739 karma · joined November 9, 2013
-- it's just that if someone else is writing a ton and wondering why they can't succeed, it's helpful to understand what other ingredients are involved.
I also think there's some amount confidence in one's prerogative to create and publish, when for example both of one's parents are also in creative fields. Confidence that creating is worth the effort and confidence that if one's creations improve in quality that there will be help to find an audience.
Almost any penalty one can come up with will be harder for the already-disadvantaged, and still shrugged off by someone with sufficient resources.
It seems like there's always corner cases that aren't considered (in your proposal above, what if the navigator doesn't have a phone because they're a child, or because their phone ran out of batteries? What happens when the sensors/algorithms are wrong about how fast we're going? What happens when the sensors are wrong about whether or not there's another device? What if that second device keeps disappearing and re-apparing while somebody tries to do a multiple step operation?) ... Trying to build some water-tight mechanism to keep us out of trouble but also with access to full functionality "when we can use it responsibly" is an endless rabbit hole.
IMO it feels like a systemic problem asking for a systemic solution. Whether we think that solution is self-driving cars, rail travel, walkable cities, or taxis probably says as much about our politics as anything else though.
I read (once, somewhere??) that some lifetime meditators put under FMRI often have the signature activation pattern that in the rest of us basically happens when we're about to say "Oh wow, look at that!" (i.e., excited by novelty) So I'm a little captivated by the idea that part of the nature of these states called "liberation" and "enlightenment" is an unending feeling of amused and interested novelty. In the literature they'll talk about "the freshness of every moment" and other similar phrases, so it seems to really be part of the sales pitch and goal.
For me it wears off pretty fast, and isn't always available. :) But definitely it's one of the things that keeps me coming back to the cushion, because ... yeah, you said it :)
Of course the next step would be leveraging this thought to propose a mechanism to convince them to expand their notion of "in-group" to include, i dunno, everyone who works for them? Everyone who was integral in their success? Every living being with whom they share a planet? So that the altruistic instinct could be expanded to be helpful to many many more.
... no particular ideas atm, but commenting in case it helps someone else reach an actionable insight :)
A "secret santa" is a gift giving tradition where you pool a group of people together and each person gets the name of someone and buys them a Christmas gift (generally within some price range) but they don't know who bought them the gift. So it's an opportunity to buy joke-gifts for someone you aren't particularly close to, if you happen to draw their name.
Now we have a tool that isn't lying through malice, volition, or any sort of intent, and that will combine jargon and phrases that seem authoritative into its misinformation.
IMO responsible engineering involves considering the ups and downs of each solution - that's where the famous HA saying "if you have two you have one; if you have one you have none" comes from, dictating that we need at least 3 instances of a server for high-availability, right? What would it take to engineer this new tech for high accuracy? Where is anything other than the hubris of "we were so busy asking if we _could_, we never stopped to ask if we _should_" ?
btw, imo, nearly all commercial shops' use cases are a long distance from needing kubernetes, but that doesn't seem to be stopping very many people... :)
For instance, I've finally learned to embrace "long-john" style long underwear under my pants, but it's only possible because I'm working from home. They are amazing layers for warmth, but unlike additional shirts, hoodies, jackets, scarves, hats, long underwear can't be casually removed. You have to take off your shoes and your pants! So if (when) I was going into an office, I always made the choice to have cold legs during the commute but comfortable legs all day. Now I can wear them in the morning, take them off if the day warms up, and put them back on whenever the temp. drops again.
But overall I'll echo a few comments in here that some of the more expensive gear, even as base layers, really is better technology. And getting to know my body and my situational habits, it's been possible to figure out layering clothing that worked for me, but only because I was working in tech and felt like I had enough money to get it wrong a couple times... If I were still living on a student or even "average" budget, I would've been much shyer about trying some new $30 shirt just to see if it agreed with me.
that's just my guess though :) Happy hacking!
My recollection is that the whole experience depended on which group you were in, and mine was fortunately very chill. Smart, friendly people who arrived and left more or less at the same time every day. Lots of matrixing and loaning of people from different orgs -- I had the feeling that if I were making a career there I would wind up slowly drifting around between projects.
The biggest surprise to naive me-in-my-early-20s was that "Department of Energy" is a euphemism for "Department of Nukes." Nuclear stockpile stewardship was a large portion of the activity there, and so a lot of your colleagues will be people who are at least vaguely comfortable with that.
There was a ton of "basic research" too -- some high-energy group had a daily experiment that would deliver a "whomp" of a shockwave around 3:15pm most afternoons, there was a room temp. fusion group, lots of interest in assisted driving cars and unmanned aerial vehicles... you just had to appreciate that all the first applications of all this tech was going to be military.
Also the security clearances.... the joke was that the "L" clearance stood for "Lavatory pass" because in our building until you got one, you needed a line-of-sight escort at all times, even in the bathroom. Even for the "L" the process was quite onerous, and I understood that the 'Q' clearance held by nearly all full-time staff was even more burdensome. I heard stories of people waiting for their clearance getting stuck in rooms with nothing to work on. One person in my group basically got sent offsite to some "think tank" or something for several months while he waited for his clearance - I only met him once the whole summer, at a conference.
I don't think this would have gotten great marks in my collegiate music theory IV class (iirc covered special cases of voice leading and rarer harmonic progressions like the augmented 6th and neapolitan chords), but honestly neither did I. In my highschool classes this probably would've gotten passing grades, at least on short exercises.
Is there an easy way to get it to "true up" the intonation on the longer chords? IMO part of the magic of this style of music is that a capella performances aren't constrained to equal temperament, and get really nice resonances on anything they hold.
So anyways the vajryana is the racecar. The point of that metaphor wasn't to flesh out which schools corresponded to a sedan or anything, but more like to point out how few people drive racecars, how few tasks or challenges are well solved by racecars, how much training, respect, and caution you might want to have before you started driving racecars at full speed, the conditions under which you would consider driving a racecar, etc. etc. And like you said, there's no judgement for not driving a racecar -- if anything there's a lot of respect and/or demand for people to drive more practical vehicles.
tho idk, personally, even though in my material life I prefer a bicycle, in my spiritual life I'm still trying to train to drive the racecar, so maybe it needs an even less sexy anology.