Thanks DavidVoid for sharing the Feynman links, I did enjoy it. He had such a neat way of thinking about and experimenting with concepts that happen almost invisibly behind the scenes.
Wow I started reading it and it rings true enough that honestly I don't want to think about it too much and I stopped reading. Maybe we are on a spectrum and I and towards that end but not completely without the ability to have fantasies. It reminds me of thinking about either (a) what happens when I die and simply cease to exist or equally terrifying (b) eternity is real and I go on living forever. These are just not fun places for me to go in my thoughts.
I fully share the feeling that they were describing of Kubrick where he couldn't "see" things described verbally. For instance I have the hardest time picturing a word spelled out loud to me.
Thanks for sharing! You thought this one through more thoroughly than I have. And your closing line about it being impractical is unfortunately all too true.
I like the idea of adding +spam@gmail.com, but it would be really easy for this to be invalidated by just stripping this from your email before selling it in a mailing list.
It's nice to see they have an easy to get to Delete My Activity feature but I have to guess that it deletes it only from the perpective of me being able to ever view it again.
For Chrome I like to use the "Bookmark all tabs" option (Ctrl-Shift-D). When I am in the middle of researching a topic but want to shift gears, I save bookmarks to a new subfolder in my "Working Tabs" folder. Then I delete all tabs. That way (1) I know I can restore to this state if I need to, (2) I keep separate trains of thought from getting muddled, and (3) I can keep a relatively Zen workspace.
I work in a corporate environment in business intelligence and this rings true. This year we are tasked with retiring an arbitrary number of reports (mostly old Crystal reports) since they take too much of our time to maintain them. This will mean telling business partners that we are shutting down their reports, which in turn will cause them to create more Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. And in the process there will be the "heat loss" described in the article.
These are great and I need to start using these. For instance the dominantcolor script extracts color schemes from pictures. Something I've tried to do by eye in the past with limited success.
I started using a diffuser at home, typically with tea tree or eucalyptus oil. It helps me relax, maybe via the placebo effect. But I have also become somewhat obsessed with it, to the point where I have a diffuser at home, the office, and even in my car. Had anyone else had this experience?
I agree for the most part with bootsz. One trick I play on myself is to make my own coffee at work using an Aeropress. Aside from it being cheaper than Starbucks and much better tasting than office coffee, it naturally limits me to two cups a day because of the effort involved.
This was a really enjoyable read. The "aimlessness" of SimCity series resonates with me, and while I loved the game, when my arcologies shot off into space I felt a certain empty sadness. Its great to see talented designers addressing this in their games.
This reminds me a lot of Scott Adam's theory about systems over goals. I've used this in various areas of my life and I'm happy with the results so far.
Even though I would probably never go though the effort of it, I am impressed and love the idea of it. One philosophy that I hear a lot of VIM users prescribing to is don't make too many custom changes to the bash file that you can't use someone else's computer. I wonder if you got used to this setup if you would find yourself pounding the floor on someone else's computer. I drove stick for years and still occasionally find myself with phantom clutch syndrome.
Maybe I have been listening to Sam Harris too much, but the whole time I was reading this paper I was thinking about the "AI Control Problem" [0]. When machines increase their knowledge of the "Theory of Mind", then keeping the "AI in the Box" [1] will become increasingly more difficult.
I am a huge fan of Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics and Hadley's implementation of them in ggplot2. Thanks for sharing this; it helps demo the power of the grammar. Since learning GG it has made me think of plotting in an additive fashion instead of before when Excel would do most of it for me and I would often be forced to remove layers I didn't need.
Part of this phenomenon is due to other people's expectation of us. I find it is very difficult to carve out 30 minutes of time where I am not interrupted by someone. If I turn off my phone and IM for that long people start to get worried.
I personally haven't found that. I find quality typically rises to the top, and only an occasional worthy pun will make it up there. But of course my opinion is anecdotal and heavily subject to bias. I just try to be a good citizen here and add to the quality conversation whenever I feel like my experience on a topic makes me able to contribute something of value.
I agree with the sentiment. I am willing to pay more for my beans, but brew my own coffee at home and at working using a good burr grinder and an Aeropress. The lower temperature and higher pressure method makes such a smooth cup without bitterness that you can actually start tasting the coffee. I like the analogy of the camera-- you can buy a great lense, but if your hand shakes then the picture won't come out well.