3beard

The source of all real insight is, of course, divinity. True understanding is not generated by the brain but rather received in the Plexus Solaris and then works it's way up to the brain, where it is turned into action, language or memory.

> I'm sure I would gain a lot by being able to shut my mind up at times

There is nothing much more to understand. The single best piece of advice I ever got came from an Indian guru named Muktananda who said "Meditation is not very difficult and meditation is not very easy". That is, you need to find a balance between trying too hard and not trying hard enough.

I'm wondering how many people in favor of legalization would actually like to see a pot shop in their own street. From my own experience in the Netherlands, these kinds of shops attract a sort of crowd that you would much rather avoid.

> The illegality pushes the price up;

You make it sound as if this is a bad thing. I'm having a hard time imagining what benefit will result from making a potent and fairly addictive narcotic cheaper and more available.

The idea that you can have a nice, clean, legalized marijuana business is just as crazy as the idea that you can have a nice, clean, legalized prostitution business. It will not happen. Some stuff in life is just dark as of itself, and karma is real.

Pot smokers make a big deal of legalization but seriously, have legality issues ever prevented anyone from acquiring the stuff? I think many people are focusing on legalization because they want to avoid the real question, namely what is your personal relationship with this potent narcotic. Are you in charge of it, or is it in charge of you?

> But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.

Quite the opposite. The problem is that there already too many assholes who make it their sole mission in life to maximize their monetary inflow. But the fact of the matter is that this world keeps running because millions are prepared to do their part for a very modest fee.

It's night and your driverless car is waiting in front of a red light. Suddenly you see a man with a shotgun walking up to your vehicle. How do you tell your driverless car to ignore the red light and get the hell out of there?

I'm fairly doubtful that the present state of AI is able to deliver a driving program that equals the skill of a competent human driver. Moving around requires a lot more understanding than is generally believed.

We had that book at home. I remember being totally daunted by the source code of the Star Trek program... that thing had literally HUNDREDS of lines of code!

I wish I could work myself up into some kind of indignation, but what I really believe is this: if you willingly submit yourself to the cesspits of human banality (i.e. Facebook, Tinder and all the likes), you pretty much deserve all the crap that will be unloaded on you.

A second way within the system is that people start to vote for politicians who are serious about privacy.

Young programmers can easily be guilted into working 60 hours a week because young smart people tend to be a little naive about how the world turns. My advice to junior programmers is "your recruiters/managers are probably more cynical than you think, understand you better than you think, and manipulate you better than you think".

I don't understand why AI eliminating jobs is considered a problem. If any job can be done by a computer program it simply means that humanity has outgrown this kind of work and that nobody should do that mindnumbing crap anymore. Let's forget that the word "computer" used to mean "guy who sits in an office of an accounting firm, and adds numbers all day long".