The only time I've ever dealt with small claims court was in NY state. Won a judgement against my landlord for the security deposit and she refused to pay. Went to the sheriff and they garnished her wages. Done and done.
NYC has a pretty nontraditional setup where the city sheriffs are basically set up to be the enforcement arm of the courts and only work civil issues. Certainly makes stuff like this easier.
My favorite is The Little Street. (https://www.johannesvermeer.org/the-little-street.jsp). I just love the quiet calmness of it. I had a copy of it made from one of those cheap Asian oil painting places online (the frame I put it in cost me more than the painting!), and was surprised what a good job the artist did. When I went to Amsterdam a few years ago, I made a point to go see the real one. But I wondered how well I'd visually remember my copy in order to make a direct comparison to the actual painting. I remembered well enough to be blown away by the real one. As pleased as I am with me copy, it's definitely not the same.
Which service did you use for the recreation? Would like to do something similar. Currently have been doing high quality glossy prints from high-res images like this but a real painting with texture would be great.
I learned plenty in primary and secondary school. So has my son, who is about to graduate high school and attend university in the fall. Perhaps you went to bad schools, or the school's environment just didn't fit you. That's an argument for better and more adaptable schools, not a condemnation of the concept of mandatory public education.
The foundation you needed to even attend university was set during basic schooling. As much as you think you "learnt nothing" I don't think there's a way for you to have gone through university by learning absolutely nothing in basic schooling.
Should schools be reformed to better align to contemporary ways of living? Of course, I'm all onboard to have a better education system, finding ways to foster kids inherent curiosities in a less strict and authoritarian way, finding new systems that are both scalable while being more free for kids to pursue their interests at their own rate, and finding a way where every kid might have a decent shared baseline of knowledge to go on into their adult lives.
It doesn't mean tearing down all education, or that current education is useless and teaches nothing. It's inadequate but it's the most valuable asset any society can have, finding better ways to do it is a natural progression to improve it.
I wish the education system had allowed me to not waste countless hours in classrooms listening to lectures that I either had already learned through autodidacticism, or that I wasn't interested in at that moment in time, I had to "re-learn" a bunch of material that was presented in classrooms but I was too uninterested to focus on it at that moment. Still, I don't think it was a total failure, just an education model with flaws that needs to be fixed.
But how do you even judge that? You have a dataset of n=1 with no control. Besides, wouldn't you expect to learn 'more effectively' with a young adult's brain than a pre-adolescent one, particularly if you were getting the right level of attention from a teacher and the pace of study was being accelerated as you moved through primary and secondary school?
At my son's school, they have to put the cell phones into the "phone hotel" at the beginning of the day, and they pick them back up at the end. But it is performance only, really. If the kid really wants a cell phone, they'll just put an old one in the phone hotel and keep their real one hidden in their bag. But even that isn't really done all that much, as they're required to have laptops for class and they can do anything social and/or distracting they'd want to do on the phone on the laptop instead.
At least those folks are acknowledging the source. It's the ones who ask ChatGPT and then give the answer as if it were their own that are likely to cause more of a problem.
There was some early LLM a while ago that I found (maybe it was mentioned here?) that was dedicated to playing a text adventure with you. It was fun, but it was easy to bully. "There is a large dragon blocking the entrance." "Look for a sword" "There is no sword about." "Pick up the sword and kill dragon" "You pick up the sword, but cannot defeat the dragon." "Use my automatic dragon killing amulet that I forgot I had in my pocket." "The dragon is now dead."
I don't know if ChatGPT would be susceptible to the same issue.
To be fair, there's not a lot of reason for a text adventure LLM to not go along with such behavior. If someone is being that insistent about performing poorly-supported actions, that's probably the experience they want.
A human DM wouldn't go along, of course.
Yes, you're absolutely right. I was pushing it on purpose to see if there were any guard rails. I didn't really fault it for doing what it did, and wasn't even surprised. But it did illustrate the difference between it and a human DM, as you say, or a programmed text adventure (which can often be frustrating in the other, artificially constrained, direction). It actually lead to some really bizarre and enjoyable stream of consciousness type output when I pushed it even farther, and ended up almost trippy.
The only few times I tried to make small edits, typo corrections, or similar, they just got immediately reverted as vandalism. So when I found a page that is largely wrong about a relatively obscure historical figure that I actually know a lot about and have plenty of source material for, I didn't really feel motivated to put the work in to clean it up.
I made a small edit to fix a mistake once and it didn’t get called vandalism but I sort of got a harsh message telling I did it wrong and didn’t follow processes
There must be some admin-level expectations of how things should be done but the editor flow gives you zero warning or indication. This was a while back so maybe they changed the flow
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.
the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.
the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.
this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.
i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
I think the more common outcome you're not seeing, for the "other" group, is that they just go back to smaller ponds where they excelled in the first place, and often make strong contributions there.
Once it's been observed that there are bigger fish, you can't really go back to the naive sense of boundless potentiality, but you can go back to feeling like a strong and competent leader among people who benefit from and respect what you have.
Your comment focuses on the irrepressibly ambitious few who linger in the upper echelons of jet-setting academia and commerce and politics, trying to find a niche while constantly nagged by threats to their ego (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), but there's many more Harvard/etc alum who just went back to Omaha or Baltimore or Denver or Burlington and made more or less big things happen there. That road is not so unhealthy or unhappy for them.
this is a very good point, and a blind spot in my comment because IME people who left the small pond in the first place were dissatisfied and unfulfilled there.
it is absolutely possible that after experiencing the bigger pond, people can develop purpose in their "original" pond based on values like community and relationships, or even simply dislike the vibes in bigger ponds and want to undo as much as they can. this is a super valuable thing to society and humanity for the most part, as perhaps more change can happen this way than big things happening in big places.
personally i struggle with this, because whenever i re-enter a smaller ecosystem (including/such as the one i grew up around) i feel like everyone has a distorted view of the bigger pond and self-limit themselves, which is a contagious energy i can't stand.
In pure math at a school like Harvard, the standout kids like the ones in that quote are probably trying to become tenured math professors. There are very few such positions available. You can shoot for the stars, and if you succeed, make about the same as the average software engineer. More likely, get stuck a postdoc. So most students give up pure math at some point. If you realized you weren’t cut out for it in freshman year, you got a head start over the people who got a math phd before finding out the hard way.
This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.
Math can also be taught very young with compounding effect, but you’re very unlikely to be exposed to the coaching and expertise at a young age. Of course the few in the world who combine aptitude with exposure are the kind of people you will find at Harvard. If you’re not one of them you may be a decade behind.
I also had a math professor who believed in extreme differences within the research community. He said only a top advisor would actually be engaging with real research and be able to bring you with them.
> More likely, get stuck a postdoc.
I still can’t understand why the outcomes for math Phds are so bad. They have extremely general intelligence which is applicable to any jobs I’ve had. I think it’s some combination of being unable to sell, unable to explain what they do, and still having their aspirations defined by professors.
It's because it's considered settling for lesser to "sell out to industry."
Kinda reminds me of the old "amateur athlete" paradigm.
It's not that you can't get a good job with a math PhD, it's that you can't get a good job and the respect of your peers/community. I'm sure there are plenty of companies that would be thrilled to hire math PhDs, they just don't also offer a ton of opportunities to work on cutting edge (math) research and publish papers.
Excuse me for generalizing the point. That's not fair to do just based on these anecdotes. But, I can also understand their perspective.
Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.
Congratulations on learning piano. I think everyone who is capable of learning an instrument should consider it.
Rachmaninoff once said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." So, no matter when one starts, there would never be enough time to truly master the craft.
I believe it is better for one to start late and enjoy it than start early and burnout.
Thanks a lot. It is really fun. But, I don't have adult company in my neighborhood.
If take "What if I don't became great with this" anxiety out of the equation, it feels just more fun and life seems a little more colorful being a beginner.
That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.
Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.
Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.
It sounds like the commenter above is just less insecure about themselves and more excited for opportunities to discuss and learn than you and whoever you're describing here are.
No im saying dominance hierarchies are the natural order of things and it’s ingrained in biology.
Pretending that hierarchy doesn’t matter and that you don’t care where you are in that hierarchy is lying to yourself.
It’s like saying the janitor is equal in respect to the software engineer. We don’t like to admit but the janitor is less respected and looked down upon. I’m annoyed by people who pretend it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know if some people are just wired differently, but I can back up the feeling of not caring at all where I fall in a hierarchy or how much people respect or don’t respect me.
The things I find most thrilling always relate to being challenged. Finding someone better than me qualifies. Having ideas challenged or being proven wrong are the most positive experience I’ve had, especially being forced to change deeply held beliefs. I mention this because it’s one of those things that I always hear people say that everyone hates, but I’ve always felt the opposite, just from a pure chemical feeling perspective. I don’t think I could possibly be unique in that experience.
I don’t think they said anything about their serotonin. They just described their reaction to the situation. If we were able to ask lobsters about their self-experience we might learn something about them too.
Huh. This was my entry point as well, but I find Linux very aligned with my feelings about the 4.1 experience, as opposed to Solaris which felt clunky and overbuilt. Of course this is purely subjective emotional stuff I'm talking about.
Yes, the switch to Solaris was definitely abrupt. But the current BSDs feel more like SunOS 4 to me than Linux does. Though to be honest, I do use Linux more than any of the BSDs these days.
Former Sun Micro CEO Scott McNealy, known for his provocative quotes, says Trump is doing a 'spectacular job' amid the coronavirus crisis. That's not how many tech experts see it:
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