Capt-RogerOver

Yes, "factual" was not the best word choice. "Factual" in that context was something like "having obvious empirical and experiential basis".

>> So you may be technically correct but the claim is so weak as to be nearly meaningless. My claim was referring to the following: many "science" people have a hard time developing their spiritual side, because of what they learn about the scientific models of the universe. Lacking proper guidance to place those models in proper places in their mind, they often end up believing (even subconsciously) that believing in "science" collides with with having a spiritual experience. I was pointing out that there are very good ways to combine the two. But yes you have a point and I get it.

>> What's wrong with keeping them separate? Science is falsifiable and religion is not. One sometimes advances the knowledge of humanity and one sometimes allows us be happier humans. There is nothing wrong with anything ;). But seriously, I think that reconciling some parts of those just leads to a deeper and more profound understanding of life. Not only being able to see either a particle or a wave, but even the deeper underlying phenomena combining the both.

Your views sound outdated. There is a "you" separate from "your chemicals". In the same way a character in a video game is in fact very separate from the transistors that power the computer that the game runs on. They live in different worlds, by different rules and both have very different implications for life.

There is a perfectly valid and functional world model that incorporates both the science and it's atoms and spirituality. Functional in a sense that people having this view can both apply their knowledge to the scientific domain (building new mechanical machines) and also to the spiritual domain, that is be truly happy and enlightened in the way the experience their own life. (Seeing yourself (factually incorrectly) as ONLY a chemical machine does not produce happiness, mission, love, etc. (nor good health for that matter, because health is affected by psychological wellbeing a lot) without a solid spiritual foundation.) Jordan Peterson has a very good video about this, something about reconciling science and religion.

The point is, "Free Will" is not a scientific concept, it's a concept from spirituality. And can very well fit with all of the science that is known to humanity today. Free will comes not from the randomness of quantum mechanics, but from implications of the chaos theory (which has basically killed determinism as a means of understanding the human life experience).

The idea here is following:

- Processing food, even in chemical ways does not necessarily mean it will be bad for your health.

- However, a lot of examples have shown that food that has been processed by the current realities of the food industry is often very bad for your health. Many times it's shown to be bad, many times they don't even check it.

- Basically if you process the food, the chances are very good that it is going to be bad. You have to be very careful when you do that (and back it with a lot of research) in order to do it safely.

- Food industry do not have a direct interest of doing it safely in the long run. They have an interest to make money and not get caught by existing regulations.

And finally: - For you as a consumer it's very hard to know whether specific processing is safe or not.

- Many times it's hard for the producer to even know. But they don't really care, as long as regulations are followed (sometimes not even that).

- This leads to you knowing that if the food has been processed, the chance is very good that it's bad for you. Not because "processing" is some weird satanic black magical non-christian sinful process. But because it's currently implemented in such a way that it lets through a lot of bad.

- There is no reliable way for you to distinguish between good processed and bad processed.

-> If you wanna eat healthy, in 2017 you should stay away from processed.

What other dangers did you think of? It seem the only dangers all stem exactly from this: when the technology becomes exponential (machines making machines), at which point they become better at it than humans, and humans can't longer predict the outcome. The technological singularity. The black hole and the big bang of the conscious technology, with results that we can't begin to fathom how to fathom. It's all based on the assumption that AI will make other better AI. It's not an option, it's an inevitable and logical progression for ML tech.

Models are not wrong. They are just models. Ie, != reality.

Would you care to expand "(side note, thats how a baby learns vision "unsupervised" -- the spatial patterns on the retina have temporal proximity, so the supervisor is "time")" to a couple of paragraphs? It seems like a very deep and profound thought and would be very interesting to read.

Have you tried firefox with a tab unloading extension?

We will obviously always use the url bar to tell for sure what site we are on right now. But the color thing makes it possible to much faster tell the difference. It's a very useful feature.

I think the websites actually increase the revenue. Instead of not clicking on any ads (as in uBlock)- the browser clicks on all of them.

Why would it be less susceptible? Isn't it the same company that makes them?

Not if they have shown that they can go so far as to put in BIOS. Imagine the level of effort it requires to develop something like this? If that is true, why not develop a small dedicated chip for it and put it somewhere unaccessible on the motherboard? (I mean, it's likely that they did or will do this.) http://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html

Lenovo have been repeatedly caught doing this. They have shown that they do not want or plan to have this as an opt-in - instead they are trying to hide it better. It's obvious that it's their strategy, not some one time "mistake". (They put it in BIOS even! (!)). http://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html

What is your opinion on Qt mobile?

Is there anything that's good with it? It's not very short, not rememberable, resembles word "dick", hard to use as a verb, doesn't have pleasant sounds, what's up with the domain "dklo"- hard to pronounce, remember etc (and then remember it's ".co" of all the unusual tlds). Where does the name even come from?

Very informative quote:

So where do the reports of superhuman abilities come from? Well since there are many breeds of dogs in the ImageNet, an average human (like me) will not be able to distinguish half of them (say Staffordshire bullterrier from Irish terrier or English foxhound - yes there are real categories in ImageNet, believe it or not). The network which was "trained to death" on this dataset will obviously be better at that aspect. In all practical aspects an average human (even a child) is orders of magnitude better at understanding/describing scenes than the best deep nets (as of late 2015) trained on ImageNet.

Well all the practical advice still work: eat well(!), excercise, have a proper sleep schedule, read good books, and even yes, hard-limiting time spend on social media - they all still work.

I just meant that all those things also do take time and, more importantly energy. Like the mental energy to keep yourself from looking at facebook, or the energy to keep an excercise schedule, etc.

And so after a certain point, you should switch more of that energy from "dumb" solutions to more intelligent, deep and wise solutions like introspection, meditation, specific work with your fears/feelings ("shadow work" as some call it), going through important memories, talking about this with your loved ones, etc. etc.

> the point where my mind often cries out for it if I go without for a while.

Especially when you notice that some part of you cries out for something like this - is usually a very good time to find time and energy to do this. Your system actually tells you what you need. And even if nothing superbad happens if you ignore such signals every once in a while, if you repeatedly ignore them - the signals will stop coming and you'll become even less conscious about this part of your life. Until this behavior will cause some actual crisis (life, social, health, mental health, you name it) that will actually force you to return to listening to your signals.

But it will be much more comfortable and better in the long run if you don't let it come to this and listen to them already, especially if you are even at this point already sensitive enough to recognize them. (Many people don't even recognize such internal signals, so it's actually pretty great that you have this.)

> How does one find the time to oneself when the world demands ones time? If I try to put it simply, it's by recognizing that you are actually a more important and close being to you, than the world around you, or your obligations, your practical goals, work, or sometimes even people who try get something from you. Recognizing that giving yourself the needed energy and attention is actually the best way to achieve the life you actually want, even if it would mean giving up on some external things.

Since you already experiment with things like meditation and psychedelics, you should look more into finding out more about your psyche and feelings, and other self-development themes. Find out more about your inner being, about the structure of your (and in general, human) soul, what motivates you, what deep fears you have, in what ways are you still unconscious about yourself. There are tons of books, trainings, coaches that can help with this. Basically you should do more "self-development".

There is no innate problem with facebook, slack, or computers or screens or any other similar thing. The problem is that you are getting distracted. You are not fully present with what you are doing. Thinking that facebook is a problem is just grossly misleading.

When you have fixed your internal issues, you will not care how many websites or LCD screens are around you. You will do what you want, when you want it.

Telling this to an average person is next to pointless, because they are so unconsciouss that they will not understand it. They have lost touch with the notion that they actually have a choice of whether to be distracted or not, they have a choice in how to feel in every single moment. Since you already experiment with the stuff you wrote about, you just might though.

For someone who is in deep unconscioussness, who lacks knowledge about themselves, who is constantly distracted and who eats junk food that does not provide their brains with enough nutrition, etc. - trying to do simple dumb things like "I'll only look at facebook 10 minutes a day" - sure it might give some results. But once you've gained some basic groundedness - it just becomes ineffective to look at specific distractors, and much more effective to look at deeper issues within you that cause distraction in the first place.

The biggest drawbacks of Spotify and Netflix is the limitation of content, which comes from the fact that not all labels or movie studios are supportive of this. This is not an inherent problem of the platform itself of course. If this problem was non-existent, I am pretty sure that both services would be used by almost everyone.

Yes it's the same frequency as water molecule's resonance frequency.

While it surely sounds like a perfectly valid choice for you, it's worth to mention that another option is to actually get friends who have (or convert them into) a more healthy or otherwise desirable lifestyle as yourself. Then you can be with your friends at almost any time you want.

JavaScript being single-threaded is one of it's biggest drawbacks. This is universally agreed on by both it's proponents and critics. Yes sure, some very few resources are wasted on each thread, but in case of JavaScript, it wastes a lot more by not using all the cores, of which there are usually several present in almost any modern computer that will run JS.

It's a solution for a made-up problem. Sure, async/await makes it easier. But not as good as the normal sync code would be. And for what reason? The concurrency problems are already a solved issue in many many frameworks. Sure, if you do fully manual threads in something like C++ and code up everything yourself - you're in for the trouble down the road unless you are a good professional. But there are heaps of concurrency frameworks in all major languages that make this very easy. And what about performance, how does JavaScript justify putting virtually every single return value of every function into some Promise object? Talk about wasted resources.

It's not about how the processor works. A developer which is using a language of JavaScript's abstraction level does not think about exactly how a processor works. It's about how a human can easier think up a program and put it into code. And that is mostly synchronous indeed.

Bittorrent sync?

Doesn't Dropbox achieve exactly that, and in almost the perfect way possible? But yes I get your point, there are surely some areas for which no good solutions exist yet and users don't know that it would be very useful.

Exactly, it's like all already there, working seamlessly, even most of the time free. For the users who really want/need this functionality, it seems to be very cheap to just research those options and configure them already (even if they don't come preconfigured by default on a new OS installation). So maybe it's just not such a sought-after feature?

I'm a relatively avid software user and I'm having a hard time agreeing that lacking such features is a big problem. I have almost never thought that I would need such a feature, and haven't heard anyone else lack it.

My point is that it's very understandable that such possibility would be useful for some people, and that they would very much like that workflow. It's just that if they are a minority - the industry will not prioritize such development, and it's a good thing. This means that they will develop more needed features.

In a way, everything you describe already exists in the form of Web Apps. Log into Gmail on your PC, do some things there, then switch to an iPad and open the same address there. - voilà you have same app on multiple devices. It will even sync flawlessly...

Regarding file sharing - I can only speak for the technologies that I've been using personally, but both Samba, Dropbox, FTP, SFTP bluetooth filesharing and bluetooth sound have all been working amazingly great for me... It seems like a perfect example of a developed and implemented standard which most devices agree on. What am I doing wrong?

This is obviously an area too big to adequately address in a HN comment, but just the broad strokes: Spontaneous thoughts that you were referring too, can basically (simplifying) be seen as the mind's way to avoid certain feelings that it has labeled as "bad". For example there can be some situation which you translate into feeling "alone" (only an example), and that feeling is labeled as "bad". Every time such situation will happen, that feeling will start to manifest in your system, but the brain will usually very quickly start to think some thoughts in order to distract you from such feeling. For the brain it sounds like a good idea, because there will be less of that "bad" feeling in your conscioussness, while you think.

Now of course, in general, it's not a very good solution, because it only masks a problem. The problem itself is that you don't fully accept and understand all your feelings, and instead are labeling some of them as bad. Additionally to this, if you don't accept the feelings, but instead try to mask them with thoughts - that just makes them grow, because the feelings are not being let out of the system and start living their own lives.

What happens during meditation is that you force out all of the thoughts, so that feelings that exist in you become much more clear. You can finally switch your attention to the feelings that have been craving it. Then you become more aligned with them, understand them better and they stop being problematic. Each time you stop meditating - it's just so much more easier to notice that certain thoughts come from feelings, as opposed to "just randomly initiate".

So it's not really about being aware of the thought process during the meditation, it's more about using the experience gained from meditation, as a reference point, in order to notice deviations from it and how they are experienced.

> has no more or less free will than a computer

Exactly. The only difference in our modern times is that a brain is orders of magnitude more complex than a computer. None of the scientists who are working on replicating the consciousness think that nowadays computers have comparable consciousness to a human. They all understand that the complexity needs to go up MANY times before we can talk about it. But it's still very clear that a consciousness (with free will and all other aspects of it) is definitely possible to have in a (future, much more advanced) computer.

> Your three sources of data for choosing your state n+1 are your state n, your perceptions of the world around you, and maybe some truly random factor.

That IS free will!

Perhaps you define it in some other way? If you say that "free will" is not possible if the decisions of such entity are based on some past experience (partly)? Well in that case there is no living entity that we know that have your definition of "free will", so what's the point of trying to recreate it? How would it even look?