also have taboos of eating dogs and cats, but the last time I checked it was not because of value their lives, but because they are cute. It's mostly organized lying to feel OK.
Read a 350-page novel in your 2nd language: 9 hrs (work & elapsed)
In Austria, where for all practical matters and purposes charity donations are not tax-deductible, the animal welfare group Vier Pfoten is doing this. Doesn't make it more attractive to me, though...
after tax pay of 75k a year isn't crazy unusual [...] in major cities
Less than half of that isn't crazy unusual everywhere else. Of course, anybody can just move there, and is qualified and lucky enough to find such a job.
Still doesn't change the OPs point, though; living on 15k/year is still a very convenient life.
As others pointed out, "memory wipe" is a broad category, but assuming that this is about episodic memory:
How about sending yourself a letter via delivery service on a specific date in handwriting + audio-recording? This of course completely ignores any other faked messages that would need to be discarded, but even with only episodic memory loss, I assume I'd be so confused as to be easy game for even the most incompetent scammer.
If this is about formal guarantees, we need to have some more precise ideas about the "memory wipe" and the adversary in question. In the most general case, likely game over.