aftoprokrustes

Let's be fair to the title: 'giant' is in inverted commas, and the article is pretty straight to the point and does not try to drag on the expectation that the worm was 100s of meters long (or alive, but I was expecting a fossil). It does say, however, that it is the biggest knRecopiez le code 53587468 pour accéder à vos comptes Caisse d'Epargne. Si vous n'etes pas à l'origine de cette demande, contactez votre agence.own sea creature at the time: in my book, this is an acceptable definition of a giant.

I was a bit disappointed by the size at first, but I actually found the article very interesting in a lot of aspects: how 30cm was giant at the time, how worms were the dominating family, and yet how similar they were to modern day worms are quite fascinating to me.

Not necessarily. I am in the same case as OP. Basically I am a specialist with a PhD in a niche topic. There are at most a handful job postings per year that fit my profile perfectly, but then I have virtually no competition. If you have a generic profile ("frontend developer"), you get hundreds of opportunities per day, but are alao in competition with hundreds of similar applicants.

My position is comfortable, but if interest in my particular combination of skills decreases, things could get quite difficult.

True, but with some important additions:

- in some countries, dedicated home office rooms and supplies can be deducted from taxable income or lead to other forms of tax reduction.

- you do not have to pay for the commute. Not only in terms of money (gasoline and car value loss, public transport ticket...), but also generalized cost (time lost, loss of flexibility...)

- some employers actively provide financial support for home office (e.g. by subsidising supplies).

I am personally happy to pay for my home office _and_ accept a lower salary if this means I can spend tine with my kids and wife every day, rather than waiting for the train in the rain.

Note that this does not really reduces the validity of the comment you react to. Beavers could probably say pretty much the same thing. "Did you try living next to humans? I do not recommend it. Not only do they break the dams we took so long to build, but they love to put stupid wire around the best trees. And some of them even have rifles and will shoot without warning. At least I could bite one in the groin!"

I know how annoying it can be to have wild animals destroy your property (there are for instance beavers, racoons, wild boars and woodpeckers where I live, and I own a wooden house), but in principle we do not have more right to shaping our habitat the way we like than beavers and wildlife in general. More than "managing beavers", what we need is to find ways to co-exist peacefully. One part might be "managing" them, but another part is definitely to accept that their needs in part conflict with ours, and that we need to give them some space and accept some of the damage as a price to pay to share land with them.

I obviously cannot assess the validity of the requests you got, but as a former researcher turned product developer, I had several times to take the decision _not_ to display confidence intervals in products, and to keep them as an internal feature for quality evaluation.

Why, I hear you ask? Because, for the kind of system of models I use (detailed stochastic simulations of human behavior), there is no good definition of a confidence interval that can be computed in a reasonable amount of computing time. One can design confidence measures that can be computed without too much overhead, but they can be misleading if you do not have a very good understanding of what they represent and do not represent.

To simplify, the error bars I was able to compute were mostly a measure of precision, but I had no way to assess accuracy, which is what most people assume error bars mean. So showing the error bars would have actually given a false sense of quality, which I did not feel confident to give. So not displaying those measures was actually done as a service to the user.

Now, one might make the argument that if we had no way to assess accuracy, the type of models we used was just rubbish and not much more useful than a wild guess... Which is a much wider topic, and there are good arguments for and against this statement.

But the blameless culture as highlighted in the article does not prevent to identify when someone messed up personally or is not doing effort to follow the process/bring the results. It means to start by assuming the best of intentions, and see how one can avoid repeating the same mistake in the future. See the example with the fire department in the article.

Note that you bring in the example of a court, and this is how a court works: a suspect is presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

The main point is that a blameless culture fosters honesty and team work. A blameful culture fosters covering up and lying to look good to the manager. But if someone is careless, they will get into trouble in both cases. See the example with the person who deleted the production DB: they would likely never have said "guys, drop everything you are doing, I deleted the prod database and need help" in a blameful environment - even though this is the best reaction to have for the business. But even in a blameless culture, it takes a lot of courage to admit such a mistake and ask for help. Assuming that people are not afraid to do such mistakes just because they will not be immediately fired for it is quite absurd.

Would you mind elaborating? In particular, do you refer to the technical people ("no need to take care, even if I mess up no one will blame me") or the managers ("those cowards just want to avoid being accontable for their mistakes by blaming the process")?

My last company had a culture of blameless post mortems, and also a strong culture of accountability, so definitely no one would fit the first definition. And the company was too small to have non technical managers.

My current company (big corporation) officially supports blameless reaction to incidents, but internally has a strong culture of cover-up and blame ping-pong, but I still cannot think of anyone who would believe "blameless means no accountability". It just comes from deeply ingrained habits (lots of people do their whole career inside the company, lots of them even getting their masters at the company's own "university". Behavior is hard to change when everyone comes out of the same mould). I also think it comes from inadequate processes: where in the previous company the postmortem was mostly a meeting done by and for the technical team, my new company has a strong culture of "escalation meetings", where the highest managers quickly get drafted in, which obviously has a strong influence on the capacity to conduct an open and blameless process.

This sounds lile terrible advice. Not only does it take a long time to get familiar enough with a code base of reasonable complexity to make a contribution of any interest, but not all open source projects have the capacity to review and process external PRs.

You are essentially trying to steal time from people who already invest a lot for the community for your personal profit. This feels parasitic.

This fits. The way the interviewee describes his relation witho Tolstoy couldbe the way I describe my relation with Hugo. I was obsessed with him for a few years, and read most of his fiction. It changed my relation with the world, and in particular obstacles and sadness

> To me, consciousness is the collection of electrochemical signals traveling throughout the brain

This is unfortunately not a definition of consciousness, rather an hypothesis about the cause or origin of it. Consciousness is an experience, as you mention in your next sentence:

> I also believe in brains that have more than one consciousness, as I've personally experienced a similar thing before

This is what makes it so tricky. My only definition of consciousness is pretty much "I know it when I see it", with the annoying caveat that I cannot see any other experience than my own...

> This. We don't know if a brain keeps all information necessary for a "reboot" or not. It may decay over time if whatever machinery necessary to first "start" consciousness is never used after birth.

We do not even know what consciousness is. I am not even sure there is an agreed upon definition that would fit the layman's understanding of what consciousness is.

The hypothesis that consciousness is a by-product of brain/nervous system/body activity is, in its current state, just this: an hypothesis. Not only that, but it is pretty much an hypothesis outside of the field of modern scientific models, which are based on a materialist methodology (assuming that everything has a material cause), such that we do not really have mature ways to study anything else. The materialist ontology ("there is nothing else than matter") only developed later in history, once the methodology was so established it became accepted as fact, rather than just as a (very successful) method of working.

It might be polemic, but there is also data from the study of NDEs and memories of past lives in infancy which, in my opinion and that of many others, should at least motivate us to stay open to the possibility that consciousness is something more than a by product of brain activity. Some propose that the nervous system could act as a form of "receptor", in the same way a radio receives a program. You cannot experience the radio program without the device, but it does not mean that the radio "creates" the program. Obviously those theories are no less wild guesses than the consciousness-as-byproduct ones, but they show that other models can have internal validity and cannot just be rejected because "obviously the cause must be in matter".

I could go on and on, but to people interested in going down this rabbit hole, I always recommend the report of the Galileo commission, and detailed call by academics to open the width of interpretations of consciousness that are considered acceptable enough to be studied: https://galileocommission.org/

All of this to say: we do not know anything about consciousness, so any such business is just preying on rich people afraid of loosing it all or unwilling to contemplate their life decisions, as one feels drawn to when the end feels close. It is sad and absurd.

(Before I get burned to the altar of scientific wisdom: I did not say that the theory of consciousness-as-a-byproduct is absurd or should not be studied. It is good to test it and try to make it work, and I have deep respect for the researchers in this field. I just argue that, in the current state of our science, there is no reason for it to be the only acceptable theory)

I unfortunately cannot read the full paper (I am not affiliated with university anymore), but from the abstract alone, "one of the masterpieces of science" seems a bit exaggerated. I do not want to argue that it is a bad paper without reading it, but from the abstract, it seems to say "two attempts were made at replicating the result that speed of counting seconds is linked to body temperature, and one of them failed to replicate the results", which on the face of it is important (see the debate about the replicability crisis) but not that exciting.

Am I missing or misinterpreting anything?

Another "perfectly timed" TV moment with Rockets, unvoluntary this time, would be Ariane 5's first launch. The commentator literally says "all propulsion parameters at their normal value" (in French) as the thing is blowing up. (1:25 in the video)

https://youtu.be/PK_yguLapgA?si=zS9ak1nFT5tJ_Z9l

Note that the article does not say that it was hard, just that it was perfectly timed. The fact that the time of the launch is known to the second is exactly why they were able to pull this off, but they still had to have the idea, and execute it right.

Plus, realize that we looked at it with the headline "most amazingly timed shot in TV history", which made us look for something extraordinary. It must have been a totally different experience to see this on TV at the time, half asleep learning about rocket fuel, and all of a sudden the guy points in the direction of the launchpad and a rocket lifts off.

> That car driving itself is not one big AI brain.

> Instead of a whole toolchain of specialized models, all connected with normal code — such as models for computer vision to find and identify objects, predictive decision-making, anticipating the actions of others, or natural language processing for understanding voice commands — all of these specialized models are combined with tons of just normal code and logic that creates the end result — a car that can drive itself.

Or, as I like to say it: what we now call "AI" actually refers to the "dumb" part (which does not mean easy or simple!) of the system. When we speak of an intelligent human driver, we do not mean that they are able to differentiate between a stop sign and a pigeon, or understand when their partner asks them to "please stop by the bakery on the way home" -- we mean that they know what decision to take based on this data in order to have the best trip possible. That is, we refer to the part done with "tons of normal code", as the article puts it.

Needless to say, I am not impressed by the predictions of "AI singularity" and whatever other nonsense AI evangelists try to make us believe.

I should have mentioned that I only ever was part of the review process for very junior positions (PhD candidates and interns), so all CVs are pretty much the same. So for most, a 10 secs glaze is enough, but whatever the quality of the CV I always feel compelled to read the cover letter with more care.

Apparently everyone here hates cover letters, so I would like to offer a different viewpoint. Every time I am part of the hiring process, I start reviewing each applicant by looking at the cover letter. I only look at the CV if the cover letter convinced me, if at all. I am in a field where people with lots of different backgrounds might contribute, and the cover letter allows me to see whether the applicant understood what the job is about. You would not believe how many people throw applications without having the slightest idea of what they are applying to.

Even when I apply for jobs, I do not like when I am not able to write a cover letter. My CV alone is nothing special, and I often feel safer with the extra information the cover lwtter allows me to communicate.

Note that I am not a software engineer, and the jobs I review or apply to are very specific and have a few dozen applications at most. I understand the situation would be different for a generic job posting ("software engineer providing support in various teams") with several 100s applications.

Thanks a lot for your comment, it is very interesting to read directly from your experience. I am particularly pleased by your comment, because it kind of goes in the direction of my first reaction when I read this comment about "sub-trippy doses" being used.

I do not have experiences with psychedelics, but I do have quite some mileage with meditation, in particular approaches that aim at shifting the "way of looking". Those practices can lead to experiences that lead to profound shifts in the usual day-to-day way of looking at the world, but the experiences themselves are more subtle than what I expect a full blown trip to feel like. So I can totally picture that the experience, even if just subtle, can be a big part of the transformation.

I did not say that they are easy problems, nor that seeing a robot do a backflip isn't impressive. It was just an amused observation that what we call "intelligent" in a computer changed based on whatever the current hot tech can do.

What I find funny is how it seems what we called "AI" shifted from what we actually mean when we speak of a human as "intelligent" to what we definitely do not consider a part of intelligence.

Take the robots from Boston Dynamics as an example. We do not consider a human intelligent because they can distinguish a cat from a chair, or walk without tripping or do a backflip. But we would consider them intelligent if they were able to make creative use of their physical ability, based on the data they have, to solve a problem. But when we marvel at the "AI" in things like robots, my understanding is that the "AI" is mostly in the perception (going from raw sensor data to a labelled model of the world) and the actuation (going from an instruction as "move one meter forward" or "do a backflip" to an actual sequence of action of the actuators). But the actual "intelligence" (the decision to open the door in order to go fetch the peanut butter and bread in the other room, and bring it back to complete the task "make me a peanut butter sandwich") is mostly classic if-then logic, or given by a human operator.

I see a similar pattern with things like ChatGPT: one might be impressed by the capacity of some students to learn textbooks by heart and parrot them perfectly, but those are not the students we call "intelligent". An intelligent student is one who might have forgotten the proof of a theorem or the exact definition of some term, but is able to creatively come to a correct and creative solution when presented a new problem (to which "parrot students" tend to fail miserably).

I had the same experience with Maven vs SBT (scala build system, config is scala). At first it is really cool to have access to a full programming language (in particular when it is the same as the one the project is in, which means that you do not need to "switch brains" when working on the config), but quickly people start trying to be smart or cute, and it becomes a big mess. In particular in Scala, where people _love_ defining new DSLs and favor cuteness over readability. After two years working with SBT I still do not really understand some of the DSLish constructs used in there (and I tried to read the docs).

On the other side I fell in the trap of trying to overcome the limitations of purely declarative config formats by using jinja templates, which also ended up being a very bad idea and a maintenance nightmare.

For most projects, my approach is now to try to be as standard as possible compared to the particular community in the tech at end, and resist the urge to be smart or cute (hard!). Configuration always sucks, and I now prefer to just suck it up and get done with the config part, rather than loosing time reinventing the wheel, ending with a config that still sucks _and_ no one understands.

> No one is claiming that buying a pair of sneakers from a company that uses part of its funds for an evil end makes you guilty of the crime

If you are a German company, yes, the law makes you guilty. This goes by the sweet name of Lieferkettensorgfaltsplichtengesetz (also known as LkSG), and makes it a duty (Pflicht) for companies to pay diligence (Sorgfalt) to the absence of crime at any point in their supply chain (Lieferkette). I do not know exactly what the criteria are to decide whether you did your search with enough diligence, should a crime be found in your supply chain, but I just wanted to point that this concept definitely exists in some jurisdictions.

Not just time saving, but since I use it I did not have to re-tie my laces during the day, it looks very symmetrical, and I regularly have the silly but satisfying experience of people seeing me tie my shoes and say "how did you do that?". This is the knot I am teaching my kids (my wife can take care of the "standard" one).

I am not of the field, bit did dig into the CBT hole (both reading and consulting a trained therapist), and I have the impression that the effects are overstated (and, at least for me, this was totally the wrong approach). The main issue I see with the studies I tried to look at was that they compared the answers to some psychometric scales between people following a CBT method and people following "talk therapy". My problem with it is that, while CBT is pretty formalized and can be "administered" in a not so terrible way even by an if-statement based chatbot [1], "talk therapy" is a very broad category, and the effects will be mostly dependent on not only the skill of the therapist, but also the fit between the therapist and the client. So yes, CBT will consistently give small results, but comparing it to consulting a random non-CBT therapist is as absurd as comparing the travel time by bus to the travel time by jumping in and out of random trains until you reach the destination.

[1] before I get attacked on this: I do not say that there are no good therapists with CBT training - but I am confident most of them would still be very good even without the training or method.

Hi, I came here to tell the exact opposite, so I guess this is a good idea to do this as an answer to your comment. I feel like death is what makes life beautiful and precious. Because if you have an infinite amount of something, this is really not precious at all, is it? This is actually a central theme is Buddhist mythology: the realm of humans is seen as the most worthy place to be born, because it is mortality that gives one the possibility to understand and practice the teachings of the buddha. There are higher realms, where beings live many eons and with very little suffering - nice for the time it lasts, but it makes them unable to really understand the preciousness of live, and ends in bad karma and rebirth in a lower realm.

Knowing my life is finite is what makes me cherish beautiful moments. This actually often a consequence of fatal diagnoses: I could for instance observe how my father in law inceeased his interest in my children pretty much overnight after he was given one year to live by an oncologist.

There are meditation techniques focused on the awareness of death, and they can be very liberating: my favorite is called "the 9 contemplations of Atisa", if you want to look it up. I personally added a few contemplations to it, to take into account the secular setup in which we live: I find it extremely helpful to ponder the fact that we do not, and will likely never, be able to know what death is and what is the nature of consciousness. Maybe it is the end of everything, but maybe it is also the reunion with the great everything, or I will be reborn as a butterfly.

I also find the "charnel grounds" meditation to be very freeing, but some people do freak out there, so take your time.

Post doc? In what kind of utopian field did you work? In my former institute virtually all papers were written by PhD candidates, and reviewed by PhD candidates. With the expected effect on quality (due to lack of experience and impostor-syndrome-induced "how can I propose to reject? They are likely better than me"). But the Prof-to-postdoc-to-PhD-ratio was particularly bad (1-2-15).

Not necessarily. You can be compasionate to a narcicist manipulator while being perfectly aware that he is trying to manipulate you and not playing hus game. Being compasionate does not means doing everything someone asks for, but trying to understand where they come from, see their actions as their (likely unskillfull) attempt at avoiding discomfort/suffering (dukkha), and orient your actions based on that understanding.

Something that worked for me is that I have a profile where I am a domain expert who is reasonnably good at data science and software development. I am no rock star in any of the three fields, but this particular combination is pretty rare. I got my last 2 jobs this way: most applications just got lost, or ended in a meh screening interview, but there was this one job posting in the year that required this mix of skills, and I was just the obvious choice and got hired pretty much without competition.

I am not suggesting that you start a PhD in some obscure domain, but any additional skill can help stand appart from all other generalist front end developers. For instance in my last company we did quite a lot with geographical data, and if a front end dev showed even just the slightest knowledge of geodata (like knowing what a map projection is, or a knowledge of the technologies used to display maps efficiently on the web), he would quickly go on top of the pile. So if the is any domain where you know just a bit more than the average guy, even just as a hobby, I would say that it makes sense to display it on your CV and search for postings that might be related.

As I mentionned in another comment here, in my case, I used to intellectualize too much. Actually, intellectuallizing is the only way to do anything I knew for a long time: even when starting a new sport, I would start with a book or a series of videos about the theory and biomechanics of the sport.

For me, actually allowing me to feel without necessarily having a fixed interpretation, allowing a multiplicity of meanings, is what really unstuck things. Which does not mean that I do not interpret or use concepts, just that I do not reify them anymore.

There is a lot in your comment that resonnates with my way of practicing, and I will not be able to answer everything, but I feel like I need to try.

What the article gives is a very formulaic correspondance table between emotions and "messages": anger means this, fear means that. This reminds me a lot of "dream dictionaries": things of the kind "if you dreamt of a tree, it means that you want to sleep with your mother", and "if you dreamt of a dog, it means that you have repressed memories of abuse by your father". This, in my experience, is not helpful. Even adopting a more nuanced approach to dream interpretation, purely intellectual analysis of dreams tends to fall flat: you can build a very plausible interpretation of a dream, but (a) it does not mean that it is "true", and (b) it is often quite hard to know where to move from there. What is helpful is to try to reenact the dream in imagination, be attentive to resonances in the body, and see how things evolve.

Now to Buddhism: I am quite familiar with several Buddhist traditions and studied quite a large portion of the Pali canon, and I am not aware of any advice of intellectualization. Note that there is not even a word for "mind" in Pali: the closest is "cita", which is often translated as "heart-mind" - it is the rational and the emotive/feeling together. The Tibetan tradition also places the center of the mind in the heart, which is where you _feel_ things. So if you have some references to explain what you mean, I would be interested. There are broadly two main ways I learned from Buddhist (or Buddhist-inspired) teachers to work with emotions, and they are the following: - classical Vipassana insight meditation: feel the emotion, and decompose it in smaller components. Look at how impermanent it is. See how the various elements (the resulting papancca ("mental proliferation"), the feeling in the belly, the agitation, etc) really are not bad in themselves, see how there is no such thing as "the emotion", just an ever changing flow of sensations and thoughts. See how the emotion and sensations change when you stop resisting them: in big part, they are fabricated through your aversion, greed and ignorance (the "three poisons"). If you do this long enough, you realize that the emotion is "empty": it has no independent existence. - Rob Burbea's version of insight meditation, based on "ways of looking": based on the insight that emotions (and all phenomena) are empty, actively look at the emotion through a variety of lenses: see the emotion as a message from the divine. See the emotion as a biochemical process. See the emotion as a aggregate of impermanent sensations. when you do this over and over, you again deepen your insight into emptiness.

The core of those approaches is to _feel_ the emotion in all its complexity, not just the intellectual interpretation of it. Of course, there is a skillful use of concepts involved: "looking at the emotion as impermanent" is a concept. But what you do NOT do is to solve the emotion like a puzzle, a stay content when you realized that it is due to your father abusing you as a kid.

Note that I also did CBT with a trained therapist for a while, and it did not work at all for me: I am already a lot "up there in my head", and only when I dropped it and switched to approaches that focus on the body did things start to unwind.