I'm just this guy, you know?
Joined July 2017
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started @m_ashcroft's course Expanding Awareness this week, will dump stray thoughts here. first, a little about why i was roped in so effectively by his article on coming off autopilot (expandingawareness.org/blog/…):
in describing the concept of presence as he means it, he gives the example "if a plane flew overhead would you notice?" but as someone who routinely gets distracted by things i see and hear and have to start my thought over, or ask someone to repeat themselves, i wonder if the ability to be present and the ability to actually have real conversation or even full, complex thoughts instead of passing ones might be mutually exclusive for some people. not refusing to believe i have the capacity yet or anything! it sounds really nice, just doesn't currently feel likely to be attainable
an early exercise involves recalling times that you find yourself "trying" (derogatory) and how that changes your body, and i can't think of any. this COULD mean i'm already great at this, but probably means i'm disconnected enough from my body that i can't tell when i do it
when i was diagnosed with ADHD (in the last few years, in my 30s), i was interested in learning more about it, so i picked up a book on it (unfortunately i can't remember the name and there are ~infinite ADHD books), and while a lot of it was relatable to my experience, the part that really fucked me up was about agency. to summarize the idea, it said if you're only responding to external stimuli without having the agency to choose how you respond to it, you're essentially removing your own free will. i had an immediate reaction, and immediately just KNEW
1. that this was true,
2. i had been doing it for years,
3. that it was a tragedy.
meds have helped immensely and i've learned a ton of different "coping mechanisms" that work with varying degrees of success at different times, but i've never really let go of the idea that you can accidentally relinquish your free will.
saw Three Musketeers a while back and was distracted by how sexy Oliver Reed was, and was surprised that I hadn't seen anyone else mention the same, thought maybe I was crazy. just saw The Devils and the first half of the movie is just about every woman wanting him. I feel better
This hardly seems fair - a completely reasonable question, and a direct @simonsarris quote
it turns out there's still a ton of good music being made, even to an insufferable music snob! so this is going to be a thread for albums that are sticking in my brain that arent decades old. though i have impeccable music taste my writing a holiday is limited so...trust me ig
not sure exactly what this goes under if not straight up "pop music" - i guess you could call it americana? it's not exactly country, and she's from LA so that's for the best. but it's unmistakably american. and just killer writing, great delivery
open.spotify.com/album/19cvo…
this is very cool, but it's impossible not to picture a sci fi story about AI that was left in space for hundreds of years and went crazy from the accumulation of random bit flips from radiation
Elon Musk says a chip for space should run hot, since raising the temperature 20% in Kelvin cuts radiator mass in half, and that a multi-trillion parameter model does not care about a few bit flips
“Well, I guess you want to design it to be more radiation tolerant and run at a higher temperature. So roughly, if you increase the operating temperature by 20% in degrees Kelvin, you can cut your radiator mass in half. So running at a higher temperature is helpful in space."
"There’s various things you can do for shielding the memory, but neural nets are going to be very resilient to bit flips. So most of what happens for radiation is random bit flips."
"But if you’ve got, like, you know, a multi-trillion parameter model and you get a few bit flips, it doesn’t matter. Heuristic programs are going to be much more sensitive to bit flips than some giant parameter file. So I just design it to run hot. And I think you pretty much do it the same way that you do things on Earth, apart from make it run hotter.”
is that a thing? like do other people read that and think "ah yes of course, the original beauty fluid"?
what age are people picking for the 9 albums thing? I feel like I could pick a different 9 for every couple years from 6th grade through college
earlier today I read up on the Asian interest in blood types and what they supposedly represent. learned that type A corresponds with being uptight, serious, perfectionist, planner etc. so I wondered if maybe it was related to the western understanding of type a personality. WELL