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I’m thoroughly confused as to what state of the world one envisions as the alternative and how that would function. I understand an argument against purely a philosophical justification for proprietary software and no open access. But the practical reality of modern societies and Capitalism is that the closed source nature of many services / software brings many positive benefits to society and in some case is necessary for that platform’s very existence.

Doesn’t the equipment used for reproducing the soundstage matter in A/B testing? I haven’t done a rigorous test myself, because I’m comfortable having a predilection for high fidelity audio even if it isn’t demonstrably/empirically superior. But in my experience listening to music on a “audiophile” or “studio reference” setup, when the equipment is sufficiently sensitive and well engineered as to most accurately render the audio signal, I recall rather obviously noticing a difference in sound quality.

I can’t imagine if you compare a 192kbps MP3 with a DSD256 audio file played on reference monitors from a high performance DAC there’d be no audible difference. Personally, using a McIntosh integrated amp and Focal Utopia headphones the first time I listened to a DSD track, 1-bit word depth sampled 2.8M times per second, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I acknowledge that’s not a direct comparison, but all i’m saying is maybe the lossy vs lossless test performed on a low fidelity audio chain where the signal is always meaningfully subject to harmonic distortion before you hear it is the reason most people can’t tell a difference?

one of my favorites is Sym. " Symmetric Encryption that's easy on Humans"

https://github.com/kigster/sym

What profound discoveries has madeuptempacct made? To qualify as the "arbiter."

I much prefer reading to videos. My suggested online resource: http://lcmtuf.coredump.cx/electronics/

Print: The Art of Electronics https://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521...

These municipalities are the unsung heroes fighting the good fight. True Champions. I hope it is the catalytic butterfly that ends the telecoms' monopoly and abuse.

JPM's Quorum is originally a fork of Ethereum though.

Ethereum (which definitely has its own fair share of issues) recently hit its all time high in daily transactions, which incidentally is more transactions than all other existing decentralized blockchains put together--a set containing Bitcoin.

I think personal experience here is the answer. Even an excellent academic study, peer reviewed, conducted by experts in the field, published in a prestigious journal, is still at best one single experiment. Pretty sure the common answer to this is question is, try it yourself. Do it consistently 10 minutes a day for at least a week and see if you notice any benefit. That should be more informative than any study and as relevant to you as any experiment can be, you are the test subject. Also probably take as long as any review (a thorough one anyways) of academic literature.

If you see a benefit, consider it "proven," if not consider it a still unanswered question. That being said, I recall having once come across some interesting research in neuroscience dealing with meditation. However, it being neuroscience and not psychology, I don't think the research set out to ascertain any proclaimed "perceived" benefits. Just understanding the impact on the brain, neurologically, of meditation. I will try to link if I can recover the source.

It means you no longer experience it as an explicitly negative experience. While physiologically the pain signals are still present, your brain's reaction to them changes. Most notably (in my experience) the change occurs when one learns to stop resisting in any fashion the experience of the pain and just accepting it is there, neutrally observing it. From an uninitiated person's standpoint, I can't say this means things will no longer "hurt," they still do, you just change what it even means to be hurting. At the very least from something that is unequivocally negative and must subside, to something neutral that is occurring in the midst of everything else that is occurring.

In my experience (undergraduate mathematical statistics, currently "quant financial engineer") this is exactly right. If you want to continue "doing" math in the sense you did in school, or in the sense we assume a "mathematician" does, it really is almost exclusively a consideration accompanying having a doctorate in the field. Mainly because as stated above, undergraduate mathematics really just scratches the surface of core competencies. That being said, while not many fields offer pure math tracks for undergrads it certainly doesn't make it irrelevant. In most "quant" fields mathematical literacy and the thought patterns accompanying having studied mathematics are far more valuable than actual proficiency. Outside of research few individuals are "paving new roads" mathematically, they are most often applying the results of cutting edge research or long standing industry standards in mathematics within the context of their job. This requires a high level of mathematical fluency and comfort with abstract formalisms, not theory expertise akin to that of a phd.

That "visualization part" is unfortunately, for the majority of people, how the human brain creates meaningful neural pathways and absorbs information. Not necessarily in a "visual" as in involving images way, but some form of connection to something you already know whether explicitly visual or abstract is how the brain creates memories. In my experience speed reading, it dramatically increased the rate of information intake, especially if using software to sequentially display text (like Spritz), and eventually with practice it was possible to retain comprehension as well, but never was I able to create lasting stores of that information. I could get through a non technical book in a few hours reading consistently around 700 wpm (taking breaks to rest the eyes) and could understand what I was reading in the moment, but can't say I remember much of anything from those books. They literally feel like a "blur" in my mind.

Perhaps if the goal of reading is to identify specific information anywhere within a text quickly and move on to something else or switch to reading more mindfully at that point, then it may make sense. Personally, I read exclusively to obtain information and retain it. If I don't care to retain the information, I won't read it in the first place. So not being able to retain anything meaningful save for the few instances I slowed down ended up defeating the purpose for me. Lastly IIRC, I once read about the neuroscience of reading with regards to speed reading and the gist of the article ended up saying that it takes discrete periods literally measurable in observable time in order to form memories, and speed reading feeds in information continuously at a rate that does not allow for this crystallization to occur--because the actual reading is like a blocking operation neurologically to memory formation. When we read normally, we pause and reflect in various abstract ways on the information which creates connections and hence memories.

The Applications of Probability to Cryptography - Alan M. Turing

https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04714

"A Mathematical Theory of Communication" - Claude E. Shannon

http://math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entrop...

[vipassana] = [answer]

Agreed with the notion, but will point out that many of the "oil states" are not oblivious to the writing on the wall and as a result have begun allocating significant portions of their "fossil fuel" profits into alternative channels, in many cases into energy as well. The sheer amount of deployable capital at their disposal leads me to believe they will not "descend into utter irrelevance" as you suggest. At the very least they will succeed in maintaining their relative prosperity, but envision there is a state of the world in which they successfully transition into being champions of Renewable energy going forward. It's not very difficult to build an new industrial energy empire when you have trillions of dollars to spend.

edit:spelling

I genuinely agree with this notion, almost holistically, and I feel comfortable asserting that if we unreservedly followed this line of thinking the world would be a better place. However, in the intent to further improve on the notion, while I do believe it is important to have to make difficult choices about "who" gets to have a voice in order to achieve more civilized discussion, I don't think that "shutting-out" should be limited to the "bad faith actors" or the extremist ideologues. I think a stronger adherence to a sense of dialectics could benefit by further reducing the voices allowed. There are plenty of soft, gentle and respectful "voices" that detract from getting to the core of important discussions by bringing forward very irrelevant, tangential or otherwise "missing the point" (factually incorrect) ideas. Just because they presented their opinion respectfully, does not mean it needs to be "allowed" into the debate. This becomes especially problematic or can have a serious negative impact when it comes from an exogenous source with a disproportionate amount of credibility. In short I believe some aspect of the "scientific method" for wont of a better expression deserves a role in "regulating" the process of public debate.

the immediate cancel yearly subscription approach is the move...