The compound and the dose are predictably the same for me, but varied between them. Low dose shrooms: One with nature, universal love, watching everything alive breath. Mid dose shrooms: I become an aztec snake, get geometry, structural universe. High dose shrooms: Past life journeys and childhood memories. Low dose acid: lo-fi geometric one love reality. Mid dose: reality is electric, seeing/feeling the "walls of reality". High dose: electric, electric, what is this thing, synthetic geometry is reality? Everything looks like electricity. 2cb low dose: saturation on 3000%, everything is the light it should be and reveals itself as such. mid dose: opposite of ego death maybe? super embodied, no fractal stuff etc, but more looks like a "rubber" reality. High dose: for me not visual or auditory, very physical almost... physical hallucinations? Melting into things, becoming them etc.
The list goes on, but it's interesting how different yet the same they all kinda feel... guess that tracks given what are actually limited variables.
Or 300 chances! First homo sapiens was born around 300k years ago, and their culture rose and declined many times in many places. Around 40k years ago it did start to "monotonically accumulate" though.
You're probably going to get downvoted, but the reality is it's a valid question.
Just as apparently sulfur emissions from global shipping fleets helped offset some warming and eco-friendly fuel actually caused problems, the climate is complex, and there are definitely going to be the collision of interesting trade-offs.
Unfortunately, most likely, the answer is there won't be anything beneficial here. Remember, the key here isn't average global temperatures, but rather the temperature range. Life likes a temperate climate in a narrow range of degrees. Not just humans, but agriculture too.
If you lower the winter temperatures by 10 degrees, and raise the summer ones by 10, your crops still die either from the frost or from the fire. And humans likewise either freeze on the street or overheat in the sun.
This is the main thing climate change denialists can never seem to grasp. It's not the specific temperature numbers, it's the SPEED at which it's happening. Humans, in their current biological form, have been around for a million years, and survived much larger climate swings. But...the climate also changed slower. And they migrated. And they still almost didn't make it several times, barely surviving.
A world where hundreds of millions of people from the indian subcontinent are trying to escape murderous heat one season while tens of millions of people in Europe are freezing in the winter, and putting up walls to protect what they already have, is not one where humanity thrives.
In the long term we'll probably be fine. A few billion will die. Demographics and politics will shift. The human spirit will persevere, and we'll innovate our way through and adapt to a new world.
But it might take a century and our children and our children's children will not be better off than us.
There is a whole world out there, full of people who call Wi-Fi the internet. Nearly all of them do many things better than you, and most of them wouldn't treat you with contempt just because you find small talk difficult, can't swim or can't dress well on a tight budget.
Think about what kind of image your present to them and if it's really how you would like them to see you. Just honestly.
I'm loving the new programming. I don't know where it goes either, but I like it for now.
I'm actually producing code right this moment, where I would normally just relax and do something else. Instead, I'm relaxing and coding.
It's great for a senior guy who has been in the business for a long time. Most of my edits nowadays are tedious. If I look at the code and decide I used the wrong pattern originally, I have to change a bunch of things to test my new idea. I can skim my code and see a bunch of things that would normally take me ages to fiddle. The fiddling is frustrating, because I feel like I know what the end result should be, but there's some minor BS in the way, which takes a few minutes each time. It used to take a whole stackoverflow search + think, recently it became a copilot hint, and now... Claude simply does it.
For instance, I wrote a mock stock exchange. It's the kind of thing you always want to have, but because the pressure is on to connect to the actual exchange, it is often a leftover task that nobody has done. Now, Claude has done it while I've been reading HN.
Now that I have that, I can implement a strategy against it. This is super tedious. I know how it works, but when I implement it, it takes me a lot of time that isn't really fulfilling. Stuff like making a typo, or forgetting to add the dependency. Not big brain stuff, but it takes time.
Now I know what you're all thinking. How does it not end up with spaghetti all over the place? Well. I actually do critique the changes. I actually do have discussions with Claude about what to do. The benefit here is he's a dev who knows where all the relevant code is. If I ask him whether there's a lock in a bad place, he finds it super fast. I guess you need experience, but I can smell when he's gone off track.
So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually.
What junior devs will do, I'm not so sure. They somehow have to jump to the top of the mountain, but the stairs are gone.
my solution has been somewhat similar... i only smoke once a week.
in my experience, weed 'flips the world' so that 'stuff' is no longer 'shut out'.
if you've lots of issues you'd rather not deal with, you're probably in for a bad time... depends a lot of course - where are you, how you feeling, who you with, do you trust them, the weed itself,
to me the experience is like a waking dream, where a very raw version of you comes out...
but that only works if you take massive breaks (1+week?) in between. give time for the 'stuff' to build up again.
excellent for meditative activities, but incredibly difficult from a self control perspective
> surprised there aren't any comments whining about this
This is called a totem.
You’ve invented or learned a caricature to rail at which may have once been based in truth, and from time to time again approximates it, though never with the fidelity you ascribe to the original. It’s commonly done by sides in partisan polarisation, the most common being a two-mode system that pillories its picture of the other.
If you picture the person writing the totem comment, you probably have a clear idea of what they do for a living, how they dress, et cetera. Totems are why both deification and demonisation work; they’re a hack of the human ability to visualise and project.
We already get 82% calories and 63% proteins from plants, but animal agriculture takes 80-90% of all agriculture lands, and is a leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss and droughts.
"Plant-based replacements for each of the major animal categories in the United States (beef, pork, dairy, poultry, and eggs) can produce twofold to 20-fold more nutritionally similar food per unit cropland. Replacing all animal-based items with plant-based replacement diets can add enough food to feed 350 million additional people, more than the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food loss."
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable
A global shift towards healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.
I hesitate to comment on these threads, because no one wants to take the risk of saying anything adverse. "What if I say something bad about therapy? would this cause someone else not to see a therapist and end up dying?"
But I will say this. As people are becoming more lonely in a crowd, as they can't silence the noise in an empty home, as they can't find someone to listen to them even when they surrender, therapy will be the only outlet. You often see the cases in japan where people rent friends.
It's not that therapy is bad (it's pure luck if you find the right therapist), it's that there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it.
I love the engineering behind Voyager 2. Is there a good book or documentary that folks here on HN recommend to go deep on the various engineering pieces behind Voyager ?
It's staggering that as the richest and most powerful nation ever to exist, we've put ourselves in a position where we can't safely transport chemicals, we won't provide comprehensive information about contamination to those affected, we either can't or aren't able to put any kind of comprehensive cleanup plan in place, and we can't find trustworthy parties to enact that cleanup.
This isn't just a politics problem - the entire investor and management class at the railroads has been gambling with lives for years and the incinerator company's clearly doing the same thing, and we can't even agree as a country that that's bad, because we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so."
The cult of the MBA has gutted this country and we've let it do so because we gave up any sense of actual civic or national pride or any sense of society or mutual obligation and can't get through a conversation about how we'd like society to be without someone saying it's going to cost money and is therefore a nonstarter or that we've got no right to tell them they can't render the land they happen to live on toxic for the next thousand years or wipe out a species they don't like.
I think you're jumping into the technical bits right away without thinking through requirements/features. Maybe we (the royal 'we' as in all of humanity) shouldn't have a public town square? When you build something to have marginalized voices be heard you are also including all marginalized voices. The MarginalizedVoice super object has EqualRightsForSquirrels as well as HatefulRacistUncle child objects. There are very valid points, that people don't like to hear, about how the concept of someone/group choosing what MarginalizedVoice gets heard and what doesn't isn't fair. If the basis of a platform is "public town square" you're going to have to deal with all MarginalizedVoices.
Content moderation (incl comments) doesn't scale so don't build something with public town squares. That's only a feature platform builders want in order to sell advertisements. If the thought of not having an ad-driven platform leads you to "users won't pay for it" then maybe think of a platform users would pay for or some other way to have it be sustainable.
> I have utter disdain for real-life people, who would miss no opportunity to destroy our lives, such as borrowing a trillion and endebt us for generations just to fuel a stay-at-home policy that destroys social links and physical health, and more generally play the class warfare game (I live in France)
A practice that’s been good for my psychological health is to imagine how a good person would come to hold the ideas I disagree with. I’ve never failed, unless the subject is someone really beyond the pale like a mass murderer.
You can come up with multiple explanations, that range from “they are ignorant” to “they know something I don’t” and everything in between.
To try to engage with the example you gave, I’d imagine this about the people who support the lockdown:
1. They believe covid is extremely dangerous, and they want to protect people from dying. They don’t like that the lockdown is an inhibition of personal freedom, but they believe it’s justified due to the extreme circumstances (kind of like how it’s OK for the government to force people to evacuate their homes if the area is about to be flooded). Probably if covid had a 5% death rate, you’d support lockdown too. A poll found that over 35% of US adults believe covid has a death rate of 5% or more! [1]
2. They may think that the economy can just go back to the way it was before when lockdown ends, the government makes the money, and it can just pay people enough to buy what they need for now.
3. They may understand the economic cost of the lockdown, and they know it will make life more difficult in the future, but they believe the sacrifice is worth it (kind of like how the government went into debt in WWII).
I’m not saying these people are right about the facts - I’m just saying their motivations are not evil. You and them both want the world to be a good place, you are just working from different premises that lead to you different ways of achieving that.
Now, if you want to be some kind of political activist, you can go through life trying to convince people they are wrong about things. That could be noble.
But if you are just trying to enjoy life, it’s good to be able to walk around and look at the people you meet and have positive feelings about them. It will make you happier, and it sounds like that is something you want.
The model I apply to, basically, everything about the past twenty years, is to compare it to the Industrial Revolution. I believe we're in the midst of the Information Revolution now and while history doesn't map to the present 1-1, it comes pretty close.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, there was relatively little policing of the natural environment. Aside from property laws, once you were out in nature you could basically do what you wanted. That worked tolerably well, because the scale of what a single person could do to that shared environment was relatively limited.
But with industrialization came massive force multipliers. A single company could cause absolutely devastating pollution to the environment. They could reap all of the rewards while foisting all of the externalities onto everyone else.
I believe we're now in an era where we have to think of the information environment that we live in as a precious commons shared by us all. We still absolutely must have freedom of speech—everyone should have an inalienable right to visit and participate in that information environment. At the same time, no one should have an unbounded right to cause large-scale pollution that environment in ways that harm others, which is exactly what disinformation is.
Good laws are rarely all or nothing. We need legislation that balances individual rights and collective rights.
> really curious if any of the downvoters could mention their rationale.
Not downvoting, but I used to be a huge "UFO fan" around the ages of 8-11. I read book after book, all breathlessly outlining the "reams of evidence" available. I watched documentaries on television, saw UFO topics covered in the newspaper, and I had a shelf full of books all in agreement. Must be true, right?
Except that even as young child I started noticing that all of the photos were blurry. All of them. Focus dispels UFOs just like turning on the light dispels the monster in the bedroom.[0]
Years later I read a book by a "UFO fan" who remained a fan into his adulthood, and got the opportunity to research them as his day job. He was looking into crop circles and cattle mutilation specifically around the time of their peak popularity[1] but as a result of his investigations he rapidly converted from a life-long believer to a sceptic.
Why?
Because he noticed that that evidence of UFO visitations respected state borders. Specifically, there are state-level laws[2] in the USA related to things such as insurance claims related to dead livestock. Cows are stupid, eat poisonous or dangerous things all the time and die. One dead cow represent a loss of hundreds to thousands of dollars. Many dead cows could be a serious financial problem, so there is insurance available for lifestock. The policies apply differently in different jurisdictions, and some would cover "unexplained external causes" such as little green men anally probing cattle for mysterious reasons, and in some areas the policies would not cover this. Unsurprisingly, cattle mutilations and the associated evidence like crop circles would only turn up in areas where the insurance covered it, and never in areas where it wouldn't, even if that was across the road in a paddock owned by the same farmer. Odd huh?
One theory -- that sells books -- is that little green or grey men visit our planet across interstellar distances and amuse themselves by cutting holes into cattle. But not low-value livestock like chickens. Just the high-value ones, like cattle.
The other theory is that selling books and making insurance claims is the only reason anyone talks about any of this seriously. That people see a dozen dead cows, have nothing they can legitimately put on an insurance claim, and are staring down the barrel of financial ruin. What to do? Just drive the tractor in circles over still green crops, bending them down, call Janice from the local news, claim that the circle is impossible, and point at the dead cows you cut a few times with a sharp box cutter a few hours before the news crew turned up. Suddenly, there's "evidence" that you can put on an insurance claim and your farm will survive until the next year.
> many official and declassified sources
The word "declassified" makes UFO fans excited because it's got all the elements of an official secret that they uncovered through their intelligence and sleuthing. It's the same addictive narrative that made QAnon popular.
Most (all?) military observations of potential enemy aircraft are classified! That means nothing. The value of these observations isn't particularly higher than anyone else's either. If one young pilot sees a splotch on the IR feed that "moves oddly", people run off with that and claim that "government has evidence of UFOs!" This recent one is the best example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_M0hLlJ-Q
At first blush that looks exactly like an optical effect such as Glory [3] that appears to move only because the observer is moving with respect to nearby clouds. The background is moving, and Glory remains stationary relative to the observer because the Sun doesn't move in the sky like the clouds do. It "accelerates away" because the IR camera is on a gimbal on the tip of a Javeline missile and reached its limit. It stops tracking the "target" which then seems to "shoot away" in the picture.
This and similar "evidence" is about as good as it gets. I've never seen anything even remotely convincing. Nonetheless, book after book just collates and rehashes the same evidence, including pictures long since discredited[0] as clear fakes. The authors get paid and can feed their families. The readers get to be entertained just like I was when I was a kid.
Everyone gets something, but we don't get to invite visiting alien dignitaries to speak at a UN convention in much the same way that Air Traffic Control doesn't schedule flights differently on Christmas Eve to avoid hitting Santa.
[0] Several famous UFO photos that adorned book covers published by legitimate print houses turned out to be chandeliers that the photographer had thrown into the sky like a frisbee and then quickly snapped an out-of-focus picture of. On commission for the print house.
[1] Speaking of which, isn't that odd all by itself? Crop circles weren't a "thing" until they were. And then vanished again. While they were popular, like a meme on Reddit, there were all sorts of interesting variations. Similarly, the aliens themselves evolve just like bad Fifty Shades of Grey fan art. Some traits are never mentioned by any "witnesses" until after a particular story, and then it's a common trait many people claim to have seen.
[2] I read this over 15 years ago so I might be confusing a legal boundary with a corporate "coverage area" boundary in a contract, but the gist of the story is the same either way.
The list goes on, but it's interesting how different yet the same they all kinda feel... guess that tracks given what are actually limited variables.