I started watching the video linked at the top and the first anecdote is about Elon Musk using first principles to determine he could be rockets cheaper than current companies. He compared $130m to the price of raw materials of a rocket at $2m. But isn’t that comparing apples to oranges? And the exact thing that would get you in trouble when doing back-of-the-napkin estimates. That is, $130m is how much rocket companies at the time were _charging_ NASA for rockets, not how much it actual cost those companies to build.
Yes this was my thought when he implied not knowing the proxy settings, or even that you must connect to a proxy, to get internet was a sign that someone “doesn’t know computers”.
It’s like a mechanic making a blog post complaining that people don’t know how cars work because they can’t change their oil or brake pads and somehow that’s a bad thing.
The examples he’s given are more like a driver not knowing how to turn the wiper on, changing the speed of the wipers depending on the amount of rain and so on.
Changing oil or brake pad would be like upgrading RAM in a machine which has easy slots for upgrading RAM (such as in many Windows laptops).
Edit: I’ve had a neighbor tell me that he doesn’t know how to change wipers in a car. So that would be another example.
Exactly. There are simply people who throw up their hands and say "I don't know." To things. No want or drive to explore further. Maybe they think it's beneath them. Maybe it's embarrassing to them to admit they don't know in any way that makes them appear vulnerable (the example where the kid kept clicking away the dialogue box that simply said there wasn't Ethernet plugged in).
There will always be these people. So it's up to designers of systems to cater to them because they will always be the norm.
But!
As a extremely fluid thinker and great troubleshooter I'll gladly take a more "dumbed down" OS with things hidden away that I can still access as long as the designers are making the changes because it makes computing easier for the entry level user. They really shouldn't have to know most of the things I do. Things shouldn't be released in a state where I need to draw upon arcane knowledge from the early 2000s or even the DOS era. People have lives and computers for some of them aren't their entire life... But computers are mine and that's ok.
I just started swimming with a local Masters group a few months ago and can definitely notice a difference in my mood if I miss a couple practices. I thought it was just my imagination but didn’t even think about the breath aspect of it.
My first job out of school was final test for a semiconductor in Phoenix that had a small fab in Gilbert. I remember we took a rabbit suited tour there as part of the new hire orientation, it was pretty neat. The one thing though that stuck with me is how much water a fab needs on a daily basis. I can’t remember the exact number, I just remember thinking how stupid it was to build fabs in Phoenix.
But then again, the amount of lawns and greenways in Phoenix compared to a place like Tucson, it’s pretty clear most folks in Phoenix don’t much care about water conservation.
I'm from Arizona and have thus wondered this and researched the perceived water dilemma myself. Fabs do need a considerable injection of water to start, but their systems are so advanced and their logistics so efficient that they end up reusing so much of it over time. Couple this with the fact that Arizona also has a great infrastructure already in place for water reuse and conservation. When Arizona had only 700,000 people in the 1950s, they used more water than they do now for 7,100,000 people. And it's still in the top 3 fastest growing states in the US (both by new relative to existing population, but also by total incoming population volume). Models also indicate that the once-in-a-century drought is coming to an end in the next few years, with huge rainfall amounts the last two years in the state.
As an Arizona native, occasionally my paranoia about living in a desert and simultaneously living through world wide climate change begins to really worry me.
Inevitably I come to a conclusion that is very similar to yours. Arizona is pretty low on priority for water from the Colorado River and does a great job with water reclamation.
That being said, I worry if I'm just believing what I want to hear
Though you need a lot more AC during the summer. Something solar could provide but until it's more ubiquitous most power would still come from fossil fuels.
It's like a swimming pool. It takes a lot of water to initially fill it, but then it's cleaned and mostly recirculated/reused. In 2020, Intel used less water per chip than they did in 2010.
> “Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”
Note to self: die in a way that keeps my brain intact for a few seconds after death.
They're just theorizing here. Generally that would be something to say to console someone, just like "They're in a better place". It could be just as likely that if the person had strong memories of traumatic experiences, they could be remembering them.
It seems likely to me it depends on the person dying.
If you always saw yourself as a victim, if you wallowed in the trauma and abuse that life gave you, then your final moments are likely spent remembering all that trauma and how shitty and unfair your life was, and convincing yourself you’re better off dead and gone far away from this world. A crude way to die.
One my fears is that as I am dying my brain will get stuck in a subjective time loop, in essence, the last 30 seconds will subjectively stretch out to a thousand years... but with only a handful of repeating feelings and sensations. What if due to other physical discomfort, your memories replayed are those of regret or other unpleasant sensations? (similar to a "bad trip").
Not too likely. Did you ever experience a moment subjectivity stretched a thousand years? If no, why do you think there is a special mechanics for the event of system shutdown?
If anything, any sensation or thought requires energy. Experiencing 1000x or 100000x more sensations in the same space of time takes 1000x/100000x amount of energy, and it's not like your dying organism has hidden last reservoir of energy to power your brain activity.
The poster wrote that he got assaulted by a football player, fell on the ground, and somehow hurt his head.
Then he met a girl, they got married after two years and then had a child. Another two years later they had another child. He also had a great job, and bought a house, where he lived with his wife and family for like 10 years.
One day he was sitting on the couch, looked at a lamp, and noticed that the lamp did not look right. The perspective was off. He stared at the lamp for three days. Then he realized that is not a real lamp. Nothing was real.
Then he woke up, still laying on the ground where he had hurt his head 15 minutes ago.
I think the distinction is the subjective perception that time has stretched out a thousand years. It's not that time has literally dilated, just that our "normal" perception of time has changed. Perceived time dilation occurs under certain drugs (to include those endogenous to the human body) and the OP thought has been something that has occurred to me (and others) as well. IIRC, the movie American Beauty suggests it in the last scenes.
Subjective perception still requires energy to percept. Thus, to perceive time dilation your brain needs more energy to process it, but there is no a source of such energy.
Fair enough, I see what you're getting at. But I think there is an important distinction: it's not the claim that actual perception goes on forever, but the subjective experience dilates to seem like it. It's quite a bit like the other discussion between the "easy" and "hard" problem of consciousness. You're speaking to the "easy" problem (how neurology correlates to subjective experience), where the "hard" problem is the measurement of how the actual experience feels to the observer.
There is still energy at the moment of death (e.g., your ATP doesn't instantaneously disappear), meaning for a few brief instances, there is still energy to perceive and during these instances, the subjective experience of time may differ from normal day-to-day experience. It's not to say perception actually goes on forever, but the subjective experience of time feels like it does (or, at least changes our normal perception of time).
I have always wondered if our last DMT moments were perceived as timeless. People imagine darkness but seem to forget that our minds reconstruct all of reality in real time. So you could conceivably live another life in your last moments.
I am afraid that the last few minutes of life will be like a confusing and disoriented nightmare. That has always seemed to me to be the most likely scenario as your brain is shutting down.
If its like psychedelics I don't think it would be. Which i think the initial parts could be similar since they decrease blood flow to the brain, seems the same as dieing? IME there is nothing to fear, fear (emotions in general) is a higher level concept and those seem to be the first thing fall apart. Thoughts about thoughts, self identity, are made up to make living and thinking easier.
my guess is you slowly transition to simple machine with sense inputs and outputs until it all shuts down.
Reading your comment gives me such an unsettling feeling. You nailed it. I think death is the ultimate form of discomfort. Our bodies refuse to let us die peacefully under most circumstances. They fight with every last breath and every last heartbeat, to keep going. And all the usual signals of comfort are gone, with one just left bare before the universe. Think motion sickness + nausea + all the other terrible feelings combined, and you cannot just give in, you just have to endure until you're gone.
Interestingly there are two David Lynch movies (Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) that can be interpreted as just that: someone's disorienting nightmare as they are dying.
> discovered rhythmic brain wave patterns around the time of death that are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation
There are other possibilities besides memory recall. It sounds a little bit like falling asleep, where there might be some thoughts, some stillness (meditation) and some dreaming.
I'm raising pigs for the first time at home and I'm having a similar dilemma with the slaughter date just a few days away. They're like 300lbs dogs- playing with each other, running to me when I come out (although this might be just because I feed them most times I go out there), friendly with the kids.
I think it comes from a viewpoint that all death is bad and all life is good. something I think is probably pretty culturally specific and kinda ingrained in me since childhood. I was raised Catholic with everyone around me believing that after you die you go to Heaven, but still family members dying was a tragedy, instead of say, it being a celebration since didn't they just get into eternal paradise?
But death isn't bad. It's actually necessary for life to continue. The circle of life, carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle, all that stuff. From that point of view, eating other animals is nothing. It's an efficient, and delicious, way of surviving and passing on genes. We're not above nature. We're in a closed system here that we can't ever rise above. Although with that point of view stuff like climate change takes on a different meaning. If we can't rise above nature then climate change is a natural phenomena even though it's accelerated by humans. Just like the Great Oxidation Event.
My dad had a similar dilemma I think, though he'd never admit it. He even named and spoke with every single one.
He enjoyed raising animals, but in the end just sold them off at auction rather than slaughter them himself. We'd still eat meat, but presumably not what was raised. He claimed there was more money in it, but I strongly assume he just couldn't bring himself to kill the creatures he'd raised.
I raise meat. At small scales, I cannot afford to eat any of it if I want to make any profit. Agriculture is completely rotten due to regulatory capture by Big Ag.
We rotated our evolution from genetics to memetics when we started this whole society thing. Society, culture, cars, concrete, skyscrapers and the internet are all as natural as termite mounds are. We are part of nature not above it. We do have more power to steer the great wheel of nature than most animals, and we have the power to understand the responsibility that comes with it. So yeah, climate change and the Anthropocene extinction are natural events, but collectively working together and stopping or changing the outcome of those events has just as much potential to be "natural" too.
Can't you apply the same logic to humans? It's just the circle of life to use humans for your own purposes, whether for slavery or eating. We are just part of nature.
I'm not trying to justify not acting on climate change. That original comment is really just a snippet of some internal thought trains I've had with myself after we decided to grow some of our own food- where the price of deciding to be a meat-eater is not hidden behind some shrink wrapped plastic. Specifically the argument that eating meat is natural- well where do you draw the line between rationalizing our behaviors as being natural for some actions and trying to elevate ourselves above our primitive selves for others.
I'm not a philosopher or anything. of course slavery is bad- if slavery is natural and I'm against slavery, does that eventually lead to me having to be vegan in order to be internally consistent? Maybe, but I'm still not ready to give up meat.
This is an off-the-cuff response so maybe I'm completely wrong, but I recently started baking sourdough at home with my own starter.
The starter is simply flour and water, but after a while of refreshing with new flour and water eventually the ever-present wild yeast and (good) bacteria start to grow really quickly.
I usually wrap with saran wrap and when the starter is really active the saran wrap expands a bunch. From what I understand this is the gas from the bacteria eating their way through the flour.
Could excess gas in humans be a similar situation? ie lots of gas means our microbiome is busy eating and farting a bunch. Which to me sounds like a good thing. Maybe not so good for those around you.
I’m hitting the paywall so I can’t read the article, but the headline reminds me of something Andrew Huberman talked about in one of his recent podcasts-
It’s a small segment at the beginning, about a recent study showing how fermented foods help decrease inflammation possibly through increased gut bacteria diversity.
