If this story moves you, and you have the means, consider donating to CSF Leak research at Stanford. Cerebrospinal Fluid Leaks are something that can completely mimic a large amount of FTD symptoms, and even in the care of utmost professionals, can be near undetectable - and somehow, treatment can be as beautifully simple as a one and done injection... to a hellish guessing game and years of attempts. As Dr. Ian Carr…
What Happened to Lee
111–120 of 299 posts
Re: What Happened to Lee
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry for the loss you and his other friends/loved ones have experienced. Do you feel like the article was accurate and fair to the people involved?
Yes. Very. It was important to me and Michelle that it be a tribute to Lee’s genius and contribution to Cloudflare. We spent a long time looking for the right reporter and publication. Wired seemed appropriate given Lee’s love of technology. And Sandra was a total class act. We opened up fully to her, spending nearly a year letting her get to know us. Lee’s family was incredibly giving of their time. It takes a reall…
Re: What Happened to Lee
#113Terrifying. As a software engineer, shit like this scares me. I've felt like I'm on a steady, slow, decline for the last ~4 years. Is it just burnout? Do I need a new hobby? I used to love programming... Spent 12 hours a day jamming on it. Now, I struggle to keep my mind on a line of code for more than 5 minutes. At what point is it just burnout, or at what point is it something more? That's what's terrifying to me.…
Re: What Happened to Lee
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It survived both political parties in power. It might get chipped away over the next 30 years or replaced with public option etc, but bringing back the preexisting condition issue would be extremely unpopular. Also, it does not actually cost insurance companies much money as they can all just raise premiums.
So you're confident that the Supreme Court will overturn the 5th Circuit's decision to throw it out? The Supreme Court will be hearing the case this autumn. And you must be confident that Trump will lose, since the 5-4 majority that saved Obamacare last time will not survive a few more Republican appointments.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#115Re: What Happened to Lee
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, unless one sees the suffering of others as suffering of NPCs or punishment for a former life, I cannot understand how one can believe in a benevolent omnipotent god. The cruelty that some have to endure is simply not explainable with a such a god. It cannot be benevolent AND omnipotent by definition. It becomes far far far more likely that there is simply no such a god. It's not like this dilemma is new so t…
It's a deep problem with a long history of attempts at answering it, some more satisfying than others. One answer that appeals to many faithful is the idea that all this suffering will be "redeemed", or made to be worth it at the end. Augustine, for example, would take the "NPC" prong of your dilemma by saying that our earthly existence "in time" is not a full experience of reality at all. Indeed, you can find this v…
One interesting thing is that the language and imagery used by the mystics of these different and separated religious traditions are often indistinguishable from each other- it's not clear if it was St. John of the Cross or Augustine or Zen Masters Ikkyu or Dogen who is saying them.
On thing they refer to in this transcendent reality is apprehension of "the coincidence of opposites". So for example, the obvious fact that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time is itself contradicted or "resolved". In logic we say "not both A and not A" (or else a contradiction is permitted and from there literally anything can be proven).
If I were a goldfish, no matter how right the math you read to me was, I would not understand it, you or anything it referred to. Even as the atomic bomb it described exploded, I still would not understand the nature of reality which now quite literally impinged itself on my flesh.
What would it feel like to be confronted with that kind of knowledge? Would we recognize some formulation of it but reject it, as in: both A and not A?
Would it be something impossible, existing outside of what appears to us to be exhausted possibilities?
Not A Not not A Not both A and not A Not not both A and not A. etc?
We can feel the limits of our own thinking when we reach something which is logically impossible. We just can't get our thinking around these things; contraditions seem like an absolute dead end, leading everywhere and nowhere.
Are there things in our lives which we literally experience, like an atomic bomb disntegrating a goldfish, which even as they touch us and we feel them, we simply fail to comprehend the "real" meaning of them? The breeze? A look? A birth? Suffering?
Spirtual insight may be a thing like mathematicqal talent- some people have a talent for it and some people don't. Such a talent may be completely disconnected from normal intelligence. To people who don't have it, it seems like garbage, i.e. self-contradictory, self-pacifying wishful thinking.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was incredibly sad to watch. The last time I saw him while he was still speaking — he is still alive but doesn’t speak or seem to recognize me anymore — he would repeat the same questions from the same conversation in the same order on a 30-minute loop. Over and over. I’ve really struggled to wrap my mind around his condition. I don’t think it’s frustrating for him. He seems to have lost the emotion to be frustrat…
The thought of someone I love (in the broadest sense of the word) being affected by this is horrific. I'm really sorry for his family and friends :( I think that you're kind of right: I know one engineer who is like that and he it's his autism which makes him brilliant. He could operate in deep-thought mode all the time - he is extremely intelligent and extremely focused. There are other people who can hit it for pat…
Re: What Happened to Lee
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the preexisting, running total of human suffering and tragedy in this world points to the fact that transcendent reality, the realm of God or a God, must have an alternative interpretation for human events You're begging the question. It doesn't point to that at all. Furthermore, I'd feel terrible accepting that "fact" if I were faithful. It would reduce my faith to that in a demiurge who can't (ergo impotent) or w…
Aren't there more than two explanations for "won't" beyond (1) ignorance or (2) malice? Perhaps we are the ones who are ignorant for why things are this way.
Re: What Happened to Lee
#119Terrifying. As a software engineer, shit like this scares me. I've felt like I'm on a steady, slow, decline for the last ~4 years. Is it just burnout? Do I need a new hobby? I used to love programming... Spent 12 hours a day jamming on it. Now, I struggle to keep my mind on a line of code for more than 5 minutes. At what point is it just burnout, or at what point is it something more? That's what's terrifying to me.…
Re: What Happened to Lee
#120I'd like to add to discussion [1] which shows relation between stress and autoimmune disease, [2] (Russian) case study of a Russian businessman who burned out (lost a part of cortex due to autoimmunte disease) and [3] encephalitis provoked by emotional stress. [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/autoimmune-disease-and-s... [2] https://www.forbes.ru/karera-i-svoy-biznes/392253-kukushechk... [3] https://www.shmabst…
Overwork leads to a stress. No wonder useful body cells can be attacked producing a whole range of resulting diseases.
The risk of a heart attack also significantly increases when white blood cell count gets high as their presence fuels inflammatory processes in obstructed blood vessels. Eventually this may lead to a full occlusion which is essentially what heart attack is.
[1] https://carrington.edu/blog/researchers-discover-link-mental...