sctb

Explicitly yes:

> I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they embody new ideas.

I remember encountering this file in Red Hat Linux circa 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linus-linux.ogg. It sounds much clearer nowadays, but still to my ear it's roughly halfway between lih-nucks and lee-noox.

My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind.

Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist all of the usual objective approaches of description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.

> It's like Cypher in the Matrix writing about the relative benefits of changing his dinner from steak to something cheaper.

Now how can we take the rest of this comment seriously with a sentence like this?

I'll give you my understanding, which isn't exactly Christian or Buddhist or whatever—it's just how it seems to me, and YMMV.

The word "soul" describes the fundamental sense of self experienced by a human person. We know this self isn't the same as our mind, our body, our possessions, or our memories, because those things change but the sense of self seemingly doesn't. It's just "me" or "I".

Because this sense of self doesn't change, it seems timeless, or eternal. And many experience some amount of tension because this eternal sense of self seems to get mixed up with all of the temporary things in the world, especially our bodies and minds. With that admixture comes a fear of losing the self (i.e. death), as everything temporary is eventually lost.

So what? The infinite is infinite, the finite is finite. IMO, any direct experience actually includes both. But anyway I figure it's wise to keep them straight and not mix them up.

My dictionary says this about "protocol":

> [In computing:] a set of rules governing the exchange or transmission of data between devices.

In the article, pg says this:

> The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients.

It seems obvious to me what pg is getting at, even though the other protocols he mentioned are all formal while Twitter's is not.

It seems to me as though one can talk about the good old days, talk about progress, talk about things getting better, worse, or anything in-between. There are countless examples to draw from and endless lines of reasoning. Sometimes it's an interesting conversation but often it's not—you get the same rehashing of historical events and what-about-this. But basically what I see is a never-ending ping-pong game of "it's getting better" and "actually it's getting worse" (and vice-versa).

I'm more interested in the next conversation, one which moves on from this banal stalemate. What if nothing is happening at all? What if the questions we're asking about memory, the past, and progress rest on faulty assumptions?

May you never have to write one again, but if you do, it might be helpful to think of the cover letter as a reflective writing exercise. You might be able to gauge your level of interest in a particular role by how easy it is to write about, for example. Or it could just be some practice at communicating your strengths and abilities (this would definitely apply to me).

IMO it's too disheartening to put effort into such personal writing without the awareness of some kind of direct value or benefit, since chances are it's going straight into the void.

Recently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42675538

Cymbals aren't like speakers, microphones, or rooms, whose inputs are audio and can therefore be modelled with IR via an impulse input. (Well, you can model a cymbal with IR and use it as a reverberator, like a speaker.)

AFAIK, what you're talking about would probably fall into the category of physical modelling, and there's quite a bit of development happening there currently.

On the main page for this year there are all kinds of media available, audio, video, slides, transcripts, Q&A: https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/.

> Since C doesn't support continuations, it is not possible to have continuations and at the same time generate "natural" C code.

Since CHICKEN actually does this, I'll add the proviso of "without a GC or costly runtime".

"Does a [robot] dog have Buddha nature?"

I could be wrong, but I associate Japanese animism much more strongly with Shinto than with Zen Buddhism.

From the linked interview at https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-grab...:

> And so, mid-2021, they interviewed me along with some other folks and then chose me to lead Bluesky based on this vision that I pitched for how we were going to build Bluesky, which is essentially how we’ve built it. And so that’s how I got involved.

I'm not sure how this article relates to the dark forest hypothesis, or really anything else for that matter—I can't see the thread. Can anyone summarize?

For more information, there's a recent talk on Project Lilliput by Roman Kennke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHJ1moNLwao.

> "[...] Reading him simply makes one realize that stream of consciousness springs not from consciousness but from a word which alters or redirects one’s consciousness."

This has a slight ring of Derrida and/but I find it a very interesting point. The "stream of consciousness" really does seem like a stream of the words themselves, each one in reflection of the previous and anticipation of the next. The flowing is not just in the writer's mind but the reader's as well.

No problem, said von Neumann. https://www.scottaaronson.com/qclec/27.pdf

No, it's fine because the 'next' struct member is just a pointer which has a known representation.

That's also dang.

> It feels like the concept of qualia is a last-ditch attempt by humans to make themselves feel special.

I don't think so, I think fundamentally it's just a concept used to express a more generalized form of perception (i.e. not divided into discrete senses, either internal or external). I'm happy to leave it at that, but YMMV.

Not sarcasm: I'm sure it would be frustrating to see so much scientific and commercial effort going into treating TIID pharmacologically when you believe the solution is trivial. But you could also consider all of these developments as evidence that the prescription of "just eat healthy" isn't broadly useful.

Discussed a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799068

I like dynamic languages too. But I don't like the idea of "optimization", and I would be super interested in a dynamic language that didn't attempt to divorce performance from correctness. The worst part about jumping through insane hoops to enchant the optimizer is that it can all go wrong with the tiniest change--a flag here, a different usage pattern there, a new version, etc., and suddenly your program doesn't do what you need it to, as though an operation taking 1000x longer is just a matter of degree.

> This makes all logical thought impossible, and means there cannot be correct or incorrect thinking.

No, this is conflating paradigms. If this were true, you would expect the same Buddhist texts not to mention "right" and "wrong", and boy do they ever.

Here's an interesting experiment you can do around retrospective perception and timing: clap your hands once, listening for the sound of the clap. Notice what it's like to remember the sound of the clap for a minute or so. Now, clap your hands twice, again listening closely and noticing what it's like to remember the sound for a little while. In the second case, is it possible for you to remember the sound of the first clap only, without an echo of the second?

Do you have a sense of how different mTOR-related interventions stack up? As in, metformin vs rapamycin vs intermittent fasting?

MacPorts is a noteworthy project that seems to use Tcl in its sweet spot.

They're minimal; retinol is usually mixed with a carrier oil or cream in various concentrations and applied topically. I would be surprised if it has an impact on the superficial musculoaponeurotic system (SMAS) referred to in the article, however.