minism

This was a great essay, and as someone who struggles a lot with hyperawareness OCD, I cried reading it.

First on a positive note, the example about attention on sex and arousal feeding back on itself and deepening the experience is well described and easy to relate to. But I think the "deepening an experience through attention" phenomenon applies in so many other domains as well - Sustained attention on a film or video game world, deep uninterrupted creative work for many hours, etc. It's a wonderful positive feedback loop.

It is somewhat similar to how when sitting in silence outside for a long period of time you begin to become aware of more and more subtle details of the experience that weren't immediately accessible. Almost like you're turning up the sensitivity knob on things.

Unfortunately as the author describes, the attention feedback loop can become unpleasant and even torturous when it is directed on negative sensations. For me it has been various things at different stages of my life - muscle tension, breathing, eye floaters in my vision, etc. The same process plays out - Sustained fixation of attention on the sensation increases your sensitivity to it, meaning you notice it more and it bothers you more, meaning you pay more attention to it, and it gets out of control.

The difficulty I experience is that this attention is unwanted and yet I feel my mind focus on it almost automatically. Paradoxically, most of the treatment/recovery advice for this type of OCD is to allow these sensations to be there without rejecting them, which I'm still working on.

But it is helpful to see the positive flip side of the coin too - Our minds are capable of deep focus and deep attention, which can increase sensitivity and let you see increasingly subtle details of experience, making you a better appreciator of art and life, a better creator, a better listener and friend, etc.

Right, but isn't it a problem that a quine also requires the information contained in the language's compiler/interpreter to be fully meaningful? This would be "outside the universe" so to speak.

kind of amazing really, like speaking in tongues

Right.. this is a perfect example of why government legislation/intervention in the market is needed to some degree.

Definitely. And I've been largely skeptical about overhyped AI promises in the last 5 years.

I'm feeling very uneasy and not sure what to make of all of this.

Thank you! This is a great explanation.

Great overview, I think the part for me which is still very unintuitive is the denoising process.

If the diffusion process is removing noise by predicting a final image and comparing it to the current one, why can't we just jump to the final predicted image? Or is the point that because its an iterative process, each noise step results in a different "final image" prediction?

I recently was in the same position. Went from curious to skeptical to disgusted by the whole crypto/web3 space.

The turning point was seeing my name on the company website, I was embarrassed for myself. Was an easy decision to quit.

Thank you for saying this. This attitude drives me insane

You have to be careful because sometimes productivity is just an illusion caused by accruing technical debt that you have to then pay for in time later. With database abstractions you often pay back this debt once the app reaches even slight complexity and you need to spend a lot of time understanding, debugging and refactoring query flows.

Dark was infuriating to watch. Visually stunning, great characters and performances, but ultimately an intentionally obfuscated and meandering story that only ends up disappointing you.

It's kind of similar to Westworld season 1 or Lost -- there's this style of storytelling where you drop a bunch of interesting clues to lead you towards possible theories about whats really going on, and then all of those threads are dropped on the floor as if they never mattered. I find it abusive and disrespectful to the viewer.

I see where you're coming from, but tbh the more I work on web backend code the more I disagree with this. I really think database interactions should be made explicit, even early on, rather than hidden by ORMs (or overriding a dot operator).

Same thing happened to the JS world with typescript (though typescript seems more powerful than python type annotations).

Its fine though - I'm glad the culture is trending towards understanding that strong typing saves you time rather than causes you extra time. This is true even for very small and simple programs, and even if you're the only developer.