duncancarroll

There's a shortcut

There's a trick to it

If you like this, you would love meditation!

Roblox is indeed eating the world

"But here’s the thing"

This phrase feels like the new em dash...

This was my first thought as well

It looks like the article cited is from 2022: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/aging-neuroscience/arti...

It's Covid. As someone who only recently recovered from Long Covid after a long, arduous 2-year fight, I see his point.

invisible, omnipotent and omniscient being intimately involved in their day to day activities

The statement above is independent of the (laudable) morality & ethics you're describing.

Y Combinator and other accelerators have job boards: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

A lot of VCs also have job boards, or they will list their portfolio companies and you can reach out directly:

https://jobs.a16z.com/jobs

https://jobs.sequoiacap.com/jobs

https://kindredventures.com/portfolio

etc

Fun! I was a bit confused at the end because there's no "victory" state or indication. I think I was expecting it to give me a new word pair once I got to the end, or tell me "come back tomorrow for another round"

Looks cool! Can you point it at app store reviews as an input source?

Not that I can make sense of it all, but to be fair the last result has been demonstrated by Michael Levin's lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5VI0u5_12k

This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. I've always wanted to see this visualized and the marbles make it so tactile and real.

All the images look like renderings. Is the car actually in production?

Me, for one. As a person with negative free time this sounds like exactly what I need.

idk if I agree, it feels genuine enough to me, plus you can self-host so it's not like they're just trying to own your content.

There are a lot of weird comments in this thread but to me this looks like a cool, genuine project which has an obvious need; I don't think the vibes are off at all.

Given that lately I can't even be bothered to write Markdown for my static site I'm looking forward to giving this a try this weekend.

Well that's unfortunate. Although I still don't understand why she wouldn't have sought medical attention as her own condition worsened, but I suppose that's at least conceivable.

This feels very hand wavey to me.

So she feels progressively ill and then dies, all without ever seeking medical attention? I suppose they assume it was acute / she collapsed, but it still seems unusual. She's only 65 remember.

But then Gene's just walking around the house for a week? With his dead wife in the bathroom and a barking dog in a crate??

I haven't dealt with Alzheimer's but you're telling me it's possible to be functional enough to eat and sleep for a week, but not know that your wife is dead and the barking dog needs food and water? And you don't ever seek help or outside assistance?

And then, coincidentally, you also die of a heart attack.

Just seems far fetched to me.

Edit: I guess at 95 he might have mobility issues, so maybe he couldn't call for help? Idk still seems odd.

I realize you're probably just trying to help, but:

A) I tested this on myself with results which are consistent with theirs and which would be unexpected if their conclusions were off-base, which is why I'm comfortable making these statements.

B) There is no treatment for Long Covid and people have been suffering for years without any recourse. If my comment helps one person searching the Internet then I don't think it's a bad idea.

(Edited to be less snarky)

Related to this, it's been shown that Long Covid sufferers have low levels of circulating serotonin due to viral inflammation downregulating the gut intake of tryptophan (serotonin's precursor) and is also (I believe) correlated with IL-6 similar to the article. [1]

Tryptophan is the only way your body can produce serotonin, and if you're not getting serotonin that is a problem and can cause depression, fatigue, irritability, brain fog, brain zaps, etc.

The cool thing is there's a workaround: The same paper also found that if you supplement with Hydrolyzed protein (basically pre-digested protein, you can get it off Amazon) the tryptophan variant therein uses a different cellular uptake pathway which is not downregulated. This type of tryptophan is not generally found in food, so it's not like you could just eat a bunch of turkey instead.

I tried it and I'll be damned, it worked. This is not medical advice btw, just sharing what worked for me. You have to take it very very slowly because your brain, having been serotonin-starved for years, will have a very, VERY low tolerance, so even though your body rate-limits serotonin production, even the "normal" amount is a big disruption and you can still induce Serotonin Syndrome if you're not careful. I take no more than about a 1/4 serving every other day.

Also, goes without saying but DO NOT combine with SSRIs / MAOIs, or anything else that modulates serotonin.

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01034-6

For what it's worth, I've had some success treating my Long Covid symptoms with a specific form of Tryptophan found in Hydrolyzed Whey Protein (a standard bodybuilding protein powder.) You can get it OTC from Amazon [1]. My symptoms are slightly different from yours but sound close enough.

A recent study showed that persistent viral infection can block normal tryptophan receptors [2] which causes a diminished ability to synthesize serotonin, which it turns out is pretty essential for a lot of things including alertness & sleep, etc etc.

The tryptophan found in hydrolyzed whey binds to a different receptor than normal dietary tryptophan, thereby allowing your body to reuptake it and produce serotonin as usual. (This is all in the study.)

A word of warning: If you do this, take only a very small amount to start, maybe a quarter serving, because even though the body rate-limits serotonin production your tolerance will likely be extremely low from not having much for years. I didn't know this and I took a couple servings per day (after all, it's just protein powder right?) but by day two I was hypomanic which was unpleasant and it took about a week to return to normal. So start with maybe a quarter serving, wait a few days, and repeat until your serotonin normalizes.

Also DON'T TAKE THIS if you're on any medication that interacts with serotonin such as an antidepressant, SSRI, MAOI, or what-have-you. I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice, just something that helped me after many years of difficulty.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002QZORGK [2] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01034-6

I started getting these post-Covid, but I'm not on any SSRIs. It feels like your brain does a "degauss" thing like the old CRT monitors; it's not fun.

There's some evidence to show that long Covid is connected with low serum serotonin, and the zaps make me wonder if it's connected to cerebral serotonin as well, since I imagine it's the sudden reduction that causes the zaps: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01034-6

Your app is good, I'm between HSK1-HSK2 and there are often scenarios I want to practice that aren't covered in the standard dialog options in other popular Mandarin apps, so I see the appeal.

Some feedback: - It took a while to generate my first session, I almost lost interest before I even knew what the app was.

- I tried to click on the buttons in the splash screen screenshot, mistaking it for the app itself.

- I would have liked to not to have to enter the prompt myself the first time, and just click something pre-made, only because the first time I use an app I have very little patience and just want to see what it actually does, so if it makes me think (or wait a long time) I may churn.

Maybe if you had a default prompt's audio baked into the APK it would feel more snappy (for those who select the default prompt.)

Anyhow nice work

Yeah but this would be more widespread and harder to counter; imagine a major phone vendor is a victim of the supply-chain attack he's describing. Even if only say, a thousand people buy Android phones with bombs in them, if suddenly no one can trust anything with a battery in it, that is going to have a major impact on society.

You don't even have to be proximal to the target, you can just swap a box of batteries at the factory a thousand miles away. Genuinely frightening if you ask me.

I agree, the interpretation factor is huge.

I can picture things in my mind's eye, can remember what people look like, walk through the recent past, etc., but I don't see them painted as images on my closed eyelids as though I was seeing them with my actual eyes. When I remember I "see" them but not in a literal visual sense.

Like if you asked me, "When you came to my house yesterday, did you see a green apple on the table?" I would scan back through my memory "visually" and if I encountered a memory of a green apple I would say yes, but I would only see that apple in my "mind's eye". Does that qualify as an image? Because I wouldn't really call it that, it's just a flash of mental objects and sure some imagery.

So am I aphantasic? I still have no idea.

I've had a couple OBEs (as a result of meditation, not near-death), and they're very interesting, but I'm not surprised that Parnia's subjects weren't able to match up any images because I've never had an OBE where the objective world is completely accurate. It's odd because you'll be totally lucid, often more so than in waking life, but things are slightly off, and electronics in particular never seem to work.

I've had OBEs where I can remember any aspect of my life from any time period, in exact, incredible detail, just as if it had all been recorded and was being played back on a gigantic IMAX. Smells, tastes, sounds, thoughts, everything, with no impediment to recall. Every memory was instantly available as soon as I thought of it. It was like I'd just taken off a heavy lead raincoat I'd been wearing all my life, and now there was nothing to impede thought or movement.

In another, more mundane experience, I had just OBE'd and was trying to lift my arm out of my body. As I did so, my watch's vibrating alarm went off, so I grabbed my arm and tried to turn it off (it only has two buttons and pressing either will turn it off.) I could feel the buttons, but as I pressed them it did nothing. Then I realized, of course, that I wasn't grabbing my real arm. So I laid back down, snapped back into my body, opened my eyes and turned off the real watch.

I was surprised b/c it had never occurred to me that something as insignificant as my wristwatch would come with me into the OBE state, nor that I would be able to feel it and manipulate it exactly like the real thing. It made me think how in ancient Egypt the dead would be buried with everything they needed to take with them to the afterlife. Food for thought.

Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)

This is a decent article but the author unfortunately has no understanding of what is known as a "spiritual emergence", which PKD very clearly went through and is critical to understanding his life and legacy. One of the first phases of this process is "anamnesis", in which you recall information from what is thought to be past lives. Laugh all you want, until this has happened to you, you can't even imagine what it is like, but PKDs entire experience with the fish symbol was a clear example of this. There are many other signs, his precognition, the "AI voice", etc., all of which are common.

These events can mimic psychosis and other mental illnesses, but they are anything but. They signal the start of an inner metamorphosis, likely biochemically driven, though we don't yet know the biomarkers. It's like a second puberty, you have all these weird urges to meditate and whatnot, and if you do it right you grow and come out the other side a different person with a different experience of the world than the pre-pubescent .

Because of the general cultural lack of understanding and guidance, PKD, while brilliant, could only guess as to what was happening to him and had no idea what to do about it. In other times and other cultures, perhaps he could have been guided through the process, just as parents guide their children through puberty. It can take years to unfold and can easily go off the rails, see: Gopi Krishna, Living With Kundalini.

Unfortunately substances are one of the things that can make it go off the rails, and his propensity for them may have contributed to his untimely death instead of the preferred outcome of an "enlightened" individual. Again laugh all you want, until we figure out consciousness we have no basis to assume the non-existence of higher consciousness. But granted this whole space is polluted with new age crap, so unless you've had this happen to you it's understandable to paint it all with the same brush.

His Exegesis is a wonderful work, one of his best. Highly recommend reading.