gbjw

"God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?"

"Push this boulder, and imagine yourself happy."

> Humans derive a lot from process, not the final product.

This is what gives me solace. Surely much of 'art' (in so far as a definition is useful) is not a static 'product' that you can replicate at will. It is a connection between two people: the artist and the consumer. Yes, AI 'art' can look aesthetically pleasing: but does it evoke emotion? Does it connect you to the 'artist'?

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” - William Blake

For anyone looking into this, Rotation Averaging by Hartley et al. (2011) is a must-read on the subject of rotation averaging: https://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~hartley/Papers/PDF/Hartley-Tr...

Happy Birthday!

Couldn't agree more with this assessment. I'd also like to repost the top comment on Medium since it might be particularly germane to the HN community:

'...a spirit influenced by gnosticism (even if it doesn't know it): the body and the material world is bad, the spirit is everything. So the best space, becomes no space: the virtual space of the internet, for example. Meta, indeed.'

In Canada as well (e.g., York is known to have a strong 'activist' graduate union that periodically shuts down classes over labour disputes).

Sure -- or people don't want to clog up channels with what they perceive to be minutiae or very context-specific questions requiring some back-and-forth.

Sending a message in a public channel is psychologically akin to walking into a room full of people and just loudly proclaiming/demanding help. I don't think people are simply 'scared' to do it -- they just (rightly) intuit that it's somewhat strange and counterintuitive that it would be the preferred method over talking to an individual and building a rapport / friendship.

Somewhat tangential, but McCarthy is publishing two new novels (after a 16 year break): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/08/books/cormac-mccarthy-new....

Amen. Another documentary comes to mind: The Alpinist (on Amazon). It follows a Canadian climber who ‘solved’ his ADHD by becoming one of the world’s best mountain climbers. Funnily enough, his climbing style was smooth, controlled and relaxed. At a desk, he couldn’t sit still.

Completely agree. I'd like to also recommend another book in the spirit of Ecclesiastes: Tolstoy's Confession. A Confession was published shortly after Anna Karenina and at a time when Tolstoy (in his fifties) was widely considered to be one of the world's preeminent writers. He had vast wealth, fame, and a large family. Nevertheless, he was so overwhelmed by the vanity of existence that he was convinced suicide was the bravest, most reasonable course of action.

Apart from pure cowardice, he writes that what stopped him from taking his life was a vague intuition that his own logical reasoning about life's purpose was sound but somehow incomplete. His eventual insight is as follows: life is not meaningless because logically it must be so. Logic cannot 'negate' life because it is itself a byproduct of life. If one reduces life to a form conducive to logic, one reduces it to a cold, dead simulacra that may indeed not be worth living. Instead, Tolstoy argues, the life that is worth living, and the one that so many of the peasants around him lived, was one guided by (potentially unconscious) faith. He concludes that this faith in the transcendent must be the source of life ("God is life") and that life is a logically impossibility save for this faith.

His post-Confession writings are all dedicated to his interpretation of the Christian scriptures. I'll also note that his advocacy and envagelism of Christian pacifism was a direct influence on Gandhi and MLK Jr.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Confession [2] http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/confessions-tolst...

Interesting to note that the link between emotions and the 'gut' are all over the place in English:

'trust your gut'

'I have a gut feeling'

'I hate his guts'

'my gut reaction'.

What is 'representative' democracy in the age of weekly/(daily?) polls that break down your constituents' views on every last issue? The blind leading the blind...

This is insanity -- you get paid $1.2M as an IC?! How? Is this total comp?

To nitpick here: many tenured professors also use Slack, email, alerts etc. There's also often an (implicit) expectation that they can get stuff done in the evenings, on weekends etc. (e.g., paper reviews, grants, references, etc.). So I don't think it's quite as easy for modern-day profs to just 'shut [themselves] from the world'.

Furthermore, a lesser-talked about side-effect of extended (semi-)lockdowns and associated measures is a general reduction in the physical health of the populace. How many of us have put on a few extra pounds? This survey [1] (which, admittedly, seems to be probably skewed by sampling bias), shows that millennials put on 40+ (!?) pounds over the pandemic.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1257041/average-weight-g...

Your anecdote makes me wonder if the Omicron variant is largely spreading through aerosols and eyes. See (commentary from May 2021): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5....

Cf. 'The Myth of Mental Illness' by Thomas Szasz (1961): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Mental_Illness

Thank you so much! Moby-Dick is my favourite novel --- appreciate the effort.

'Why can't consciousness solve the mystery of its own existence?'

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Simone Weil

I think it was serious. Norm was very well-read and his favourite literature was deeply religious and suspicious of modernity (Twain, Tolstoy, Proust).

Hardly nonsense and a view espoused by several other cultural commentators and authors (e.g., Ross Douthat, Dostoyevsky, Simone Weil, to name a few).

Also mine. Here is the video of it (his mannerisms only add to the aesthetic): https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5vaqxy

Gutted. He was a comedic genius, and extremely well-read. Rest in peace, Norm.

So you mean your frustration is warranted then?

The 13 inch MBPs don't have a dedicated GPU and the Intel integrated graphics draws significantly less power. Does anyone know why the 16 inch MBPs power on the AMD GPU for external screens?

I also love Blood Meridian -- curious what your other two would be? Mine are probably Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov.