paulrudy

Same story here. I'll never go back to Apple Music, even if only for streaming. I had hundreds of tracks and albums just demolished by something related to iTunes Match, didn't realize for months, and didn't have a solid backup system at the time.

I've been on mailbox for 6 years and I think the only issue I've had with rejections has been the email confirmation from some Discourse-based forums. But after I contacted the hosts and was added manually, the forums' emails made it through with no issue

Thank you, this really clarified things for me!

Thank you. So based on your examples it sounds like the "computation" term is quite literal. How would this apply at larger levels of complexity like interacting anonymously with a database or something like that?

> FHE enables computation on encrypted data

This is fascinating. Could someone ELI5 how computation can work using encrypted data?

And does "computation" apply to ordinary internet transactions like when using a REST API, for example?

In Robert Waggoner's book, Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self, the author, who was a very skilled lucid dreamer from childhood, describes how he had a moment of insight after waking from a lucid dream. He had been thinking of himself as the controller of his dreams, and treated them mostly as entertainment. But he realized that for everything he "decided" in his lucid dream, there was far more content that arrived, unplanned--scenery, characters, events, and so on.

This made him curious about using awareness within the dream not just for entertainment, but to conduct experiments and tests, to research what was and wasn't possible, what dream characters and dream consciousness knew or didn't know, all from within the dreams themselves. He's spent decades doing that, and comparing notes with other skilled lucid dreamers.

It's an incredibly fascinating book, a sort of natural history of the dream world by a seasoned traveler within it.

Also has a bunch of useful tips on cultivating lucid dreaming, which I remember working pretty well a few times when I had been disciplined enough to practice them.

"From TFA: ‘Highlights automatically surfaces directions for a location’ Is that a mistype? In an apple advertisement?"

"Highlights" as a singular brand/product/whatever name. Like saying "Postmates delivers stuff"

Since I only partly understand your comment, I'm not sure if this pertains, but the phrase "spatiotemporal encoding" caught my attention. It makes intuitive sense that complex cognitive function would be connected to spatiotemporal sensations and ideas in an embodied nervous system evolved for, among other things, managing itself spatially and temporally.

Also, Riccardo Manzotti's book "The Spread Mind" seems connected. Part of the thesis is that the brain doesn't form a "model" version of the world with which to interact, but instead, the world's effects are kept active within the brain, even over extremely variable timespans. Objects of consciousness can't be definitively separated from their "external" causes, and can be considered the ongoing activity of those causes, "within" us.

Conscious experience as "encoding" in that sense would not be an inner representation of an outer reality, but more a kind of spatiotemporal imprint that is identical with and inextricable from the activity of "outer" events that precipitated it. The "mind" is not a separate observer or calculator but is "spread" among all phenomenal objects/events with which it has interacted--even now-dead stars whose light we might have seen.

Not sure if I'm doing the book justice here, but it's a great read, and satisfyingly methodical. The New York Review has an interview series if you want to get a sense of the ideas before committing to the book.

His autobiography, And There Was Light, and a collection of talks, Against the Pollution of the I, are wonderful

Whew. I'm sorry you had that situation to grow up in, caught up from an early age in maneuvering relative to a parent's insecurities and emotional blindness. I can relate in some ways. I hope the clarity with which you wrote about it now is an expression of having come to some healing and peace!

Good point, yeah, generally the basic survival topics are still in play even when we're busy with finer details! Still, giving an intelligent species the credit for (perhaps) engaging in the final details seems like something generous to leave on the table! Like whale dating apps, exactly.

Maybe the trees would show something useful to GTP

All of those options sound interesting and plausible, yet when I go for a walk while talking with a friend, I'm imagining an alien anthropologist wondering, "Are they communicating the ambient air temperature, and the availability of food nearby, their orientation to the sun and Venus setting?" Maybe the whales are gossiping, or sharing old stories, songs, jokes...

This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not.

Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.

Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience.

It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.

I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.

"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.