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Comparing stocks to Flo's is perfectly meaningful. It's often done when comparing, for instance, the price of a house to one's yearly salary.

That makes no sense. House price/salary is used to compare payment periods or affordability. The context is important. Share value and GDP are totally different things and there is no direct relationship.

I often have them append to notes, too, but also often ask them to deduplicate those notes, without which they can become quite redundant. Maybe redundancy doesn't matter to the AI because I've got tokens to burn, but it feels like the right thing to do. Particularly because sometimes I read the notes myself.


The study is based on 100 cells from one 74-year-old man. The follow-up study will involve 150 individuals. I hope there's a very wide age range among them. They describe much, maybe all, of the variation as error, but one could imagine some of the variation actually serving a useful purpose and therefore existing even in young people.


Isn't the effect largely an age + lifestyle effect? Mutations increase as one ages, and things like smoking increase mutations (as the Nature write-up mentions).


That is such a beautiful analogy that now I will read your other comments.


Very occasionally I run into a speed glitch in Emacs but not nearly enough to drive me away, given that nothing else can do all the stuff it does.


You list only academic positions. Has no popular software been written in it yet?


Naughty Dog used Racket and their own in house lisp (prior to that) to write their games.

Could be mistaken but IIRC Jak and Daxter was the first console game to have a fully streaming world and they achieved it using a technique inspired by their hot reloading dev setups


Arc was ported to Common Lisp last year, but before that was Racket.

And HN is written in Arc.

So does the website you're on count as popular software?


Six degrees of "Kevin..", I mean, Racket


Depression, lack of motivation, are functional. They kick in when you don't think your prospects are good, prompting you to step back and think. If you were sufficiently convinced grinding LeetCode was a good career move, you would be motivated. The fact that you're not suggests you should do some research rather than plowing ahead. What do employers really care about? What's the best way to convince them you've got it? Where do you fit in?


> If you were sufficiently convinced grinding LeetCode was a good career move, you would be motivated.

Motivation certainly doesn't work like that in my brain. Consistency in pursuing goals I know on paper are the right choice despite lack of motivation is the only way I've achieved anything.

If you can wed career goals with dopamine, that's wonderful! But I suspect you're extremely lucky.


It takes some competitiveness, and I'm not sure the level of neuroticism it brings (me) is worth it, but "Who are these assholes and what's so special about them" works for me most the time :D

Then there's "Oh jesus how terrifying and embarrassing would it be to not have a great answer" coupled with "The people I idolize the most work in theoretical CS".


This doesn’t work in Silicon Valley. He has to do leetcode.


It does if you're connected. I've seen many incompetent and under-skilled people given high-ranking positions in tech companies simply because they knew someone.


It’s not happening as an IC


Call me a slacker but 40 days a week really feels like too much.


It is when you factor in commute as well.


And after WFH became a thing, we realize that we really do need to factor that in.

You want me in the office every day? I have a one hour commute. Pay me for 9 hours. Or let me WFH, and pay me for 8.


Just have to reach 25x efficiency by using AI... So not a big ask in future...


But why does that feel like anything? I could write a program that concurrently processes its visual input and its internal model. I don't think it would be conscious, unless everything in the universe is conscious (a possibility I can't, admittedly, discount).


> But why does that feel like anything?

Anthropic principle: because it does. If it didn't feel like anything, it wouldn't. But it does, so it does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle


> But it does, so it does.

Explain the first part of this sentence.


More of "because you are a continuous chemical reaction that started 4 billion years ago". A bunch of legacy crap gets left around from the time before higher order thought when the brain - muscle interactivity was just based on feelings.

If we had all those animals, especially those around the time of the cambrian explosion to experiment on as they developed it would probably make more sense in the 'but it does' department. This is also why your math teacher wants you to show your work.


I have a feeling the response would be “read the latter”


> But why does that feel like anything?

Consciousness is an attention mechanism. That inward regard, evaluating how the self reacts to the world, is attention being payed to the body's feelings. The outward regard then maps those feelings on to local space. Consciousness is watching your feelings as a kind of HUD on the world. It correlates feels to things.


Sure, but that still leaves the mystery of how qualia is generated in a mechanistic manner.


Yes. Still perplexing to be thrown into the world. How is it that my individual experience is in this body but not another one? Etc


Just wait till you hear Geoffrey Hinton’s “little pink elephants” routine; it will all make sense then (it won’t). The mystery is almost rivaled by that other mystery of why some of us fail to be mystified.


> But why does that feel like anything?

Orchestrated objective reduction or just an emerging proeprty of:

Our 86 billion neurons, every single one deafeningly complex molecular machine with hundred million of hundreds of different receptor types, monoaminoxidae, (reuptake)transporters, connections to other neurons.


Appeal to complexity? I see this common pattern when science-minded people need to explain something that's beyond their reach.


Among others, this is a big reason I want effect systems to gain more attention. After having seen them, the idea that in most languages, the only option is that any function can do anything without keeping track of what it affects in its type signature is bonkers to me.


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