PinkMilkshake

If one is free to ignore or alter the definition of anything, then one could consider anything to be anything one wants.

But I get what you mean. We can only hope that permanent means permanent if you don't do anything to reverse it like being overweight.

Yes, I had a lot of similar questions. Maybe 'task' is a misnomer? Maybe it's context switching that is the issue. Like talking and driving and having music playing in the background all exist in the same context of operating a vehicle. Just like using a calculator, reading a textbook and writing in a notebook are all different tasks you switch between to study, but are all in the same context of studying.

Side note, Wikipedia claims you can multitask between tasks you are already highly proficient at.

This is what I can gather from skimming some articles in a lazy research attempt:

* Almost all evidence shows multitasking is not actually possible

* Some evidence shows attempting to do so anyway results in IQ reduction and loss of ability to focus

* Some evidence shows this reduction lasts even after you are done

* Some evidence shows this reduction is due to permanent physiological changes in the brain

'Brain damage' might be going to far.

I think a lot of writers like the idea of coining a term that's in mass usage. It's like a personal brand marketing thing maybe. It's often injected into all of their writing in out of place ways and comes across as forceful and unnatural.

Examples include Cory Doctorow and Ted Nelson.

> I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying my feed.

I did the same thing, but using a different technique.

Steps:

1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family

2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone

x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it, but the rest I did by hand.

I still keep my account, just with nothing on it.

I don't think we can have a reasonable conversation about the progress of philosophy without separating it's two major traditions, Continental and Analytic. Once you do, it becomes clearer where the progress has been made. The modern world stands on the foundations of the Analytic tradition and while I don't necessarily agree, some argue that it reached it's apex when it discovered Empiricism.

Progress in Continental Philosophy probably ended at the same time, when it came up against our new found ability to test what is true. Now the remnants of it (that I know of), Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism spend all their time trying to attack the foundations of Empiricism. Because until that is done, they can't really move forward.

I feel that all the worst parts of human history and many lingering pseudosciences came out of the Continental tradition. Communism, Fascism, Anti-enlightenment, Psychoanalysis, and many schools of Sociology. And while Sociology has potential, Marxism is to modern Sociology what Alchemy is to Chemistry.

It's like the APL of constructed languages.

I've always had an interest in invented languages and spent some time lurking the conlang/worldlang/auxlang communities. They are a very eccentric and confrontational bunch of people, to put it mildly

The most interesting auxlang project I ever came across was Unish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unish), mainly because it is the only one I know of created at a university by trained linguists. It's word selection was highly methodical (http://www.unish.net/introduce/e_unish_Word.jsp) unlike most invented languages which are based on the personal tastes of the inventor.

Check out the book In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent for a fun and interesting look at the whole topic.

I understand this feeling. But the glass half full perspective might be that these newer, smarter humans would have the ability to make faster progress on anti-aging and gene therapies which we could use to catch up.

I hope there is someone out there right now, working towards a degree in Critical <whatever> Studies for no other reason than to get a PhD publishing nonsense and reveal it all afterwards.

I cant help but give a Gilfoyle style heh... heh... heh....

What I hope has happened is the 20 revealed papers are not actually all of them and that they do a Wikileaks style drip release, wait on a response, then hit us with more much later.

Not always true. In New Zealand we had subsidies for farmers (about 40%) and then they were taken away. The removal forced the farmers to innovate and now we have very efficient farming methods that have far less environmental impact. 2/3 of NZ's exports are agricultural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_New_Zealand

Edit: The thing I found most interesting about this is agriculture was deregulated by the left wing government in what is a very socialist leaning country. Kiwi's are very pragmatic.

> Replication and comparison makes for a good MS or early PhD project

Do you think that might be the solution? That is, to get an MS your final project has to be an attempt at replication, and then a PhD has to be a new contribution. If that became the standard, would it solve a large part of this whole issue?

I think your parent meant "The amount of pain one needs to endure to get a Linux desktop [app] to work as it should is huge"

That is definitely one of the nicest looking terminal apps I’ve seen. I wonder how far terminal app visual design can be pushed.

This postmodern pseudo-philosophy has wormed it's way into everything lately. HN was one of my escapes from it.

I had a similar idea but I couldn't work out how to resolve all the issues that would cause. For example, things that naturally need more performance, like 3D games. I don't think playing games in your web browser would put you in the category of power user.

In 1943 a large chunk of Sydney, Australia was photographed from the sky. It's now available on the NSW Government website here: http://maps.six.nsw.gov.au/ You can flick between the aerial photography and the modern satellite imagery, or overlay the maps and fade between them. Fantastic stuff.

Or you might be a pragmatist.

I think you are giving postmodernism too much credit. It's whole premise is a non problem. Looking back on it's history, it's a politically and religiously motivated ideology to push anti-enlightenment values that coated itself in esoteric language to avoid scrutiny. It's not a well thought out philosophy, because they reject the very thing that would allow that to happen, reason.

Empiricism solved this issue. You will very quickly learn if your assumptions are wrong by testing them in reality. This is what is meant by "feels over reals" and the opposite. Your assumptions, beliefs, or axioms - no matter how fondly held - will be crushed under the infinite weight of reality.

Yeah, it's sad. The SE has been the nicest phone I've ever had. I can use it one handed! I'm not sure what I'll do yet. It should be supported for a few more years but now that they aren't selling it anymore I'm anticipating the inevitable "we didn't slow your phone down on purpose, honest" update.

> It's interesting that they were not able to extract good images from the test when they just asked the subjects to imagine the pictures. I speculate that is because the vast majority of people are able to recognize images of things, but not produce those images.

It seems reasonable to me. To use a computer as an analogy, the set of signals produced by a webcam recording a video to a hard drive are not going to be the same as the ones of the video playing from the hard drive on to the screen.

Not to mention Soylent is just one of a category of products that has existed for decades. Ensure came out in the 1970s.

> Don't they have calculators at Apple? Or phones, perhaps?

He must have been from the iPad dev team.

I thought it was going to be something where you type in a theme word and it adds -ly or .io on the end.

I'm pleasantly surprised at what it turned out to be.

I do like to imagine a future where the modem/router becomes a place people can host their own data. A formally verified Deno-like web-server on seL4. The actual modem/router software running in a separate VM.

> I have friends who claim to be "anarcho-" something, who at the same time espouse state socialist politics.

I think we have the same friends. I've never met a true anarchist. I've found that when pushed enough, they tend to be authoritarians in disguise, and they are only shout "Down with the system!" as a generalization of "Down with the system I don't like!".

> What we need is a framework, or a backbone, that allows people to easily create new federated-native apps ("dapps") without thinking about consensus issues, protocols versioning, and with native laws compliance.

I agree that this is probably the way forward. The only downside is how your identity is tied to the service provider you choose. It was a PITA when Lavabit went down and I lost that email address.

> Have you seen the rig Apple uses?

I cant find this, do you have a link? I'm quite interested in what they do.

I would much prefer a market based solution.

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There’s room in search.