vlasev

You can do this with text too (like in spreadsheets, code, etc) to find differences visually.

The Venn diagram for psychedelics include escapism, but it includes a lot more as well. Psychedelics can be a powerful tool, and for all the good that they can bring you, they can also wreck your shit for a while. It really depends on who you are, what context you take them in and what you do afterwards. This applies more broadly to other substances as well, even ones not typically seen as psychedelic, like alcohol and caffeine. There can be therapeutic effects with those as well.

For example, if you're feeling really stuck at a certain point in life and you take the time to get drunk by yourself and listen to some enjoyable music, you can end up being really honest with yourself and become aware of what you need to do to get unstuck. But you can also get drunk at a party and make a number of bad decisions that you'll regret later. It be like that when it comes to psychedelics as well.

Imho, the main benefits of psychedelics are two-fold.

One has to do with subjective experience - psychedelics can simply provide you with a different experience, a different point of view. This can help you see that there are other possibilities for the narratives you tell yourself and this can be beneficial. Depression is a good example here - it's super easy to forget what it's like to not be depressed and psychedelics can provide a temporary clarity about it that can later help get out of the depressive state.

The temporary difference in point of view can also cultivate more skepticism in general. This is especially true for certain "truths" we hold about ourselves (like insecurities, inadequacies, fears). Psychedelics can open us up to consider different causes for our behaviours and this can be therapeutic as well. But I gotta say, they can also make you lose yourself within a new false narrative, so skepticism is a powerful ally here.

The other benefit simply has to do with neuroplasticity. Most psychedelics open up a dose-dependent learning period that lasts from days to weeks. That's why something like a shroom trip doesn't really end until a few weeks after the shroom is ingested, when that learning period eventually closes. Even if you didn't experience anything spiritually or psychologically significant in the acute phase of the trip, you can still benefit greatly from the learning window that opens up afterwards.

It's a good time to try a new activity, do some self-reflection, change a habit, have a therapy session or two, connect with people on a deeper level. You might be surprised by your learning abilities after a shroom trip. But I gotta say, all this also opens you up to learning "bad things" too, so again, skepticism helps here.

Yeah, you can do all that without psychedelics as well, but there are a couple of problems here - you might be unaware that there's something you can actually do, and even if you are, you might not know what to look at or how to change your point of view about it. Psychedelics can provide a strong emotional and psychological example that can guide you in that process.

One thing that seems to work well for me is to push myself into thinking highly random thoughts. I imagine some kind of boring scene from life. Then I change it up, add content, make it a bit weird. Then after 5-15 seconds of this, I switch to a different random scene. After 5-10 minutes of this, it becomes automatic and I drift into sleep.

Now if someone would write an app that checks if your licensed code can be found with Copilot, we would go full circle. It could actually be useful to see if your code is used without proper licensing?

I can confirm this as well, discovered in a similar way. For me I notice objects start to fade into grey in the periphery. Another cool thing is that blinking seems to reset it for just a second or so and then things fade back to grey instantly.

    {name}{confirmation}{request}

    const inputs = [name, confirmation, request]

Using a conditional render like

   {nameInput}
   {isBob ? confirmationInput : null}
   {requestInput}

If you render the inputs via a list, like

    const inputs = isBob ? [name, confirmation, request] : [name, request]

You can probably tokenize the names so they become irrelevant. You can ignore non-functional whitespace, so that code C remains. Maybe one can hash all the training data D such that hash(C) is in hash(D). Some sort of Bloom filter...

Reminds me of the bridge story in Margin Call [1]. Or if you'd rather read it, here's the script [2], just search for "Did you know I built a bridge once?". Or condensed:

"It went from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia. It spanned nine hundred and 12 feet above the Ohio River. 12,000 people used this thing a day. And it cut out 35 miles of driving each way between Wheeling and New Martinsville. That's a combined 847,000 miles of driving a day. Or 25,410,000 miles a month. And 304,920,000 miles a year. Saved. Now I completed that project in 1986, that's twenty-two years ago. So over the life of that one bridge, that's 6,708,240,000 miles that haven't had to be driven. At, what, let's say fifty miles an hour. So that's, what, 134,165,800 hours, or 559,020 days. So that one little bridge has saved the people of those communities a combined 1,531 years of their lives not wasted in a fucking car. One thousand five hundred and thirty-one years."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8Mc-38C88g

[2] https://imsdb.com/scripts/Margin-Call.html

Call me cynical, but I feel like the 4 day work week will be forgotten when it comes to reviews.

If you're looking at the money, yes. But how much is the potential happiness and stress reduction worth? 5%? 10%? 20%?

Woah this is really cool and an awesome point of view. Collapsing along the x-axis is just a projection along the vector [1, 0, 0] onto the the y-z plane defined by it and the origin. Then if you project along the vector [1, 1, 0] onto the plane defined by [1, -1, 0] and [0, 0, 1], you get the convolution.

I'm sure you've seen this elsewhere in the comments, but multiply two polynomials to see a discrete convolution in action! Here your functions would be discrete.

I can confirm. I've mostly been working from my bed during these Covid times, and once I started going to the gym I was astonished by just how weak my back was, as opposed to my upper body or legs. But thankfully, it's building back up nicely.

Can confirm the same for me!

I'm a dancer as well and this is spot on. Thanks for putting it into words! Even if you do it competitively, though, the analogy still holds. But then it becomes both that and a sport!

Since it's done by stacking 30-45 min exposures, it would be sharp. All you have to do is align the images well.

You can pretty much make a telescope as large as you'd like, depending on your technological level. Hypothetically, you can use gravitational lensing to make a telescope via the sun! It's rather unfeasible at our current level of rocketry, but in time, maybe! Article: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/using-the-...

You can also use Earth's atmosphere as a lens too! It's an amazing video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgOTZe07eHA

Going even crazier, I can imagine we could some day use a massive black hole as a giant telescope.

Hubble points via gyroscopes, not thrusters! But they are slow, so that's part of why you need to schedule things well. YouTube video explaining how it points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEZI9DxIQss

Also, I don't think it needs to change orbital parameters at all for its operation. Station-keeping yea, but I don't think it needs to burn more fuel because of pointing at things.

Some galaxies have stars in the trillions. Even the Milky way is at something like quarter of a trillion. It's mind-boggling.

Just a nitpick: Hubble is at a much higher altitude than Starlink and as such would never be interfered with.

This leads to a very interesting conclusion - small gains in male attractiveness leads to a much larger perceived gain in their attractiveness. It basically means men have a LOT to gain from improving their looks!

From what I've seen and heard from my friends, women tend to select for lean-ness. Smaller guy with six pack is usually more attractive to them than a big guy with six pack. And it shows in their dating preferences too.

I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but I still think it's not the right point of view. A lot of the compatibility in a long term relationship stems from shared values, experiences, interests and culture. So I think your pool of potential "perfect people" is a lot closer to home than that.

It really is like that. The less effort you put in with every choice in a relationship, the more work you'll end up having to do to save it later on. Every choice is a potential investment into your future together. A relationship is very much about doing fewer things wrong, because your default state is to be happy together.

Reminds me of how the Space Shuttle Main Engines gained improvements over time so you could then set them to 104.5% thrust. Higher modes were later available. From Wikipedia on RS-25 engines:

- Block IIA (RS-25C): First flown on STS-89, the Block IIA engine was an interim model used whilst certain components of the Block II engine completed development. Changes included a new large throat main combustion chamber (which had originally been recommended by Rocketdyne in 1980), improved low pressure turbopumps and certification for 104.5% RPL to compensate for a 2 seconds (0.020 km/s) reduction in specific impulse (original plans called for the engine to be certified to 106% for heavy International Space Station payloads, but this was not required and would have reduced engine service life). A slightly modified version first flew on STS-96.

- Block II (RS-25D): First flown on STS-104, the Block II upgrade included all of the Block IIA improvements plus a new high pressure fuel turbopump. This model was ground-tested to 111% FPL in the event of a contingency abort, and certified for 109% FPL for use during an intact abort.

I hear you. I too moved to a new city shortly before lockdown, knowing almost no one here. I played a lot of games for a while and then got bored of it. I wrote a lot and then got bored of it. I did side projects and got bored of them. And a lot of other stuff. It's only been 3 months, but it feels like 3 years.

I'm almost all alone, only really physically meeting 1-2 other people. It's the highlight of my weeks and gives me energy for a day or two after that, only to succumb to the boredom again. I think it really shows how social interaction is an essential "nutrient" to our lives, without which we suffer and lose our energy. It's like an essential vitamin for a lot of us.

Strangely I've been productive at work. I didn't use to be good at WFH but that has changed out of necessity. I'm not sure if it'll remain this way after we start going back to our offices. And made some personal breakthroughs by taking the time to look deep inside. And then some more. And more. Doing any sort of working out seems to produce quick gains, I think mostly because I have zero physical stress otherwise. It's not a bad time for this kind of thing.

Walks are good, but I get bored of them too. With nowhere to go in particular, it feels pointless. But it also helps. At the end of the workday, I'm excited to go outside only to stop my excitement when I realize there's nothing really for me to do.

It's a loop for sure. And nothing seems to offset that innate need for human contact, not even all the facetiming in the world. This will surely be a big turning point in society at large. I see no other way.

It probably extrapolates, much like how when you stare at those videos of a moving background and look away, your environment appears to shift in reverse of the motion you were observing.

I'm not sure if you can echo this, but I've been in negative spirals in the past and the only thing that really helped me get out was to focus ALL my efforts on creating a positive spiral to counter the negative one. It often started with questions like

- What is the the thing making me feel the worst at the moment? - What is the largest small thing I can do with my current energy to offset my biggest problem?

For example, one time when money was really bad and I knew I'd get some money from tax returns, I focused all my energy (to the exclusion of other things even work) on trying to get it done, which resulted in some money and reducing my pain. This allowed me to re-focus on the next small challenge that I felt I could tackle reasonably well.

Sometimes the spiral is so deep and the challenges so multidimensional that it's hard to pick on the right thread of the ball of yarn to start making progress, but it's possible.

spending 3 days on a task that was supposed to take 5-15 minutes. Then a simple coding exercise (2-3h) took me a week, because I couldn't focus,

I hope I'm not too intrusive, but did you happen to quit some sort of addictive substances before that, like caffeine, nicotine, etc? Did you happen to go through a breakup or something? Or was it a super random, out of the blue kind of thing?