Multitasking, something we copied from computers
blog.mikemwanje.dev
blog.mikemwanje.dev
You probably can't cook a meal without multitasking. The author suggests that you are rapidly switching focus, but I don't agree - if you schedule things correctly you can jump from task to task without thinking about it. Eg if you know you need to make a burger with fries and a plate of nachos at the same time you can schedule the tasks based on how much time they take - burger on the grill, fries in the grease, start prepping the bun/plate, get the nachos built and in the broiler, pull the fries and let them drain, plate the burger, add the fries, pull the nachos out, out the window for service. You don't need to think much ahead to get it done while in the process, if you already know the plan and are used to it. Everything has a timer and you just need to move things when the timer says go. Bonus points if the timer is internal.
While that might be through of conscious thought, but there's definitely at least anecdotal evidence to suggest that the brain performs tasks in the background. Think about how many times you've struggled to remember the name of an author, a movie, an actor; only to have it come to you hours later while you're working on something entirely unrelated.
> Only the real heavy thinking/processing happens in the CPU...
> Brains and computer systems work in similar ways.
Where is this "CPU" in the brain, of which you speak? I suppose the pre-frontal cortex? That zone is generally associated with orchestration/planning, that you mention. But to say that those functions constitute "the real heavy thinking" is a bit of a reach, I think.
It would be like saying the manager does the all the hard work (:
I'm no neuroscientist, but anecdotally, a good portion of my important mental results come from an unknown place — maybe bubbling to the forefront of consciousness when I'm sitting on the toilet, or in a dream. Not when my "CPU is spinning", so to speak.
YMMV.
In the mental world, you can also listen to a couple conversations at once with effort.
But on the other hand, would I say that walking is itself parallel because it uses two legs, two feet, and two arms all doing things at once? I guess not.
Steering with one hand and changing radio stations with the other.
One that I feel I can't do at all: hit a keyboard key really fast with one hand and hit another one more slowly with another. Unless I treat it like playing drums in a specific rhythm, my fast hand has to stop briefly to let my slow hand hit its key.
For example, there was a fellow (his name escapes me at the moment) who had trained himself to be able to write a sentence with one hand while solving a mathematical equation with the other.
There's a reason why our minds evolved a "unitary" identity or ego, it's evolutionarily advantageous (tautologically, sorry), but it's an illusion. You can "divide" your mind among several tasks (in other words, the brain is not like a CPU, it's more like "the cloud", yeah?) but it's not really as useful as it might seem.
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(FWIW, my first thought on reading the title was "This person doesn't cook." ;P )
But cooking a meal is a task in itself ( consisting related of subtasks). When cooking a meal it is a good idea to avoid attempting other unrelated tasks such as responding to emails and such as the quality of the original task will decrease
can definitely drive and listen to a podcast when you’re good at it.
- Lose our ability to focus for longer
Well, multitasking is bad for the caches and any attempts at speculation might have been ruined by the forced task switch
- Prone to errors due to shorter attention spans
Prone to errors due to Spectre and its followups. Some mitigations go as far as disabling hyper threading, due to leaks triggered by the really fast context switching between the two hyperthreads
- Waste time during context switching
Yep, CPUs need time for that too
- Less productivity
Oh yeah.. one old way of increasing throughput was longer time slices for less context switches. Eg the old Windows NTs differentiated on timeslice length in their server and workstation offerings.
it's just that CPUs are still a helluvalot faster than us
I really don’t see the parallel you are trying to draw, computers do what they are instructed to do with very very very little chance of a hardware failure. Not wanted operations can happen, but they ultimately boil down to human error.
+ We are otherwise a heavily distributed system which has many autonomous systems interoperating at the same time
This made me think. Is a cosmic ray human error because we were unable to prevent it damaging the system?
Also, if I’m not mistaken, in airplanes which are much more likely to get hit by cosmic rays at high altitude, they often use redundant CPUs that work in lockstep with each other. So.. in the end it is human error I guess? Handling unexpected cases should be done well as well.
Of course, the same parallel cannot be drawn with multitasking on multiple cores; though other issues of communication between cores can (and have, extensively) be compared with parallelism between multiple humans.
Rote: Walking Engaged: Talking
Rote: Washing dishes Engaged: Listening
I find that "music in the background" while coding only works if you either completely zone it out and it acts as white noise (rare) OR the task is so boring and routine that you need some other stimulus to avoid getting bored.
Coming from a technical background, I never fully understood what is meant by "object oriented ontology".
Another nice example is stretching the concept of "open source" to include the wildest ideas.
> Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently (as Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects.
So, basically, it's your default assumption that the world exists independently of somebody being there to see it.
Looks like the clickbaity name is there as a prank, because it's a revolt against some newer philosophy that can't settle on the old "if a tree falls on the forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound?"
But I did never hear about this before, so I may have understood things wrong.
Humans have long strived to emulate their metal tools.
To do the same thing over and over forever, perfectly. To keep a perfect schedule. To suffer terrible abuse without bending or breaking. To obey orders perfectly and without hesitation.
What's not to admire?