I think alcohol and tobacco use are primarily symptoms, not causes, of problems. They, along with depression, anxiety, ADHD, and other addictions, are strongly correlated with ACE (adverse childhood experience) score. As smoking has become taboo, other stimulants became more popular (adult ADD). I'd expect something similar if we restricted alcohol without solving the problems that lead to dependency.
Thanks. The implication seems to be that if you restrict the # of parameters so it's equal to intrinsic dimension, learning isn't possible, but it is possible with this random projections method. Wonder why. It seems like with both methods, the number of possibilities being explored is the same, but the higher-parameter model space is richer with solutions for some reason.
Meditation is a pretty broad term encompassing many different activities/intentions (though they all look pretty similar from the outside). In the studies I’ve read on the adverse effects of meditation, the style has a major influence. Due to historical accidents, vipassana is a common style in the West - I find this mind blowing, since it is probably the most likely to cause adverse effects.
As a long time meditator, my experience with vipassana is that it is the hardcore path, for those willing to risk crashing and burning to get to enlightenment faster. Techniques like mettā, tonglen, or dzogchen seem to be ~5-10x less likely to be associated with a psychotic event - which at that point, seems like it could just be about prior history [1]. It's worth mentioning that Britton, the academic meditation critic in the article is a co-author of this paper.
When I started meditating I also was introduced via Theravada based vipassana and eventually felt the need to give it up after having some strange things come up and also falling into the nihilism trap I think is common to hit. Thankfully years later I encountered Mahayana teachings and it clarified a ton for me, letting me restart my practice.
That’s all to say I think it’s important that people take it slow and get familiarized with the actual teachings to ground the experience. Jumping in to a 10 day, 10 hour per day training with little or no context is going to be seriously difficult. We have to understand that these practices come from places where the students wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar with the basics of the teachings. There would be at least a basic cultural understanding of the point of meditation (an actual spiritual practice) as opposed to a kid from the US that hears it makes you feel better and might make you more productive.
What you say about metta etc being less likely to induce psychosis than vipassana makes sense, Goenka retreats especially are super-intense bootcamps. Do you have a citation for the 5-10x figure? I can't find it in the Britton paper.
Meaning the whole "power struggle between branches of government" claim, which I referenced in a deliberately dismissive way because I really don't want to get into it. I'm more interested in trying to figure out how the Fed potentially buying up toxic securities via FOMC, instead of letting them blow up on their own, might affect the outcome this time.
I don’t understand how someone can say “this is the worst software I use daily” and then you say “you are wrong.” Maybe you use worse software than them? Also, you seem to implicitly default to comparing each piece of software to others in it's class; you’re grading on a curve. The parent comment is saying “of all software, these are the worst”, and you are saying “but other PM/VC/OS software is worse” which is different.
For example, git is the best version control software; it is also a disaster of a UX.
Your appraisal of Docker is also too generous, I honestly can’t tell if it’s sarcasm
When you don’t know what to say, better say nothing or I don’t know.
Instead it proceeds to list the best software in class used by the developers. It just sounds stupid to me.
Regarding Docker, I have this opinion because Docker was the trend for a few years, at every conference there was a hipster making a presentation about docker. So I think Docker made containers the cool topic and a lot of people started using containers because of that. And because a lot of people used it, new services/software started appearing around it.
Yes, Docker uses the existing kernel apis for containerization, but the value it added was publicity, ease of use and adoption for containers, not the core features
Not to nitpick, but wouldn’t Etherium Be the right cryptocurrency? I try to ignore it, but I remember that that’s the “smart contracts” one, so it could make the job contracts in such a way that if they are completed, payment is automatic or something?
How would the contract know that the job is completed? Ethereum contracts can only access events on the chain itself. There is no way to go out to the network and, say, ping the new Pi, because there is no way to cryptographically verify that this happened. So some off-chain server somewhere has to issue a command (with some private key) to the contract to say, "Yes, I checked that the work was done, you can disburse the funds". In which case you never needed the contract anyway and just could have sent the money directly.
