criticaltinker

In the spirit of curiosity and playfulness I would like to respond with a bold claim:

The distinction between self and other is simply a concept. Certainly useful in many situations, but ultimately just one perspective - one tool at the mind’s disposal.

One could reasonably argue this is the central teaching of Buddhism. Alan Watts helped articulate these ideas to western audiences in many of his lectures:

“You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things that happen to us rather than things that we do. In other words, we don’t assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape.

If you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you’re doing, then you become aware, also—in the same moment and at the same time—that you’re not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun.”

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

- Alan Watts

I’ll bite. The data/graphs look suspicious and convincing enough, so WTF did happen?

I was hoping for an answer but alas there was none. Anyone have plausible theories? Is this an unexplained mystery or just an artifact of S curve growth?

JS engines have had many serious vulnerabilities in their JIT optimizers, it’s not myopic at all and is a well known technique in the industry.

I agree that some folks aren’t executing untrusted ruby code so they wouldn’t have to worry about this - but how many PaaS/SaaS products out there are? Or how about third party dev tools that are blindly downloaded and executed on local workstations or CI pipelines?

Adding to this great comment with my own experience at work where we extensively use signal processing and time series compression algorithms to visualize large amounts of biological signals in the browser.

WebAssembly is less than 10%-20% slower than native code in our benchmarks and tests for algorithms like fast wavelet transform and bit packing.

WA allows us to aggressively optimize ahead of time when compiling, and be less sensitive to JS engine performance pitfalls around JIT optimization and garbage collection.

Interesting! Now what is the correct pronunciation…

Day-muhn?

My colleagues all seem to say it differently, and I’ve always been curious which one of us sounds the most foolish.