Sodastream. I was tilting back five or six cans of diet soda every day. The cost and caffeine were getting to be a problem.
171 karma · joined July 20, 2018
When we describe sensory experiences to one another, we usually do so in comparisons. "It tastes like chicken." "They look like little blue bananas." "It smells like almonds and paint thinner."
Of course there will be a gap in understanding if Mary has never tasted chicken, seen the color blue, or smelled paint thinner.
> ...despite having previously learnt all the physical facts about colour vision...
Well, we _could_ simply include scratch-and-sniff in our physics books...
If Mary never actually had examples of the different colors, then she wouldn't know how to recognize a color when she eventually saw one. But that's because she (and pretty much everyone else) can't synthesize accurate sensory simulations given information like frequencies or wavelengths.
One could imagine a machine that could take the physical description of a color, taste, smell, and stimulate Mary's brain to simulate a sensory experience. No metaphysics necessary.
When you're writing anything non-trivial, you ought to have something new and/or interesting to say, otherwise you're just adding noise to the environment.
I can see this being useful in finding ways to rephrase things, improving the structure or flow of a document. But this seems to be suggesting content rather than form or format. Adding content to your writing because it commonly appears in writing similar to yours seems to go against the idea of new and interesting.
That may be good for politicians, but I can see this being misused to 'bulk-up' a small number of ideas or facts into a full paper. On balance, this could easily do far more harm than good.
I often wonder if the AI in "Rainbows End" becomes the "Power" that gets resurrected in "Fire upon the Deep".
. . .
*SPOILER!* There's just a hint of the hidden villainy and ruthlessness at the end of Rainbow. *SPOILER!*
One common disappointment I have with sci-fi is how often AIs or alien intelligence are so close to human intelligence. In the Star Trek universe, every alien species is essentially humanoid with some added prosthetic and makeup. This is understandable in a weekly TV show with a tight schedule and budget. But I've read lots of books where the aliens or AIs not only act human, they think and reason like humans. What a boring waste!
There was a lot to like about Blindsight, but I particularly appreciated the completely alien life forms and their interpretation of broadcasts coming from Sol.
"A Fire Upon the Deep" and also "A Deepness in the Sky" were both astonishingly great books.
After that, I started going through his catalog. Can't recommend enough for lovers of hard sci-fi and expertly-crafted storytelling.
MS Windows could really use a "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT?" feature. From the first version of Windows with networking, a Windows install had a lifespan of a few years, after which simple things like clicking on the Start menu would take several seconds to respond. You expect this when connecting to an external disk share, but it was woven into the OS so that it happened at weird times.
I didn't know enough about Windows internals at the time to figure out why this was happening. After a few days/weeks/months of irritation, I usually ended up doing a fresh install and re-installing/configuring all of my apps.
Just in the last month or so, my Windows 10 development system will sometimes take several minutes to pop up a File Explorer window. Default File Open/Save dialogs are affected as well. I'm not using any shared drives and I disabled the stupid One Drive thing. At this point, a reboot resolves it, but I sense another reinstall in my future...
As a youtube-couch expert on astrophysics, I hear "universe" redefined as something like "a bubble of matter and spacetime that is 'quarantined' and can never communicate with the rest of the cosmos" whenever multiverse theory is discussed.
Somehow the word "universe" in the phrase "nearby universe" seems redundant (e.g. where ELSE would it be?)
That, more than any other description, has always resonated with me. Any beginner can create a bird's nest of code that is too complex for even the most experienced developers to fully understand.
I've been at this for 40+ years now, and if I'm struggling to write something, it's usually not because I don't know how to implement it. It's because I'm trying to pick an implementation that will be simple to understand, verify, and use.
HA!
I was just testing a VR app that has a Windows component when things started failing in VR. I took off my headset and noticed my test machine going through power-on self test.
"Oh crap!", I thought, "a bug caused the system to reboot".
Nope. Just Microsoft deciding it's time to apply some updates. Doesn't matter that I scheduled for a time that I wouldn't be testing.
I've NEVER been able to successfully gain control of this, despite reading up on it and doing all the recommended things.
I'd look at something he'd done with controls snaking left and right as you scanned down the dialog, and I'd (sigh to myself internally, and) say "OK, go ahead and clean it up and check it in", and he'd look confused and ask "clean what up?"
He was actually UI blind in the same way some people are face blind...
I'd been at this non-stop for weeks, and had been just working and sleeping, poring over and over the code with no clue. As I remember it, one night I was dreaming that the code was slowly scrolling up a screen in front of me, and one line was colored red. I woke up at that point and knew what the problem was. I think I just got dressed and went directly into work rather than try to go back to sleep.
Since then, I've had fresh insights after sleeping on a problem and coming back in the next day, but I've never had another instance of my brain saying "It's right here, you idiot!" to me in a dream.
If/when technology switches over to the micro-mechanical, we'll suddenly all be scrambling to re-introduce a generation to this 1800s-era mechanical design stuff...
This is what I wish I'd had at the time. I'd have understood intuitively what each of the components did. The time-scale is slowed down enough that I could see what was going on. I could build and test in stages and see how each new change affects the outcome. Endless experimentation and possibilities...
This is just terrific!
Sheesh. We're in Glenn Beck territory now.
(since it's an entirely new product, copyright starts over)
So, it sounds like credit card companies' main goal is to not support exploitation of underage and non-consenting women.
Pornhub is removing all of their unverified videos because that's the only way both parties can be satisfied that what remains is consenting & legal-age.
I think this title is misleading.
I guess this is really saying that there are no active probes on the surface of any of the other (inner/rocky) planets.
This strikes me as a very roundabout way of saying this; as though the population of the other planets (besides Earth) included humans or alien robots...
Regardless of the damage, I'd just take the bullet, fix my security, and not pay. Be consistent in this, and keep it up for a while. Long term: no more extortion for anyone.
Well said. This needs to be carved in granite somewhere
They assert that no machine can ever be truly self aware or try to draw a fundamental (quantum) distinction between inanimate and "living" matter, or assert that probabilities don't collapse into a single reality until a HUMAN looks at them.
To paraphrase Charles Babbage, "I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a [notion]."
One trick I've learned is to keep a separate list of "low-barrier" tasks for those times when I just can't get started on something important. I get a big emotional boost from getting things done. Once I've completed one or two of those, I'm sufficiently revved up to start on a top-of-my-priority-list task.
By "low barrier", I mean simple, stand-alone tasks that don't require lots of thinking. A good example might be re-shelving a stack of books or sorting through a small box of hardware. These tend to be very low priority tasks, but it's especially satisfying if they're things that have been on your physical/mental to-do list for a long time.