daoboy

I'm not usually invested in celebrity deaths, but this one is heartbreaking. TNG was a formative show in my life.

He was a wonderful actor and by all accounts a wonderful person.

I've got whiplash from the speed at which we've jumped from overpopulation doomsday to demographic degrowth doomsday.

It seems likely we lend too much credence to experts ability to model complex systems over a long period of time.

For those well suited through intelligence and demeanor to pursue a career in mathematics, what problems do these people reorient towards after this?

I just finished this and had the same thoughts. As an anime fan since Akira and Ninja Scroll days, it was easy for that entire book to play out in my head as an anime. I had no idea so many of the tropes could be traced back to that book.

Similar recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767937

This is all well outside my area of expertise, but my impression is that Michael Levin's work with bioelectricity is on the cusp of #6 Somatic limb regeneration.

SMEs please correct the record if I'm mistaken.

The domain was purchased and redesigned. It still exists but lost something ineffable in the process.

So glad to see this preserved.

It was sad to discover zombocom finally died an undignified death earlier this year.

We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too.

I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.

I'm on my last Samsung for this reason. Just way too much bloatware, need to agree to a new privacy policy once a week, and every time it updates I find a few new apps on my phone I didn't want.

Gonna hold out for the Motorola/Graphene phone though. One of the models is supposed to be a flagship foldable.

This is one of the few places I ever engage on the internet, but I think it may be time for HN to be read-only, too.

This didn't seem especially controversial of a comment, and even here there's no end of the rotten attitudes for no good reason

Although the author turned out to be a fairly despicable person, Prime Obsession is an absolutely wonderful book on this subject.

My earliest introduction to locusts was as a biblical plague. These Sunday school lessons did not include pictures. I always imagined some twisted diminutive demonic swarm of insects, and was disappointed to finally discover they were just grasshoppers.

That homebrew page is pure gold. Thank you for the suggestion!

That's very similar to the setup I'm working on, including the stand. Thanks for sharing!

One of the appealing features on the Note Max was the screen size (13.3"). How do you find working on such a small screen?

I'm desperately awaiting the perfect eink device for this.

I've got a great writing setup on Obsidian that really works for me, a royal kludge mechanical keyboard...just waiting on the next gen of eink

The Boox One Note Max was sooo close, but they almost immediately discontinued the product and probably won't be supporting it long.

Suggestions are welcome

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47834195

I understood that the move to non-replaceable batteries was at least partially driven by water resistance

*Edit. Not sure why people are downvoting. I didn't make a positive declaration. HN didn't used to be this way for completely milquetoast comments.

There are a handful of anecdotes like this one that make me very hopeful for the future. In spite of everything, humanity is still achieving wonders:

The device, implanted in July 2023, records from the brain region that controls muscles involved in talking and translates these signals into instructions for a voice synthesizer. Within 30 minutes of it being switched on, Harrell could communicate again. “I was absolutely overwhelmed with the thought of how this would impact my life and allow me to talk to my family and friends and better interact with my daughter,” he says. “It just was so overwhelming that I began to cry.”

Agreed, I found this essay engaging and emotional. While I can see why the unusual style might not be someone's cup of tea, I don't agree at all with the criticism that this is bad writing. It had a Haruki Murakami ethereal feel that I am quite fond of.

Regarding other comments in this thread, the moral panic over AI writing has mostly passed me by. While I certainly have a philosophical preference for things written by an actual human, I don't care to invest the bandwidth in analyzing every single thing I read for hints of llm patterns. If I like it, I'll keep reading. If not, I won't. Sometimes discontinuing a piece of writing also aligns with obvious AI use, but that is generally a secondary issue.

Physical books are irreplaceable to me. I love the feel, the smell, and having a house full of them. Just went to a library sale this morning and got even more.

I also really need a break from screens, and reading a book is a great excuse to not be on my phone or watching tv.

It sounds like there wasn't really a counter narrative for the models to learn from. This feature of how llms accumulate information is already being gamed by seeding the internet with preferred narratives.

I'm not sure how many Medium articles, blog posts and reddit threads I need to put out before grok starts telling everyone my widget is the best one ever made, but it's a lot cheaper than advertising.

The majority of my encounters with West Coast Buddhism have been... off-putting.

Particularly in the SF tech scene, there is an unfortunate 'competitive enlightenment' vibe amongst many of those who profess to follow Buddhist teachings. "Oh, you've only attained the second jhāna? I got through all four on my first try."

I am certain there are plenty of genuine and sincere practitioners out there, but my small sample has not included any.

Thank you for what you're doing, this is an important fight.

The story is tragically illustrative of the maxim that you can oppose terrible legislation a hundred times but they only have to pass it once.

Adjacent but not directly to the point of the article, does anyone remember their dreams or have success with lucid dreaming?

After about a year of trying I can remember at least some dreams most nights, but zero success with lucidity.