I actually encountered this pretty early in one of these user tuned GPT's in OpenAI's GPT store. It was called Sommelier or something and it was specialized in conversations about wine. It was pretty useful at first, but after a few weeks it started lacing all its replies with tips for wines from the same online store. Needless to say, I dropped it immediately.
Tangential, but I was once told a story that seems fitting here. It was told to me by a mechanical engineer who was educated at Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands.
He claimed that in the early days there was a lecturer or professor there that, at least in Eindhoven, was very important to his field of expertise. If I understood him correctly, this prof's ideas about engineering mechanical systems revolved around restricting the degrees of freedom as much as possible. A three legged table cannot wobble, but a four legged table can and usually does because it is overdetermined. In mechanical systems (for instance sensitive optical mechanics) reducing "wobble" is key. And the best way to reduce wobble is to make sure it cannot occur.
Here it gets interesting. My source claimed that this professor had laid down his ideas in a standard work in Dutch, which was never translated in another language, restricting its influence to Dutch mechanical engineers. He also claimed it is not a coincidence that Philips and later ASML took an early lead in designing optical systems.
Not sure if it is true, but an interesting story nonetheless.
This sounds like the principle of "designing for exact constraint". You learn about under-constrained and over-constrained typically in a strength and materials course in ME undergrad. An simple case of exactly constrained is a 2D beam with a pin/hinge at one end, and a roller support at the other. The pin removes the 2 translational DOF's and the roller removes the third rotational DOF. A beam with a pin/hinge at both ends is over-constrained and is "statically indeterminate" (or over-constrained), which requires you to use other techniques to find the stresses in that beam, such as principle of "virtual work", or some others I've forgotten. For more complex structures, there is a formula which has as its inputs the number of members, number of joints, type of joint, etc, and will give an integer output which will tell you over, exact, or under constrained. Although a 3 legged table will never wobble, they will more easily tip, and the surface of 4 legged table can be considered somewhat flexible, and provide an additional DOF that keeps the legs in good contact with an irregular floor.
> this prof's ideas about engineering mechanical systems revolved around restricting the degrees of freedom as much as possible. A three legged table cannot wobble, but a four legged table can and usually does because it is overdetermined. In mechanical systems (for instance sensitive optical mechanics) reducing "wobble" is key. And the best way to reduce wobble is to make sure it cannot occur.
This is how I was taught mechanical engineering (France, 2000-2005) and not a Dutch in sight.
Ah. I was looking for a time reference but the only one I could find was that Philips thing, which I failed to relate to a specific time period through a cursory search.
Tangential but interesting tidbit: Botulinum toxin messes with your motor neurons, which is bad news for your heart. For the same reason (but at lower dosage) it eases wrinkles and causes the infamous expressionless Botox look.
A corollary of this idea that also the bad stuff that you read leaves a trace, and not necessarily a good trace. To continue the food metaphor: like junk food there is junk reading and while it may satisfy some need it is all informational empty calories and transfats. Which brings up a subject I pondered many times: to go on an information diet. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.
Actually Dobelli was the one who got me thinking about this. I tend to agree with him, although eschewing all news is a bit too extreme to my taste. I tried scaling back my intake by switching from a daily paper to a weekly paper, but one has to have tremendous discipline to avoid the news of the day on the internet. Especially if the internet is your job, like it is for me.
Chiming in as someone who's been doing this. Haven't watched a TV news program since 2020.
The only thing in 4 years that I "missed" (which it turns out actually means "was delayed in finding out about to a degree that other people actively comment on it") was the recent escalations in the middle-east.
And even that I was only about 24 hours behind.
You really miss nothing, particularly with the amount of passive news we ingest via social media. (I also have a fairly minimal social media diet.)
Since the "good" stuff can also leave a bad trace, and there is nothing to measure (remember, it's there even if you don't remember it), how would you approach the diet composition?
one of the most popular things in modern society,'modern music' (whatever that means)is not different from 'junk food'.. 'Modern music' is to your brain what junk food is to your body! Modern music with its repetitive beats optimized to give you a brief 'dopamine' have a similar effect on your brain as junk food does on your body!! in the same way that junk food provides a quick burst of pleasure but lacks nutritional value, modern music offers instant gratification through repetitive beats and catchy melodies while offering little to no informational value to the brain . .... "junk food", "short videos", "porn" and "modern music" these things are all designed to give you a brief dopamine rush ;)
Tangentially, I would love to have something like this in which I can "program" my own breathwork routines (reps and sets including breath holds). Been trying various apps, but haven't yet found one that ticks all my boxes. (Tips welcome.)
I would also like to know! Breathwork is important and it'd be nice to follow some routines and also somehow track my breath during sessions or throughout the day
I was slightly older but just as fascinated. I knew some programming and it blew my teenage mind how they managed to cram all those universes inside a freaking C64. Mostly I just enjoyed the game.
Docking was bloody hard indeed. Luckily you could buy a Docking computer. It took me another few years before figuring out why it would play The Blue Danube waltz by Strauss. :-)
Tangential. A file lock is released if the locking process exits. This can be leveraged to make a poor man's semaphore that is automatically raised if the process exits. Slow but solid if you want to control the number of simultaneous crash prone processes that have access to a resource.
I am now reading _Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution_, Cat Bohannon's fascinating book on the female body from an evolutionary perspective. Only the first few chapters blew my mind a couple of times. Here is something she writes about liposuction:
> It seems that women who have liposuction on their hips and thighs do grow back some of their fat, but they grow it back in different places. [...] As it turns out, women’s fat isn’t the same as men’s. Each fat deposit on our body is a little bit different, but women’s hip, buttock, and upper thigh fat, or “gluteofemoral” fat, is chock-full of unusual lipids: long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, or LC-PUFAs. (Think omega-3. Think fish oil.) Our livers are bad at making these kinds of fats from scratch, so we need to get most of them from our diet. And bodies that can become pregnant need them so they can make baby brains and retinas.
> Most of the time, female gluteofemoral fat resists being metabolized. As many women know, these areas are the first places we gain weight and the last places we lose it. But in the last trimester of pregnancy—when the fetus ramps up its brain development and its own fat stores—the mother’s body starts retrieving and dumping these special lipids by the boatload into the baby’s body. This specialized hoovering of the mother’s gluteofemoral fat stores continues throughout the first year of breast-feeding—the most important time, as it happens, for infant brain and eye development. Some evolutionary biologists now believe that women evolved to have fatty hips precisely because they’re specialized to provide the building blocks for human babies’ big brains. Since we can’t get enough of those LC-PUFAs from our daily diet, women start storing them from childhood forward. Other primates don't seem to have this pattern.
> Meanwhile, we found out just a few years ago--again someone finally asked the question--that a human girl's fat may be one of the best predictors for when she'll get her first period. [...] That is how important this fat is for reproduction. Our ovaries won't even kick in until we've stored up enough of this fat to form a decent baseline.
