atmk's recent activity

  1. How to search the world?

    ~life Ask (advice)
    The world outside my doorstep is unorganized chaos and I am blind to most of its existence. Say I'm looking for a job. And I know what job I want to do. I can search for it on a job listing site,...

    The world outside my doorstep is unorganized chaos and I am blind to most of its existence.

    Say I'm looking for a job. And I know what job I want to do. I can search for it on a job listing site, but there will still be many such jobs that won't be cataloged on the site and that I'll hence be missing. How can I find the rest? What are some alternative approaches?

    Also there are two ways you can end up with a job: either you find it (going on a job search), or it finds you (headhunters etc.). Obviously the latter possibility is much better as it's less tiring and it means you end up with an over-abundance of opportunities (if people message you every week). What are some rules of thumb for life to make it so that the opportunities come to you? (and not only for jobs)

    Often I don't even know what opportunities are on offer out in that misty unknown (and my ADHD brain finds it straining to research them (searching 1 job site feels almost futile because you don't know how many of the actual opportunities you aren't seeing)), so the strategy I resort to is imagining what I concievably expect to be out there and then trying to find it. This has several weaknesses: firstly I could be imagining something that doesn't actually exist and waste hours beating myself up because I can't find it. Or, almost even worse, my limited imagination might be limiting what sorts of opportunities I look for which means I miss out of the truly crazy things out there.

    Here's an example of an alternative approach that worked for me once:

    Last month I wanted to visit a university in another city for a few days to see if I liked it, and I needed a place to stay. I first tried the obvious approach of searching AirBnB for rents I could afford, but none came up. Hence I had to search through the unmapped. What ended up working was: I messaged the students union -> they added me to their whatsapp group -> sb from my country replied to my post on there adding me to a different WA group for students from my country -> sb in that WA group then DM'd saying I could crash on their couch.

    I would have never thought of trying an approach like this when I set out, and yet I must have done something right because it worked. What? The idea to message the students union and join whatsapp groups took quite a lot of straining the creative part of my brain, so I'm wondering whether the approach I took here can somehow be generalized so that I can use it in the future.

    TL;DR: Search engines don't map the world comprehensively. You might not even be searching for the right thing. What are some other good ways to search among the unstructured unknown that is out there?

    15 votes

  2. Comment on How to succeed in a cramming-based academic system? in ~science

    atmk
    Link Parent
    Thank you for this reply. Yes, I have also found LLMs to be very useful as they allow me to follow a conversation based learning style for which I would have previously needed a tutor. I'll...

    Thank you for this reply. Yes, I have also found LLMs to be very useful as they allow me to follow a conversation based learning style for which I would have previously needed a tutor. I'll comment again if I think of any more questions

    2 votes

  3. How to succeed in a cramming-based academic system?

    ~science Ask (advice)
    I'm an intuitive learner. I learn by constantly asking questions, the answers to which i can then effortlessly remember. By messing around and seeing what happens, and then asking why. Lecturers...

    I'm an intuitive learner. I learn by constantly asking questions, the answers to which i can then effortlessly remember. By messing around and seeing what happens, and then asking why. Lecturers have been enthusiastic about my approach but said I'm going to struggle because the school system in my country wasn't designed for people who learn like this. I want to kill myself.

    The way I see myself learning stuff:

    • Here's a fresh store-bought kombucha scoby
    • Here's a scoby from the same store that I've been growing for 6 weeks
    • If I sequenced the DNA from equivalent cells in each of these scobys, would I find any differences? Why?
    Same with my latest interest: Law. I've watched a few (mock) court cases and researched whatever questions I came up with, to get an understanding of how courts worked, and had a look at the cited laws.

    In physics tests I end up running out of time because whenever I forget an equation I need, I try to intuit/derive it, which I would manage given enough time.

    The way we are actually expected to learn stuff:

    • Listening to a lecturer talk for 12×2 hours, and/or reading the referenced literature. Anything mentioned could be on the test.

    I have been trying to do it the mainstream way anyway, but I am getting such bad grades that I've had to re-take a year. Even if I found strategies to help me focus I'd still clearly have a competitive disadvantage to people to whom this approach comes naturally. This feels unfair since I know there is a way that I could learn about my field as effortlessly as other people do listening to these lectures.

    How does someone like me succeed in academia instead of just scraping through?

    I understand that my prefered methpd which I outlined is what you do at PhD level. I'm afraid that by force-feeding my brain all this information that it currently sees as irrelevant, I will kill my curiousity, which I don't want to do because it's the thing that's allowed me to get this far with practically no effort (I went through the archetypal Smart Kid thing in middle school).

    For context, I'm in 1st year bachelor's biochemistry (repeating the year). Although I think that at least in my country, all university courses have the format I described.

    Since I am also struggling with ADHD I honestly feel like giving up on Uni and going for some sort of apprentiship-style thing. I would like to have a degree though because it's sort of a requirement nowadays and I am genuinely interested in my subject area. Alternatively, what kind of professions seek my method of inquisitively deep-diving into stuff, as I described?

    19 votes

  4. Comment on Children predict the year 2000 (1966, video) in ~life

    atmk
    Link Parent
    Yes, considering one of them was mentioning quite metaphorical things like going to the 'funeral of a computer' (which I'm not really sure how to picture), I would expect many of their visions...

    Yes, considering one of them was mentioning quite metaphorical things like going to the 'funeral of a computer' (which I'm not really sure how to picture), I would expect many of their visions come from sci-fi

    1 vote

  5. Comment on California is preparing to defend itself — and the nation — against Donald Trump 2.0 in ~enviro

    atmk
    Link Parent
    This is great to hear. What do you think the Democrats (or civil society?) are doing correctly that is allowing actual pro-welfare state legislation to be passed over there? (Instead of the...

    This is great to hear. What do you think the Democrats (or civil society?) are doing correctly that is allowing actual pro-welfare state legislation to be passed over there? (Instead of the Democrats just being less right wing than the Republicans as is the case in the rest of the US, at least from an outsider's perspective)

    2 votes

  6. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~life.men

    atmk
    Link Parent
    Interesting, there seems to be a wave of people speaking out about the horrors of boarding schools at the moment. A couple of months ago I watched an interview with Richard Beard, who wrote a...

    Interesting, there seems to be a wave of people speaking out about the horrors of boarding schools at the moment. A couple of months ago I watched an interview with Richard Beard, who wrote a similar book detailing his experiences, 'Sad Little Men'.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on How universal basic income became the pessimist’s utopia in ~finance

    atmk
    (edited )
    Link
    One thing I don't understand with proposals for UBI is where the money would come from. From a purely mathematical standpoint. The only way I can see it working is if it was introduced gradually...

    One thing I don't understand with proposals for UBI is where the money would come from. From a purely mathematical standpoint.
    The only way I can see it working is if it was introduced gradually as jobs were automated. Otherwise I see it leading to a shortage of work. Here's my thinking:

    Let's assume that everyone is given an amount of money that fully satisfies them, meaning they leave their job. Suddenly all jobs in the economy become vacant (as people are happy with their guaranteed income), meaning that the economy grinds to a halt. Eventually people will want to use their ideally-sized incomes to buy things like food, but there won't be anyone around to sell the food to them, as they too will be smugly sitting at home with an income they are happy with. This would cause the price of everything to skyrocket, up to a price for which others would once again be willing to provide the service, which would however render people's ideally-sized incomes valueless.

    This is my proposed solution:
    The economy carries on as usual. Automation will eventually be developed. As a job – let's say a bricklayer's – gets automated, the employer keeps paying the bricklayer their salary, because the work they are paying for will still be getting done. Except that now the work will be done by a robot on behalf of the bricklayer. The bricklayer will now be free to do whatever they please with their time, however they'll still retain a legal bond to their ex-job, as they'll be contracting the robot to do their work for them. The robot would be bought and owned by the bricklayer – not the employer who would be banned from buying robots. The ex-worker pays for its upkeep and insurance out of their (ie. the robot's) salary, and it is in their interest to invest into improvements so that they can keep as much of the salary as possible.

    This approach would prevent ludditeism. I would be interested to explore it further. What are your thoughts?

  8. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    atmk
    Link Parent
    That sounds interesting. Have you gotten any ergonomic use out of it? I once thought about making a voice controlled extension for Firefox that would aid skimming though webpages. You would say...

    That sounds interesting. Have you gotten any ergonomic use out of it?

    I once thought about making a voice controlled extension for Firefox that would aid skimming though webpages. You would say the question/info you were looking for and it would use a BERT-like ml model to highlight the most relevant part of the text

    1 vote