"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

I think they basically agree with your point here -- they mention Descartes and Kant to say roughly "I hold basically these ideas, but I don't mention the philosophers' names when I talk about them because 1) I came to them independently, and 2) the people I'm talking to are not familiar with the context so situating our conversation there isn't helpful." Their argument is that you can have philosophical conversations without relying on the context of the canon, and that in a first-level discussion they wouldn't bring up Descartes or Kant.

Strongly disagree with this:

> I think the variety in barista coffee is different from the variety in, say, fashion or wine because with fashion and wine there is social signalling and all kinds of things going on

Sounds like OP just doesn't care about coffee thst much. Fine for them, but any subject has a subculture; there are definitely social signaling games within the coffee world

Just fyi (perhaps @dang) this jumps to the Postscript of the blog post due to the anchor/hash in the URL. I was a bit confused initially.

The title is also wrong. I was wondering if the submitter maybe did mean to link to the postscript, but it doesn’t fit the title any better.

This is SO cool I love it. Feels like I'm reading snippets from a million people's diaries one after another. Humbling!

Can you recommend any command-line pdf tools? As a student I have to look at lots of pdfs and the gui tools for manipulation are very lacking.

I used pdftk for this project,

https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/pdftk-java/pdftk.1.en.h...

I only used the subcommands "cat" (extract & concatenate PDF pages) and "update_info" (to edit ToC metadata).

I agree that a smart, ambitious person can become expert in more than one field in their life — but jumping to a new area of mathematics is on an entirely lower level than jumping from algorithmic finance to cutting edge biomedical, especially at the time Erdős was working.

There are a few people who did a complete switch to study rare diseases with no background.

Sonia Vallabh, and her husband, Eric Minikel are the strongest examples of these type of highly smart and ambitious people.

> Sonia Vallabh ... had just graduated from Harvard Law School.

> [Eric Minikel] ... had recently gotten a degree in urban planning from M.I.T

https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/sonia-vallabh

https://www.broadinstitute.org/bios/eric-minikel

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/health/rare-diseases.html

Worth mentioning Nebula [0], which is $10/month to support a large roster of educational (or education-adjacent) creators. The site is "creator-built and creator-owned", according to their homepage, and a number of YouTubers I like and respect have promoted them. No ads, and there's some Nebula-exclusive content which might be interesting as well.

[0]: https://nebula.app/

Oh, also, two other things: First, CuriosityStream has a bundle deal with Nebula where you can get both at once: [1]. You have to find an appropriate promo link from one of the participating YouTubers but that shouldn't be too hard.

Second, I know you mentioned wanting to find dedicated services, but if you're spending a decent amount of time on YouTube and you can afford it, I find Youtube Premium well worth it. Not having ads makes such a huge difference to the experience, and it also pays creators better!

[1]: https://help.curiositystream.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034158...

those first four are things that i didn't even realize bother me but i feel like it'll be a massive QoL improvement to have them turned off. thank you!

Any chance you can say where you work? Because that sounds kind of like a dream job to me, haha.

Not publicly (prefer to keep work and personal presence delineated), but if you can relocate to SoCal and you're a US citizen, you can send me an email.