I've read a great deal of Russian literature old and modern, but I didn't much like this book. It was like an unplanned Salmon Rushdie novel, where the metaphors don't seem to add up to anything - very likely there was a lot of cultural reference in the symbology that went over my head - but still, just didn't get much pleasure from reading it.
I felt the same way. My wife and I each got copies of the book so we could read it together and were excited about it, given the rave reviews, but neither of us could get into it.
I think I would get a lot more out of it as part of a structured class or group discussion that could explain some of the cultural references and symbology, as you say.
Slight digression, but I’m trying to expand my productions of Russian literature for Standard Ebooks: I’ve produced some Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Garshin and Sologub so far. Was considering a Bunin or Leskov compliation next, but is there anyone slightly off the beaten path that I’m missing with a decent public domain translation?
"Super Intelligence" made a nice point that AI will likely be very stupid until it's suddenly very, very smart. I thought the AI worries I read about in the media were a bit hyperbolic till I read this book - it makes some good and sensible arguments as to how a human dangerous AI might come about. It doesn't claim general AI is necessarily very likely, but more that, in the event it does come about, it will be very sudden, very swift - it won't be the gradual curve of innovation and improvement we've been used to elsewhere - and so our time to react to it's birth and implications will be very short.
My business depends heavily on rich HTML editing (https://qwilr.com) - and I can't begin to explain how much time and energy and engineering resource we've poured into trying to improve that experience, and make it reliable across browsers.
We had an enormous leg up in that effort - the guy who built the Google Wave editor helped us design and build the core of our editor; even so, its been this massive thorn in our side. Its been months and we still haven't gotten our custom editor out into production for all users (just a beta testing subset at this point).
I recognise of course the myriad competing forces for engineering time on the browser vendors ("implement X new shiny API!") - but O how I wish they would agree upon / build a rock solid content-editable experience.
Been waiting for something like this, i.e. light-weight physics animations for ages. Similiar frameworks were bit too heavy weight for my purposes. Excited!
Another of my kind! I've been eating once a day for about 2 years now.
This is obviously just anecdotal, but for me, I certainly feel more mentally alert during a fasted state; though I wouldn't say I've been sick any more / less than other times in my life.
Friends think I'm quite bizarre for eating this way - but it just seems to work for me.
When do you eat that one meal of the day, and what does it typically consist of?
I've been doing something similar over the last few months - a very light breakfast, a solid lunch, and then no dinner - but for me, doing this was with the purpose of losing weight - which did happen, at the rate of just under 1 kg a week.
I eat dinner only, quite a lot for dinner and I can graze for the rest of the night. I like going to bed with a full stomach. I don't really get hungry during the day, drink plenty of water and exercise at 3:30, then I'm hungry after that. I eat most stuff, but keep pretty low on sugars, starchy stuff and eat more fat than most.
Friends also think it's a bit bizarre, but it works for me too and I'm used to it. Definitely feel more mentally alert - all the time, and don't get the after lunch tiredness anymore.
Whoa; So we've been working on our start-up, https://qwilr.com - for the better part of a year; with the notion of "Documents For The Web" as our guiding principle from day-dot.
However, there seems to be an issue on that page: on Win8.1 x64 and Firefox 32.0.3 I get constant CPU of between 25-60% when it's loaded (I'm on a i7 Haswell CPU with 6GB RAM, and I see my RAM usage creeping up by about 1kB every couple seconds as well).
On Chrome 37.0.2062.124, I see the RAM usage creeping up in the same way, but CPU is low.
