corry

I'm 100% onboard with the 'Lawrence of Arabia inspired Dune' theory but I think one of the cleverest things Herbert did with Dune is to introduce a 'visionary substance' (spice) into the otherwise austere Islamic-adjacent motif.

He not only shrouded the spice in ritual and religion (which isn't THAT suprising considering many human societies used visionary substsances, and Herbert was a child of the 1960s psychedelic culture too) but also give it a central place in the economy and functioning of the empire.

What if a visionary substance was the real deal that gave you insight and precognition? What a rebel leader took full advantage of such a substance? What if that was combined with religious fervour?

Dune is basically space war + outsider Messiah + Islam + psychedelics

Yes, exactly!

Part of maturing is realizing that you are but a link in a chain; and all the potential futures in which you saw yourself as the protagonist fade into a fuzzier (and less direct) set of potential futures which your children will shape and navigate through.

Meanwhile, we are also becoming captive to the stories that we tell ourselves about ours lives and the stories that our culture tells us about our value. But though it's not easy, you can change the story you tell yourself at any time... and watch your life fill-in with possibilities again.

I get migraines about 6 - 8 times a year, complete with visual aura and very occasionally speech aphasia. I tracked them in a spreadsheet for years so have a rough idea of triggers but it's proven fairly bad at predicting.

I've tried many drugs to combat them, but there is one thing that helps me short-circuit it 99% of the time is a high amount of caffeine. It's not perfect -- I liken it to side-stepping a train; you get missed by the train itself but still get thrown off by the wind and noise, still fall hard on the ground, still get bruised but not hurt as badly -- but it works well enough, so as soon as I get the visual aura, I slam back a strong coffee and know that it'll work. Why? No idea, perhaps the pressure in the brain's blood vessels are affected?

What I don't see as often discussed is the subtle changes in consciousness that accompany migraines.

For me, in the pre phase (12 hours or less before the true onset), the first sign that I'm heading towards one is a sudden immediate bias towards pessimism with a kind of resignedness too (which is quite unlike my normal states of mind). That's often my first clue. It's like the storm clouds are gathering on the horizon and all light and colour is drained from my life.

Then, the visual aura hits. Now I know what's happening with certainty and I hit my caffeine prophylactic. The caffeine stimulation combined with the first inklings of pain and knowledge that you're about to go "into the shit" gives you quite a fight/flight feeling. You're at a bit of a loss as to what to do, since you're amped up but there's nothing to do but wait it out.

Then once the aura fades, you feel quite strange. I'll typically go lie down at this stage. If the caffeine worked (which is like 99% likely for me), I feel in a kind of haze but I'm not in deep pain - just uncomfortable and mentally quite scattered, though I'm no longer pessimistic about the future. In fact, it's like time collapses, and I'm forced to be in the moment. It makes me feel sick to try to think about the past or future - it all feels like a huge burden to try to internalize those states of time. I just try to focus on my body and how I'm feeling. It's almost like a meditative state. I can't sleep due to the caffeine but I try to rest and keep my mind clear.

At some point I'll realize that I'm mostly through it, and can get up and move around and generally kind of resume my day. But it feels like a hangover of sorts. Everything is hazy. Thinking is difficult. Very sensitive to light and noise.

Then, surprisingly, the next day I'll feel mentally GREAT like my mind was cleaned.

Which brings me to the most interesting part of all this for me - the migraine has a lot of similarities to a psychedelic trip. There's a come-up that's distressing, a plateau where one is forced to be in-the-moment, a depletion afterwards, and the next day onwards a feeling that things are cleaner and better ordered than before, like your mind and spirit has been defragged.

Perhaps both the migraine and the psychedelics are stressors or some kind of release valve on your brain.

One wonders if there's increased brain plasticity post-migraine like with psychedelics.

Yes, you can't use official labs (which of course would be the gold standard) but you can order and use kits from places like Meraculix (who have a US distribution point, so the tests travel via domestic mail within the US). Not risk-free since ordering a test kit for a scheduled substance at least implicitly implies you have a scheduled substance in your possession (or access to one). Sorry about your drug laws.

Fair points! I guess I have more optimism for the modern incarnation, but history does indeed suggest otherwise.

I hear you, and it's a good warning, but I think the word "often" in your first sentence requires some qualification or maybe nuance.

It's no different from any other potential for abuse from someone with power - the way to mitigate it isn't merely to try pick good people (of course, start there), it's to wrap the vulnerable elements in protective practices and institutional controls to prevent abuse if an individual actor fails to live up to the standard.

For example, in the biggest abuse scandal of our generation (sexual abuse by Catholic priests), it's not just that the priests did great individual evil but also that the institution itself utterly failed to do anything about it or even abetted it.

However, the illicit nature of psychedelics makes those kinds of controls or institutions impossible or very hard to put in place.

Finally, for the abuse in the MAPS MDMA trial (which was 1 patient out of 200 participants) to be used as evidence that psychedelic therapy is more prone to abuse, you'd have to look at the rate of abuse among therapists and psychologists as a whole to know if it's par for the course or something extraordinary.

Bad actors will try to take advantage of the vulnerable -- and these drugs put you in a more vulnerable position than otherwise -- so your warning still stands. I just don't think these issues are unique to this stuff other than the legal status.

Thanks for sharing, although I'm curious what prompted this to be posted in 2025?

I've heard from a few underground psychedelic facilitators that LSD is one of the best 'medicines' for therapy of various kinds, but (a) the duration is often uncomfortably long, (b) the social/political stigma hangover from the 60s adds undesirable connotations which can 'prime' the participant in negative ways, and (c) the variability in street doses makes it unpredictable to work with if you don't have a way of measuring potency yourself (which I would argue disqualifies you from being a facilitator to begin with, but that's a separate topic...)

As for duration, this research indicates that lower doses are metabolized much faster (6.7 hours for 50ug vs 11+ hours for 200ug) which could help although the tradeoff is less 'good effect' even if 'bad effect' is minimized as well.

However, with respect to dose potency, a PSA for anyone new to this area -- go to the /r/LSD subreddit and read the pinned post on street dosages -- in short, street doses are on average ~100ug below what they claim.

So when this study says that 50ug produces such and such effects -- and the typical psychonaut on reddit might roll their eyes at such a 'light dose' -- keep in mind that an accurate "50ug" in a lab likely means "150ug" on the street which is a fairly typical dose sold. Of course the data shows an occasional over-dosed tab vs. the reported value, too.

Which leads to the most important PSA of all: please don't put any psychoactive substance into your body without having a lot of confidence in its actual composition and dose.

IMO it's a mistake to get too caught up in the (admittedly self-described) goal of modelling AI's economic impacts.

Instead, this is a super rare and valuable look into who/what/how folks are doing with Claude across millions of conversations, nicely categorized by function and task.

The economic impact data (i.e. wages) that they might overlay onto that usage data is a separate thing that -- of course -- is more subjective and likely to be part of some PR machinery about the public value of AI etc.

But as to sharing the raw usage data itself - we should applaud it! What a useful window into how this stuff is being used in the real-world.

Will OpenAI release similar data? Why or why not? I hope they will. It elevates the discussion for everyone, and frankly would be 'good business' if it gets people thinking about who/how AI could be used at their organization with more granularity.

I believe this is a well-understood feature of the dopamine system? The sensitivity of the receptors is like a balance scale, and will correct to one side if the other is flooded.

Give yourself big dopamine rushes and the scale balances by reducing your sensitivity to dopamine and (crudely put) causes feelings of discontentment, and you’ll need more dopamine released to feel like normal. Alternatively, push down on the pain side of the scale by doing some controlled suffering — fasting, cold plunge, intense exercise — and the receptors become more sensitive, and you feel better.

I’m sure this is too simplistic of a model but it makes sense to me in terms of lived experience.

Love your point here - the non verbal-ness of it feels like an increasingly rare thing in our lives (especially in tech).

Music and I suppose other traditional 'fine arts' (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc) are these windows into creation that's not as mediated by language, which is arguably the defining feature of humans.

I suppose dance / ballet / etc would be another similar space too, a kind of physical creation not mediated by language.

Towering above all other art forms, though, remains music - with such an immediacy to it (both in terms of how it hits your senses and how easily it seems to convey emotionality). It's no wonder that it looks like it's the top form of 'art' made and enjoyed by humans these days.

Absolutely terrible take.

Creating music that you yourself love -- even music no one else will ever hear -- is a peak human experience that I wish everyone got to experience.

The joy of creation is truly wonderful for its own sake.

Can AI help that creation, just like other "synthetic" techniques for making music (not least - the synthesizer)? Definitely.

But for me at least, the less of me (i.e. other people's samples, stock sound effects, DAW gimmicks) that's in my music, the less rush and joy I get from it. The less it feels "mine". But that's all very subjective.

Which takes me back to why this is such a dismal take. Why wouldn't this dude point to how making music is a creative joy, and AI can help bring that joy to more people by lowering the barrier to entry?

I can't be the only one that sees "wokeness" and general political radicalization (on either side) as being explainable by the collapse of religion and nationality as the key sources of identity and group-inclusion.

Political identities are modern-day religions, basically.

I'm not saying it's better to be actually religious - this isn't some sob-story about how the decline of religiosity is some great evil. I'm just pointing out the parallel: that something that's consumed A LOT of human energy and attention has disappeared in 1 generation leaving a huge vacuum of meaning for most people, and people are filling that vacuum with political identities.

Doesn't this list work for both political movements and religions: shared moral frameworks, common enemies, a metaphysical value system, sense of belonging, set of virtues and sins, rigid orthodoxy, regular rituals (protests, boycotts, etc), transcendent societal goals, conflict-as-sacred-struggle, etc.

Overly simplistic, maybe; but I think I'm not too far off.

I mean, an LLMs ability to solve a logic puzzle seems like a weird way to gauge how it could be USEFUL to you (even if it otherwise would be a good test of how 'intelligent' the LLM is).

Do you search Google or Reddit and wish you could just 'get the answer' instead of wading into pages/posts?

Do you compare two long documents together and not want to invest a few hours into a close reading of them?

Do you write code that consists of trivial functions or trivial text manipulation?

Do you want a 3-hour podcast summarized into a few bullet points for a particular audience?

Do you want to send a saucy limerick to your friend on their birthday?

Do you want to compare Kant's view on <topic> with <new_metaphysical_school_of_thought>?

Do you want to analyze 250k rows in an Excel file of user support tickets and summarize the top issues?

etc etc etc.

Totally fine if you don't do any of these things, but these are the things most people are using LLMs for.

Whatever other zaniness is going on with Musk/Sam/etc, I can't escape the feeling that if I had donated a lot of money to a non-profit, and then a few years later that non-profit said "SURPRISE, WE'RE NOW FOR PROFIT AND MAKING INVESTORS RICH but you're not an investor, you're a donor, so thank-you-and-goodbye"... ya, I'd feel miffed too.

If we're a for-profit company with investors and returns etc... then those initial donations seem far closer to seed capital than a not-for-profit gift. Of course hindsight is 20/20, and I can believe that this wasn't always some devious plan but rather the natural evolution of the company... but still seems inequitable.

As much as Elon's various antics might deserve criticism (especially post-election) he seems to be in the right here? Or am I missing something?

A few months ago I learned to solve the classic 3x3x3 using the beginner's method [0]. Basically, you memorize a set of algorithms based on the current state of the cube and what overall stage of solving you're at (you first solve the white layer, then the middle layer, then the final layer).

What's funny is that I feel no compulsion to learn other methods, no compulsion to get faster at it, no compulsion to move up to larger cubes like 4x4x4 etc.

I just find it soothing and meditative. In fact, doing a few cubes has replaced some amount of doom-scrolling for me. Hard to describe exactly. Scratches some hand-eye / brain-motor itch.

[0] This is the guide I used: https://assets.ctfassets.net/r3qu44etwf9a/6kAQCoLmbXXu29TTuA...

I think that's 2/3rds of it, but I think you'd need to add the final 1/3rd which is a shared metaphysical set of values. In other words, the tribe needs to be about more than just kinship and belonging - there needs to be a higher purpose or esoteric dimension to the group that comes from beyond the group.

I was writing a similar comment when I read this one. Hard agree.

The collapse of religion and its close-knit communities has created a vacuum that gets filled with (checks notes) -- vapid corporate culture BS, identity politics (actually, politics of all kinds), consumerism, and much more.

You don't have to believe that religion is good or right (how can they all be right?) to believe that humanity in the West is in the throes of a profound crisis of meaning despite significantly better quality of life than ever before.

I can't help but picture our grandparent's generation. Imagine your grandad -- a WW2 vet, provider for his family, guy who tried his best to build his community -- coming home in the 50's from his job at the factory fawning over some pseudo-inspirational new take on management that the plant manager is promoting.

One gets the sense that we're unmoored as a people, and will cling to almost anything that provides a meta-narrative and set of values... because we no longer get one from a close-knit community of people joined together with a set of values.

I think I put my finger on exactly why it sounds a bit uncanny-valley: it sounds like humans who are reading from a prepared 'bit' or 'script'.

We've all been on those webinars where it's clear -- despite the infusions (on cue) of "enthusiasm" from the speaker attempting to make it sound more natural and off-the-cuff -- that they are reading from a script.

It's a difficult-to-mask phenomenon for humans.

That all said, I actually have more grace for an AI sounding like this than I do for a human presenter reading from a script. Like, if I'm here "live" and paying attention to what you're saying, at least do me the service of truly being "here" with me and authentically communicating vs. simply reading something.

If you're going to simply read something, then just send it to me to read too - don't pretend it's a spontaneously synchronous communication.

Huh? It's obvious to almost everyone that Dropbox is in a tough position in that it's largely failed to expand its offering beyond the very original product and value prop, which is also being eroded by the other major players.

So they attempted to use DB's position to leap-frog into new product categories, which require big spend on R&D and related teams, as well as new heads for supportive teams (sales, marketing, support, etc).

It's not working, so they are pulling back and re-trenching.

That all seems pretty transparently NOT a "having too much money" problem.

This is my #1 question on GLP-1: are we just seeing how humans do much, much better by being lean vs. the direct result of the drug?

A lean current-epoch human -- with our food abundance, access to modern medicines, higher standards of life, lower risks of injury, etc -- is likely going to be markedly healthier than a non-lean current-epoch human or a lean human from a prior age where medicine/food/etc was worse.

Or is it, in fact, the direct result of the drug?

True, but (a) maybe it would evolve "naturally" given enough time, and (b) the things that humans create are a product of evolution too, no? Albeit not directly through the mechanism of natural selection.

Interesting thanks for sharing - maybe I'll try again with another device.

I've used the Braun wrist cuff, and while the heart-level feature is cool and perhaps good enough to mitigate position issues, I found that it was very unreliable vs. cuff measurements.

What do I mean by "unreliable"? Two things - (1) internally consistency for the given device and (2) not closely correlated to the arm cuff measurements.

My method: I would wear both devices and take a series of readings (like 5+ from each in a session, and did multiple sessions a day).

My results: while the cuff readings of course had some minor variation in of themselves, they were largely consistent with themselves (i.e. clustered around the average for the session) whereas the properly-positioned (according to the heart height feature) wrist measurements were all over the place showing big swings between readings and a wider dispersion from the mean.

Then there was the issue of did the wrist average measurements roughly correlate to the cuff averages - and not only was the answer "no", it would vary whether it was higher or lower. Which is a shame - it's ok if it was, say, overstating things by +5 mmHg but overstating at that rate consistently (because then you could mentally adjust the outputs); but when it's inconsistent you're just left scratching your head.

As I wrote about in another thread, the continuous wrist monitor Aktiia that I've been trying gets correlated explicitly to an arm cuff and seems far, far more accurate and consistent than this Braun device. It uses optical imaging of your wrist's blood vessels vs. physical pressure on a cuff.

All this to say - test for yourselves! Try multiple arm cuffs, even. While the exact numbers are less important than the trend, you need a device that you can trust w.r.t. output.

Hey I hear you, appreciate the perspective but I'm borderline keto most days -- almost zero sugar, very few carbs, etc -- and yet still here.

So while this may explain some amount (perhaps most?) of peoples idiopathic/essential HBP I doubt it's that simple.

"It's your potassium levels", "it's your homocysteine levels", "it's your fructose", "it's white-coat syndrome", "it's...." etc. Surely we're making progress but it's also not a silver bullet thing.

Good thing the treatments are so safe and effective.

Totally agree, although perhaps the real gift of this technology will be from the fact that people can be more aware of the underlying conditions (high BP) and tighter feedback loops on how to reduce it / manage it vs. just helping notify about an acute emergency situation.

As I typed the above sentence out, I thought "why not both?". Use the technology to reduce your risk, but in the event that the bad event still happens the notification could save your life.

100% hard agree. I'm now paying most attention to my overnight rate, like in the middle of the night - but even that takes a few hours to get down to the minimum value. Fascinating to see the big spike prior to waking up that signals your body is preparing for rising.

Did I eat late before bed? Higher BP overnight. Drink any alcohol at all after, say, 12pm? Higher BP overnight. So it's still useful and interesting to see the overnight values change and shift around.

However, the contrarian in my mind says that it's not smart to ONLY pay attention to your deep rest state BP, since that only applies to a fraction of the day. And if you're running around at high values for the rest of the day, you're still potentially doing damage to your kidneys, retinas, etc - the sensitive blood vessel stuff.

So it's a useful device, it's useful to have the data, but it's also still a bit of black box.

The fact that 80% of all high blood pressure is of unknown physiological cause is a real head scratcher considering that cardiac misadventures are the leading cause of death in the Western world.

Hey I have firsthand experience with it as indicated in the post. Probably a few months worth of wear at this point.

BP remains a great mystery to me, even with the device. My cardio fitness is pretty good despite carrying a few extra pounds (I'm in the low 50s for resting heart rate), and while overnight I dip down in the 120's, I can see it shoot up based on various things like cold plunge, caffeine, exercise (during), etc. I can also see it drop temporarily (hot tub, meditation, the hours FOLLOWING intense exercise, etc).

I had many pet theories through the years - that I had white coat syndrome, that I disliked the feeling of the cuff, etc etc. But the device showed me that, no, something really is going on independent of these pseudo-causes.

BTW water retention seems to play a big role. When I did keto, which causes a big drop in water retention, my BP also went down. Strange. Supplements have an impact too.

All this to say - get the device and see for yourself, but you might find yourself in the same place I am - which is that you have much better understanding of what's going on in terms of symptoms but are still on the search for "the underlying cause" if there even is such a thing.

Thanks for sharing. For me, I can see that DURING exercise, my blood pressure is quite raised but then drops down lower than usual in the hours that follow. However, I think that's more a function of resting HR - which remains elevated.

My particular BP scenario is good diastolic, high systolic but low rest heart rate (low 50s). My pet theory is that my heart does fewer but stronger pumps, which increases the BP. After exercising, when heart rate remains elevated, the BP is lower since the heart is doing more frequent but less powerful beats.

Just a pet theory, I haven't even discussed it with a medical professional.

Actually, there is a wrist device called "Aktiia" that's approved for use for continuous BP monitoring with clinical accuracy by the UK and German health authorities (I believe). It's a bit of a pain to get over the pond, but with a shipment-forwarding company + a UK App Store account you can get up and running.

I've dabbled a bit with it and it's very close to the cuff measurements.

It works by calibrating with their custom arm cuff device. I'd guess that it's correlating what the wrist sensor sees w.r.t. your wrist blood vessels and what the "true" reading is from your arm. You re-do the calibration every few weeks.

The device takes a reading every 20 or 30 minutes or so and seems to try to pick periods where you're more stationary.

However, one thing to be aware of is that you are not used to seeing your BP readings from the entire day. Did you jump in a cold plunge 10 minutes before it ran? Get ready to see a really high reading dot in the 'danger zone'. Went for a jog and are catching your breath on a park bench? High dot.

This isn't a bad thing, it just takes some getting used to since your "daily average" will be significantly above the readings you're used to if you're doing arm cuff measurements at the start/end of the day. Of course it's also getting readings at those more usual times too, but they get washed out in the larger number of data points from your day.

And goes without saying, your blood pressure SHOULD go up and down based on your activity and time of day. You just aren't used to seeing it other than at true rest.

But all in all it's been fascinating to see, and there's no doubt in my mind that this technology will be mainstream quickly (and Apple will likely dominate it).

I think that was true during the age of the blog, but far less so now.

Comments and discussion of a post are to be found on third-party communities like Reddit, HN, or even Facebook. How many of us scan the list of comments under, say, a Substack post vs. will scroll through a page or two of HN comments for the same post?

IMO it's a foregone conclusion that a discussion on HN will be higher quality for a tech-related post than a comment chain on a specific post, since HN has already attracted a wider set of readers than 99.9% of all blogs.

The main advantage of commenting directly on a blog post is that the author is far more likely to see it vs. the ephemeral state of the post being on the HN front-page.