My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She lucid dreams very regularly, and she says she spends a lot of that time flying.
I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.
I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.
> Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream
There is a Peter Pan tendency, at least to my dreams. You know you can’t fly. But then you remember you have, and believing it’s true makes it happens.
That’s what I was getting at with the film-script effect. I’ll be in a bind and then realize that there “must” be a solution in a particular form, otherwise the dream wouldn’t make sense, and that sort of conjures that thing into existence.
Maybe fortunately, maybe sadly, the one thing I’ve not been able to do is conjure up lost loved ones. I’ll get a bunch of puppies who know my dog, but he just couldn’t show up, or I’ll get strangers or living loved ones who know my grandmother or best friend; they’re just constantly indisposed.
My first and really only experience with Kubernetes was a project I did about six years ago. I was tasked with building a thing that did some lightly distributed compute using Python + Dask. I was able to cobble together a functioning (internal) product, and we went to production.
Not long after, I found that the pods were CONSTANTLY getting into some weird state where K8s couldn't rebuild, so I had to forcibly delete the pods and rebuild. I blamed myself, not knowing much about K8s, but it also was extremely frustrating because, as I understood/understand it, the entire purpose of Kubernetes is to ensure a reliable deployment of some combination of pods. If it couldn't do that and instead I had to manually rebuild my cluster, then what was the point?
In the end, I ended up nuking the entire project -- K8s, Docker containers, Python, and Dask -- and instead went with a single Rust binary deployed to an Azure Function. The result was faster (by probably an order of magnitude), less memory, cheaper (maybe -80% cost), and much more reliable (I think around four nines).
Years ago, there was a TED Talk[0] from the guy that started Open Source Ecology[1]. The TED Talk was really cool, but I haven't really followed what they did. It sounded promising to have open-source technology for use in this space.
I absolutely love this vision. He's still working towards the goal. It seems that his vision has problems scaling up though. He seems to mostly still drive this himself.
> Car and Driver estimates that the vehicle will run at least $60,000. Ram’s gas-powered truck, meanwhile, starts at $42,000.
I don't know how much of this is attributable to truck culture, how much is newfangled tech, and how much is the changing landscape of capitalism, but this drives me nuts.
Until two years ago. The most expensive car my family had bought was US$20k, a then four year old CR-V. Last year, we bought a then two year old ID.4 at a little over $30k. That was a bit of a tough pill for me to swallow, but I wanted a vehicle with less maintenance than an ICE car and less fuel cost. Admittedly, than $30k will take a long time to recover (but electricity is certainly much cheaper than gas, especially today).
But a $60k vehicle? There is no way I'm going to rationalize that kind of purchase. I already said 'no' to that when Ford hiked the price of the Lightning and my only option was an upper-tier model around that price point.
Yeah, it's all well and good to say somebody doesn't know how to regulate their pace, and it's another thing for your manager to tell your team that you need to be using a squad of agents constantly. To have a weekly stand-up that is specifically and solely for the purpose of talking about your "AI wins" for the week. To be told that you will be evaluated on how much you're using AI for your job.
When your manager and your company regulate your pace for you with the understood threat that not using AI will risk your job, you don't really have much of an option.
I would say: not explosive. I've seen a decent number of setups, and I can think of three areas where you could be concerned with safety (not necessarily where you should be):
1. Most use propane burners (the exact thing you'd use for homebrewing which is already legal and safe, and also similar to what some large turkey fryers use) which can be risky, but some are electric (120v or 240v).
2. Stills are an open system insofar as there is a way for pressure to escape - if you're goofing things up, you might vaporize and not recondense your ethanol (eg, because you have the heat way too high and/or aren't doing a good job of cooling down the vapors), and it's possible for that vapor to start on fire. I've seen it happen, and it's certainly a spectacle but wasn't particularly dangerous.
3. The distillate itself (ie, ethanol) is usually pretty potent, especially the foreshots and heads. Let's say 70%+. Especially as it's coming out, it's still prone to evaporation, and you could have a combustible/explosive risk here, but I've never seen this to be an actual problem.
I think this is the right answer. I am frustrated by Copilot and by many aspects of AI, but to me it seems like straightforward branding: you use a Microsoft product, you want to use AI in it, you look for Copilot (name and/or icon).
To me, the issue isn't that they've named so many things 'Copilot' but rather that Copilot is in every goddamn product.
> The failure is in gov't making sure there's sufficient regulation to prevent monopolistic practises.
This may not be a problem inherent to capitalism, but it certainly is a problem caused by the capitalism we currently have (by which I'm specifically referring to the US, but it may apply more broadly elsewhere).
And the government's failure to adequately regulate the market is due to the right. The party that claims government doesn't work has repeatedly - for generations - run on this as their platform, and when in power, they ensure it doesn't work by continued regulatory capture and gutting of consumer protections.
I would think it's because of the staggering money they're making. According to Fortune[0]:
> Altman said on an episode of Uncapped that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.”
> Deedy Das, a VC at Menlo Ventures, previously told Fortune that he has heard from several people the Meta CEO has tried to recruit. “Zuck had phone calls with potential hires trying to convince them to join with a $2M/yr floor.”
If you're making a minimum of $2M/year or even 50x that, you can afford to live according to your values instead of checking them at the door.
I see you're treating Sam Altman as some kind of trustworthy source. Might it be possible that he's making that up -- of course, nobody will ever call him on it! -- and exaggerating the numbers to make his company and team look really good and ethical for not accepting such lucrative offers, or perhaps to make them sour on Meta for not receiving $100M offers?
I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream! Naturally, the first thing I did was start to fly. About five seconds in, I told myself, "Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream. I believe I woke shortly after, too.
I keep wanting to get back to it and try it out, but I'd love a more efficient way to get there instead of constant wakefulness checks and first-thing-in-the-morning journaling.
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