vijucat

I feel nauseated when I use in-ear earphones that reach deep inside. This entire article is not relevant to me. The earphones that I can bear are these : https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Y4S55RC/. The design reaches inside a little bit, but not too much, and they sound quite decent. I suppose the AirPods (but not the Pro) are similar in design.

I'm reminded of the robot that goes wrong in Robocop. Except, with Reinforcement Learning, we'll have a robot that executes hundreds flawlessly until stopped. This is the kind of advancement that should be regulated, IMHO.

> Let’s talk about what machine learning is...it analyzes training data to uncover correlations be­tween different phenomena.

The author seems to have missed or excluded reinforcement learning and planning algorithms in this definition.

My criticism of AI criticism in general is that no one admits that at the root of it, we do not understand thinking (or "consciousness"). We are merely the "recipient" or enjoyer of the process, which is opaque. Just as AlphaGo, even if it just a facsimile of a Go player, could beat a human at Go, it is probable that an AI could produce a passable facsimile of thinking at one point. Its mechanisms would be as opaque as human thinking (, even to itself), but the results would be undeniable. AGI is a possibility.

Hilarious and heart-warming (minus the drinking daily on the job part, of course)!

Yes, I quite liked this about New York city, too. "Wow, look at that thing, it's about to fall". Anyone can start talking to you. I was on a business trip and having a coffee near Times Square when an American tourist just commented about a crane on a tall building nearby and then proceeded to tell me all about his life experiences, about the heat in Arizona, his war experiences, etc; It was very refreshing and "humane", for lack of a better word. It happens all the time in India, too, where I was born, but somehow, I did not expect folks in the US to be chatty. I guess I presumed they are more worried about privacy and stranger danger!

Here's an analogy: imagine a neural network having to train it's neurons but without them having any connections to each other! Is such a thing even possible? Interconnections are what help us tune to (maybe even perceive) reality!

> In what way?

I do not face the same eye fatigue after hours of sitting in front of a VA panel compared to sitting in front of an IPS one.

Honest question: how is any firm meant to make any money in this worldview? If everything has to be Open Source, then maintenance contracts (which are completely optional) will be the only way to earn and will decimate revenues. Creating a beautiful and functional piece of software is hard work. We should be thankful that firms open source even parts of their product.

Can you please recommend a VA panel that is good for text sharpness, too? My eyes don't react well to IPS, for some reason: I used to have a BenQ GW2760HS (1080p, VA panel) and then upgraded to a Dell UP3017 (2K, IPS) and find it harsher on my eyes, even if I enjoy the text sharpness!

Wow, that was great. Very engaging UX / text.

By the way, I hated the Spotify ads so much I paid up for YouTube Music + Premium. Even though the Spotify Windows app is VERY usable compared to https://music.youtube.com. Good Lord, I hated those ads. I know the conspiracy theory that they were designed to be irritating so that you pay up, but that only works in a world without much choice; ;now you have YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Deezer. Spotify, I'll readily pay up and switch if you improve those awful ads.

Lovely anecdote. Thanks for sharing!

Yes, it goes against the cult of Effort, "10000 hours of deliberate practice" and all that. But I believe you're 100% right: those at the absolute right end of the distribution are often gifted. They work hard, too, but that is akin to sharpening the knife. It is not the knife.

I'm reminded of a documentary on Tiger Woods on one of the Discovery channels where the voice over is going, "How did Tiger Woods become such a genius? Was it his family's Buddhist traditions?", and it went on to list a bunch of possible factors, all the while showing a clip of Tiger Woods playing golf with absolute perfection AT THE AGE OF FOUR! I had to laugh at the mental effort being expended to avoid the horrific conclusion that he was born with it.

I briefly looked at Plastic SCM and really liked it (https://www.plasticscm.com/). It's design is much more sensible from the get go, and it has a great UX + UI. If things being Open Source is so important, then I dream about a world where gitlab acquired Plastic SCM and makes it open source!

I hate git with a passion and am very happy with svn. Even my business users can learn and use TortoiseSVN in one session.

Also, my desktop PC is my "cloud" computer. I don't waste time trying to sync code, OneNote, or browser tabs between my laptop and PC. I just Remote Desktop into my PC using my laptop (on the rare occasion I try to work using a laptop) and just work on the single source of truth. Also simplifies backups. I understand that your mileage may vary based on the stability of your Internet bandwidth and power outage situation. Here in Hong Kong, the electrical and internet cabling is below the ground, and there are no power outages even in a T10 typhoon when literal tree branches can be flying around!

My first day in Japan, I switched on the TV and was immediately thrust into a program where different designs of nail cutters were being analyzed. The angle of the cutting blades, etc; The cutting of the nail was inspected in slow motion video capture, and an Excel sheet of how far the nail flies, how neat the cut was, etc; was filled and a Winner was arrived at. I've never seen anything like it and I watched all 30 minutes of that program! It was a fascinating demonstration of what I believe is called "kaizen". I really like the attention given to everyday objects in Japanese design.

Suggestion: make a theme park from grounded / unused planes. A Disney World, but flight-themed, and with REAL planes (and real ex-pilots). I can tell you that a ton of boys would be excited as hell to learn how to take off and land from a real pilot. In stormy weather! I'd definitely give it a visit :-)

Interviews, and in fact, most first meetings between people, are often shibboleths: a perfunctory test of similitude to prevent outsiders from getting in and causing unnecessary angst by thinking differently. (In Biblical times, apparently, the word "shibboleth" could not be pronounced by The Other Tribe, who pronounced it "sibboleth", and were denied entry or worse, killed by the guards).

If you're OK with this, then interviews can be an enjoyable game with rather predictable behaviours (and even predictable questions, probably taken from "Cracking the Coding Interview" or equivalent online course). You just have to learn to jump through the hoops. Just look at leetcode or google, "how to pass tech interviews" and pay up for a course on it. Just remember to not roll your eyes during the interview. (The real issue arises if you start hating this process or the thinking behind this in the industry).

You could get lucky and find employers / interviewers who assess general intelligence, or better, find employment through your network of friends, ex-colleagues, and mentors, which would bypass this process.

All the best!

Talking to folks. And https://reddit.com/r/ContagiousLaughter.

"C:/Program Files/AutoHotkey/Compiler/Ahk2Exe.exe" /in Cleaner.ahk /out Cleaner.exe /icon Cleaner.ico

That's it :-)

FYI, AutoHotKey on Windows is a much better (my opinion) version of Karabiner, with it's own programming language. It's quite amazing what you can accomplish with AHK: it goes well beyond key mapping to process control, building quick utilities or quick mini GUI applications, compiling those into executables that you can share, etc;

See https://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel/downloads/ or https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/scripts/ for a larger collection.

For example, I would have never thought of AltEdge ("Sends Alt-Tab when the mouse is on the left edge of the screen and keeps cycling through the windows") or Barnacle ("A programmable toolbar that fits inside any window") or MonitOff ("Turns off the monitor at user defined idle times during the day") but it took 10 seconds to download the executable and try out one of these (AltEdge).

https://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel/download/altedge/

For me, Windows' programmability, especially AutoHotKey, has been a major reason to find Mac OS rather unattractive. Over the years, AutoHotKey has solved several minor-but-daily annoyances for me.

Woah, it's just 108k on Cygwin. Amazing.

The "Who am I?" enquiry as described in "Self Inquiry Practice" [1] (just the first few minutes of the audio will suffice) and some combination of listening to the various Nisargadatta Maharaj audios on YouTube ([2], [3], for example) helped me.

It should be easy and effortless once you get the knack of it; you should be able to suspend all thought and enter silence on-demand. "Observe your breath", etc; are things that naturally occur AFTER one becomes silent (the intensity of the silence causes you to be attentive to each little movement in the here and now with new eyes). It seems to me that common meditation practice has this in the reverse order and unfortunately, I am not sure that mere imitation is going to help. Instead, abandon all postures and practices except one: the question "Who am I?". Please let me know if you have any further questions.

1. Self Inquiry Practice - Ramana Maharshi - Audiobook - Spoken by lomakayu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymvj01q44o0

2. I AM THAT excerpts pages 236 to 250: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VxOFa0GE9Y

3. I am only the Self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzd0txiRN2E

> Do thought-free states feel better than good feeling thoughts?

Yes, significantly better. Firstly, the state of just being is much lighter, not dependent on the memory and understanding of the world it takes to be cognitively happy; it is child-like. Secondly, this silent state is aware that it is self-contained, free from external circumstances, and revels in it; it is not wrong to say it is full of energy and power from self-sufficiency. Thirdly, there is awareness that there is no effort involved in being silent and happy, that no work needs to be done, and that brings a 2nd-order joy, too.

I'm new to this state, though; I just entered into silence for the first time around 6 months ago. It immediately makes me a bit excited when all thought subsides and the silence descends onto me, and that just results in the thoughts coming back :-)

An interesting resource that I found on the topic of breathing is https://www.normalbreathing.com/

Dr Artour Rakhimov claims that breath starvation (breathing slowly and less) is key to higher oxygen absorption; and definitely not deep breathing! "Take a deep breath" makes sense if you have been hyper-ventilating, but not ALL the time.

I found his site via his "How to unblock a blocked nose in 1 minute" video, a technique which works even when both nostrils are clogged:

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

I used it way back (5+ years ago), and it was too cumbersome to train the recognition engine to recognize my writing properly...Maybe it has improved since then? Maybe the iPad ecosystem does this better Not sure, to be honest.

The writing experience was not ideal, either. I'd scroll the page by mistake, etc;

Wonderful reply. Thanks!

My theory about handwritten note-taking is that the bandwidth difference between thinking (fast) and writing (slow) is somehow extremely beneficial to the process of generating creative and evocative output. There have been so many journaling sessions which I started with the absolute conviction that I had nothing new to say, and after 4 pages of extremely creative and detailed ideas, surprising even to me, I had no choice but to exclaim, "Now where did that even come from?!". Maybe the hypnotic act of twirling the pen on paper slowly puts the mind into that sub-conscious creative state similar to what happens when one is about to fall asleep? It is honestly magical. I now use OneNote every day (because I can search through a large volume of notes easily), and I quite miss the dramatic revelations of pen on paper journaling. My notes were about programming and trading. For those who write fiction, I bet slow, old, typewriters are similarly more beneficial than the latest ergonomic keyboard and Word 365!

FYI:

> How Widespread is This?

> It seems this is very widespread. Just a quick internet search turns up tons of people having the same issue. Sadly, most people think it is specific to them, that they've done something wrong, or they're waiting for a firmware update to see if that fixes it.

See https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/airpods-pro-rattlegate....

> Suboptimal...No. Just no. The best developers I've known wrote code with tiny laptops with poor 1366x768 displays. They didn't think it was an impediment.

I've realized that a stable environment does wonders for productivity. What you got used to (stable) is path-dependent and personality-specific. But it doesn't matter. What matters is to train yourself to sit down and work. If you're opening that laptop lid and thinking about visiting Hacker News first, shut it down, get up, walk away from the desk and then retry. At this point, I feel like doing a "productivity, productivity" chant / rant a la Steve Ballmer's "developers, developers" chant:

original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRm0NDo1CiY

Aside: Zoom stock has risen 252% during this time ($67 on Dec 18th 2019 to $236 on Jun 18th 2020).

Yeah, art was the wrong choice, but you get what I mean.