otisfunkmeyer

Best response in this entire thread imo.

And I have yet to hear from pmarca or anyone else an answer to this puzzle that is even slightly convincing.

Which gives me pause.

...As opposed to all of the other media outlets with their stellar records of truth-telling.

The "publication of record" ship has sailed and we're left with competing agendas and increased need for personal vetting, which many have done on this leak--a fact which is easily searchable.

ad hominem attacks don't change the veracity of the leaked documents.

This is strawman thinking and to use your phrase, "I'm surprised it showed up on HN."

favorite comment here in some time.

yah I agree those were definitely good times ;)

you just blew my mind. im not even kidding.

I believe this article references the Unabomber. If it doesn't, then Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" definitely does.

It's a fascinating line of thought--though I obviously don't support the actions taken by its author.

To clarify a little further, Bill Joy in this essay refers to Kurzweil who refers to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind." I became a technological utopian until reading Naomi Klein's "No Logo" later that year, as well as the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.

This ultimately led me on a sort of existential quest that led to the book "Waking Up in Time" by Peter Russell and then I began to have a much more spiritual orientation towards life and reality and now try to be as practical as possible while working towards a positive technological future.

I was 19 when this came out and this essay single-handedly changed my life and led me to Ray Kurzweil, Minsky, the Unabomber Manifesto, Naomi Klein, and then ultimately to spirituality through Hawking-trained-physicist-turned-cave-dwelling-monk Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time."

The rest of my life quite literally flows from reading this essay over and over when it came out. Genuinely happy to see it here.

then spend your time taking advantage of the billions of available free resources to increase your qualifications.

i was once where you are now. i am no longer there. it took time and a lot of work. it was worth it. you can do it too.

alternate theory. people who have money are desperately looking for things with potential for big returns. if you are one of those things or create one of those things there is more money looking for you than has ever looked for anyone in the history of the world.

this comment is what a lifetime of philosophical thought, traveling, psychedelics, meditation, and experimentation has led me to as well.

"there is literally nothing better to do with your life than try. so just try."

If it's a paid Linux though, then you can get a team that:

-Appreciates design.

-Makes choices.

-Supports the most powerful and popular hardware.

-Yes, focused first and foremost on tinkerers and geeks, who are the main people losing out in the current environment. It's all a group that's increasing in size and will likely continue to for the foreseeable future.

How's that plan sound?

I actually think that this is likely to happen over the next 2-3 years. Every single one of these companies is now going in the wrong direction in a specific way--which opens up a real desire for a real alternative.

We all used to love Mac, we all see that Apple has lost its way and seems to be heading more and more confidently in the wrong direction, and that may be just the push the community needs to actually build something.

And what an amazing achievement it would be--an actually open alternative that runs on lots of (powerful) hardware with the beauty of Mac OS (before Lion lol).

I really think it's going to happen because I think a very large percentage of the community now realizes that there is no existing private company heading in the right direction. So we now have to take the steering of the ship into our own hands.

Abracadabra.

the only app that has a worse UX than vine is... wait for it... periscope!

Half the time periscope videos won't even load for me over the web. No matter how long I wait.

Twitter Co.'s infrastructure seems to have only ever gotten marginally better since the fail whale days!

Since no one else had chimed in, I will report that yes I too am flabbergasted befuddled stupefied and completely amazed at the magical time we live in, which as you said gets better on a seemingly weekly basis at this point.

And VR hasn't even gone mainstream yet. What a wild ride we're on indeed

and right when we were finally awake...

many people have a 15-year old view of Los Angeles, and downtown in particular.

LA is one of the (imo the) great cities of the future and will be the biggest benefactor of the transition to self-driving cars and multi-modal transport, when it's collection-of-villages-like-nature will flourish.

The city will be like living in many cities all at the same time that you can easily shuttle between (Long Beach, Pasadena, Venice, Santa Monica, Malibu, Downtown, Burbank, Noho, Manhattan Beach, Topanga, mid-Wilshire, Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Thaitown, Hollywood, etc.) The list goes on and on.

I know of no other place where each "neighborhood" feels as though it is its own city. Right now, due to the nature of transportation, this has MAJOR downsides. In the future, these will be massively mitigated and LA will become perhaps the most desirable place in the world to live.

To add one more example, LA has the best weather of any of the world's major cities. As the global population becomes increasingly mobile, weather will play a larger and larger factor of where people choose to settle.

On top of this, there is major investment in making sure LA sustains its role as the world entertainment capital as entertainment shifts to VR and is increasingly tech-based.

LA is also at the very forefront of the global shift toward increasingly healthy living. It's a city that may as well run on green juice. While at the moment this is trendy and cliche, soon it will be just how more and more people around the world eat. And much of this is invented and perfected in LA and SoCal in general.

LA is amazing. QED.

I don't find it misleading, just to offer an alternate point of view.

WOOOOOOOOW! that's AWESOME

i use ios play books! your work is not in vain!

if im not mistaken, amazon glacier is $10 per TB per month at 0.01 per GB per month stated price. please correct me if something has changed!

Unless you are talking about a different Paper, Paper was a free app with an in-app purchase of tools (different brushes) available.

I know this because I downloaded it because it was free and then bought the tools. I wouldn't have tried it if they wanted the (I think) $4.99 up-front.

Not to derail this comment section too much but your comment made me realize how much I too find Amazon's search to be terrible terrible.

It's especially strange considering that Bezos has such an almost pathological (not necessarily in the bad sense) focus on the customer.

One would think Amazon would have some of the best, most laser-focused search of any site on the Internet, but I can't even reliably use 4-stars-and-up as a search filter, or even "Prime only." No matter what I do, I get shown things outside of the filter I set up. It's downright bizarre.

Again, my apologies for the little thread hijacking. I guess one could at least argue it's "search-related" lol....

I've had the worst service with Homejoy of any startup/tech-related company in the history of my life, and lord knows as an "early adopter" I tend to try them all.

I super, duper, ooper, do NOT recommend Homejoy. It is WELL worth your time--at least at this point--to find a cleaning person on Craigslist or something like that and have a short talk with them to determine competence.

Homejoy is sending out anyone with two legs to "clean" your place.

Wow after reading that comment I was expecting something so.... Bad. Instead, I saw something so.... Good. To me. I'm surprised to hear someone disliked it so much actually. C'est la vie.

FWIW Vipassana is one of the best experiences I have had and I'd highly recommend it.

My main question is: why is there an insanity checklist?

In the same way that many people experience a "white light" during near-death experiences, why do so many people:

-think they're jesus

-think aliens communicate through radio stations

-think everyone around them are "agents"

It's a very SPECIFIC checklist. To me at this point, this is the most interesting part of this phenomenon.

My reply to another poster about the SPECIFICITY and UNIVERSALITY of these experiences sums up my interest.

If I am crazy now, I am quite happy about it. Quite relaxed, if you will.

I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of insanity. There are so many strangely fascinating (fractal-like?) pathways that don't quite add up. For instance, a Buddhist hearing a Christian God. It's enough to make one think there's something to it all :)

My favorite lecturer on said ideas, Terence McKenna, quoted Jacque Vallée, who said that these experiences are almost always non-evangelizable.

It's as though they are almost custom made for the person having the experience. Explaining them at face value to another person either gets a "you had to be there" or just sounds like the rantings of a crazy person.

Thank you for sharing this. I had my own version of a similar thing and the strangest part about it, which I think you may agree with, was that as someone who considered themselves smart, I could tell that many of my thoughts were totally crazy, BUT THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN SOME OF THEM WOULD TOTALLY ADD UP AND COME TO PASS.

I totally agree with you also about how it's "hard to even think about this now without getting drawn into it."

A voice in my head early on told me to immediately stop taking any/all substances (I quit all drugs, alcohol, cigarettes cold turkey due to this and have been completely sober because of it since 2008) and so I was able to avoid being hospitalized or scaring other people, but INTERNALLY, I was just as crazy as you were.

I am REALLY curious as to what this is because it seems like a very "real" realm that one can just pop into somehow--for us, probably due to drugs or what not--but "real" nevertheless.

For instance, these days I have so many positive coincidences or "synchronicities" as I/Jung/others like to call them. And these feel no "less real" or "less crazy" than the nightmare I experienced at that point.

I've only met 1 or 2 other people who were not crazy people who could relate at all to this experience of mine so if you'd ever like to chat, I'm easily findable thru teh interwebs.

To anyone else reading this who thinks it all sounds very crazy, that's exactly what I would have thought before it happened to me! Now, I wouldn't say it's any less crazy, but it's definitely less write-off-able.