171–180 of 232 posts
This is false.
Doing dishes can involve gymnastic skills at any moment and the deepest truths of life, the universe - and everything - can be found in the simplest of chores.
Waiting for a Haskell programmer to explain why this is an artifact of procedural languages and that making coffee should be abstracted as the death of coffee caused by hot water.
I really like this guy's writing and am grateful that he shared some of the coding challenges. I'd really like to be able to program games like this, and while I'm not a programmer, I'd like to learn how. In TFA he shares some of the code to check the coffee "state": >'LOOK AT COFFEE MAKER': () => { if( State.scene.state.coffeedrunk ) { return "The coffee maker has done its job and mercifully drained the last life ou…
The truth is, the author is coding an irrational and illogical system, and what this is basically is a big old set of special cases.
But then keep in mind the whole piece is satire.
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It's interesting how all the tedious tasks listed are a product of modernity. Vacuuming, driving to work, flossing, doing dishes, etc. I wonder how repetitive life feels for humans who still have to hunt for their food. Not to say that we should shift back to a hunter-gatherer society, but I wonder how much of the mundaneness of life is something we brought on ourselves and not actually an implicit part of existence.
That's a totally backwards take. Most of these things are modern labor-saving devices that replaced even worse drudgery. Sweeping takes longer than vacuuming. Washing dishes by hand takes longer than a dishwasher -- especially if you don't have unlimited running water, or dish detergent, or if you need to start a fire to get hot water. Ancient Romans didn't have to deal with rush hour traffic, but research says their…
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I think I've read several studies that indicate hunter gatherers worked less than agrarian societies. However, agrarian societies are better at producing predictable abundance of food, so they outpace hunters by far. I will admit that hunting is incredibly fun. I do think we lost something as a trade-off when we moved to agrarian/industrial societies.
I recently saw an interesting review of Against the Grain by James Scott, which makes the claim that: only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” And so early states led the way in agriculture in order to collect more taxes. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-th...
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I read this as I watched my 2 year old daughter joyfully scrub the shower with a nylon brush. She's demanded the brush ever since she watched me use it months ago. I think finding lovely things tedious is something most of us learn, then unlearn.
It's still new and exciting when you're 2. I don't think you're unlearning loving the tedious. Things are just not tedious at that point, but fun, novel, and optional. If she didn't want to scrub the shower, she wouldn't. But we have to do it.
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If that's the case you're right and I'm completely wrong about that quote. I don't pretend to be a Buddhist so you're more likely to be right than me. I have not bothered to verify this as of this writing. Another famous quote that everybody gets wrong because they cut it short: "Distance makes the heart grow fonder" That quote means separation is good for couples, but almost nobody knows the actual quote: "Distance…
The fact that there was an original version of a quote doesn't make the original version any more "true," so I've never quite understood the instinct of people to use it as some kind of gotcha. Indeed, if anything it seems like in general the opposite would be true, if common culture adapts a quote to more accurately fit their reality (irrespective of whether this particular quote is "true" or not). (Also, I can't fi…
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It's still new and exciting when you're 2. I don't think you're unlearning loving the tedious. Things are just not tedious at that point, but fun, novel, and optional. If she didn't want to scrub the shower, she wouldn't. But we have to do it.
Oh no, little kids absolutely love familiar, boring, repetitive things. They also like routine a lot and can get upset when given too much choice. Look at how often toddlers want to re-watch the same cartoon over and over.
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Are we using the same definition of "tedious"? This is what I get: Tedious: too long, slow, or dull; tiresome or monotonous. "Too" long as in "longer than I'd like." Tiresome. Monotonous. Those sound like the opposite of enjoying the ride to me!
It's tangential to the discussion but I find it surprising and slightly upsetting the fact that people downvote someone who basically quotes the definition of a word as-it-is, verbatim. It happens quite often on hacker news. Are the folks here denying definitions and they make up their world instead and get upset when they encounter reality, or why does this downvoting happen? I'd really like to know.
However, “quot[ing] the definition” in this case is citing a denotative facet of the word. There is also nuanced and idiomatic usage that is indicated in connotative meaning.
Pointing to denotative meanings when connotation is more contextually relevant is often considered combative and may garner downvotes.