KennyCason

I also noticed that when I place text in the box, as I type the text expands out to the left and out of the box due to centering. My expectation was that the text would start from where my cursor is, and go to the right. (like in powerpoint or slides)

I really love this! My only complaint is having the brush reset to pointer after each stroke.

I discovered and enjoyed some of these puzzles many years ago and had a blast with them. Very fun for after you’ve solved many of the 3D spatial puzzles and variants.

Wow, I'm very glad to have discovered your blog as of today. I'm really enjoying your posts and clear writing style. I just read your "Proof of the SVD" blog post. I can tell I am going to learn a lot already. Thanks for putting in so much effort!

Thanks for the reply. I agree with your assessment.

This sounds very identical to my process as well. I obsess about recalling as many of my dreams as I can when I wake up. I have a similar experience all the way down to trying to not move my body or so anything that can disrupt my dream recall, including avoiding actively thinking about my dream (similar to a meditative state).

The only difference is that I don’t record anything after. I find that just thinking about it a few times after I wake up is enough for my satisfaction. Dreams are very powerful tools for thought that I think society could benefit more from.

Agree with this 100%. I’ve practically quit drinking and replaced it with a casual, infrequent smoke/edible. I find it far more enjoyable and far more learning. It’s also nice to not take in 1000+ calories. :)

It also certainly depends on dose. I know after my first experiences my initial thought was that there was no why in hell I’d try that at a festival, but then I saw so many people/friends doing it and decided to give it a try. Was definitely mind blowing.

I’m curious of your thoughts of marijuana outside of medical value? I notice many people seem to only focus on the medical benefits and not the recreational benefits. Or the creativity and new spark or insight that marijuana or other psychedelics can provide. To me they all seem to be valuable tools to both the healthy and unhealthy mind. (I’m not assuming that you are against recreational use btw!)

Do both! But I will certainly always advocate for increasing physical health. It has an absolutely amazing ability to increase your own happiness and mood. I can confirm with myself as a single anecdote. :)

I think I understand your sentiment when applied to a subset of people. Specifically people who’s lives may be a mess and they are leaning too heavily too drugs to change their lives. I don’t think psychedelics alone should be used for that. I feel that people (yourself as well) are being far too focused on psychedelics usage for healing/treatment. There is another aspect to psychedelics where you literally experience something transcendental. that experience alone can be humbling, terrifying, amazing, or any other range of feelings. It can certainly be learning. Something that you perhaps can’t even put into words. And even many of the experiences that you are be able to somehow find words or metaphors to describe, the new perspective(s) can be interesting at worst case. They can show you knew ways to think of problems or even serve as new creative ideas for art, and of course cause you to make various changes to improve your life. I could probably easily name 100+ interesting thoughts that psychedelics have showed me and I certainly haven’t dabbled anywhere close to 100 times and don’t really feel the need to.

There is also of course also doing them for the pure enjoyment of them. For example, I’d wager many people would prefer a psychedelic experience over being drunk. Much in the same way that people may prefer marijuana over alcohol.

Thanks for writing both the post and your follow up. I found both to be very learning.

Wow. This was an awesome read! Very enlightening to me. I would like to attempt to do one coding project blind soon. I already regularly blindfold myself and walk around my house as I feel it has helped me hone in on using my sense of smell/hearing to navigate.

Being eaten alive, genital first is literally my worst nightmare. The only thing worse would be living it on repeat or being left alive severely mutilated. Nature is scary.

Agreed. Furthermore, taking on a project like this is a great learning process. I’d encourage more people to experiment like this.

We plan to add them to the website. Our fees are fairly standard, we make money from managing the fund and rental properties, 1% of AUM (assets under management) and 10% of rent.

I completely understand that sentiment, but lot of the work an industry like this is actually offline. Working through securities and real estate laws, building the data model to evaluate property purchases, raising capital to purchase the properties, and managing/supporting our residents. We had to put in all of that leg work to get to where we're at now.

Correct. It’s a little bit of both. We both select housing markets that meet various criterium we’ve set as well as seeing where customer demand drives us.

I’m in my early 30s and bought an iPad last year to give digital art a try. I ended up falling in love with it and regularly use it to draw. I also now draw all my graphics for my indie game development with it. I primarily use Pixaki and Procreate. It certainly beats using a mouse to draw or even any other drawing pad I’ve used previously. It’s also, imo, a far smoother/natural experience than a Wacom.

I was then very surprised by the long battery life and now also use it to watch Netflix.

Completely agree. This is the same kind of understanding that I get when reading these words. I rarely have to translate Chinese<->English, and instead just use them naturally in everyday conversation (wife is Chinese and that’s our method of conversation). As such if you asked me to translate 天真 for example, I would have to spend a few seconds to think of the word “naive”, I would instead come up with a long descriptive English sentence similar to what you did as I feel it better captures the essence of what I’m thinking when speaking Chinese. I think it’s subtle things like this that are important to remember when attempting to gain mastery in a foreign language. I also find it interesting how different languages/cultures evolve to convey similar ideas through such different means.

Something else I find is when speaking to many of my Chinese in-laws I regularly get various stories and explanations for words and phrases. Sometimes they are straight forward and sometimes there are literary or historical references that I would have never been able to derive on my own. :)

I’ve been all aboard the Kotlin train for a couple years now. Absolutely love it.

Very nice and clear write up. Looks like I know what I’m going to be programming today. I particularly liked your example of how to sample existing tiles to generate rules.

I’ve been wanting to work on a 2d game world generated off similar constraint algorithms. But also allow some tiles with high entropy states to be able to occasionally “flip” and propagate around, thus changing the world dynamically as you’re walking around.

And I shall name it Wave Function Collapse since it’s clearly not controversial.

I’d wager that’s not the only reason. There seems to be a deeper philosophical story he wishes to convey.

There is the beauty of emergence which is a pattern being highlighted over and over. From the math patterns emerge the basic microbiological patterns, which then emerge the more conplex macrobiological patterns, which then leads to humans. And then the author shows us humans also being a substructure of the larger pattern that we may call society or humanity. He shows this in capitalism as well. He seems to reiterate that at the end of the capitalism video by flashing back to the mechanical components of capitalism being not much different than the mechanical components of a human. He then also discusses the evolution of the mind I’m guessing as he mentions the emergence of the digital mind.

As we explore further, we realize all these thoughts are coming from the mind. There is a had barrier between mind/body or objective/subjective reality. There are also messages of hope that humanity transcends its current weaknesses (war, conflict, etc)

And he then concludes with his thoughts on the nature of the universe(mind?) being open-ended and unlimited of options, ever changing.

Everything he brings up is at some point related back to various philosophical principles, with of course, the story being mostly told by images and sound instead of words. Which I appreciates as well.

All-in-all, I found it a beautiful story.

Ha! That’s awesome! Some of the kanji hall-of-famers actually turned out pretty great.

Haha that’s a great example. Those are definitely areas where the written language has room for improvement. I could also imagine myself making a similar mistake.

Regardless, I’ve always been impressed that the Chinese can make such a bold change as their written language yet here in the United States, I’m still arguing with people who don’t know how many feet are in a mile as to why we should switch to metric. :)

If I ever get around to making my “hyper language”, I’ll be sure to post or let you know. I imagine it will likely be “not-very-user-friendly”. haha

Thanks for your perspective as well.

I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)

I agree with you that there must be a newer/better way to construct a Chinese-like writing system that isn't quite a burden to both learn as well implement in computers (fonts, etc). I.e. Words could still be built up of logic word roots , similar to current system but more consistent/logical. More advanced words could be built of simpler words. Some of my favorite examples are words like "skull" that are in Chinese 骨头 (literally "head bone"). These sorts of constructions for me as a foreigner learning Chinese are amazing. I'm able to memorize so many Chinese technical/science terms that are a pain even for natives in English.

I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. Sort of like the word2vec generations, but using images as the input and the output would be a sort of viewable "character". I also imagine "hyper-intelligent" beings developing languages like this, only with higher dimensionality of input and not only images.

I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly.

Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed.

What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English reading speed. I find Chinese very efficient to read/parse. I think there are many factors that contribute to this such as well defined word roots, similar sized characters, relatively small number of radicals (larger than alphabet of course), very simple/clean grammar. The more I study, learn, and use Chinese, I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc.

I've studied Japanese/Chinese both for a long time (10-15 years). Nowadays, I use Chinese everyday as that's the language my wife and I use.

As a pure alphabet goes, I really like the Korean implementation. I was able to mostly learn and retain it with only 1-2 hours of study.

Thanks!

Looks interesting. On the page I noticed a sale price of ~$41 in red text but upon checkout it is $69. I don’t mind paying $69, but just want to confirm I’m not missing some opening sale.

Could you elaborate more on your specific ES problems? Having worked with Elasticsearch extensively for many years, and do not share this sentiment.

Many of the ES queries fundamentally aren't meant to have a 1-to-1 equivalent in SQL as ES's goal is to specialize as a distributed search index, and not a general relative database.

If your point is that ES is being more frequently used as an alternative to just writing/scaling/using a SQL service to it's full potential, then I can somewhat understand the sentiment.