davidscolgan

Seconding Daniel Ingram, my mentor says that Daniel Ingram's book "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" is a great introduction for a developer-minded person. I haven't actually read it so I can't comment on it, but I learned from someone who gained a lot about Buddhism from that book. Also happy to chat further over email.

Yes, my goal in sharing my story is not to garner pity but to give hope that it is possible to recover from even great loss and come out on the other side stronger. Blessings to everyone suffering right now.

Perhaps the most important event of my life was discovering I have autism at age 33. Many things that didn't make sense suddenly did. I pointed my hyperfocus inward to my own mind, at first because I had lost the ability to code and make a living, and wanted to heal my "coding injuries" as I had called them. I had become an atheist at age 20 and primarily had used psychology to try and figure out what was happening.

I studied Buddhism under a mentor and realized that many of the principles applied regardless of your beliefs about cosmology. The idea that all problems humans face can be summarized as "greed, ignorance, and aversion" was a useful frame. These helped me triangulate the ultimate source of my burnout to unmet family expectations that I had for many years tried to live up to but could not. Confronting my family about these expectations and taking responsibility for my own life was absolutely key in my healing.

These days I don't exactly have a set practice but I still live with my mentors. They started a syncretic monastery that welcomes all traditions, and observing the similarities and differences between worldviews has been quite eye opening. The most valuable practice I take from all this is a honed awareness of the root causes of suffering, and I've found that once the root cause is identified, it becomes possible to release it.

I am not saying this to complain. I have no regrets or complaints. I am free from suffering as a result of going through this experience.

I live at the monastery full time now.

It feels like I have failed in every way that is possible.

I have lost my wife, my child, my parents, my grandparents, my friends, my house burned down with all of my possessions. I lost my ability to code due to burnout and had to spend several years doing nothing.

During my burnout experience I was basically forced to confront the roaring void of existence. I spent time at a monastery and contemplated the futility of it all.

And yet at the end of all of this, I considered what else is there to do with life but to begin anew? And now that I have lost everything, I am no longer naive. I know what is possible to have, and what is possible to lose, and I can act with understanding from past experience. I feel far more capable of success now that I know what it is to fail in the hardest ways I can imagine.

I like Pelican. It's Python and has been around for forever so I don't have to roll my own. I realized after a while that I was rewriting Pelican for no particular benefit and the things I thought were limitations of the tool were just my inability to see how to interface with it.

There is no benefit whatsoever in me rolling my own tech unless it actually allows me to do something I can't do otherwise, and a lack of imagination has been my biggest limiting factor.

Once I saw this I also stopped trying to reimplement Django from scratch too. But, doing these custom and also abandoned own website rolling projects did teach me a lot about how Django and Pelican work!

I have autism and only discovered it two years ago at age 33. I have been intensely researching it.

The book Neurotribes presents a very in-depth picture of the history of autism and the research and theories for the past century.

This is not saying that autism is not real, that it is not a thing to understand, or something that should not be researched. It is only saying that the idea that autism is On The Rise in a terrifying way, that it is something to be feared, is misguided.

As this article says, and as the book Neurotribes explores in depth, autism used to have much more strict criteria for diagnosis. Connor, the leading researcher of autism for much of the 20th century, was convinced autism should only cover the most severe cases, and he did not like the spectrum idea. As time went on and it was realized that many more persons may have some aspect of autism even if it isn't extremely severe led to the DSM making the criteria much looser. The authors of the DSM particularly noted that this may make it seem like the prevalence was increasing when in fact it was simply more widely diagnosed.

The reason for caution of using the term "autism epidemic" is that it spooked many parents into thinking there was a horrible plague afoot, and that it needed to be cured.

My current understanding of it in myself and wider society is that it has always been around, that those on the spectrum hold an important place in society, and that rather than finding a cure (if this is an epidemic) is more important than understanding autism and advocating for services to help those who have autistic children.

This absolutely does not seek to discredit the indeed heroic efforts many parents have gone to to support their children, in fact by being more precise about what is happening the hope is that autistics like myself can have even better outcomes.

Yes, I've heard him say in a few places in his videos that he gives his blessing to this fork and encourages its use over his own repo for that exact reason.

Oh hey it's deepnight - I remember your awesome Ludum Dare games. Thank you for sharing this tool with the gamedev community!

Ah I am in no way trying to be dismissive - this is really cool by itself, and it feels like there may be applications of this that would be highly useful at the same time.

It feels like there is a kernel of something realllly cool here but I can't quite tell what it is.

Dear sarvasvkulpati,

I appreciate your question! It demonstrates a curiosity about the nature of computing itself. Some will surely say that this idea is unreasonable or not practical. But, if this is an idea that speaks to you, I encourage you to try your hand at making a prototype of your idea! This is the hacker way. And being in college you have time, peers who are equally enthusiastic, energy, and the help of professors. Regardless of the practicality, all interesting progress comes from people who ask questions like this, and see what comes of trying to make something interesting.

In college I had a peer who convinced us to all use Gentoo Linux because it was the most hardcore Linux. I bricked my computer three times trying to use it and ultimately switched away from using Gentoo but learned a ton about Linux that I use to this day on a less hardcore distro. I still use Vim even though it's more complicated than other editors. I also went through a period where I tried learning every programming language I could find to see which one was "the best". I ultimately found a few I liked the most. None of these were efficient at first, but eventually led to highly cool results.

Ask for help if you get stuck. I bet something interesting will come of it, even if you just learn what doesn't work.

Something something "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Your idea is really cool. Stay hungry and awesome. Cheers to you.

I've wondered if the AI superintelligence everyone is watching out for is actually slowly being built from the bottom up, and encompasses evening in the entire world. Deep Thought from Hitchhiker's Guide is seeming more and more plausible to me. Perhaps this bot that makes Reddit videos doesn't do anything "useful" per se, but it is doing what a human might otherwise do, and adds itself to Reddit as an entity that could be indistinguishable from a person making silly videos.

What percentage of Reddit comments are bots? I'd be curious to know. SaaS and Lambda functions and and APIs are all like very complicated neurons that link together to form this world wide web of interactions.

I've wondered if an approach to the AI alignment problem is really to see that the entirety of all the computers in the world are a giant brain that is continually self-improving. Phoenix Wright bot is one neuron, like any other. And so to align the world AI, you have to align the culture that makes the AI. And so, basically, anything that one does to improve the culture in a sense improves AI.