CodeDiver

So glad you're open to solo-founder questions, thank a bunch. In your experience, do you think that you might just have unreasonably high standards for partners compared to people who have successfully matched with cofounders?

Would love to share the climb with a co-founder. Outreach efforts have put me in touch with smart, creative, educated people in the Bay Area. But to my surprise, I just haven't met a truly gritty, determined person yet. Started projects with the people I found anyways. It always feels like playing tea party with stuffed animals. Not a good experience for them, or me.

These lovely people live pleasant, balanced, healthy, entertaining, lives. Bless them. Nothing wrong with that! But they don't have crazy drive. Don't wanna run circles around a partner in any project. Want a cofounder to be my equal or superior in energy and persistence, that we can chase each other's effort, enhance each other's growth/success, and the project's growth/success.

I don't want a pampered, entertaining life. I want to struggle, grow, learn, achieve. Not sure how to find partners to share those values with. Should I make sure that partners share those values, or are these criteria unreasonable/misguided?

Flying solo for now. Later, maybe self-made success on a larger scale/stage may draw special people to me, so I don't have to actively search. A co-founder isn't a necessity for me, just a highly desired and recommended luxury, if I can reasonably get one. When a commenter above said, in paraphrase, "Going solo isn't impossible, you just need to be four times better", I just think "Fine, I'll work to get there."

Am I doing it wrong? Right? Sound familiar or was your co-founder-less situation different?

Giving yourself permission to be impulsive is a habit. Self-control is also a habit.

Intellectually, you already know these internet discussions don't matter to your life. The other advice in this thread about thinking more reasonably isn't gonna help much--you're already reasonable. The problem is that your impulsivity is a habit you've built up by repetition. Habits can override reason, if you're not attentive.

So pay attention to your habits. Frame your problem as a bad habit, so you can treat the habit. Define the good habit you'd like to live by. Work up the initial determination to break your bad habit. Then arrange the next couple weeks of your life around reinforcing/maintaining the new habit through repetition.

With repetition, doing the right thing gets easier.

Good point. From a niche advertiser's point of view, this is better than regular TV. TV shows have product placement, but rarely revolve entirely around a product. But every "Let's Play" on Twitch is, on one level, an extended, entertaining commercial e.g. an infomercial. Which would make Twitch a massively interactive 24/7 infomercial, like QVC for gamers. To the eyes of Amazon, the internet's store for everything, that must be very attractive. It also raises the question of whether you could have a Twitch for other categories i.e. a 24/7 niche infomercial network that people actually want to watch.

What questions were they asking?

Laws have unintended consequences. It's good to slow down the creation of laws and weigh tradeoffs. Laws are intended to be solutions. But the cure may prove worse than the disease.

"The Story of Philosophy" by Bryan Magee "The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant

These are what you're looking for. You won't regret either of these.

Thanks for sourcing. I guess it's not your fault for reading the author's anthropomorphized metaphor and thinking "homunculus", particularly if you have no familiarity with Crick and Koch's project. In any case, while relating one anthropomorphic metaphor to another is not bad analogy making, the analogy doesn't correspond in fact to what Crick and Koch are looking for. They do believe consciousness has a unified quality, where the input of disparate system form a gestalt. The problem is explaining how all input from so many systems coordinate together. Functionally, there must be a juncture to make coordination--hence the "conductor" metaphor--but how, where? As it happens, there is a piece of anatomy that looks like a physical nexus--the claustrum.

The claustrum is suspected to be a key junction that ties together different systems, making coordination between systems possible. This possibility is suggested by the claustrum's seemingly unique anatomical situation--so many other regions run into it like no other.

If the claustrum is a junction connecting myriad systems, enabling coordinated forms of mental life, possibly consciousness, then in a sense, it could really be a key to consciousness.

Calling this critical juncture key to consciousness is not saying the claustrum is a theater where a homunculus watches everything come together, or that consciousness happens in the claustrum.

Consciousness is a state of the brain where disparate systems interact, and the claustrum may be key to explaining that coordination in consciousness.

Borrowing the car analogy in the article, the ignition system isn't where a car "runs". Nonetheless, the ignition is key to explaining how everything that comes together to put the car in a running state. I think people are misreading what the investigator meant when he suggests the claustrum might be key to explaining the conscious state.

Am I wrong here? Somebody quote me the passage I'm missing where the investigators say the claustrum is where consciousness happens, rather than just saying that the claustrum may be key to understanding how consciousness happens.

Toggling big switches vs smaller switches. Same idea, different scale, different "stick".

What is/are the appropriate scales to study brain function at? Quarks? Molecules? Brain regions? Which ones? All the above? None? We need to know the answer in advance before pronouncing a method "crude", or conversely, "too precise", by some criteria.

We don't know the answer to the scale question but poking "areas" to build up a fuzzy picture of regional function at first approximation is getting us there.

Would the knowledge gained from knock-out/stimulation experiments be more fine-grained if the investigators already had a fine-grained understanding of what they were studying and thus, the cleanest way to study it? Yes.

But breakthroughs are not made where investigators know what they're doing. Breakthroughs are made where nobody knows what they're doing--often crudely, frequently accidentally. The history of scientific advance is messy. Significance of results doesn't map neatly to sophistication of methods/tools.

I wholly agree that neuroscience has a long way to go. But to me that doesn't diminish the achievements of neuroscientists pushing us there, using whatever ethical opportunities available to them.

If you want to keep the assumption that consciousness and the physical world share causal interactions, consciousness must be a physical thing. How could consciousness and the physical world interact causally if consciousness is not part of the physical world?

The reason physics can't define consciousness isn't that consciousness isn't physical. Consciousness is just part of the world our current physics, and really our current philosophies, haven't developed satisfactory means to address.

Many physical phenomena, now explained by physics, were once unexplained by previous iterations of physics. Previous physics were just incomplete, until people came along with new ideas to expand what phenomena physics could explain. Doesn't mean those phenomena weren't physical things before physics evolved ways to understand them.

When you say you've just started learning to code for building web apps, do you mean you

(a) already know HTML/CSS/JS and now want to learn a server side language, or that (b) you are going from no experience straight to server side programming?

Regardless of whether you learn Python or Ruby, there is practically no way around having to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for building web applications. You will be reading/writing HTML/CSS/JS in your Python or Ruby projects.

So if you have no prior HTML/CSS/JS experience, I would prioritize those skills first. Otherwise you will learn Ruby or Python then be disappointed to discover that browser technology is a giant hole in your skillset, impeding you from doing the useful things that got you to start learning in the first place.

You can do great things with just HTML/CSS/JS, especially since the browser environment supporting dynamic client-side applications in JavaScript has become so powerful.

Then when you're finally doing something that genuinely requires that logic and/or data be hosted on a server, managed by server-side tools, your knowledge of browser technologies will provide a solid foundation for stepping into that ecosystem.

If you already know HTML/CSS/JS, Ruby vs Python comes down largely to personal taste and whimsy. There are indeed differences, but the differences don't matter till much later, if ever. The greater danger is not that you will learn a language that isn't future-proofed, but that you could waste far more time picking what to learn than you ever might have wasted by picking the wrong language, especially since there isn't truly a wrong choice between two great languages. The debate between them is largely a religious war.

Since you seem focused on web apps, and have already started learning Rails, stick w/ROR. You're on a great path and your current choices won't hold you back. Good luck.

PS If you're interested in learning HTML/CSS/JS, I am thinking of teaching these subjects to beginners (no charge of course). PM me with a contact if interested.