milansm

Why do we need to systematically counteract our biases? Why is that right thing to do? And who decides what is right?

I was biased when I married, I’m biased when I pick people I’ll spend time with, I’m biased when I apply for a job, and wouldn’t like it to be any other way... Of course, unless it’s me deciding for everyone else what they should optimize for their decision making process.

Back at the uni days if I struggled to understand a math concept, proof or algo, I would just memorize it. After a while the understanding part would also come.

Note that every single item from the parent comment is actually applicable, practical skill, unlike the knowledge about the solar system.

I quit coffee as part of New Year's resolution. I started feeling nauseous in the morning if I drank a cup of coffee in the afternoon the day before.

Once I quit, I thought I'll be less productive, and that I won't be able to focus, but after a week or two, my body recovered from the caffeine addiction.

I started drinking black tea - two cups per day. It's still caffeine, but in far less amount.

I miss coffee, though. I miss its smell and taste and somehow I correlate coffee with work satisfaction, creativity, and being productive. It's probably because the coffee is marketed around work culture, and I bought that.

I agree with what you just wrote. But, the premise is wrong, I think; We don’t know if lockdown now vs lockdown later (in UK’s case) will result with 0.1% vs 1% of life lost, respectively.

But how can anybody be sure that conservative policy (lockdown, I assume) would work for UK (or any other nation beside China)? They probably have to factor in the chance of success. They can fail in implementing conservative option (which might not be so conservative after all), and ruin the economy as a side effect. I imagine this as a choice between these: - long struggle with uncertain outcome in terms of life lost but with certain economic ruin - short struggle with uncertain outcome in terms of life lost, with small economic ruin

I’m neither epidemiologist nor politician in power, so I can entertain myself with these thought experiments. In the end, I have little choice (and knowledge or firepower), but to do as instructed by local authorities.

Exactly.

> Taiwan, officially the Republic of China...

ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence [by Max Tegmark]

> When they launched, Prometheus was slightly worse than them at programming AI systems, but made up for this by being vastly faster, spending the equivalent of thousands of person-years chugging away at the problem while they chugged a Red Bull. By 10 a.m., it had completed the first redesign of itself, v2.0, which was slightly better but still subhuman. By the time Prometheus 5.0 launched at 2 p.m., however, the Omegas were awestruck: it had blown their performance benchmarks out of the water, and the rate of progress seemed to be accelerating. By nightfall, they decided to deploy Prometheus 10.0 to start phase 2 of their plan: making money.

Since you're asking, here's mine side project which tries to tackle distractions as well (at least from Slack): qdochat.com Feedback is appreciated!

> I don't want to hire someone for whom the organisation doesn't have a career path for

and

> I'm not looking for a particular answer just an honest one.

are contradictory one to another.

Yes, you're right. Your comment is much appreciated. I'll certainly act upon it and work on improving my (personal project) marketing skills.

BTW, put simply, qdochat.com is Pomodoro technique for Slack teams.

Shameless plug, but this synchronous vs asynchronous communication is exactly what I wanted to solve with my Slack app (https://www.qdochat.com/). I was thinking of building a chat-like communication tool, but to be asynchronous by design. I settled with the Slack app for the time being.

Noob here. Doesn't targeted genetic mutation have an additional step of recognizing the exact gene (or combination of genes or gene properties, whatever the terminology is) that is needed to be changed in order for the desired outcome to take place? If so, isn't all that fuss about GMO exactly about that additional step with several open questions like: 1. we cannot be sure that the gene we're editing is the one that is responsible for the feature we want (or that it is responsible only for that feature) 2. What are the chances of editing the wrong gene and noticing it? 3. What happens is we edit the wrong gene without noticing it?

And to take yours, collective suicide would work the best.

Yes, it's just something I think it could be useful. At least some variation on that. I wanted to check what people think about it. What do you think?

You might be interested in my newest (fake) product: https://stackboi.com

Looks interesting. As a music lover (unfortunately with no talent) I might give it a try (once it's ready). BTW, privacy policy link does not work. :)

I use Slack in exactly the same manner. That's why I created Slack extenstion that tries to solve this problem (shameless plug: qdochat.com). I think mix of asyncrhonous and syncrhonous communication is the way to go.

What I look forward to the most is it will make majority of the farmland obsolete (land is mostly used for growing food for animals anyway). As someone who's living in the area (in Eastern Europe) where there's no decent forest in 100km radius, due to everything being turned into farmland, I can't wait for the era when forests will reclaim those lands.

When I cross a bridge on Danube and take a look from the hight (the bridge is quite big and tall) at the countryside I live in, all I can see is a farmland. And I can't help but imagine that only 200 years ago there were forests there, as far as you can see.

But once the meat is grown in the lab, I hope that it would stop making financial sense to farm the land for animal food.

Which is pronounced basically the same. Only the 't' at the end is dropped. Same goes for other Slavic languages.

We've written something similar for Java (except it's more generic, it can generate anything you want, and it can be made by certain rules, e.g. 100 users out of which 10 would be women born between 1970 and 1980): https://github.com/smartcat-labs/ranger

Not quite an axiom. Technology solves a lot of social problems. Example: waiting queues with numbers.

I am working for data engineering consultancy company and I noticed that we often need large datasets for various reasons, but it's hard to find those. So we started building open source tool which allows us to quickly generate large volumes of data. The idea is to create DSL for describing the data and allowed values and the generator should generate the data set based on that.

https://github.com/smartcat-labs/ranger/blob/master/README.m...

Any help and ideas are more than welcome.

English is not my native language, and it took some time for me to actually parse those short variable names you provided as examples. Though, I still don't know what propCnt is supposed to mean. But even if I did, it takes some cognitive effort to parse shortened names. I think that's the case with native speakers as well, but it's more noticeable at non-natives because the time interval is longer. IMO those little parsing efforts add up and are tiresome if you have to do it all day long. Imagine if the books are written that way.

> I'm streets ahead of the average Joe

Has anyone seen "streets ahead" being used by anyone else besides Pierce Hawtorn and the OP? I mean, is it widely used now? (I'm not native speaker, obviously)

Shameless plug regarding Slack being distraction source: I am trying to scratch my own itch here so I'm working on a Slack app that should help with that, www.collabq.com. Would love to hear your opinions!

http://api.zalando.com is quite self explanatory.

When I bought my laptop I got Windows 8.1 with it. I didn't want to delete it immediately so I dual boot Ubuntu and used Windows only occasionally. Then one day I couldn't start Windows because it was stuck in infinite update loop, even though I turned off updates because of those annoying "please update to win 10" messages. Now I run only Ubuntu.

> so you can come back later and understand/fix it

But, of course, that's very unlikely to happen.

Backend (Java) Developer. Side project: Slack app that removes trade-off between communication and productivity in software development teams. Landing page should be launched by the end of the week.