tgamba

So glad I live in Canada. American corporatist evil seems boundless.

DMT trip reports point to a use of psychedelics beyond therapy. Since so many users describe the same thing -- points of contact with other beings-- we can hypothesize that DMT gives us access to other dimensions or aspects of space and time. But how we move from subjective reporting to a scientific theory on this, I have no idea. (I have never tried DMT, it sounds terrifying)

This comment is naive, but not totally off-base. Psychedelics can cause real long-term problems for people even if used correctly. I liken it to skydiving, a potentially dangerous activity for which one must be completely prepared, with no absolute guarantee of safety.

That said, I would say that psychedelics definitely expanded my consciousness and changed my life. And that I stopped doing them in the nick of time. They do cause a turn inward, and what I learned is that turning inward can be an endless journey into the void. What I really wanted was to take my expanded consciousness and use it in the consensus world, and for that, I felt, you needed a clear head.

If you approach the psychedelic experience as Thompson did, with the macho attitude of getting as fucked up as possible on as much as you can stand, then of course you are going to come out of it with nothing.

Alan Watts put it best: "When you get the message, hang up the phone." Respect the experience, the power of the drug, and know when to stop.

When I was at University of Waterloo in the 80s, I went for a couple of talk therapy sessions with a very nice, empathetic woman employed in the Psych department. After a session, she said, "would you like to see something?"

Just adjacent to her office was a "trip room", probably constructed when the building was build in the 70s (?). It was round, completely lined with acid orange fabric, upholstered like a pasha's tent and filled with cushions in every colour imaginable. No doubt it had a superlative quadraphonic sound system installed. It also had a large, smoked glass window, for "observers." Not ideal for mushrooms perhaps but for other things...

Yes. Sticking only to the realm of hard science, the frontiers keep expanding (e.g. dark matter and energy). When it comes to our subjective perceptions and how the the brain assembles them into consciousness, we've barely a clue.

Scientific apparatuses have allowed us to "see" the complete elecromagnetic spectrum, the cell, the quasar... psychedelics may be an apparatus allowing us to see dimensions of reality heretofore unquantified.

Except all video is fake, that is, all videos are artifacts, artificial things.

"We’re not so far from the collapse of reality" -- am I the only one who finds this inane? No video is real.

Critical thinking as applied to the written word applies equally to the image. It's not rocket science.

Amazon's stated reason for acquiring Alexa was to use Alexa's technology to build a recommendation engine. Search was never a priority for Alexa itself. We are acquired for $100 million, so it was take the money and run.

I worked at Alexa, then affiliatated with the Internet Archive, on exactly this, in the late 90s. We built our own server farm to crawl, process and store the data. We had 30TB of storage, holding three "snapshots" of the web, and thought we were pretty hot stuff. That would sit on your desktop today.

Crawling was the easy part. We had two processes of up to 40 threads each bringing the data down. Even this we had to throttle because we would use the bandwidth for the entire office, then based in the Presidio.

Processing the data was the bottleneck. Parsing, extracting and pushing to the database took months sometimes and the system broke down frequently. I was online 24/7 maintaining this system and it put me off working for startups forever.

All of the software, from the crawler to the parsers to the database system, were built in-house-- there was nothing out there to handle data of that scale at the time.

Our biggest concerns at that time were getting the cleanest data possible without duplicate pages, and being able to retrieve that data as fast as possible for real-time analysis. The engineers at Alexa produced some remarkable solutions to these problems.

Alexa's plugin gave us real time information on what people were actually looking at, and combining that with the the crawl data, we could have built PageRank. Alexa could have been Google, but went in another direction. We were acquired by Amazon in 1999.

To do this today would be an entirely different problem. The dynamic nature of the web, single-page apps, the orders of magnitude of scale--only the largest companies could begin from scratch with it.

However, you could build a simple system at home that could probably yield a few billion pages, process those, get users logs from some big routing point, and build a mini-Google.

I'll let Sister Wendy do the talking here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sPATJc7rM

I see a lot of comments by privileged straight males on here. As usual, you just don't get it; you have not spent one second trying to put yourself in another's shoes.

I am a gay man who has been in the internet industry since 1996. From my long experience, about 50% of coders are macho, taciturn, unhelpful frat bros who make anyone who is not a member of their boys club most unwelcome.

My career (and surely the career of the article writer and anyone else who is not a bro) came as a result of the other 50%, talented, generous men and women whose shared their expertise and encouraged me. I certainly did not pull myself up by my own bootstraps; without that assistance I would not be where I am today, which is team lead.

So for those who "abhor" the argument laid out in this article, for once, for just once, SHUT UP, LISTEN to what is being said, and consider how it you might be a carrier of the "racist, sexist and classist" attitudes being called out.

Listening to Padgett's rendering of his Enigma theme on Youtube, it's not especially musical. Author of the article seems duly impressed, but it's very easy to write harmony to any given passage if you know the rules.

I have hired junior web developers, both those right out of school and those without CS degrees. I look for:

- a portfolio website that deploys a range of recent web technologies. This demonstrates initiative, and also the fact that you can set up a web site somehow.

- some freelance work on your resume, even if it's as simple as setting up a WordPress site.

- a code sample, so have something decent ready, again showing an interest in more than basic web development. Deploying a framework other than jQuery is a plus, as long as you show some sufficient hand-coding skills.

- interest in back-end technologies is a plus even of the job doesn't require it

- in the interview, openness, honesty and drive

- and finally the coding test I give you will show if you know what you are talking about

I am glad I had my SF adventure when I did. I lived there from 1996-2001 and paid less than US$900 for a charming Nob Hill bachelor. That same apartment goes for $3k today.

Currently I am in Toronto, paying CAD$1400 for a rent controlled one bedroom downtown that I have been in for over a decade. Current market price for same is CAD$1700, but this includes a flood of new condo units more luxurious than mine.

Toronto is looking good in comparison to US cities. It has all the amenities of SF, Seattle or Boston, though the IT salaries are not as high. Plus, no Republicans.

Exactly. Without adequate sleep and time to engage in purposeless activity (e.g. walking) there can be no insight. But perhaps only creative minds come to understand this, which is why mediocre middle managers insist on long hours.

Yes-- that is exactly what I mean. If I found myself in an organization where management looked appealing I would make the switch. It has never happened.

At 49 I am still coding and still learning. I architected and implemented node.js services this year and have done lots of interesting modern web development. I am well respected within my organization and in fact have been poached from one team for another.

Ageist hiring practices are a reality, but not all companies are so biased. And you could not pay me enough to go into management. I want to make things. Perhaps that is why I am still viable.

The problem is the focus on worldy success, not the pursuit of a dream. Artists, writers and musicians who pursue their passion consistently over the years are no longer concerned with 'making it'; the endeavour becomes the stuff of their life. I am not a famous musician or writer, but practicing music and writing has made me a better coder and a better person and kept me out of a great deal of trouble.

sweet!

This is excellent work. Web Audio has so much potential. Are the drum sounds sampled or synthesized?