“One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you’ll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That’s how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin.”
Source: Life is Short
“On r/programming was this post called “How to C (as of 2016)“. It has some useful advice, but also some bad advice. I thought I’d write up comments on the topic. As somebody mentioned while I was writing this, only responsible programmers should be writing in C. Irresponsible programmers should write other languages that have more training wheels. These are the sorts of things responsible programmers do.”
“People born during the year of the Fire Horse are notorious for being bad luck. People born during a Fire Horse years are said to be irresponsible, rebellious, and overall bad news.
And for some reason, women are said to be especially dangerous Fire Horses. They supposedly sap their family’s finances, neglect their children, and drive their father and husband to an early grave.
This myth is so powerful that it seriously affects how people behave. Men might avoid marrying a Fire Horse, and families avoid giving birth to Fire Horse children.”
Source: The Curse Of The Fire Horse: Japan’s Ultimate Form Of Contraception – Tofugu
” […] Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University has discovered that the mystery goes even further. When Boyajian’s team studied the star, they looked at data from a Harvard University archive of digitally scanned photographic plates of the sky from the past century or so to see if the star had behaved unusually in the past, but found nothing.
Schaefer decided this unusual star deserved a second look. He averaged the data in five-year bins to look for slow, long-term trends, and found that the star faded by about 20 per cent between 1890 and 1989. “The basic effect is small and not obvious,” he says.”
Source: Comets can’t explain weird ‘alien megastructure’ star after all | New Scientist
This reminds me of the wirehead addicts from Larry Niven’s “Known Space” series.
Source: This Startup Gets You High On Dopamine, No Exercise Required – Futurism
“Tech firms that offer lavish perks to their staff do not do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They offer them because they expect people to work so hard that they will not have time for such mundane things as buying lunch or popping to the dry-cleaners. As Gerald Ledford of the University of Southern California’s business school puts it, they are “golden handcuffs” to keep people at their desks. Some of the most extravagant perks are illusions: “take as much holiday as you like” may really mean “take as little as possible, and as much as you dare.” Some have vaguely sinister undertones: might the option for women to freeze their eggs end up becoming the expectation?”
After many fits and starts (and sitting on this domain name for years), I’m choosing 2016 as The Year Brian Gets Serious About This Blog Thing.
Instead of annoying friends and family on Facebook with my obsessive posts about the robot apocalypse, now they’ll have to come here to examine my neuroses. Other than journaling about humanity’s impending doom, I intend to write about my school learnin’s, food fixin’s, and life in the Cool Gray City of Love.
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I’ve interviewed hundreds of aspiring developers over the past several years and heard echoes of the same story again and again. My goal for this post is that you approach the learner’s journey with both eyes open and enough of a plan that you can avoid the common pitfalls of those who have come before you.”
“This underlying quandary—attempting to define “thought”—is sometimes referred to as the hard problem, and the results of understanding it called strong AI. People engaged in commercial AI remain sceptical that it will be resolved any time soon, or that it is necessary or even desirable for practical benefits. There is no doubt that artificial intelligences are beginning to do very meaningful work, and that the speed of change of technology will continue to shunt things along, but full-blown sentience still seems very far-fetched.”
“… that nasty little green oven mit Yoda is pretty much, inarguably, the most evil figure ever in the history of any human mythology. I have defied folks to name one time when he says or does anything that is indisputably wise. The trail of destruction that follows him and every decision that he makes is inarguable and overwhelming.”
Source: Yoda Is Dead but Star Wars’ Dubious Lessons Live On – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus
