LastThursday

I find that being agreeable in a work environment mostly works. But I have my limits, and can be disagreeable if people behave badly, which they will inevitably. The ideal is to talk through disagreements or bullying, but that's not always possible or even wanted. People do notice however if you stop being agreeable and it can make them feel uncomfortable - which helps them realise their bad behaviour has consequences - especially if you're disagreeable just to certain people. I've found that being disagreeable can sometimes make you more respected, especially amongst men. Work is generally about getting the most out of you for the least amount of recompense. That process can involve a lot of social manipulation to achieve that, including being hostile and being unpleasant. Every work situation is different though. Just realise that in the end you can vote with your feet and leave, you always have that option.

Not much to report. If you have nothing to say, then say nothing right? Saying that, presence is often enough without having to say anything much. I get those moments with friends at times. Are you comfortable enough to just sit with each other in moments of silence? Notice this with you family or with friends, can you just "be" with each other without having to neurotically fill the discomfort of being silent? When you're silent you realise that the discomfort is actually "presence". It's the acknowledgement that there is a living breathing unpredictable animal there right next to you, who chooses to be tame. I use "animal" for emphasis and not to denigrate. The silence temporarily removes the gloss of social politeness and mores: and at a nearly unconscious level makes you take notice of the divinity that you're dealing with. Sitting in silence comfortably means that you trust each other enough, that you can relax, and you re-affirm your commitment to each other. You don't have to constantly be kicking in the sea of noise to stay afloat.

DNA is put together like Lego bricks. There are four kinds of bricks. DNA has a finite length in every cell of your body. It's a digital storage medium, and so it has a finite storage capacity, about 3 Gigabytes for a human. The DNA of every human alive is nearly identical.

Em dashes are fine (mostly). They are used like round brackets to add extra — incidental — information. Except they have a more positive vibe to them than round brackets or where the incidental information is more relevant to the flow of the sentence. You could also use two commas instead, like brackets, if it's less incidental. Sometimes a single em dash is used in place of a semi-colon; which people seem allergic to using nowadays, pity. Sometimes it's even used in place of a colon: which is blasphemy. Mostly, it's a stylistic choice.

I was reverse parking in my garage with a friend as a passenger. I made a perfect turn into the space and said "that's the best parking I ever did!". I then proceeded to scrape my driver's door against a concrete pillar. Moral of the story? Never brag about your driving. Even more moral of the story? ALWAYS pay damn attention.

@integral interesting. Why don't you think it's absurd? And if the answer is clear, are you able to create something from nothing yourself? i.e. if you know how a chair is made, couldn't you make a chair in practice?

If you are triggered by a stupid person, you yourself are stupid. Stupidity is relative, and so we're all stupid to some degree, in the same way we're all intelligent to a degree.

The IT world is vast and constantly changing. You can't know all of it. Most of the technologies I know I've learnt on the job, and every place has its own unique mix of technologies. When you spend 8 hours a day at work learning stuff, you soon master it - even if it's stressful at first. So I've needed to know enough to get my foot in the door, but once I'm in a job I learn everything else. I code outside of work on my own projects, but I do that out of interest rather need, and I've found that that helps keep my skills up too. A lot of what you learn on one technology is transferable to other technologies: programming in PHP has a lot of overlap to programming in Javascript for example. Maybe the Portugese market is more competitive than the UK market, but it's like anything, you choose how much you want to learn. The more you learn the more employable you'll be, that's just capitalism. The stress comes from within, because you don't want to return to hard times.

My agnostic answer is that the above is just a relational equivalence between words: i.e. it is a statement using logic. To say "two things are one", "this is the same as that", and all those sorts of relational statements is just logic. Logic shouldn't be confused with actuality. It could be that in actuality the thing pointed to by the word "God" is the same as the thing pointed to by the word "Love". But you should be clear that "God=love" is a construct of language, not the thing itself. It could well be that in actuality God does not equal Love, but you can't "know" that with logic. At its basic level you can't make something true by stating it as fact (using language). Language and by extension logic, is ridiculously powerful. And the thing behind language (brains) are also super powerful. Our abilities have overflowed our survival needs - that's why we can subjugate nature and create cities. We are free to use language for things that aren't connected to survival - spirituality for one, but also story telling and imagination. Although, it is very difficult to disentangle survival from non-survival. Lots of the things we do seem to not be connected to survival on the surface, but when you drill down they are. Spirituality for example could encourage group cohesion and hence improve survival.

I would disagree with that. It's ok to specialise in certain areas and you can still get work from it. For example, I know backend and database stuff extensively and enough front end to get by, I don't know dev ops hardly, and a small about of cyber security - I have a comfortable job. The point is that most companies hire a mix of people who have strengths in different areas. In general the bigger the company the more specialised you can be. All these IT recruitment adverts that list everything are just typical sales bullshit, no employer in their right mind would expect you to know everything. Of course, you can become a champion IT person if you like, and employers will happily recompense you for your knowledge. But you can let yourself off the hook a bit.

@Anton Rogachevski logic is just a specialised outgrowth of language, and we use language as a glue to relate to one another. You're right in that we have to figure out a lot of things just to stay alive, whether this is done consciously or unconsciously. Logic and language is just the conscious part of that process, which we can co-opt for non-survival purposes.

My favourite is, how do you get something from nothing? Specifically if I were some all powerful entity, how would I do it? Of course it's a completely absurd thing to think about, but fun.

Interesting thought, but it's a paradox. If you had truth why would you need to construct it again? Because its truths not Truth. I was in a poetic mood when I wrote that. Logic relates one set of truths to another set. If I say "God is love" then I'm relating the truth of whatever "God" stands for with the truth of what "love" stands for. Mathematics does the same, relating proofs and derivations to a set of axioms (self evident truths). But, whether we should relate one thing to another is a different question. Logic is a stripped down model of reality at best.

Knowing is the sensation of truth. Truth is what persists. Logic constructs truth from truth.

No. The CV should be an honest and full account of you as a person and your experience. Everything is relevant because the interviewer may want to pick up on things that you don't think are relevant. But, you can de-emphasise less relevant experience by just writing less about it, keep it very brief. For more relevant stuff, you want to write more detail. For example if you were a fork lift driver, then write "fork lift driver for warehouse" and that's it, don't elaborate. If the interviewer is interested in that they will ask you further about it, if not then they haven't wasted time reading about something that isn't relevant.

@Zest4Life I've been on both ends of the hiring process. Believe me when you have to read through 100s of CVs, you instantly have to make a judgement just based on presentation. If there's anything that makes it hard to read, unclear, waffle, too much text, bad layout, bad spelling, inconsistencies, too many pages, it's out. Definitely keep it simple and concise and all the important and recent stuff on one page. On my CV I list all my software skills right at the top, literally a list of acronyms, before I even list the places I've worked at. Anything which makes it easier to take it all in at a glance, is the way to go.

What emerges is recognition of a pattern (structured interpretation). The parts of a system in isolation don't explain the system because the emergent behaviour of the system is to do with dynamic relationships between the parts. The parts of a clock don't tell the time, but the dynamic ongoing relationships between the parts do. It seems more obvious if you re-arrange the parts of a system and the emergent behaviour disappears. The dynamics are a thing unto themselves. I think this happens in both directions. For example, atoms are an emergent phenomenon because people (scientists) take many observations, which when pooled together makes a pattern emerge, that of atoms (or at least a story about atoms). Something like language is emergent, because it is the dynamic interplay of many parts both physical and mental. The interesting thing is that there isn't necessarily an innate language ability, it's just the the parts come together just right as a system to make language emerge. Sometimes the emergent patterns are statistical only, so when you zoom in the emergent behaviour dissolves. For example idea of temperature is purely statistical, if you zoom into hot matter it's just random movement, but on average the faster movement produces higher temperatures.

I watched this a while back. I nearly posted it on a recent forum post here, but wasn't sure it would hit home. Anyway, I think it's relevant to many on here who are looking for "no self". Tim Freke comes down a little heavy on it, by calling it dangerous, but the positive message is that there is another way. Watch both parts all the way through if you're patient enough. If anything at least it's an interesting discussion.

I hope you mean that in a smart and geeky way.

Hell is the mind.

@Aaly social anxiey and anxiety in general is no joke. If you can learn to talk in person like you write, then you'll have no problems at all. Anxiety can be overcome, both by practice bit by bit and by confronting what caused it and working through it. This will build your confidence as a person. All the things that @Applegarden8 says are right, you need to meet a wider range of people. Even just being on this forum might help a bit.

Welcome.

Understand is a perfectly good word and pretty normal. There's also "get it" and "grok". There's also the moment of suddenly understanding something: "penny dropped", "hit me", "realisation", "make sense", "become clear". Use all of them, why not?!

I'm nominally an unconfirmed Catholic. I wasn't brought up religious and for the most part I've been atheist most of my life, so I find using the word "god" a bit icky. The word also has heavy religious baggage, so I find it's best avoided in polite conversation. I've used it on here though because there's less confusion about its usage. But its usage on the forum has a different definition than the normal everyday definition. From a metaphysical level, I also have problems with what the word implies, that there is a single entity in control of things. I find that non-obvious. I don't think it's even really possible to capture much at all with the word, because a word always has a "semantic range", but supposedly "god" is everything without exception. i.e. the word is effectively meaningless. That makes believing in "god" difficult for me. But there's no doubt that my everyday experience is inexplicable in a number of ways, and that's what I attach the label "god" to.