zeidrich

Prime numbers are tricky things. They are one of the most fundamental parts of our numerical systems, but they're difficult to predict.

You would kind of expect that something so elementary should be easily predictable, or follow a pattern. But while we've found some similarities (like the mersenne primes) there's still a kind of nagging feeling that there should be a more basic way to enumerate prime numbers than guess and check.

We've learned some simple things about them, such as the existence of Mersenne primes, or ideas on the probability of any given number being prime being inversely proportional to its logarithm.

But I think the biggest thing is that it's a puzzle. But a puzzle that bothers us because it seems like it should be easy to solve, but it's not.

Finding larger prime numbers tells us more about them. It lets us see other parts of patterns. Patterns that might lead to some insight on how to predict if a number is a prime, or how to factor large numbers. This might have an impact on cryptography for instance.

But finding this number doesn't solve a problem, it adds to a body of knowledge. It fills in a bit of the puzzle. In the end the hope is that we learn something about the puzzle, or at the least, learn why we can never learn something about the puzzle.

I read to my daughter every night starting when she was about 10 months old. Now, I read little books to her all the time prior to that too, but we read novels. The first book was the Hobbit, and then we read all the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then we read Swallows and Amazons, and then we read a number of Discworld novels.

A few pages a night, a chapter, whatever. She enjoyed it. Now she is 2 and she reads for fun. She doesn't "read" read, but she can recognize letters, and she knows what letter her name starts with, what letter her cousin's name starts with, and can figure out the first letter of a bunch of words.

But she reads for fun, she will pick up her books and pretend to read them. She grabbed one of our Christmas cards and read it aloud to us. Apparantly this Christmas card said "Merry Christmas to the Princess" but reading is still something that to her is a fun thing, not a chore, and she does get better, she does recognize letters, she does recognize words, and when she does, she gets excited and wants to read more.

I think this is the big thing. I think the thing that school does to learning is terrible by making it a mandatory chore that you are punished (even indirectly) for not succeeding at.

Learning the way that my daughter is means that reading is always fun. If you pick up something and play with it, and then realize you've learned something, it's always fun. You never hate reading because when you don't want to do it, you just don't. Pressuring your kid to do it when they don't want to will teach them to resent the activity itself.

But your son is a month old. You will learn a lot more about him as he gets older. Everyone around me is surrounded by babies right now, I guess that kind of happens when you have a baby, but what I've learned is that every kid is super different, and the parents don't get to choose it, they just get to deal with it. You can't force your kid to be what you want him to be.

What is important I think is that you remove certain barriers, and leave certain barriers in. Leave in all of the barriers that he can learn to climb over. Help remove the imaginary barriers about what he's allowed to do or what is appropriate.

For instance, you might think that certain math or engineering tasks are too much to handle for someone his age, so you keep them away from him. These are the barriers you should remove. Don't force him to do it necessarily, but if he wants to know or wants to do it, unless it's going to hurt him (a 3 year old with a soldering iron might be an iffy prospect), then make sure he knows he has the opportunity to try in a safe space, or at least give him a path to get there. On the other hand, don't do too much for him, don't remove all barriers, if he wants to work with expensive materials, give him a limited amount, or find a way for him to earn it, especially if you can actually get him to earn the money to buy it directly. This teaches him to overcome those barriers.

But he's one month old, you're on a high, you're thinking about everything. Things will get harder, that high will fade, and you'll start wanting to take back your life. Keep him in your mind then, think about what he's feeling, and what he likes, and how you can encourage him. He's a person, not a project or a trophy.

One thing that I want to teach my child(ren) is how to function in school, and what the purpose of school is. I was always ahead of the class, and similarly I was bored and it actually hurt me in grades (but not what I learned).

I learned later in life that the purpose of school isn't to learn. The purpose of school is to try to guarantee a standard of knowledge. The other lesson to learn in school is that it's your teacher who determines your qualification, and that they're a person who gets frustrated, tired, can be lazy, can be angry or petty, but can also be happy, proud, encouraged, inspired, etc.

As an adult, I know how to behave in a classroom. I understand why showing off is not appreciated. I know why I have to go over things that I already know. Because I know these things, they don't bother me. There's always boredom, but you pay attention not because you need to, but because it helps the teacher, and making the teacher's life easier is better for the class and your evaluation. The goal of the game isn't to understand the material, the goal of the game is to be evaluated highly. Understanding the material is only half the game.

Essentially you're asking for the same thing. If you're constantly overthinking it's become involuntary.

Part of that cycle comes from stress hormones. One of the easiest ways we can motivate ourselves is to increase stress, we do that easily because one of the easy things for our conscious mind is to imagine or remember things, and if we imagine things that make us nervous, we can trigger a release of stress hormones which agitate us and push us to avoid some negative consequence.

For instance, if you have a paper to write, and you lack motivation to do it, you can imagine the result of not doing it, and that will make you anxious, and that anxiety will prompt you to seek out a way to avoid that uncomfortable feeling, which might be writing the paper to get it out of the way, or it might be flipping on the TV so you can crowd out your imagined fear of failure, and console yourself with the promise that you'll get it done later just fine if you rest.

Coffee helps you focus because it lets the stress hormones in your brain persist for longer, but it actually causes other problems. Stress-based motivation causes you to seek relief, sometimes that relief comes from tackling a problem head-on, sometimes that relief comes from avoiding the problem.

Avoiding the problem can lead to more stress (It's a lot more stressful to have a paper that you think you'll do terrible on due tomorrow than it is to have a paper you think you'll do terrible on in a week) but the thing about stress-based motivation is you have less conscious decision about what to do about it. It pushes you, you don't push it. You just help to control the amplitude.

Coffee helps maintain those stress hormones active in your brain, and that stress generally keeps you from sleeping, that's one of it's direct roles, as well as it keeps you worrying which is kind of a positive feedback loop.

First of all, this isn't necessarily a bad thing that needs to change. This is just a thing. But it's good to know how to change it. The first thing you would do is drop the Coffee altogether. Coffee's going to amplify this effect, and it's going to keep you awake at night. Proper sleep will help you relieve stress, and it will help you recover some of the more pleasant feeling interest-based motivation.

The next helpful thing would be to start doing some kind of mindfulness training. I like zazen, particularly just sitting. Essentially sitting in a calm place, and letting thoughts come to your mind, but not acknowledging them, more like watching them come and go. If you find yourself thinking about one of those thoughts, that's OK, start watching THAT thought come and go. The same with sensations or anything else. If you feel tired, you feel tired. If you feel hungry, you feel hungry.

If you do this for 15 minutes, it can feel like a very long time, and you will walk away a bit more objective. I like to conclude with a bit more mindfulness where I sort of take stock of my self. I focus on feeling everything across my body in discrete steps, each finger, my palm, my wrist, my forearm, my elbow, etc. Do I feel pain? Do I feel hungry? Do I feel tired? Then I end this step by thinking about what I might need to do to change these things, if I make myself more comfortable, or eat, or rest, will these things be less distracting?

You might find that you are doing too many things, and that's where this stress is coming from. You can go a for a long while with 10 things to do every day and no means to complete more than 8 of them. This is easy to do if you don't ever count them and get by through telling yourself that you can do all 10 if you just put your mind to it, and get frustrated when you fail.

But in slowing down, you might realize that everyone does this, and that while you can do 8 things better by putting 8 things on your plate rather than do 8 things poorly by putting 10 things on your plate, there's a cultural expectation that you have 10 things on your plate and be exasperated about it, and it's easy to fall into a trap where you're now getting stress from the knowledge that you would really like to have to do 8 things, but you need to do 10, added to the rest of the other stressful feelings you get from having to try to do 10.

Similarly everyone's mind is different, and we all learn to adapt to a different mental landscape. Some people, like people with ADHD, have minds built such that they blow through all of their interest-based focus very quickly. Then their mind wanders easily, and they might turn to stress-based motivation to get through the rest of the day. If you are like this you might be able to avoid the overthinking and the self-medication with coffee, but realize that you need to have a 3 hour work-day in order to not fall into that pattern, which is unreasonable. Or you might be prescribed medication which has it's own sets of upsides and downsides.

My only answer is, you can't really tell your mind to shut up. You're not really the boss of your mind, your conscious thought is just a part of your mind. You can learn about what's going on inside your mind, and you can even put yourself into a situation where you mind can become quiet. But you can't strongarm your whole mind into acting precisely the way your consciousness wants it to act indefinitely. It's much better to just learn how different parts of your mind work, and work to support them. Stress can be great, it's entirely necessary, it's not something you want to cut out of your brain. But it's suited to dealing with crises, and if you can arrange your circumstance so that you aren't using stress to be the motivation through your every day, you might be better off.

While he's misusing the word there's still value in the things that he's reporting.

What the article talks about is how there is a benefit both from focused thought, and involuntary thought. There has a growing trend towards trying to avoid 'wasteful' thought and on focusing attention on task, but that there's evidence and a counter trend showing that letting your mind do things without conscious direction is also beneficial.

I think it's definitely ironic that he's using the term mindfulness in the way that he does, but it's just a word. The concept that he's explaining is something that people who have actually practiced mindfulness have already learned.

Despite the fact that he's using the wrong words, I think it's a net gain for people to become more aware and comfortable with the things that our minds and bodies do without a conscious directive, and to learn to trust that they have value.

Hiring who you want is agency and power. Being powerless hurts, and giving us less agency makes us more powerless.

Applying to a position to a human similarly gives us agency and power. It's a bit of competition. If we pass or fail, it's based on how we did at the interview.

We give these things up, and that harms us. One of the big fears about Communism in the post war era was that the Party would dictate what you did for work and how you would get paid. This fear came from this loss of agency, but communism still had support in some situations because of the idea that at least in this case everyone would get paid.

Algorithmic hiring at its extreme would lead to the same loss of agency in the hiring and applying process. The algorithm would be the one that dictated whether you would get a job, and if your ability to get future jobs are dictated by your past jobs, and your past jobs are dictated by the algorithm, you are powerless. If you're really interested in computers but you worked a few summers doing mechanical work in college because that was the work that was available, well, maybe you're better qualified to be a mechanic now, so you'll never get an opportunity to work on computers. Maybe it is strictly better for the mechanic shop to hire you than get a new junior mechanic, and maybe it's strictly better for the company to hire a person who has more experience in IT.

But what if the person that they hire for IT actually wants to be a mechanic, they just had jobs doing IT work? In the same way, the company keeps you on as a mechanic because you've got experience, and it's still better for the company to hire someone like him for the IT position.

This might be more efficient for companies. But is it better for people. My question is really, how do you define 'better'?

It's certainly easy to say that it's more efficient. But cold efficiency is the stuff that scared us in the cold war, luckily Communism failed to really take hold because that cold 'efficiency' was actually inefficient and people were starving. However, implementing it in a Capitalist society is even worse, because you get all of the bad that comes with a cold uncaring hand dictating your fate, it probably IS going to be efficient, and you've got no promise that the people left behind after this efficient system is done allocating all the labor that's necessary will be cared for. How will an algorithm rate a person who is 25 and has been unemployed since college? They'd certainly be a high risk compared to someone who has been working steadily. Bottom of the pile. What if that person has been unemployed because the algorithm filtered them out of jobs just because at the time other applicants were better or more suited for the task?

As humans, we can take a chance on people like that. We might even know that they're not the perfect person for the position, but maybe we'll have "a good feeling" about them. We might make a poor hiring decision, but we might elevate a human because of it at the expense of company profits.

I think algorithmic hiring can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Putting people in situations that are not optimal for them can cause them to grow. This might lead to situations where people are not as productive, or where they leave the job early either because it is not a right fit, or because they've built skills and found a better job elsewhere.

But in all of these situations the people grow. They've learned about why the job isn't right for them, they've built skills, even if they didn't have perfect skills to start with.

Choosing the person who is the best fit for the job is more efficient for the company, but it means that you're less likely to have someone take the chance when you're looking to broaden your horizons, even when you're truly eager to do so, because an algorithm says that you have some risk factors.

But there's a cost to society there, you start working in one career, and now the system feels you're optimized to continue working there, changing jobs is risky. If you have a run of bad circumstances that lead to you being laid off a few times, your average employment duration goes down and you become a higher risk factor, meaning you get fewer offers from the best jobs, and more offers from more desperate employers, which have a higher chance of conditions that might lead to a shorter length of employment.

A question is, what is the value to society of the most efficient hiring decisions? It keeps us from making hiring mistakes, but mistakes are things we learn from. It keeps us from taking hiring risks, but risks are something that we are occasionally rewarded for. It maximizes efficiency, which reduces the number of jobs necessary. It concentrates wealth.

I'm not saying that we should strive to be inefficient. I mean, that's easy to do, we could just hire the first applicant to any position. But I do think there's value in remaining human. I don't think we make better decisions than an algorithm in terms of maximizing the value of the hire. But I do think we can make more human decisions, which can't go into an algorithm because it is so subjective and dependent on an individual's personal experience.

But that's not what these algorithms are for. They're for hiring 5000 people instead of 5500 people. That's fine for the person who wants to profit off the work of those 5000 people. But it's less interesting when that inefficiency just leaves 500 jobs off the table.

I am not saying that an algorithm is bad, or is less efficient than human decision making. I'm questioning what we should value in society. I'm asking what we should give up. To let an algorithm dictate hiring practices is different than something like improvements to robotics allowing 10% more widgets to be made per factory worker.

It's taking something from us. It's removing human agency. Sometimes that is good, for instance, removing agency from human drivers can be good because it protect society by causing fewer accidents on the road. But what is the good of removing human agency from hiring? It only benefits really large hires, it makes more efficient labor, these situations are ones where people who are already wealthy make more money. It also limits the agency of the people applying for the job. No longer can you do better in an interview, or convince someone to take a risk on you. Your position is firmly set by your personal details and past, which are set in stone, and might have already been decided algorithmically for you.

We give up a lot, and the benefit goes to a few. Is it better for us to do that? I don't know. But I think with less and less labor needed, and more and more concentration of wealth, I'm not sure if it's worth giving up our control of both the hiring and applying process to algorithms, even if they are beneficial to the company hiring. Why throw away our ability to make our own decisions for so little, even if they are "better" ones?

I think it's a big challenge of culture. Substance abuse is a problem that becomes a symptom. Part of the issue I think is cultural ideas about mental health. American culture is strongly focused on good and bad, strength of will and weakness, and where to place blame. Both the person with the addiction and the rest of society are affected by this culture.

When you become addicted to a substance, it's like it becomes revealed to society that you're a weak person. Like weakness is part of your identity. A good person is strong, a good person has the strength of will to not abuse substances. You're not a good person.

When you look back at your life, you see the same faults and have the same regrets. You think of yourself as a weak person.

The problem with those sorts of ideas is they reinforce the behavior that leads to things like substance abuse. They isolate you, they make you lose motivation, they make you act in a self destructive manner because you think you are the kind of person who should.

These are cultural elements that are present everywhere but relatively stronger in American culture. It really likes to put people into boxes, quite literally. People who commit a crime are considered criminals. The crime can be pretty minor, but maybe it sends you to jail. Criminals are bad, and people who go to jail are bad. Good people won't interact with bad people. You can lose your job, you can lose the ability to find another, you can lose your home, you can lose your ability to find another. But good people don't care, bad people go to jail. Bad people need to be punished. Bad people don't deserve our attention. Bad people don't deserve our money.

Other cultures are a bit less polarized. The need to brand someone good or bad isn't as strong. If you commit a crime, you go to jail, but you're treated like a person, you're given opportunities to correct some of the issues that sent you there, you're released in a manner that tries to help integrate you into the rest of society. American culture sees things like this and gets very angry. How dare you spend MY tax dollars on feeding THOSE bad people nice food, and give them comfortable beds!? How dare you help bad people fix their problems when good people fix their problems themselves?

A person who abuses substances needs to be helped. It's a problem that is self-reinforcing and really need some external support to break. The issue is that to ask for help identifies you as weak. It lets out the "secret" that you're not good enough, you don't have that imaginary "indomitable will" that good people have that keep them from doing bad things. The person feels this and is afraid to ask, and society feels this and will punish you for doing so.

It's like how mental health issues, like suicide attempts can go into your police file and keep you from being allowed to cross the border. These sorts of cultural impacts cause people to be afraid to look for help, and not just be afraid, but be punished for looking for help.

I think for the person in that situation, there's very little you can do to change the rest of society. But I think you can change your own mind, and I don't mean you can buck up and use that indomitable will to shrug off your addiction. I mean, you can recognize that you aren't a bad person or a weak person. You're not significantly different than your neighbor, it's just that you had a different set of circumstances 30-40 years ago and ended up learning a different set of habits and coping behavior. Had they been exposed to the same things and presented the same circumstances, they could be in your shoes.

You can identify the small things in life that are important, and you can look towards what is needed to make your life a bit more like that. It doesn't even have to be getting rid of your addiction, it could be that you want to keep your home tidy, it could be that you want to eat breakfast in the morning, it could be that you want to get in shape, it could be that you like to read Stephen King novels, it could be that you want to spend time with a friend. And you can do little things to move that forward. You can throw a couple of things off the counter into the garbage, you can get a dozen eggs for breakfast tomorrow, you could take a walk around the block, you could read a chapter, you could chat with a friend for a few minutes.

It's a matter of not believing the lie that you're any better or worse. You're a person who does some things. You've done some hurtful things, but at this point you can only do things now. You aren't a bad person, you aren't a good person. You're a person who can do things. And while society can limit their interactions with you because of their own mindset, you still have a lot of latitude to do many things despite that.

You're judged by your lifestyle. Yeah, that's unfortunate. But you can still clean your house, get up early and go for a run, eat some breakfast, read your favorite books and chat with your friends after work. The unfortunate part is that even if you "get your life back together" people's mindset might never change and think about the fact that people aren't strictly good or bad. It's more likely they'll just think you've changed and now you're good.

But maybe you will have learned that, and that's something.

It's funny that you see it as flipped upside down. I see it as flipped left and right. In terms of whether the Y is up or down, neither of them are, but the original one had it leaning right, and the one currently on their page has it leaning left.

Perception.

Communicating with your friends online via insult isn't bullying. Bullying is about the power dynamic and about making another person feel weak or appear weak to their peers.

Forcing someone to withdraw from using social media when the rest of their peers are using it is on its own a form of bullying, especially when the person who withdraws is then categorically left out of normal social engagements because of that non-participation.

You can get away from it a little bit because being 30 something, you can maintain relationships without social media. I'm in the same boat at the same age.

My brother who is 10 years younger ends up doing a large majority of his communication with his social group through social media. He couldn't stop using it and maintain relationships, not because he's unable to, but because his peers wouldn't be able to easily communicate with him.

It's interesting though because this is not a technical problem. A cremated body's ashes don't take up much space, and don't need to be housed in an urn.

It's entirely a cultural issue, in that we have special feelings about death and the treatment of a body after death. But thing about culture is that it's really flexible, but really resistant to change.

It's never going to be a problem that can't be solved. People are resilient and eventually if cemetery space does become completely unavailable, we'll make due. But it doesn't mean we won't be upset while we learn to cope.

It's more that it's a problem that we don't want to solve (because it would mean changing our cultural habits) but not a problem that is hard to solve. It just needs to get to a point where we actually need to solve it before anyone will worry about it.

I think there's a big difference between these two things.

When you use a phone to track exercise and reduce insurance premiums, that's a good thing, it encourages (or at least rewards) people who exercise and become healthier and might need less medical care.

When you use social networks to track and monitor who your friends are in order to approve you for credit, that causes a different set of rewards and incentives. It rewards you for choosing who you are willing to be friends with based on their creditworthiness. It punishes people who have associations with people with poor credit.

It essentially keeps good people down too. If you are a role model in your group of peers. If you're the guy out of your group of friends who got an education and got a steady job. If you pay your bills and don't carry debt, and you want to buy a house and have the money and responsibility to do so, you should be allowed to. When you do that, it shows those friends what you can do, and it allows you to move forward.

On the other hand, if you get an education, get a job, pay your bills, and don't carry debt, but when you go to buy a house your mortgage application is denied simply because you have some friends who are struggling on facebook, what is the impact of that? It just causes you to stop moving up. Maybe it discourages you. Maybe it makes you realize that the world doesn't really want you to be better than what your friends have become.

What the problem is has less to do with being judged by your actions, but rather being judged by the actions of those you associate with.

Boredom isn't the act of having nothing to do. That's idleness.

Boredom is a problem of a lack of satisfaction. There's various reasons for that but I believe having too much to do, and too much stress is what leads to boredom. People have an amount of attention they can pay to any topic before they need to rest. You can only listen to a song for so long before it stops being pleasant and starts being annoying. You can only hear the same story so many times before it gets boring.

When you are bored, sometimes idleness can even be a fine replacement. If you're bored, and you decide to go and sit in a chair in the sun with a nice cold drink, that's a nice response.

What boredom is, is when you're in class or at work, and you need to keep doing some routine behavior, but you need a break, you need a change, but you can't. Boredom is the feeling that you have to fight in order to keep doing something that your whole reward system of your brain has told you you've had enough of.

Boredom isn't something good. It's something damaging. It's a condition where your mind is tired of a particular action, but you don't have the agency to make a change in your situation to suit that.

Maybe, but anecdotally, I saw the FFV remake on steam, and I'm the target audience and have bought a number of versions of various Final Fantasy games and remakes. However, I didn't buy the FFV remake because it looked horrible versus the standard def version.

Two things:

1 - Regulatory capture.

2 - Startups might be efficient because they're lean on things that might be important to government. Like a small IT firm handling a presidential candidate's e-mail server.

#2 feeds #1 because lobbyists suggest important rules and regulations that can be justified by government which increase the barrier of entry to startups. Oh, you don't have certification that you do this? Oh you haven't submitted for these checks? Oh you haven't been reporting on this? If you haven't done all of these things, then you aren't eligible to win this contract.

Individually these points can be logically argued and make sense on a case by case basis. It's just that the enterprises that are in bed with the government already put themselves in a position where they are compliant with the new regulations that they're going to make, and then lobby to make those regulations to force competition to scramble for compliance at the last minute.

I'm not sure what you mean "It gets coded as green". It doesn't consider an entire statement, it considers word choice.

Similarly, it says that green means that it's placed in the "writing tone" evaluation category, in that it tries to determine whether the writing comes across as analytical, confident or tentative. More like instructions or analysis and less like judgment or conversation.

It's better to look at the demo in a different way. I mean, if I put your post into the analyzer it tells me that it's impassioned, and of that it's not very cheerful. If I put mine in, it looks very matter of fact. It's more analytical and matter-of-fact.

The two posts imply that kind of difference in tone, and it's pretty cool to see.

It's got a way to go, but trying different examples is interesting.

Science is composition.

We build a bit, we test, if it's solid, we build a bit more. We don't need to come up with hypothetical black hole computers.

The paper and the concept of TOW dynamics has been referenced in http://www.nature.com/articles/srep13253 which shares one of the authors and is interesting in a different way.

I get tired of people saying things that aren't exciting enough shouldn't be published. It's not the exciting things that make the breakthroughs, it's understanding a bit more about the things we've always figured are obvious. To me this is more interesting than some hypothetical black hole computer. Sure it's not blowing me away.

It's just a block. A little block. Other ideas can choose to use that block or not. I haven't seen that system of tug-of-war dynamics described before. It seems solid, so why not describe it?

Or does it need to be antimatter hoverboards to be worth publishing?

I've never had a person actually get upset with me because I've not responded back to a text immediately.

I have some people who will always respond to my texts immediately, and some people who I will be lucky if I hear back in an hour.

I don't hold any ill will towards the second group of people. I come to expect that from them.

The only time I might get agitated is if someone always responds immediately and then stops, just because it's violating my expectations.

I wonder if this person were to stop compulsively responding to texts immediately if people would stop getting angry when he doesn't.

Its these kind of experiences that I want to learn to teach my child to make it through.

There are a lot of other people out there who will unknowingly be very discouraging, to both children and adults, but their opinions have no bearing on our ability to learn. I remember being in music class in grade 1 and it was my absolute favorite class. Near the end of the year I was told that I wasn't very good at singing by my teacher. I never tried to sing again, but I learned later that I have good pitch and a decent voice. I am not really interested in singing now, but I might have learned a different set of skills if I didn't avoid it.

Is there a way that I could have been prepared so that being told by the person I looked up to for validation, that I was no good wouldn't make me stop trying to improve?

I don't know about that, but if there's a way to teach that, it would definitely be a good lesson. It would certainly be nice if teachers didn't do things like that, but even if you could guarantee they didn't, you won't stop the bullies or the critics or anyone other hater as you get older.

And I think that's the biggest issue is that Microsoft makes it pretty easy to disable them.

Most of these settings are all in the same place, right where you set up the OS.

In my opinion, none of them have to be off. I understand why they're being collected, and I don't mind that information being collected, and I like the things like the predictions as features.

But I do appreciate that they can be turned off. Another OS might just add those things but not make them something you could opt out of at all.

I mean, even Ubuntu went and sent all of your search data to Amazon by default for a while without any simple way to opt out of it, which to me is worse than Microsoft itself collecting Cortana data with the ability to turn the option off at install time.

But the thing about allowing people to choose to turn those features off (or even on) means that they're aware that they're there, while other people can just slip them in as a tiny line somewhere in the privacy policy and not allow you to configure those settings at all.

I have a 2 year old, and we play Minecraft, and I'd say we've started with 'concepts' already.

Simple things, but things like make a switch that turns on and off a lamp or opens a door. Or simply building larger things out of smaller things.

I mean programming is really a matter of logic and composition. Something like "This switch will turn off all of the lights, but these switches will turn on and off individual lights." is a sort of "If (mainswitch is on) then {lights settings is the same as its switch} else {light is off}"

Apart from some pretty simple logic, it's really just composition. A turing machine is comprised of some really simple functions, and apart from that it's just a matter of understanding how to compose those into more complex ones, and understanding programming is just recognizing the processes of breaking down those complex compositions into simpler ones.

I've never felt millenials have been relatively happy socialites.

I've felt millenials are the generation that feels the most helpless. Gen-X felt like they were promised something awesome and then screwed out of it. Millenials feel like they've got no chance to compete, so they don't expect it.

Gen-X resented the fact that they had to try so hard to win the rat race. Millenials know they have no hope of winning or even finishing, so the best they can hope for is to make the race more tolerable.

It's why you see things about how Millenials are more interested in comfort and work-life balance than straight up salary. Unlike the boomers who expected to work for a while and then retire on a nice nest-egg, and the Gen-Xers who struggled to meet an ever elusive goal of retirement, millenials don't have any expectation of retirement through normal means. They figure they're working forever, so they might as well get comfortable.

I mean, years ago I talked to gen-x'ers and there was a lot of dissatisfaction and a feeling of a loss of control and opportunities, but a lot of people who gave up on their dreams and settled for a job that they hate with a pension.

But with millenials, they're happy if they can take their 6 figure student loans and find any job at all, and a pension is a bizarre concept from a foreign world. They can't really hope to retire in the traditional sense, it's more like playing the lottery. There are some enterprising people who might make start-ups to try to get rich, but it's either get-rich or get-by, there's no sort of middle-class accumulation of wealth and a nice retirement at 65 any more. It's win big and buy a jet or eat spaghetti at home and avoid debt.

So if you have two jobs to choose from, neither with a salary that makes an early retirement seem a reality, and one makes life a little bit more tolerable, your decision is between a life spent (at least partially) working a more tolerable job, or a life spent working a less tolerable job. So you opt for the job that pays a bit less but gives you more leeway for work-life balance. Boomers see that as an irresponsible happy-go-lucky delay of retirement, while millenials feel that that retirement idea is not really feasible, and if you're going to be working forever, you might as well enjoy it. Gen-X kind of got stuck in the middle where they end up trying to work really hard at something they hate for the chance to get that retirement but keep getting the rug pulled out.

It's kind of like 3 people doing the limbo. The boomer plays, kind of bends a bit at the knees, leans his head back and gets under the stick. The Gen-X plays and when he first sees the bar it's nice and high, but as he gets closer and starts to go under the bar it keeps kind of getting lowered, so he keeps bending and contorting and struggling to get under the bar eventually. It hurts, but they still have hope they can get under it. The millenial looks at the bar, sitting ankle high and says fuck it and just decides to make the best of it on this side of the bar.

Then the boomers hear about the x'ers struggle and say just bend your knees and lean your head back, it's not so hard, nobody had trouble with it in our day and we didn't even go to college. Then the boomers hear about the millenials not even bothering to try to get under the bar and say "they're just fooling around, they aren't thinking about their future, they're never going to get under that bar unless they stop fooling around and try."

But the fact that the bar has moved is so often ignored. We're just all asked to bend further, and then blamed for not doing the impossible. The biggest difference between millenials and x'ers is that he millenials ARE aware of it, and that's why they can seem to be happy-go-lucky and less serious.

It's easy to motivate you to work hard when you might feel like you can retire early and live in comfort. It's a lot harder to motivate you to sacrifice a lot to work hard when it feels like there will be no end to that work, ever.

X'ers just got screwed because they got caught in the transition between easy future and no future.

Because many people speak similarly. If a number of people who speak similarly can train it, it can learn how you will say words that you haven't even said to it yet if a number of other people already have.

Machine learning algorithms haven't changed that much since the 90s, what's changed is the amount of data we have access to, and the amount of data we can process.

When you're training it yourself the data is what's limited. The fact that we can process more data doesn't matter if we don't have access to more data because you can't speak any faster.

But if you have millions of people speaking to it, then we can take advantage of the fact that we can process so much more data.

Does it say that it will send actual audio data?

I mean more of my problem has to do with the fact that it's an open door than what they will actually do. It doesn't say they will send audio data, it at most says "associated input data" which for all I know could be a database from their algorithms, or it could be a live 24/7 stream from my webcam and audio device.

I guess the thing is that some things are not acceptable, and whether there's a disclaimer or not, people aren't going to like it if we find out that all of our audio is being recorded and uploaded to Microsoft. But it's not, not as far as anyone can tell yet.

But again, we're only worried because they're what, giving us the option to opt out? I mean, if they wanted to they could just go ahead and stick somewhere in the privacy policy something like "from time to time microsoft will upload certain input data for improvement of service quality, depersonalized information may be sent to partners." down in paragraph 24.c.iii. Or they could just not mention it at all.

The question is are you willing to trust the OS. I mean, hell, Ubuntu Linux went and sent all of your search information to Amazon without even giving you the option to opt out in the install process at one point. It could be disabled, but unless you knew about it in advance there was no option to do so. And Ubuntu is open source.

I can see use cases for it, and one actually ties into the location services. Say you're from a region with a specific accent. If the system can tell how you speak, and how other people speak around you, it might be able to create an accent subset for you based on the collective data from all of those speakers. It might be able to guess from a few sentences and your location that you're Glaswegian and start to understand you, not because you trained it, but because across the region many people have trained it a bit. Then with the location to tie the regional accent together, even if you're in the US once you've spoken a few phrases it might be able to identify you as belonging to that regional language group.

But uploading of all spoken data to Microsoft would be silly, not just because it would piss people off, but because it wouldn't be something you could hide, and it would end up being quite a lot of data that's really not that useful.

But could it be possible? Sure. But they could also do it without tipping you off or giving you the ability to opt out.

I agree that calling it a disability is not right. It's a difference, it might make certain things more challenging, but a disability carries tones of uselessness.

The thing is I also don't think it can be thought of as a trade-off. There's no great balancing factor. I see people who expect every autistic person to be some kind of savant like the Rain Man. You don't automatically get some bonus somewhere else to cancel out the issues you have.

What you do get is a different perspective. You have to learn to cope, and in learning to cope, you learn to do things differently than anyone else might have had to. It's not because nature has somehow compensated you for what it took away, but because you simply had a different experience which forced you to learn differently.

I've got a different issue than dyslexia. I've got an attention deficit issue. There's nothing really 'good' about it, but there's a few things about it. One is that in learning to cope with it I've become very aware of my emotional state, about my motivation and stress, and how they impact my ability to focus. I've kind of come to an understanding that's hard to describe of 'why' this happens to me (in short, I run through my ability to focus very quickly, and it recovers relatively slowly, so I can focus very intensely for long while, but doing so might make me useless for a week. I'm normally living in a deficit because day to day it's hard for me to avoid spending more focus than I recover).

In that I've learned a little about how I function, how and why other people act certain ways, how to have a ton of patience and why it's really important to have downtime (for everyone, but especially for me), how to offload decision-making tasks.

And despite all of that, I still have the same challenges. I mean, I don't have full control over how much stress I'll encounter or how much I'll end up focusing and making decisions in a day. I can try to do things to limit them, but that still happens regardless.

But I gained a perspective that other people don't have, and I care about things that other people prefer to just joke about. I just happen to see things in a different way than the majority and it's important, but it's not a tradeoff, it's a consequence of this difficulty, and the fact that I'm not willing to just say "Hey, I'm disabled, I'm not responsible for myself." It's more like, "Yeah, I have this challenge, I've done this to overcome it. I still have problems doing these things, so I try to avoid having to do those things."

Other people could totally learn the same things that I have, but they just haven't been put in the position to be required to do self-reflection to get through the day.

Similarly, the things you learned because you were dyslexic might be things that other people could totally learn to do, the difference is you've ended up having to do them to get by.

It's like two kids growing up, one kid is forced to carry 30 lb weights as he walks to school. The other kid can get to school however he wants. The result of the kid who carries weights is that he will get stronger. But it's hardly a tradeoff, he's in a situation where he's forced to carry those weights whether he wants to or not, he's not getting anything in return, except the consequences of carrying those weights.

The kid who can ride the bus to school could carry weights instead, however, it's highly unlikely anyone would choose to put themselves through that much difficulty when they could avoid it. So you'd probably end up being stronger than him, but on the other hand, he could go to the gym and train and rest properly, while you're forced to carry those weights whether you want to or not.

I'm just saying there isn't some balance. But we're just forced to cope with things that other people don't have to. This gives us a unique perspective, but not necessarily an exclusive or even balancing factor.

Dyslexia on it's own doesn't give you the ability to do those things. However, it pressures you to learn those things in order to cope with the fact that you can't do it the easy way. There's no unique ability about Dyslexia itself that you could really capitalize on in that respect, but there are things you have definitely learned to do that you can capitalize on because of Dyslexia.

I don't think we should worry about trade offs. I think we should learn about what people can and can't do and why that's important. I agree, if the kid can't spell, it shouldn't be a problem if they can make themselves understood.

However, our pedagogical system is such that we want to offer one curriculum for many people. Writing happens to be a big part of that, and it's hard to measure aptitude when you're struggling to write. We also really love testing, and spelling errors are a really easy thing to grade. It doesn't really matter what we should have, certain issues are going to continue to stand out until we fundamentally change how we teach. And I don't mean relax our standards, I mean each child would have to be taught to their own capacity individually, and that's currently unreasonable.

I don't know if I agree. The thing is, what Newegg is doing, especially by publicizing it is to tell trolls to avoid Newegg.

That's great for Newegg, but it means that future trolls will skip them, and just go after the startups and small businesses that don't have the resources to fight a lawsuit on principal.

I'm not saying that what Newegg is doing is bad, or even that it doesn't help. I'm just saying that the publicity that they are seeking for it might end up working out well for them by getting people to stop suing THEM, but won't work well to get people to stop suing other, smaller businesses.

If a patent troll were to sue you for something you've implemented, and you knew that Newegg implemented it too, you'd have a difficult time getting Newegg to fund your defense I think. Unless the troll sues Newegg, nobody's going to help you out. If the trolls just avoid Newegg, they can still get their payout.

Stress hormones take time to leave your body, and they keep you awake. When you are frustrated that you can't sleep, that creates stress, which makes it harder to sleep. When you think about your stress of the day it creates stress too.

One big thing is to keep away from caffeine. Caffeine works essentially by slowing the rate that stress hormones dissipate.

You can't really do too much to speed up that process, so the best thing is to stop building more stress. If you have difficulty sleeping, stop trying after 15 minutes and take a break. Do something not very exciting or engaging. Then try again. Similarly do something that stops you thinking about your hard day, for me that's really easy to shut off and takes practice, but for you just try to find something that works, meditation, reading a book, writing, drawing, walking. Just avoid things that are going to build adrenaline like strenuous exercise or competitive video games.

The goal of the previous is to reduce the factors that keep you wakeful. The other side of the coin is that you can increase the state that makes you seek sleep.

Seek satisfactions. Take stock of your body, are you hungry? are you sore? are you dehydrated? do you need to go to the bathroom? Correct these things. They're easy, but you'll make yourself that much more comfortable, and at the same time you'll lower stress.

Take stock of your mind. What is your mind craving? Do you want stimulation? Do you want entertainment? Do you want to socialize? Do you want to relax? When you can, do these things.

This is going to make you feel satisfied.

Sleep crudely works in that there are some hormones that keep you awake, and some hormones that make you want to sleep. Wakeful factors are generally stress-related hormones, which are one of the things that we have most control over increasing, (it's easy to work ourselves up) but hard to decrease (they have a half life in our bodies and can't really be forcibly purged). Then there are restful factors that are generally satisfaction related, seratonin which is crudely a 'things are good' kind of chemical turns into melatonin which is crudely a sleeping factor. Others build up during the day.

Sleep happens when your pressure to sleep overcomes the stress that keeps you awake. I think that keeping that in mind lets you stay healthy.

I think there's a few things we can do in a pinch to help directly too though, but relying on these mean that there's something wrong that you're failing to correct. For instance, a bit of alcohol can be a great way to break the cycle of stress worrying about the day. This can allow your stress levels to drop and even after it's out of your system, you're out of that cycle of worrying. That might get you some better sleep and then you might have a less stressful day the next day.

Similarly, you could take something like melatonin, but again that's artificially taking the place of a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Again, if it's an occasional thing it might be helpful, but if it's covering for the fact that you're always working overly long in an unsatisfying environment and not getting time to yourself, it might be worth it to identify it and work to correct that issue.

That said, everyone's different, and everyone's bodies and brains handle things differently. For some people they might just not properly respond to a normal amount of sleep pressure and have insomnia. For them taking supplements might not indicate anything wrong with their environment, it might just be a quirk of their own personal condition.

But I think we should always look at ourselves first. Not because I'm against supplements, but because it's good to know if our bodies are telling us something. I don't have trouble sleeping, if I go through the process of trying to determine what I'm missing. Whether I'm craving some creative stimulation, or some mindless entertainment or whatever. But generally when I commit to bed I'm asleep within 15 minutes. However, sometimes I realize that there are some things that I need to do to be satisfied that are going to keep me up late. If I had a hard day, I know I'm going to need more time to recover from it, and trying to force myself to go to bed early is just going to make things worse.

I've fluctuated between being able to sleep easily and being unable to go to bed.

In the end the issue has always been satisfaction. If I feel satisfied at the end of the day, there's no resistance to sleep. If I am "missing" something to satisfy me, I follow that craving and keep myself up far too late. Sometimes that's stimulation, sometimes it's entertainment, sometimes it's relaxation.

Meditation 'cures' the issue for me too, but not really. The issue is that when I am in the state that keeps me from being able to sleep, I tend to put off trying to meditate, in the same way I put off going to bed. It helps, but the root of it is finding balance in my day.

Even through meditation if certain mental needs aren't being met, my mind will get forced off track. Sometimes I need more creative stimulation, sometimes I need to get lost in a good story, sometimes I just need to space out and let some background processes clean up.

My best sleep and wake cycle happened when I had a bit of a mental (hormonal?) boost after my daughter was born. It seems a bit funny, because most people complain about how they lose sleep with the baby needing to be fed etc. But for about 6 months everything just felt right, and at 9 or 10 PM or whatever, going to bed just felt right, like there wasn't anything else in the day that I wished that I could do. I'd wake up after getting enough sleep without an alarm at 6:30 or so, and my daughter was sleeping through the night.

Now that ultimate satisfaction feeling has kind of worn off, my daughter is 2, is pretty demanding of my time, and when I get home from work it's a constant stream of doing things for other people without an opportunity to attend to my own needs. Forcing myself to go to sleep at 9 more than a couple of days in a row becomes impossible just because by that point my body just says "Fuck you, you aren't sleeping, you have things I need you to do. Fun things. Or at least you better start looking for something fun."

And the more tired I am, the harsher that is. In general, my best successes come from getting enough rest in the first place. The more tired I am going into a day, the harder it is to feel satisfied by the end of it, and the harder it is to sleep.

To that end, I nap on the weekend to catch up on sleep. It's part of my schedule to the point that my wife expects it. No matter how rough the week is, by Saturday afternoon I'll probably have caught up.

The other thing I try to do is be cognizant of what I'm craving and feed that need. A lot of sort of wasted time can happen while you're frustrated that you want something but you're not sure what it is, or you avoid it for some reason. Maybe I've had an exhausting but not very mentally stimulating week and I've been playing a lot of video games. I might have previously tried to force myself to not play video games if I felt I was playing them too much, but that would lead to me procrastinating on anything else either, and then ultimately caving when it got late in the evening and playing anyways but playing too late. Now I might recognize that that's the kind of stimulation that I'm missing, and get it out of the way ASAP, which might be enough to let me get to bed a little earlier.

Waking up is easy when you actually sleep as much as your body wants, no alarm needed even. The real problem is getting to bed early enough that you consistently get to sleep as much as your body wants while still feeding those needs. If you have a mentally unsatisfying and draining day, and all you can do after you come home is cook, clean, and go to sleep in order to get enough sleep to get up for work the next day, you're going to find that soon you won't be able to sleep again, because your brain is kicking your ass for not meeting its needs.

What's funny is that I felt smug and self satisfied for getting the correct answer even though I watched that video when it came out.

Yes, in the book of large numbers, there is a page between 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,639 and 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,641 where it has in giant block type "This page left intentionally blank due to copyright request by the MPAA"