"I'm speaking from personal experience, having spent about 12-14 hours a day on TikTok for probably 360 days during 2024"
My jaw is on the floor... Can you provide details of your usage, were you just going through video after video for 12-14 hours or were you involved in content production or something?
Scrolling videos, commenting, expanding my algorithm by searching for similar stuff to what I liked, sometimes watching lives, sometimes hosting lives or joining lives. Maybe about 70% scrolling videos and 28% lives and 2% creating.
I should mention that I was very financially successful due to TikTok. Around Christmas of 2023, my book got over 20M views and shot up to #122 on all Amazon books, until KDP just stopped offering it within a few hours. I wonder how high it would have gone.
But due to that success, I lost both drive and purpose. I had already made it, and it wasn't clear what else I could offer the world. So while I thought about it, I scrolled to pass the time. But that scrolling was endless and addictive. And I never made any progress on figuring out the question of what I'm good for.
KDP usually cuts off high volume sales at a certain point, in order to give other books a fair amount of copies to print on demand. Usually it takes a few weeks of sales, but I sold so many copies that evening, from a single 10M view video that someone posted, so they cut it off that night for two or three weeks I think.
I don't know why they do that, but it's really the main (only?) drawback to KDP.
My guess is that they do expand, but only when genuinely needed for long-term. They probably keep a certain amount of blank books in stock, and ration them out to PoD books somewhat evenly, with established books getting higher priority.
This was the video that singlehandedly got me all those sales I mentioned earlier: https://www.tiktok.com/@alwayscandid/video/73180668430448755... ... honestly it's quite poetic how it all turned out. I did almost no work making a book, I made way more money than I ever deserved, I wasted all of it, and now I'm sleeping in my car. It's very fair, it's more than fair. It's generous.
Those are not crazy numbers for unemployed people.
If you want a real shocker: TikTok is EXTREMELY popular amongst 60+ men, consuming stuff like teenagers plus super naive...
Just check out hospitals or elderly shelter thing.
I have had this discussion with my wife, men need activities more than women to bond. My wife can make friends just by randomly running into other women at events or my daughter's activities.
Basically the whole point of the Freemasonry fraternity as well. Male only. It is dressed up with some altruistic goals and rituals, but it is a social club for men essentially.
> Basically the whole point of the Freemasonry fraternity as well. Male only. It is dressed up with some altruistic goals and rituals
Freemasonry began as a workers' guild, but the accreted "goals and rituals" take a group far beyond the simplicity of a men's shed.
The simplicity of any club rapidly becomes complex when monotheism or henotheism (any theism) is injected:
From Wikipedia:
* Anglo-American style Freemasonry, which insists that a "volume of sacred law" should be open in a working lodge, that every member should profess belief in a supreme being, that only men should be admitted, and discussion of religion or politics does not take place within the lodge.
* Continental Freemasonry or Liberal style Freemasonry which has continued to evolve beyond these restrictions, particularly regarding religious belief and political discussion.
* Women Freemasonry or Co-Freemasonry, which includes organisations that either admit women exclusively or accept both men and women."
I don't think it is complex. The theme of a social group is just there as a filter. If you like rock climbing and meet someone at a rock climbing gym that person is far more likely to be interested in things you are interested in: physical fitness, the particular mental challenges of rock climbing, etc. It was just an example. I won't analyze the sexism or male only nature of the fraternity, but I think Freemasonry anecdotally reinforces the idea that men want/need/form these kind of clubs more than women on average.
When we study this we notice very small actual bias at an individual level on socialization preference. The differences are modest and more like slight preferences. There is more overlap than not at a local individual level. What gets missed is that even though the differences are relatively small, the network effect greatly amplifies these small variances resulting in non-linear outcomes. Even small biases at an individual level essentially produce significant effect in socialization behavior.
> but I think Freemasonry anecdotally reinforces the idea that men want/need/form these kind of clubs more than women on average.
There seem to be as many Women’s Institute members in England as there are Freemasons.
And that is before you consider more ad hoc organisations like book clubs that are definitely more female dominated (though sports clubs perhaps the opposite?)
I'll defer to you of course if you have personal experience that I do not. But would it not become more complex than a "woodworking club" (men's shed) or than a brick mason's guild as soon as a complex filter such as religion is introduced?
> I won't analyze the sexism or male only nature of the fraternity
No need to analyse the usefulness of fraternity (or sorority), I think. It's just a fact that sometimes the sexes don't want to mingle. What could become problematic are cases of gender-fluidity.
Honestly, as a non-sports loving male, it makes it much harder to build male friendships.
Not that its impossible, but the majority* of men get together to watch, play, or talk about sports the majority of the time... whereas I'm perfectly fine just hanging out where hanging out is the activity!
I eventually just stopped trying to invite most of my guy friends out for 1-1 meals, etc.
Kids these days get together and give presentations to each other. For example, a co-worker of mine had everyone at her birthday party present on an inventor they chose.
This is generally known to be true for men. We have a much harder time connecting socially without some sort of shared activity or action. The OP isn't trying to project on to you.
While that may be true, there are exceptions. And hence I think parents comment is more inclusive to say: some people (that are overwhelmingly male) need activities to bond, while others (majority female) do not need that. (May not be the best example here but helps i.e criticising certain toxic behaviours that are somehow more linked to one sex without blaming everyone of that sex)
To be honest, I apologise if the following appears a bit terse; I’m just really frustrated with what you’ve said and this is the best I can describe why that’s the case (without watering it down)
We don’t need to step back and work out the fundamental nature of sex and gender in order to have a functional conversation about them.
I don’t need to provide a definition of a chair before I can tell you that ones with three legs are more stable (“but what is a chair? what is the exact definition? aren’t some of them tables? aren’t some three legged chairs less stable?”). We just don’t have to do this. Do you do it for chairs? Or just gender? Why? Does it help feminism or trans rights to interrupt a conversation about male mental health with a semantic rabbit hole?
As for your second paragraph, there very much are studies showing the correlation being described, and they’re very easy to find. It would have been far more constructive to actually ask rather than suggest it’s an “assumption” — or even better, to research it yourself.
>For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That's one of the reasons they're used: to end a discussion.
>If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth.
----
Please don't try to end our constructive discussions, mmoose; people (men and women sure fine) have a tough enough time without having to get the language police involved.
[this will be my last response to this thread, as I continue hoping somebody learned anything, today]
There is an interesting thing. If you study the socialization patterns there are only small to moderate average differences and huge overlap between individuals (all genders). This is in part social construct and in part nature. When you average things statistically you can mislead yourself pretty quickly reading some of these studies.
There is more overlap than not. So, how do we reconcile that with how things end up: network effect. Small biases in socialization norms lead to significant non-linear outcomes due to amplification of these biases leading to norms that exaggerate these biases and end up creating norms that are quite distorted from the average. Leads to some significant consequences for how different genders end up socialization.
> We have a much harder time connecting socially without some sort of shared activity or action.
You might have a harder time doing that; other men have different experiences. The average man has brown eyes and is 1.72m tall; does that mean your eyes and height are that way? It's certainly an error to take statistical generalizations and apply them to individuals - one of the first things you learn in statistics.
Also, the studies you cited don't address this issue. The psychcentral link is about memory research. The other looks at social relationships, but doesn't look at this aspect of them. Do you actually know of any research?
Do you have something to say about the issues? Don't worry about me, thanks anyway.
Edit: As far as learning something, the GGP's citations were nonsense, as I pointed out. What has anyone offered, other than a demonstration of the fundamentals of misapplying statistics.
lol. Just address the issues, if you can. I've done nothing more.
I don't even see something negative in what I posted - it's pretty positive to me. I didn't say, 'we're all going to die' or say something fatalistic (like the comment I originally responded to).
Unless you mean 'negative' is 'disagrees', which of course badly is miscontrued in open intellectual debate, especially on HN.
I don't know what the 'personal' issue you have is. Perhaps a stereotype of people whose beliefs might overlap with mine in this area? It's not personal to me.
Just stick to the merits of the issue; you don't need to bring in ad hominem arguments.
All they need to know is their own needs. Mine are not defined by my gender/sex, but by me; same with the person I'm talking to, same with you.
I'm not thinking about myself on the basis of what someone else thinks all people of my gender/sex do - that's irrelevant. Do you redefine your own needs based on what you read someone else thinks half the population does?
Why does anyone need to be defensive about what someone has found for them?
For example, studies have shown that men who decide to isolate themselves to be "family men" die earlier at age 58.
It might not need to be a pub, but having a club house to do pretty much anything is enormously beneficial to the human brain to have positive social interaction.
We get to decide our own social interaction.
The world is not responsible to not triggering us.
> For example, studies have shown that men who decide to isolate themselves to be "family men" die earlier at age 58.
Yes, but isn't it a benefit to society as a whole though? All the prime working years are gone by then and there is no need to pay pension to those men or for expensive medical treatments. And younger generations can be happy for there being one less cishet white male boomer in the world.
I mean, it sure sucks for the individual not being able to enjoy their retirement, but for the society it seems that it will be a benefit.
Of course people dying younger is a benefit to society. Old people cost a lot, they're not productive, and (unlike children) they don't have any productive years in their future either. Ideally we would all drop dead of a heart attack 10 years after reaching retirement age (this would also solve the geriatocracy we find ourselves in).
Instead we clutch to life far beyond any societal benefit and, in many cases, beyond personal benefit too, spending a fortune to delay death another few weeks or months… but with incredibly low quality of life.
That said, dying at 58 is probably of no real benefit. But everyone dying a few years younger would have prevented Brexit.
I notice that both you and bragh have this idea - bragh calls it "working years", and you call it "productive years". You only value the lives of people so long as the wealthy are able to extract value from them.
I'm all for death with dignity and not being a burden on your loved ones. But people who've worked all their lives deserve to have a period after where they can enjoy life without the burden of "productivity".
Eventually it doesn't end well indeed. But modern society has made it pretty clear that older men aren't actually needed and are more of a burden. Just look at how triggered the GP of the thread got just about a mention that men might want a different approach when it comes to social stuff.
Well, not needed, unless an actual shooting war breaks out and you need a lot more people pulling guard duty or just some very high-risk stuff younger men should not be wasted on. Like that Ukrainian unit of pensioner men in a ground-attack missile unit who source their own missiles by repairing unexploded ones.
> modern society has made it pretty clear that older men aren't actually needed and are more of a burden
The mistake - which leads to disaster - is more fundamental. Modern society isn't an actual thing with needs, just an abstract concept. Individual people are real, and we all have real rights and needs. 'Goverments exist to protect rights' - society exists to serve the individual, not vice versa. Almost all morality includes protecting and helping the vulnerable.
Who decides who is a burden? Infants and children are also a 'burden' as are people with all sorts of illnesses (and people spreading disinformation). Only the cruelest fascists have suggested they should die to help society, as if that's a reasonable discussion.
> Just look at how triggered the GP
Ad hominem is against HN guidelines. Just stick to the issues instead of trying to change the subject by attacking and characterizing people who don't agree with you.
I am actually surprised they cancelled the F150 Lightning, I see a lot of them the Metro Vancouver area where a lot of contractors, (gardeners, pool maintenance, labourers, etc...) are driving them as electricity is super cheap here and gasoline is quite expensive.
I am reading this article and thinking, darn there's going to be too many people like me trying to find these on the used market, and the prices will stay high.
Big fancy expensive powerstroke mega trucks with a person-high wall in the front look cool, and occasionally haul heavy things, but little white trucks that are busted up and 20 years old do all the duty. And those trucks drive way less than the range on the lightning each day. Once these lightnings price down to work truck level, I expect to see them on the road a long time.
I thought the same thing too, when it was announced. But I suspect, in addition to the price, that not being able to buy a medium or long bed version also harmed fleet sales. The short bed being the only option is probably a pretty big limitation for groups who are buying them as fleet vehicles.
Just speculation but maybe the fact the world is in an oil glut right now and with the prospect that Russian oil could re-enter global market causing even more glut caused Ford to believe that gasoline will remain fairly cheap compared to 2008 era for the next decade.
it seems gas in vancouver (canada) is $4.50usd/gal ($1.18usd/liter)
that said, I'll bet the new one will be interesting for them, as I'll bet the gas motor can be used as an on-site generator which they might buy anyway.
> electricity is super cheap here and gasoline is quite expensive
Yeah, not everyone has that arrangement though. I was shocked (shocked!) when I realized that for my plug-in hybrid van, running it on gas can be cheaper than charging it, depending on the time of day and time of year.
Where I live, peak hours electricity is $0.22/KWh in the summertime during peak hours, or $0.18/KWh off-peak. My van gets ~32 MPG on its tank, but also ~32 miles on a 16KWh charge. So it’s easy math, 1 gallon = 16KWh, so $0.22 * 16 = $3.52, so gas has to be more expensive than that to be worth it. Off-peak it’s $0.18 * 16 = $2.88, which makes it barely worth it to charge, with gas prices near me being close to $3/gallon.
(I have since bought solar panels and now it’s basically free to charge my car, but I can totally understand why electric vehicles just don’t work out cost-wise for a lot of people, even when accounting for ongoing fuel costs…)
Not quite. Erlang uses the Actor model which delivers messages asynchronously to named processes. In Go, messages are passed between goroutines via channels, which provide a synchronization mechanism (when un-buffered). The ability to synchronize allow one to setup a "rhythm" to computation that the Actor model is explicitly not designed to do. Also, note that a process must know its consumer in the Actor model, but goroutines do not need to know their consumer in the CSP model. Channels can even be passed around to other goroutines!
There's also a nice talk Rob Pike gave that illustrated some very useful concurrency patterns that can be built using the CSP model:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZs
It's true that message sends with Erlang processes do not perform rendezvous synchronization (i.e., sends are nonblocking), but they can be used in a similar way by having process A send a message to process B and then blocking on a reply from process B. This is not the same as unbuffered channel blocking in Go or Clojure, but it's somewhat similar.
For example, in Erlang, `receive` _is_ a blocking operation that you have to attach a timeout to if you want to unblock it.
You're correct about identity/names: the "queue" part of processes (the part that is most analogous to a channel) is their mailbox, which cannot be interacted with except via message sends to a known pid. However, you can again mimic some of the channel-like functionality by sending around pids, as they are first class values, and can be sent, stored, etc.
I agree with all of your points, just adding a little additional color.
As soon as Cody Kociemba open sources his firmware I'm going to apply it to my Nest 1st gen. It is ridiculous Google is turning off the support, it is probably because they don't want to support the old API or something...
I just threw my unsupported Nest in the trash, just like Google wanted, and got something else.
After all, that’s what they want me to do. Well, their first preference would be for me to buy another one.
Even if I were to put some kind of open source thing on it, I don’t want visitors to my house to see Nest hardware and for Google to get that slight amount of free advertising.
What a waste... I like the style of it, still works fine after 10 years and it works with old furnaces. The environmentalists should be all over Google for this debacle.
>In the United States ... contact with infected bats is the leading cause of human rabies deaths.
> The same goes for people planning to ... explore caves in regions where rabid bats have been.
>The clearest example is someone who has been bitten by a wild dog, bat, fox, raccoon or other animal known to carry rabies. If someone had direct contact with a bat — for instance, waking up to find a bat in the room — this is also considered a possible exposure unless a bite or scratch can be definitively ruled out. ... If you find a dead bat, do not throw it away. Do not touch it or allow other people or pets to touch it. Instead, call animal control so that the bat can be tested.
>In addition, try to prevent bats from getting inside your home through windows, chimneys or other holes.
Germany - where I live - built Housing like there‘s no tomorrow in the 60s, which lead to the most prosperous phase of the country‘s existence. Then we stopped. And now we‘re where we are. Companies can’t hire because people can‘t move. There‘s sub and 0.1% empty apartments in cities.
I was reading this yesterday and it's wild to me how much changed in Canada in 1995: https://progressingcanada.com/ - Seems like 95 through 97 set in motion some bad things for Canada?
Around the turn of the millennium many countries seem to have decided to underproduce housing, both by ending government programs like you describe and by erecting government barriers to private home construction.
My conspiracy theory is that homeowners vote at higher numbers and more reliably and like free money.
In a local election we had to stop talking about "Housing Afforbabiliy" as homeowners perceived that as "Shitty Apartments Brining Down My Property Value."
The thing that drives me insane is that this is endemic in extremely liberal cities. Ask them if they support Trump’s wall and his mass deportations, and when they freak out point out that the housing policies they favor are the same thing on a smaller scale with pretty much the same motives.
In CBO’s projections, the federal budget deficit in fiscal year 2025 is $1.9 trillion. Adjusted to exclude the effects of shifts in the timing of certain payments, the deficit grows to $2.7 trillion by 2035. It amounts to 6.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025 and drops to 5.2 percent by 2027 as revenues increase faster than outlays
"The budget projections are based on CBO’s economic forecast, which reflects developments in the economy as of December 4, 2024. They also incorporate legislation enacted through January 6, 2025."
I have found ChatGPT is pretty good at explaining topics when the source documentation is poorly written or lacks examples. Obviously it does make mistakes so skepticism in the output is a good idea.
My jaw is on the floor... Can you provide details of your usage, were you just going through video after video for 12-14 hours or were you involved in content production or something?