phaedrus

I have almost exactly the inverse situation. We are at the end of a cul de sac that is capable of efficiently draining water away and out of the neighborhood. But in roughly the spot where your drainage creek is, there's a large strip mall parking lot (across the street from our backyard). We don't get a lot of rain in annual total, but when it does rain heavily a flash flood comes into our backyard and must cross our side/front yard to drain into the cul de sac.

The previous homeowner put in a DIY french drain, but either he didn't do it right, or it's too flat, or it's too small, or it is clogged. We instead get surface water flow and erosion along the same path where the french drain runs.

(It doesn't help that when our neighbors got sand delivered for an above ground pool bed, the delivery truck dumped the entire pile of sand ON TOP OF the river rock exit basin for our french drain. The sand was later removed/used but I was still upset; unfortunately it was my brother in law who ordered the sand. Since the drain is above it I don't think it went in the drain, but maybe this rock basin was supposed to be a dry well.)

I am thinking of building something like your concrete berm along my back fence line, possibly modifying the french drain to just transfer the water from the far side of the berm to the exit over the cul de sac rather than trying to absorb it from the ground.

I have IBS. During my last visit, my GI doctor apropos of nothing blurted out, "you've got to get your anxiety under control!"

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"You said the stress of getting ready to leave for the office triggers your attacks," he said.

"I work from home!!" I said. "_YOU_ posed a hypothetical and I answered with a hypothetical: that it would certainly be stressful if that happened. I also said I still have the IBS attacks when I don't have a stressful day."

In my opinion general practitioners (who are not therapists) putting their patient's issues down to "anxiety" or stress is like doctors diagnosing "hysteria" in 19th century women: it contains the in-built subtext that you're not a reliable narrator of your own symptoms, and there is no evidence you can present to disprove the accusation of "hysteria" or "anxiety".

My electronics mentor worked at 3M in the 80s. One of his coworkers thought it would be funny to prank him by asking him to look into a piece of equipment with something like a binocular microscope that the prankster had rigged to flash laser light at the sample. (I'm not sure what the equipment was, maybe something to do with chip lithography or looking at the surface of a magnetic platter.)

Somehow 3M was able to get out of compensating him for this workplace injury even though, if an ophthalmologist were to give him an eye exam (he tells me) they can literally read lithography writing (albeit backwards) burned in scar tissue on his retina. IIRC the prankster was never appropriately disciplined either.

Like OP it mostly affects/affected his peripheral vision and he just ignored it much of the time, but as he's gotten older his eyesight in general has gotten worse such that he can no longer compensate for it.

In my opinion packet switching is an idea that would have been inevitable once the technology to support it is in place. The real important idea of the Internet is the insight that the envelope should be independent of the data it contains.

I say this because I work with specialized equipment that uses RS-232 serial protocols for communication, and despite many decades of examples available of "the right" way to do it (e.g. OSI model), engineers continue(d) to not understand this lesson and design ad hoc protocols that don't respect this division of concerns and which suffer for it. Even in IP protocols designed to modernize this to wrap the RS-232 serial packets in internet packets, they repeat the same mistake(s). That is, in the midst of having to deal with a more complicated problem for serial protocol to IP protocol conversion because the original format didn't clearly distinguish envelope from data, they compound the problem by mixing levels in the new protocol.

For example, writing IPv4 into the standard for a proprietary an Application or Session level protocol even at the same time as our network is banning IPv4 and requiring IPv6, but the protocol is not even defined for IPv6 addresses. When it should be agnostic to IP level concerns entirely. (The engineers said, while designing the system, "well .1 is going to be this piece of equipment, .2 is going to be the other side, if it's blah blah blah it's .3, etc.")

C++ already has (named) return value optimization; I think the behavior you describe would happen when passing the result of a function to push_back/emplace_back.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/copy_elision

It seems like C++ would be simpler if were either just all immutable (like Haskell) or embraced using the full, mutable language for metaprogramming (Jonathan Blow's Jai). Of course that's a horse that left the barn before most of the current barn was even built.

I chose my username from the narrator's alter ego in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In reference to the analytical knife:

"Phædrus was a master with this knife, and used it with dexterity and a sense of power. With a single stroke of analytic thought he split the whole world into parts of his own choosing, split the parts and split the fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until he had reduced it to what he wanted it to be. Even the special use of the terms "classic" and "romantic" are examples of his knifemanship."

In a bit of nominative determinism, or perhaps just having chosen the name because I know myself (or maybe I just over use these words), my keywords include: "part, system, level, language, article, object," etc.

Even computer security itself is a metaphor (at least in its inception). I often wonder what if instead of using terms like access, key, illegal operation, firewall, etc. we'd instead chosen metaphors from a different domain, for example plumbing. I'm sure a plumbing metaphor could also be found for every computer security concern. Would be so quick to romanticize as well as militarize a field dealing with "leaks," "blockages," "illegal taps," and "water quality"?

Ada code resembles this.

I work for the government supporting critical equipment - not in medical, in transportation sector - and the systems my team supports not only are not connected to the internet, they aren't even capable of being so connected. Unfortunately the department responsible for flogging us to do cybersecurity reporting (different org branch than my team) has all our systems miscategorized as IT data systems (when they don't even contain an operating system). So we waste untold numbers of engineer hours now reporting "0 devices affected" to lists of CvE's and answering data calls about SSH, Oracle or Cisco vulnerabilities, etc. etc. which we keep answering with "this system is air gapped and uses a microcontroller from 1980 that cannot run Windows or Linux" but the cybersecurity-flogging department refuses to properly categorize us. My colleague is convinced they're doing that because it inflates their numbers of IT systems.

Anyway: it is getting to the point that I cynically predict we may be required to add things to the system (such as embedding PCs), just so we can turn around and "secure" them to comply with the requirements that shouldn't be applied to these systems. Maybe this current outage event will be a wake up call to how misplaced the priorities are, but I doubt it.

I like to draw the comparison that in an alternate universe where the ASCII .txt file format had simply included a color byte with every letter byte, we'd now be having coding format guidelines that also go into great detail prescribing manual syntax highlighting. The fact we don't and avoided endless bike shedding over syntax highlighting, instead leaving it to automatic tools and the presentation layer not the code itself, is purely an historical accident. Well, what does that say about other code formatting details which programmers currently do waste time manually doing and worrying about?

This rigamarole is why I stopped taking ADHD medicine.

I waited too long to make an appointment once (because, you know, ADHD), and then ran into a problem that my doctor's office had reorganized duties to give the renewing prescriptions role to a newly hired nurse aid without considering that he can't refill controlled substances. I kinda wondered how that could work, but either because was new to the job or overconfident he assured me I was wrong about the legality of that and he definitely would get the prescription scrip for me.

By the time he / the doctor's office realized actually no, he can't refill my ADHD medication, my doctor was out and a four day weekend would soon begin. At this point I was already a few days off the meds and going through withdrawals, which got worse over the weekend. By the time Tuesday rolled around I'd essentially been forced to "quit" cold turkey, and so I was like, what is the point of re-starting this now I've gone through the hardest part of getting off it?

I wrote program to solve the cutting stock problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_stock_problem) for a personal project. I couldn't (or didn't want to) use any existing program for it because my stock involved cutting pieces shaped like either /---/, /---|, or |---| and I didn't want to waste material on the 45 cut.

I find it interesting that the description of Brady's program to optimize search for BB(4) by cutting out search subtrees whose differences don't matter is fairly close to a description of what I did to make my program fast.

I work on a team that supports some equipment related to airplanes. An acronym for one piece of equipment that is decades old is "RCSU". When I got a support call talking about "RSCU", I assumed the person meant "RCSU".

Nope. It turns out, when they made their next-generation piece of equipment, the vendor differentiated it by swapping the inner two letters in an already easy-to-say-wrong acronym.

My reaction was, "WTF didn't they just call it the RCSU2?!"

Thanks for reminding me of that. Honestly the battery life on the Boox Tab is great. I've never had it run out on me.

I bought a Boox color e-ink tablet last year. I wanted something different enough from phone and laptop that I could read books without feeling like I am staring at screens every waking hour. I also liked that it ran full Android so I can put whatever app on it.

While the color screen is a neat trick, in practice, in an e-reader, for this purpose, I have to conclude the colors (which are faint) were not worth the sacrifice of grayer screen background, less resolution, and slower/more complicated refresh.

All that is to say, my experience with the Boox tablet makes me feel like this Daylight Computer is on the right track with its design choices. While I don't quite have the disposable income to turn around and purchase another tablet so soon after spending my money on a different tablet, if I could do things over (or if my current e-ink tablet broke), I'd definitely buy this Daylight Computer.

Hopefully the company that makes this is successful and continues to expand and support the device. That's the other issue with the Boox tablet; I read on Reddit that there will not be new Android versions for it because the company is part of a culture of moving on to new hardware and abandoning support for deployed hardware quickly.

I'm sure at NASA as at all government agencies there are teams who work very efficiently and do more with less, and other teams whose mission does not have that characteristic and constraint.

"Instead of a measurable, quantifiable thing that exists independently out in the world, we suggest that intelligence is a label." Thought experiments lead me to the conclusion that the same is true of consciousness. I make the analogy to how the essay, What Color Are Your Bits? which argues that copyright is "out of band" (my summary) from the actual bits of data. I think the property of a system having consciousness is, like copyright of data, neither intrinsic nor an epiphenomenon but rather at least partially a status of how we regard it.

The thought experiment goes thus:

Assume it's possible to simulate a conscious brain with a deterministic program. (Already a big ask for some, but this is one of the axioms of my argument so bear with me.) Assume that if embodied the simulation would be indistinguishable from the original person, but also if not embodied it could be interacted with in a simulated environment.

If it is deterministic, that means if you re-ran the simulation with same data , inputs, and timing, all would proceed identically. Is the simulation conscious again while replaying it along a fixed path?

Suppose you memoized portions of the computation. How much of the brain could you memoize before you no longer consider it conscious?

Suppose you could, instead of memoizing "in breadth", instead use memoization to skip steps of the consciousness without changing the outcome. How many in-between states could you gloss over while still considering the simulation conscious?

Suppose you divided the simulation among multiple computers, without changing the outcome. If you accept the original premise, you may have little trouble accepting a distributed system with a fast network is also capable of hosting a conscious mind. However as we said this replay is deterministic, there's nothing stopping nodes from substituting internal playback of pre-recorded network packets for actually communicating on the network.

Are you prepared to call it a simulation of consciousness if a "distributed system" of nodes each internally simulating all of it, in portions, while all remaining silent and not sending any network packets between them?

My point with all of these variations is not to say which is or isn't conscious, it's to argue there is no clear dividing line. One could come up with moral arguments about which of these scenarios it's unethical to keep trapped in this experimental setup versus which are the mere image of a thing and not the thing itself, but that's my point: it's only a moral/ethical dilemma and not a physical or informational state change between non-conscious and conscious. The "universe doesn't care;" consciousness is not a conserved property.

Dwarf Fortress is perhaps a stronger exploration of your thesis, because it is unapologetically simulation-first.

As an amateur game engine developer, I morosely reflect my hobby seems to actually consist of endlessly chasing things that were broken by environment updates (OS, libraries, compiler, etc.) That is, most of the time I sit down to code I actually spend nuking and reinstalling things that (I thought) were previously working.

Your comment makes me feel a little better that this is not merely some personal failing of focus, but happens in a professional setting too.

I once screen-shotted an intranet application at my work asking the unintentional koan, "One does not exist", next to a button that said, "Create".

One of my first professional software projects, as an intern, was I wrote a tool for simulating this type of latency. I modeled it as a set of pipe objects that you could chain together with command line arguments. There was one that would do a fixed delay, another that would introduce random dropped packets, a tee component in case you wanted to send traffic to another port as well, etc.

I wonder if a galaxy like this could be so bright as to support life on rogue planets i.e. those not orbiting a star?

(If there would be any elements to create a rocky planet from. However the article states they were surprised to detect signs of dust and oxygen already in such an early galaxy.)

Philosophically, why should it be the case that aggregations of statistical calculations (one way of viewing the matrix multiplications of ANNs) can approximate intelligence? I think it's because our ability to know reality is inherently statistical.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting macro scale, i.e. not quantum, reality itself is probabilistic, only that our ability to interpret perception of it and model it is statistical. That is, an observation or a sensor doesn't actually tell you the state of the world; it is a measurement from which you infer things.

Viewed through this standpoint, maybe the Game of Life and other discrete, fully-knowable toy problem worlds aren't as applicable to the problem of general intelligence as we imagine. A way to put this into practice could be to introduce a level of error in both the hand-tuned and learned networks' ability to accurately measure the input states of the Life tableau (and/or introduce some randomness in the application of the Life rules on the simulation), and see whether the superiority of the hand-tuned network persists or if the learned network is more robust in the face of uncertain inputs or fallible rule-applications.

I wonder if anyone has tried to approach the problem from the other end: start with the hand-tuned network and randomize just some of the weights (or all of the weights a small amount), and see at what point the learning algorithm can no longer get back to the correct formulation of the problem. Map the boundary between almost-solved and failure to converge, instead of starting from a random point trying to get to almost-solved.

Besides taxes, there is another sense in which outside circumstances can break your "rent control" model of home ownership with 30 year mortgage. Here in Oklahoma, insurance rates have skyrocketed in the last couple years. I now pay more in homeowner's insurance monthly than either my principle or interest payment (though perhaps not both together - yet). And I have a 4.something% mortgage.

I suspect it has or will soon reach the point where the Kelly criterion says mathematically I'd be better off to self-insure - if I didn't have a bank loan.

It's not just insurance (which is likely also weather-related); after a fluke super-cold Winter we had, our natural gas companies incurred a huge wholesale market bill which they've passed on to customers. I have a family member who owns his house free and clear whose gas bill went up so much he could no longer afford to heat his house. The gas company still tried / is trying to assess a one-time very large retroactive fixed fee even though he turned off his gas.

My point, I guess, being even homeowners are not totally insulated from being screwed over by outside market forces.

I am also 40. Maybe it's time to stop judging myself by the baseline of the focus I could once muster as a teenaged or 20-year-old hacker.

I wonder if a similar thing can happen with non-physical pursuits (specifically, coding) if relentlessly forced to over-do one thing over a long period of time. Overwork/over-stress early in my software development career led to a permanent reduction in my rate of being able to produce lines of code for any reason (work or personal projects). I relate to a lot what the podcast said comparing it to being a six-cylinder engine only running on four cylinders, a feeling of there being depths you have (or had) that you can't access anymore.

Obviously the word "burn out" comes to mind, and certainly related to that, but burn out implies an acute condition and this is not exactly it. I never got totally burned out, it was just my rate of writing code got slower... and slower. Part of this was undiagnosed (until late in life) ADHD, and like the woman in the podcast I tried to make up for it by doubling down until I couldn't anymore. It got to the point that trying to write code was like force un-pausing a video that's buffering until the frame rate starts stuttering, or holding down the flush lever after the toilet tank is empty.

Much like how the person profiled in the episode was eventually able to take up a new sport of endurance running because she can handle suffering through that but cannot do the type of running at the intense pace she used to do, I am now happily for many years employed in a government job. I have the capacity to "suffer" through months- or years-long red tape processes because it matches the reduced pace at which I can now produce lines of code - or I avoid it altogether by using my experience to solve problems in other ways.

Except some communication protocols have a 32 bit timestamp baked into the format.

I don't show as colorblind on any of the tests, but on some monitors I can't distinguish this shade of green (https://htmlcolorcodes.com/colors/nyanza/) - or any paler green - from white. I worked at a place which used an alternating white/green background pattern to distinguish data rows (because company branding was a darker similar shade of green). Moreover the coding culture there was to favor manually created (not programmatic) data grids if the information was static, so it was manually colored. I was always getting asked, "why did you break the color pattern?" and my response would be, "what pattern?"

The funny thing is we were supposed to be making Ada compliant websites. But I guess it didn't prevent using the website, just an aesthetic choice. Or "can't see one specific shade of green" isn't a disability.

For what it's worth I also have never been entirely convinced "navy blue" is different from "black" and that the existence of navy blue as a distinct color isn't some elaborate joke being played on me. Someone gave me a pack of dress socks of all different shades of grey, black, and navy blue as a Christmas gift, and they meant well but do not know the apprehension they caused.