sp3000

These ideas have been synthesized from many sources over two decades. I’m not a dev by trade by any means, but I have been reading Hacker News since at least 2009 (!) and always found it such an amazing source for ideas and inspiration. I started using Claude pretty extensively over the past week to actually build this site and the visuals.

The result is a short roadmap of where I think we’re headed. It’s an intentionally optimistic take on the technological future of humanity. I feel like we’re drowning in doomerism lately, and I wanted to put something out there that looks at the massive upside of the next ten years.

Curious to hear what this crowd thinks - any feedback appreciated!

If you presume rationality is the goal, then the rational mind should point to decades of research and anecdotal evidence that shows the positive effeccts of meditation and breathwork on mental well-being. Why are you assuming depriving your brain of oxygen for a short period of time is decreases the ability to think rationally? That could be a short term effect, but a long term adaptive effect could be the brain thinks more clearly. Same with fasting from food, etc.

Ah yes, we should wait for irrefutable proof to determine whether nutrient-dense real foods are better for our children than the ubiquitous ultra-processed food made up of ingredients that are entirely foreign to the human body.

Over 50% of American kids are dealing with chronic illness. The food supply is the #1 culprit.

Fantastic writing. I recently did a yoga / meditation retreat (Inner Engineering by Sadhguru) that helps develop this and I find it immensely helpful. I always had trouble knowing how or where to begin, despite reading and knowing so much about the benefits. Inner Engineering gave me structure and insights, and after only practicing it for a week, I have experienced significant changes already.

It's written by Matt Ridley, one of the best science writers there is.

Not just taking into account the furin cleavage site issue, but there is every incentive for the scientific community and those in power to blame this on the wet market over the lab leak.

Interesting, very much at odds with Matt Ridley's analysis here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/10/there-is-now-no-dou...

As Thomas Sowell once wrote, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs."

The American sick care system is based around and incentivized to keep you a customer for life. I recommend people find preventative health and longevity specializing medical providers - they prioritize actual health and wellness.

Thank you, good sir.

Bezos said it best on Lex Friedman recently, "It's impossible to build Tesla and SpaceX and not be a capable leader."

If you are actually interested in learning about Musk, I would suggest Walter Isaacson's biography. The man is not pleasant, but he is highly capable of building significant things (which he has proven over and over again).

From Dr. Robert Lustig in his book, Metabolical (highly recommended):

"Michael Pollan (full disclosure, he’s a friend), in his now-famous New York Times Magazine article, espoused seven simple words: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. Three separate clauses, but I think that each clause is misleading. Eat food doesn’t take into account that some people may do better on a low-fat diet, while others may do better on a high-fat diet. Not too much doesn’t say how you are supposed to moderate that, as it doesn’t take into account food addiction or what generates satiety. And mostly plants doesn’t take into account that Coke, French fries, and Doritos are all plant-based. If you buy your organic, all-natural, GMO-free tortilla chips at Whole Foods, you’re still stuffing your liver and starving your gut—you’re just paying more for the privilege."

You have a presented a great argument on why you will not be using smart eyewear. Nothing convincing about why it won't be adopted by the general population. Smart watch doesn't have and will never have anywhere close to the capabilities smart eyewear eventually will.

Any good argument that anyone can think of for a scenario where smart eyewear will not be as ubiquitous as smart phones eventually? I understand the privacy argument, but that is not going to be enough. The ability to think or blink in a certain way and capture anything you see is too powerful a tool, alongside the augmented reality that is coming.

Something about this statement on Berkshire's website is really amusing:

"If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."

You're correct, no one wants to be dependent on luck. That's not what this article is saying. It's merely saying that putting yourself "out there", potentially gives you many more opportunities, which consequently can turn into producing even more great stuff. I'm sure Einstein was happy his ideas got exposure, and I'm sure that exposure led to collaborations and leverage that he wouldn't have had otherwise.

It used to be able to be easily purchasable over Amazon. They removed all listings due to the FDA classification I assume. So not so easily anymore.

I agree that is an important point. While that was the population that was tested, I think it is OK to infer that there would be a similar response to those under 80 as well.

The food we eat has an immense impact on how we feel, and certainly has an impact on mental health issues such depression, attention, emotional regulation, etc. Every single thing you eat is the substrates from which all of your cells are made. The old paradigm looked at food as just units of energy, but that is not the new paradigm. What we eat, how we move, our sleep quality, how we manage stress - these things have enormous implications on pretty much every single health metric you can imagine.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/nutritional-psychiatry-y...

“How isolated, how lonely those two space supermen appeared! But they had each other for companionship; and through television, they were held in the thoughts of viewing millions of men and women. To be really isolated, to fully experience loneliness, you must be alone. From Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s spectacular movements, my mind shifted to Collins’s lunar orbiting. Relatively inactive and unwatched, he had time for contemplation, time to study both the nearby surface of the moon and the distant moonlike world. Here was human awareness floating through universal reaches, attached to our earth by such tenuous bonds as radio waves and star sights. A minor functional error would leave it floating forever in the space from which, ancestrally, it came.”

Charles Lindbergh's forward in Carrying the Fire.

2100 is almost 80 years from now. Think back to 1940 and how different our world was then. Cars will certainly be automated to some degree. And that will cause a great reduction in the almost 1.35 million people killed globally by motor vehicle accidents.

A US statistic: In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes, 30,296 deadly, killing 32,999, and injuring 2,239,000. It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where automated driving is as unsafe as that.

We will truly look back and think, "Did we really trust others to operate multi ton metal machinery at exceedingly high speeds at each other day after day?"

Bingo. One aspect of this is sleep (quantity and quality). The drop in testosterone is likely multifactorial though: sleep, nutrition, movement, stress -> all contributors that have the potential to decrease testosterone levels and creat hormone imbalances.

Here is a cause and effect: Optimal neurotransmitter function highly depends on sleep quality and quantity (and you can further the connection to movement and nutrition as well). Sub-optimal neurotransmitter function can lead to sub-clinical or clinical depression.

"Studies have shown that NREM sleep is important for turning off the norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine neurotransmitters, which in turn allows their receptors to “rest” and regain sensitivity [13]. This allows norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine to be more effective at naturally produced levels."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4651462/

One of the commonalities between the longest lived people on earth: they eat food that is macronutrient poor, but micronutrient rich (think lots of vegetables, but not too many calories). This is the opposite of people who live the shortest: macronutrient rich, but micronutrient poor (think modern processed foods high in calories).

A typical fruit or vegetable can have hundreds of phytonutrients and other chemical compounds that are just very hard to recreate in processed foods. This is in addition to the 30 or so micronutrients that we already know of that are essential for certain biological processes. In the black hole that is nutritional research, population and epidemiological studies simply show people who do include a lot of vegetables in their diet tend to have better health outcomes. It's likely you might draw a different conclusion from that research than people involved in the field, but it's probably one of the safest bets we can make when it comes to staying healthy.

Think of it as a process, with no real end in sight. Unlikely you will all of a sudden wake up one day with that blend of excitement and joy you see in children. But it possible to move closer to experiencing that more consistently by rewiring your life and habits like you said. Hope your journey brings what you are looking for.

I think most people realize that living longer will bring a whole host of issues that are hard to put into perspective today. But I also think that for most people, there is a bias against living longer because they think it will be filled of boredom and impaired mental and physical functioning, which I don't think will necessarily be the case.

To your first point, is it shown that people who live the longest follow this emotional program, in a way that is actually detrimental to their psyche? I am not talking about people experiencing various diseased states such as dementia and other chronic illness.

Restoring in your life the same levels or type of happiness that you see in kids seems unrealistic. Not only that, there tends to be a bias towards nostalgia and how good we had it when we were younger. As I have gotten older, I have only felt a continuous trend towards more happiness in general though. I was a confused, anxious child. I feel better on every level - but that has come with a lot of work on making sure I am eating nutritiously, moving regularly (outside and in the sun), sleeping well, and leaning in towards work that I feel fulfilled doing. It also comes with fostering social relationships and cultivating a good social circle. That's what worked for me.

There is a path for everyone, and there are some generalities we can make on what that looks like, but in the end it is going to be unique to the individual due to their specific circumstances and genetics.

LW=LessWrong, and IDW = Intellectual Dark Web I think

Jeff Bezos has clearly stated that his long term goal is also making humanity a multi-planetary species. Creating and making Amazon was just a step to bring forth this vision. We are lucky to have people thinking long term like this, and also taking practical steps to make it a reality.

While it is good to be skeptical, the book really goes in depth and makes a compelling case. I also believe sleep is one of those areas that it is better to err on the side of getting the recommended amount. “If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.” - Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen.