Syntonicles

Just for clarification: are your remote positions only available for Canadians / within Canada? I can't tell if it's a qualifier or an optional onsite location.

Org mode is like outlining mixed with long form writing. You can write a novel, either by writing it sequentially or fleshing out an outline of chapters. You can make TODO lists and other systems in it. At its base, it's like Workflowy+MSWord.

You can add things like tables, but they are limited like a Word Processor and less like Excel.

You can include blocks of functioning source code like a Jupyter notebook.

You can export all of it to formatted HTML or PDF or whatever you like.

You can write Lisp programs to interact with the structure and collection of your documents. This lets you build entire applications and workflows. One such application will traverse all of your documents, construct a prioritized agenda and schedule any TODO items that it finds.

Vanilla (unmodified) Emacs has an ugly org-mode that looks less inviting and less powerful than Notepad. Do not be fooled by this. A few add-on packages turn it into something powerful and beautiful.

This is absolutely the way forward.

When I started running, I couldn't make it three city blocks without an asthma attack and cramps. Now I do 3-5 miles of hill running per day in the country summer sun. (Tennessee)

Over the past few years I have been developing a system based on incremental flow, as you mentioned. You can absolutely use small habits, and also leverage the Flow State proper in order to train. Eventually you are able to graduate to multiple spinning plates. (to reference your other comment). As you say the greatest danger is dropping all the plates in the presence of a minor stressor since you are operating at your current capacity.

What you end up needing to train is getting back on the horse. It's similar to the notion of "Returning to Breath" in a meditation practice. I have a leveling system and an economy built in, so that I gamify the practice of picking up the pieces. I'm currently working on smoothing out the difficulty curve, comparing several game mechanics like leveling down, adaptive difficulty, and triggering special modes. The idea is to have some sort of a pressure relief valve built into your life.

Do you use any systems in your own life?

Surprisingly in my industry nobody would bat an eye:

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

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

It's one of the first times I've been delighted by an unexpected UI in years. We've all settled on conventions in a world where anything is possible.

Excellent, I'm looking forward to future installments! I can't tell whether the series will be related to the book of the same title, but I would personally love a Lispy / SICP style exploration into that.

If you're serious about this you can take the time to create a formal process. People don't even post their email addresses on their profiles without obfuscation, this just looks like lazy phishing attempt.

Ask it to determine whether it's in an LXC or virtual environment, then ask it to jailbreak that environment.

Download some Capture the Flag environments and put it to work. I for one would like to know the limits of its capabilities before it gets weaponized for use by script kiddies.

I was in a situation many years back that was similar in feeling but varied in circumstance. The sense of loss, worthlessness, lack of control, lack of agency, stress and isolation is an incredibly potent mix. I'm sorry you're dealing with all of them at once. It is overwhelming.

My own emotional lows are cyclical and I've had to bounce back several times. At different stages in life my approach to doing so has varied wildly. The approach you need will depend on your history and what you believe about yourself. Right now it's the narrative about yourself that your mind has constructed which you need to address.

Do you believe that you are weak and passive? That life is happening to you, rather than you manifesting it? Then prove to yourself that you are bold, capable and effective. Maybe you aren't yet and need to become so. Don't listen to people telling you that you are already what you feel is lacking. They are comfort words which deny that growth is possible. Prove it to yourself and you will know it forever after.

Choose something that scares you immensely and do it. For me it was heights, mortality and risk: so I began skydiving. For you perhaps rock climbing is more fitting. If you've hit rock bottom, learn to climb the rocks. It will require patience, fortitude, mindfulness, awareness of your body and movement, coping with fear, and deliberate action.

You won't feel passionate about this and may avoid it. You may not even like it. Forget what you like and earn it. Passion will develop alongside progress, and progress will be slow. From your point of view the ascent will look like your PhD. You'll end up taking paths you didn't intend, as if the rock is guiding you. Are you being passive? Will you second guess yourself? Your choice is to use your position to advance yourself or give up.

Look back at your progress and see how far you've come. You'll have a new perspective on what felt boring and gradual up-close. Which is more terrifying: the slow climb ahead or the descent? If you give up, will you do it slowly with shame or allow yourself to fall? What does rock bottom look like when you see how far beneath you it truly is?

As your passion and competence grows you may have daydreams of setting aside your PhD. You'll want to take a sabbatical to climb. I encourage you to do this if it feels right and necessary. I encourage not to if it feels like an excuse, and to focus on the metaphor.

You will develop the confidence and fortitude you currently lack. You will regain your lust for life when it hangs in the balance. You will make friends you never knew you wanted. You will forever know what you are capable of.

I think they choose the simplest path that sounds reasonable. Who would have anticipated edits like these? All I'm suggesting to provide an easy alternative. The simplest path for me is throwing an MIT or GPL snippet in my root folder. A copy/paste clause on a static website should be sufficient.

For me, maybe. For millions of unsuspecting 8-year old children getting their version from the school library?

I agree with you, but I think it's easier to assist individuals in being proactive than it is to lobby for impactful legal change across multiple continents.

I think Keanu Reeve's approach in restricting digital edits to his acting via contracts is the best interim solution until the world converges on something.

When I first read this, I was furious with the publisher. While I'm still disgusted by the behavior I am under the impression that the Dahl estate supports the historical revisions.

So what response should the company receive? Boycott? Hacktivism? Flagrant piracy? Perhaps not. Should we lobby to limit the rights of an estate edit posthumously? Should a blurb indicating the edit be required on the cover of the book?

Instead, I think a more grassroots effort is desperately needed. We need something akin to a software license that an individual author can include in their contracts with publishers and in their estate planning. It should be entirely frictionless and unambiguous. It should be the easiest path for an author to take.

I propose that a small foundation be created for the purpose of its creation and dissemination; and that a public website / petition exist so that any author publishing today can see that the idea is endorsed by the very people who inspired them to become writers.

Could you give me some concrete examples that come to mind? I'm new to Stable Diffusion but have been using it a lot lately.

They are boosted by people like me, who haven't seen it before. People on social media have this strange notion that we're all a perfect bloom filter. I don't have the time or energy to keep up with tens of thousands of posts per year, and new users are coming all the time. Reposts are inevitable.

A personalized bloom filter may be useful. That shouldn't be hard to implement in either JavaScript or Emacs Lisp.

Yes.

Excellent, thank you!

Thank you, I'm new to the site and didn't know about spaces. I'm more interested in trying to run a model locally. All I've ever used locally are toy implementations, and 20-line DQN experiments that never seemed to converge.

You've convinced me to go for it. I'm downloading the models from HuggingFace and the source from Github.

I'm not sure how it all fits together but I'll try to figure it out. I have experience with Python development, git LFS, and I've been following research papers for years but this is my first attempt.

Is this all self-contained? Should I start elsewhere? I've been pretty intimidated by this stuff TBH, relying on hosted Midjourney / Dall-E for my artwork.

I notice the two repos have the same name. Do I merge the file-trees? How do they work together?

I spent the past 2 years working in AutoCAD and was surprised to find that it really hasn't changed much in the past 20+ years, other than some simple UI changes. I ported over 100,000+ lines of Lisp from the mid 90s and it worked almost without modification though I did rewrite it for other reasons.

That project has come to an end prematurely. Is there a real future in CAD programming? I feel like I've wasted a good chunk of my life on a dead language in a dead product. Is any of this knowledge portable?

I don't know what you mean by "opting in". The credit reporting agencies keep track of you without your consent by providing services to other companies and agencies.

Have you ever had a bank account? Gotten a credit card? A mortgage? Missed a student loan payment?

When I got my very first credit report, which I was entitled to by law, the reporting agencies asked me to very information they already had about my life and financial history dating back to my early teenage years.

A prominent figure in the space is David Chalmers, who made it his life's work to characterize and explore theories of consciousness. He's a philosopher in New York (originally Australia) He coined "The Hard Problem" and "The Meta Problem". You should get an overview in his books. They're a bit dated but it's not like there's been substantial progress.

There's a recent book called "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind" which purports to be what you are looking for. She's an author who is married to Sam Harris, a neuroscience PhD and public thinker who focused a lot of consciousness. His ideas permeate her thinking and I found her treatment to be less open minded.

There's a series mirrored on YouTube called "Closer to Truth", where Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews famous physicists, mathematicians, etc. on this and other grand unsolved questions. You can find interviews with most of the analytical thinkers in the consciousness space if you wade through.

The most "mathematically rigorous" theory is Integrated Information Theory by Giulio Tononi. The logical conclusions of his theory are outlandish or eye-opening, depending on your bias. I don't buy it myself but the there might be something in the approach.

The most mathematically gifted individual with a theory is Roger Penrose. His scientific work is absolutely brilliant but his ideas about consciousness are quite frankly ridiculous and unmotivated.

The best, most rigorous theory I know of comes from a Neuroscientist at Princeton named Michael Graziano. He put forth the "Attention Schema Theory". I strongly recommend his book "Rethinking Consciousness" which makes a case for it, and provides an overview of the other approaches and how they relate to his ideas.

I've been very much swayed by Graziano's work, and we have the technology today to test his theory by integrating actively controlled attention mechanisms into machine learning models. If his ideas are correct, that could lead to models organically making similar claims to humans regarding phenomenological states. The theory is agnostic about whether the claims would be substantiated.

Pmf?

I agree. We've [potentially] given the grounding assimilation step a boost already, since language is already organized.

Imagine that a language model is fully integrated with sense-data that exceeds human first-hand experience. Perhaps they are trained on and can generate realistic 3D models of objects, and derive estimates of their internal construction, weight, etc. Perhaps they recall infrared emissions or opacity to EM wavelengths. Would we truly "know" what we're talking about by that standard?

I'm not actually sure why we don't consider generative image models to be grounded already. They seem to be able to modify, transform and rotate imagery. That indicates spatial understanding to me, and I'm not sure how much more we must require of them without having to exclude blind or otherwise disabled humans from our definition of comprehension.

If this is a joke, it's gone over my head. What are you saying?

I was in a similar situation, and have a life-long history of panic attacks. I would have them during stand-ups, which was absolute hell. I went on to face this, becoming a public speaker (technically speaking) and also a professional skydiver and occasional BASE jumper.

Things that help me in general are cardio, weightlifting, mindfulness exercises and meditation. Knowing I can walk away from a situation and be ok financially is huge.

Things that helped me specifically with daily stand-ups:

1. Preparing questions. Asking a probing question puts the pressure on the person that you feel is evaluating you. If you have a blocker, begin with asking the other engineer if they have completed that dependency. Always have a question in the chamber. Be careful not to throw others under the bus, especially if they are anxious or junior. The best questions are directed at the higher ups. After a year I learned that the executives were nervous about my questions and joked about my reputation as a "hard-hitter". That really helped me to feel more in control. Never put the company in a bad light with your phrasing.

2. Volunteer. Being third in line is panic inducing. Combat this by jumping the gun. I was often shocked to hear myself say "I'll go first" or "I'll start". My heart rate would jump a little but my brain didn't even have time to sort out my self-trickery before. The relief you feel after doing this is incredible. Also, there's something inherently calming about deciding to speak, rather than being expected to.

3. Conversational style. Providing an update can be terrifying. Having a casual conversation is [hopefully] not. Make it a back-and-forth. Not all of your questions need to be interrogations, simply passing the buck with a softball like "Can you clarify..." or "I'm thinking of doing this, what's your opinion?" make all the difference.

You used your session to show her cool stuff on the internet?

That's a little bit sad, but understandable at the same time. I can't imagine working at some place like CERN, especially early in your career when you're just excited to be a part of things. That's a tough act to follow.

I spent some time this year using Common Lisp. It's expanding my mind and I see all sorts of alternate histories. I'm starting to feel very curious about SmallTalk for that same reason.

There have been a lot of attempts to revitalize Lisp. Clojure is the one that comes to mind, and I do like that language. My personal take CL simply has a marketing problem. The name sounds so stale and boring that I never thought to pick it up. "Common" may have been a word that invoked unity in a fractured ecosystem at some point in time, but today it communicates "Nothing Special".

I've been reading the The Power of Structure in chunks. Your Rune section was really beginning to sell me, but I'm confused about something.

I'm trying to imagine my existing Notes as a tree of objects instead of text parsed into an ad-hoc tree. Ok, that sounds good. I could imagine a leaf node being a "blurb", which itself could be something easy and familiar like a string. I could imagine it sitting beside a table, and nested under a bullet point.

I can imagine my up/right/left/down keybindings getting smarter, as I move from "left" or "outside" of a table then it might highlight itself, indicating that I'm selecting it like I would select any heading and can drill down into it.

I can imagine instead navigating up, to the text, and there being a seamless transition so that I'm editing that text just like I normally would in Emacs.

I can imagine navigating "out" and into the tree structure of the bullet points / headings. I already use packages to easily navigate my headings, and so I like the idea.

But when I read this:

> See, even words have structure. Are words objects? We wouldn't have a word for them if they weren't significant somehow. And that's how I would want to analyze and work with them: as words. For the plain text editor, a word is just a cluster of characters somewhere in a string, and there's a whole pile of mess built on top of that string to convince you otherwise.

and this:

> Your word was supposed to be an object that carries information about itself.

I start to worry about performance. Is this something like the old Flyweight Pattern from GoF? Is this level of granularity no longer expensive?