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bloomthrowaway

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No psychedelics, too much family history of mental illness. I've always been a YOLO type person in and outside of work.

Risks are often greatly overestimated, and appealing to the corporate mindset disgusts me. I'm the type that loves risk and doesn't hesitate to call bullshit as long as it wont get me canned. Figuring out if you're in a dream is superficially similar to realizing someone is screwing with you lol.

Could be related to lucid dreaming but who knows.

It's one of those weird personal secrets, things that never come up. I realized years ago that lucid dreamers are fairly rare, and most of those that have had lucid dreams don't have many.

It makes for a really awkward discussion most of the time. And it's impossible to explain well to somebody that hasn't experienced it.

Might be generics or wiring, or just figuring out how to recognize dreams, who knows. Its real weird that some people can have this otherworldly incredible experience with no drugs, and yet most of the population never experiences it. I'm lucky I guess, but to me its normal

Yes. Once you're fully lucid you can do anything. I've flown across the US, into space, banged movie stars in the white house, drove Ferraris off cliffs, etc... Since your thought process is a bit disorganized the hardest part is deciding what to do on the spot, knowing you've only got a few minutes to an or so hour max

If I think about the dream right after waking up I can generally recall most of it. Working 9-5 these days I sometimes just don't have time to make sure I commit it to memory though :( .

I don't do a certain reality check, but I've been lucid dreaming on and off since early teens so I just notice sometimes. Most often when I remember noticing its because I look away and things are different when I look back

Many REM sleep studies are done on lucid dreamers because they can signal the researchers by moving their eyes during sleep. Most muscles are paralyzed, but its been found that eye movements match the dreamscape. They've used this to determine that "dream time" matches real time for instance, by having lucid dreamers count with their eyes.

Two way communication is theoretically possible by measuring eye movements and signaling back with light flashes, but not sure its been done.

And yeah I have a feeling it affects sleep in some way, especially because being lucid for long periods of time tends to wake you up randomly at night

I think staying asleep is just experience. I remember my lucid dreams when I was really young were rarely longer than a few minutes. Sometimes seconds. Its really all about staying calm from what I've learned. And trying not to focus too much. If you put too much effort into control it seems to increase awareness to a point where you wake.

All conjecture of course because we know startling little about how dreams work :)

No, mental illness runs in my family so I consider it too risky. But I've been told by a friend that lucid dreams occasionally, that lucid dreams are different from LSD/mushrooms in that you have much more control over the experience and it seems more real.

There's definitely other psychedelics that produce "real" seeming illusions but I'm not aware of any that give you direct control over them like lucid dreaming can.

Its a LOT like the matrix. Perception of your ability to alter reality makes reality altering possible, with the only limitation being your own faith in the extent reality can be altered. Very meta.

I never consciously do reality checks, but I'm a very inquisitive and skeptical person. Easily distracted by cracks in the wall type.

I wouldn't let one bad experience stop you from lucid dreaming :( . I might be an outlier, but my experiences have been overwhelmingly amazing. Yes, I still have nightmares are the lucid ones are waaayyy worse. But lucid dreaming is such a great experience I would never wish it away

I could believe it ruins sleep quality definitely. Even with experience it's hard to keep your mind from fully waking during periods of lucidity. I've managed to go an hour or two many times but it invariably ends with me waking at a random time in the middle of the night

Almost always exceedingly wonderful, better than anything 'IRL'. Except for lucid nightmares which seem to start out as regular nightmares anyways. Sometimes I'm able to overpower the nightmare and go fully lucid, other times I can't and its horrible. Way worse than a regular nightmare because I'm fully aware of whats happening.

Its definitely unsettling at first. I started lucid dreaming by chance at ~11 so I guess I'm used to it. I don't think much of it when I look away from the window and it turns into a flock of birds, just roll with it ya know :)

I think the false awakenings are part of lucid dreaming. The awareness that you're not actually awake yet is a small step from control of your dreams.

The only times I've had trouble telling the difference is immediately after waking up. Especially after the false awakening lucid nightmares mentioned below. Turning the lights on and walking around for a minute is enough to dispel any doubt. Dreams are a different reality, and being so familiar with this one its easy to figure out when you're "home"

same, I can't think of a single false awakening outside of trying to end a lucid nightmare. Maybe the same "your wish is my command" type control you get over reality perception is a double edge sword. You want to be awake so you "wake up" into a fresh dream world, because your mind has no way to take you to reality. Kinda terrifying.

yes, or get in the habit of ruminating on the dream for a while still in bed. Whenever I have a nice lucid dream I lay in bed and run it through my memory over and over for a couple minutes. Otherwise some mysterious process will clear any figment of the dream from your memory within an hour or so

It's not pleasant. Sometimes intense enough that I'm in a state of shock through much of the next day. Most of the pain I remember has been in the form of lucid nightmares. Usually snake bites, gun shots, knives, etc. Almost never from environmental realities like hot surfaces, crashes, or falls.

Self-aware nightmares are way more terrifying than the regular variety, a lucid dream where I sometimes can't take control. I usually try to wake myself immediately, but sometimes this leads to repeated false awakenings. The worst I remember is 5 false awakenings before waking up for real.

Just throwing this out there. I've had hundreds of lucid dreams and it's the most amazing experiences I've have in my life. It takes practice to 1) figure out you're dreaming with some level of reliability 2) learn to take control 3) train yourself not to get too excited so you don't wake yourself almost immediately.

I believe the first step is to train yourself to recognize a dream. It becomes easier once you've done it, so I assume a few lucid dreams can lead to many more. There are devices that supposedly trigger lucid dreams in many that have never had one, I highly recommend trying it. Example of one of these products: http://sleepwithremee.com/ . They detect REM cycles and signal you in-dream with light through your closed eyelids, since vision isn't actually suppressed during REM.

I've hit the point where I've had lucid dreams the seem to last over an hour. Its insane, not even something I can describe to someone that hasn't lived it. Like closing your eyes and thinking about flying, but with the same level of detail as the real world. The sound, sights, feeling of the sun and wind, even pain. To be a little inappropriate, sexual experiences also feel just the same as the real version. I've had hyper real dreams too, especially with vision. Colors that are impossibly bright and saturated, or impossible acuity.

what really helped me was reading about how airplanes work. The technology was fascinating to me anyway, but once I found out how crazy redundant all the systems were I feel much safer than in a car. A car has redundant brake systems, but that's usually about it. Big commercial planes have 3-4 of nearly everything

Recycling cannot replenish supplies. Lithium-ion batteries last for 15–20 years, 3 times longer than the 5–7 years for lead-acid batteries

Over 90% of car batteries are already recycled. Assuming this stays constant when batteries get bigger(why wouldn't it), we'll hit steady-state on materials about a decade after electric cars become dominant.

Due to recycling, this whole article is baseless. Eventually we'll only need to mine enough to make up for a the few percent of batteries that aren't recycled. Car batteries are already recycled at extremely high rates, and there's no reason to believe this will change.

I think it might be the other way round these days. Java programmers are outsourced because they're so expensive. Javascript seems like the best target now for low-skill outsourcing. Much lower barrier to entry, and arguably a much more forgiving language

I've used Spring and he's probably right :) . But there's better choices these days. Any Spring micro-services out there are probably by a team that knew Spring well and didn't want to learn a more suitable framework

A lot of Javascript's optimizations are fragile, as in they don't always hold true, so there's overhead determining if the assumptions still apply.

For instance, Javascript's hidden class optimizations are disabled as soon as someone "breaks" the assumption by doing something like accessing a variable using a dynamic array index rather than dot notation.

Javascript runtimes also try to infer types as you say based on how objects are used, but this is also a fragile optimization. For instance, if you use an assumed "int" in a string-like way the runtime re-assigns the tagged type. And it's hard to know whether you (or the library you're using) does so.

Those programs might not represent a real workload but TechEmpower's framework benchmarks are closer. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r16&hw=...

On most of those benchmarks the fastest JS framework is ~5X slower than the fastest Java framework.

And yeah the array optimizations are related to what we both mentioned above, but again the optimization is not durable. It only works sometimes, and incurs its own overhead.

Java's usage will never compare to compiled languages without GC because it has to cache a bunch of code in RAM and the garbage builds up between collection cycles. It's pretty bad compared to something like C for sure :)

IMO almost nobody is writing microservices with spring boot because its so gigantic. Hibernate isn't bad on memory use on its own.

There's a raft of more sane choices these days like Play, Dropwizard, Vert.X etc.. They all use far less resources. Spring Boot is huge because it has to support a decade of obsolete junk, its far more than just a REST app framework.

Checkout TechEmpower's framework benchmarks https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r16&hw=...

(I added filters to limit to Java+Go+JS+Python and limited DB to Postgres and Mysql)

Java and Golang lead the pack, with JS a distant second and most Python frameworks hanging out near the bottom