- I don't really disagree with anything you've said, but I still feel a warm spot in my heart from projects like this. I still have (and use!) my HP48SX from my high school days, and it still works like it always has. There is something to be said for a device's limitations, and I mean that honestly. It's very powerful for what it is, but its processing limitations keeps me from overextending, which is something very easy to do with the pocket supercomputers we've all gotten used to carrying around over the previous decade. (And its keys are simply a delight to press compared to even the best glass touchscreen.)
- Ripley being the survivor was a rug pull on the audience's expectations. Tom Skerritt (Dallas) was a well-known actor at the time, and would have been assumed to have been the default lead.
- When I turned 50 I started capping my max weights because I was more worried about long-term joint and ligament health than ultimate strength. I no longer lift above two plates (225lbs) for anything, even though that is well below my deadlift, squat, etc.
It's been a couple years, now, and honestly I wish I'd made the change sooner. I haven't lost any functional strength, and my recovery is a lot smoother. Haven't had any injury since, either.
- Seems relevant to mention https://dumbcuneiform.com/ here. I haven't ordered from them, but was always amused by the idea.
- Here in California, at least, yes. The local ATMs give 100s and 50s, and only twenties if you are specifically drawing 20 or 40 bucks.
- Not Google related, but cognition and older relative relevant: The amount of predatory scamware targeted towards older adults on the app stores is infuriating. I have a family friend who is now in the early-mid stages of Alzheimer's, but is still able to live at home and enjoy her life. She gets confused and stressed out by the fake 'alert! all your photos will be deleted!!' ads that pop up when she does her adult coloring books or jigsaw puzzles on her ipad. Apple's recommended apps in this category are evil in this regard, every single one. I've had to disable $80/week 'security' subscriptions from her account more than once. It is shameful that this is allowed.
- As someone who tried those kickstarter specials... They just aren't there unless you use a laser-based system, which are many thousands of dollars. You'll get a point cloud that is close-ish for whatever part you're scanning, but unless it's strictly decorative, you're going to find pretty quickly that it's faster to just re-create the thing from scratch if you need any kind of dimensional accuracy. The scans are somewhat useful as on-machine references, but that's it.
Also, scanning is a lot more work than you'd naively think. Reflections are the enemy, the matte spray used for scan prep is messy and expensive. It was fun to play around with, and I learned a lot, but my current advice is don't bother, you'll just be disappointed.
- Years ago I lived in an apartment where the vent hood above the range was an overpowered commercial unit instead of the usual home stuff. It genuinely surprised me how much of a difference it made compared to 'normal' vent hoods. Higher extraction volumes, even without side walls, makes a big difference.
- Going from a 1200 to a 9600 blew my mind- text faster than I could ever hope to read! The future had arrived.
- There are definitely a few engine designs out there that won the design lottery in terms of longevity. I know a guy that has close to half a million miles on a Jeep Cherokee with the old AMC 4-liter straight six, and the only engine work done other than plugs and wires is replacing the water pump at 250k. I've got ~186k on my Jeep with the same engine, and it doesn't even burn any oil yet.
- Interesting. I never knew there was a name for this phenomena. It happened to me every now and then as a kid, too, usually when I was sick and in bed. In my case, it made me feel vertigo, like size scales were shifting around so fast I'd lose my balance and fall over, stuff like that, but I don't remember any particular fear reaction per se, other than feeling kind of gross when it happened. I found that dim light (like a nightlight in a child's bedroom, with long shadows) was the worst trigger, and either bright light or complete darkness helped avoid it.
- For now, the answer is just buy more batteries and use a DJI drone. There is nothing else that comes anywhere close in terms of bang for your buck.
- I had to retake a multi-hour proctored test (and only got to do so after a ridiculous amount of back and forth with the school) because my cat jumped up on my computer table while I was taking it, and I looked over at her and gave her a few pets before looking back at the screen. Not joking in the least. It was maddening.
- I had no idea it was so common! Fascinating article, thanks for posting it.
- Stephen Baxter wrote a short story about such. It sticks with you.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080725045740/http://www.solari...
- This essay is (painfully) apt, and it reminds me of where I was when I finally switched, to my great relief, from being a Maximizer to a Satisficer*. It was all just Too Much, and I was feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities.
And my drive to Solve All The Problems was not making me happy. At all. It was just a way to exert control over a difficult life, and by being terminally distracted by the easily-solvables, I was avoiding the big problems I genuinely needed to confront.
- I still have vivid memories of getting the 'reduced cost' meal ticket for school lunch. They made all of us with the reduced tickets stand in line and wait for the other kids to get their food first, where all the other kids had to walk past and stare at us, and once everyone else was served, they'd put the food away that was given to the other kids, then hand out shitty plastic-wrapped sandwiches that were half the size of the barely-adequate meals the 'full' sized lunches got.
It was all on purpose, too, to make us ashamed for not paying the full amount.
The adults that chose this path were fucking evil ghouls, the lot of them. Of all the things I want my tax money to go to, ensuring that no one (and especially growing children) need to feel hunger pangs while trying to learn is close to top of the list.
- That vacuum tubes(!) were part of that package, and were able to be that robust, still floors me every time I think about it.
- Back when I was taking CogSci classes in the 90's, The Bicameral Mind was introduced as a 'this is almost certainly completely wrong, but it makes a great starting point for a lot of great discussion', and it certainly bore out that way; our discussion groups using selections from the book as a starting point were some of the better ones. I agree with you; even now I think it's an interesting read.
- If I said "gosh, I can't believe you can actually think at a human speed, having to use words for everything! It's like having to speak out loud when you're reading, so slow! Have you been diagnosed by a professional on how to deal with this obvious handicap?" it would be pretty insulting, yes? Even if I said I wasn't trying to put someone down, because the implicit assumptions baked in to the very statements themselves.
All I can say is, as someone who also does not have an internal monologue, and can easily and happily go days without thinking in words (which is very, very different than not thinking at all), please just accept as a given that people like me exist, we're fine, do not feel like we have any deficits, and it's exceedingly frustrating to come across comments like yours whenever the subject comes up, because of the raw arrogance of it all. I can completely and honestly believe that you have a rich, engaging internal life, even if the quantity of words involved would drive me mad, because we're different people with different thinking styles. All I ask is for the same respect in return. If we can start there, then we can have a real conversation, which could be fun. I know that when I first learned that 'internal monologue' wasn't just a literary, poetically-descriptive term, but that people actually heard voices/words in their heads while thinking, it utterly floored me. That I'd made it to college without knowing this really threw me for a loop, and made me think about what other seemingly-core differences in cognition are out there. It really is a fascinating subject to think about.
- Not the person you're asking, but as someone who also doesn't have an inner monologue, no, I literally never think either of those two things you gave as an example. I feel the feelings they describe, but they never bubble up to my thoughts in word form.
- I majored in CogSci at UCSD in the 90's. I've been interested and active in the machine learning world for decades. The LLM boom took me completely and utterly by surprise, continues to do so, and frankly I am most mystified by the folks who downplay it. These giant matrixes are already so far beyond what we thought was (relatively) easily achievable that even if progress stopped tomorrow, we'd have years of work to put in to understand how we got here. Doesn't mean we've hit AGI, but what we already have is truly remarkable.
- I assume they're getting these massive windows via RAG trickery, vectorization, and other tricks behind the curtain, became I've noticed the same as you- things start dipping in quality pretty quickly.
Does anyone know if I am correct in my assumption?
- Fuck. That is a bleak assessment.
- I ask people to unplug their Ethernet cable and tell me the colors they see on the wires all the time.
I don't care, of course. But they'll happily do that, where if I ask them to verify if the cable is properly plugged in, 99% of them will just say yes without so much as glancing in the cables' direction.
- Let him be bored, and provide the tools so that he learns how to make his own fun.
- My suburban neighborhood here in the bay area is mostly cul-de-sacs, and on the 4th of July about half of them close off the entrance to non-residents/family, and have a collective BBQ in the middle of the circle. Several of our neighbors are musicians, so we get live music from people we know, and we all know how to cook up good stuff for the party. It's genuinely a lot of fun, and I look forward to it every year.
- FWIW, this has been my experience as well. When I lived in poor neighborhoods, yeah, we had more property crime. We also had a tremendous sense of community; I knew everyone, they knew me, food & favors were traded happily. The block parties we had during the summer were tremendous amounts of fun.
Meanwhile, the more wealthy neighborhoods are full of busybodies sniffing around for the slightest HOA infraction, and high-anxiety individuals reflecting and amplifying each other's tensions. Each home is a fortress unto itself. I feel pretty lucky to be in the middle, where we don't have as much crime as the poorer areas, but we still know one another, and still trade food on the holidays.
- Yep! I'm glad to hear that someone else had the same misaligned initial expectations. Keeping it vague to avoid spoilers, but the fact that I'm still unsure if the protagonist's action at the very end of the story was an example of agency or not has been a lot of fun to think about.
Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty.
That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.