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‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

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Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#61

Post by sireat »

labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

There was a tour of Grant Imahara's workshop two years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633605

I was struck by how fantastic everything looked, this was what a dream workshop would look like.

However the man behind it was gone and it was inevitable that this amazing workshop would slowly wither away just like everything else.

This was the "best" case scenario - living on in a memory for maybe a few more decades

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#62

Post by melling »

inglor_cz wrote: post #57
melling wrote: post #9

“30 years ago I would have died of cancer; now I will die with cancer, but not of cancer.” And 30-100 years from now, the same cancer will be cured. It’s simply a matter of the human race deciding when to cure cancers.

Compared to current expenditure and human resources spent on treating and understanding cancer, what would constitute a real "decision to cure cancer" for you? Twice as much, ten times as much? Do billionaires and powerful politicians (or their loved ones) deliberately die of cancer because they collectively decided not to find a cure for cancer? Are you willing to entertain the idea that we don't yet fully understan…

Apollo project aka Moon Landing was the analogy.

I do believe that was brute forced.

And as I already pointed out, even if we fail, we can still save millions of lives.

Plus the cost to treat people is spiraling out of control.

https://www.fightcancer.org/sites/default/files/National%20D...

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#63

Post by dsign »

In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was sure that the magic going in there is probably outside of what anybody can understand, and that it would take one thousand years to make any significant progress in said understanding. I have had or heard similar arguments regarding cancer and biological systems in general.

There is no God hiding in there. Nature is not magic, but just evolution and selection, with a high degree of randomness. If Nature's random process can create intelligence, so can we, by the same more or less fortuitous means.

And now we have ChatGPT. It's not human level intelligence (yet). But to me, it is proof that intelligence is --as everybody said without quite really believing it--an emerging phenomenon: add enough computing units and a mechanism to coordinate them towards achieving a goal, and you get something "intelligent". We, the human beings, don't need to understand how the trillions of parameters work together. All we need to do is to find a process that finds those parameters.

We will discover that untreatable diseases like ageing (and cancer, its corollary) can be worked out in exactly the same way: we don't need to understand how our biology "computes" our fate. We just need to engineer the equivalent of backpropagation for biological tuning, and I have a hunch this too will be a matter of sheer computing power.

And we will get there by surprise, earlier than what most people expect. But only if our first act as newly ascended gods is not to create new creatures that take away our role of top species in our world.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#64

Post by Dalewyn »

sireat wrote: post #61
labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

There was a tour of Grant Imahara's workshop two years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633605 I was struck by how fantastic everything looked, this was what a dream workshop would look like. However the man behind it was gone and it was inevitable that this amazing workshop would slowly wither away just like everything else. This was the "best" case scenario - living on in a memory for maybe a few more dec…

I did not know Grant Imahara had passed away.

I feel a big hole in my childhood now. May he rest in peace.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#65

Post by turtleyacht »

renewiltord wrote: post #29
irrational wrote: post #27

> am 73 years old and I’ve had a difficult life, but a long and good one. I just got back from visiting my grandmother who is a few weeks away from turning 100. She still lives alone, cooks her own food, walks without assistance, has a tremendous memory and still has the mental acuity of any intelligent healthy young person. Her son, my father is 75 and is a physician and still works 60 hour weeks (which he considers…

Dude, we know. Everything has a long tail. If everyone in the tail for everything came and posted about stuff we'd be sitting here primarily reading comments that go: - $500k? I make $5 million and that doesn't even seem enough - 2 children? I have 5 children and that barely feels like a family - 3 vim plugins? I have 1E80 and even that is barely enough to write Hello World in Java

Do you have more details on Java with vim?

There's a person working on vi who has tracked three decades of patches from OpenBSD starting from Keith Bostic.

There's someone working on an obscure roleplaying game that's pre-Diablo.

There's the ones who sail on a boat and craft bespoke C-reations on their own virtual machine.

The X11 maintainers, always and ever.

So many more. And not for some reward at the end of a mortal journey, but in some sense for its own sake.

Even with LLMs and the flex of planet-scale computation, in the midst of wild, speculative financial schemes, there is a comfort in a familiar domain, patches therein, and being a kind of owner of this, essentially intangible, work of code.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#66

Post by rrwright »

More than a year after my father died, my 6 year old son was inconsolably crying one night as my wife put him to bed. He hadn’t said anything about my father’s death until this night when he realized that it meant some day I would die. He was so sad at the thought and assumed I must be so sad about my father dying, that he was sad for me. I laid in bed with him talking about death and telling him how my father died—of COVID-19. It made my son think of vaccines. We spoke for an hour about how confronting death a little bit at a time throughout life—in stories or our own thoughts—is like a vaccine that helps us with the pain of losing our loved ones and eventually our own death. And for me, laying in bed crying with my six year old son about the death of his grandfather has been one of the best moments of my own life.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#67

Post by Kye »

labrador wrote: post #58

I follow author Joyce Carol Oates on Twitter (we're about the same age) and she said something that liberated me. About memoirs she said something like "nobody reads them, not even your own family." I realized that was true because I know someone who wrote one and nobody cared. It freed me up so I could really get the message of Ram Dass in "Becoming Nobody." I used to work in health care and once there was a patient…

You have to really work at it to truly die alone. Someone somewhere is going to remember you fondly unless you were a complete asshole. This is often the fate of lifetime narcissists who no longer have the energy or presence of mind to maintain the façade. Even the most vicious of bigots have well-wishers at their funerals. You have to mess up hard to be less liked than a Fred Phelps type.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#68

Post by swader999 »

dsign wrote: post #63

In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was sure that the magic going in there is probably outside of what anybody can understand, and that it would take one thousand years to make any significant progress in said understanding. I hav…

ChatGPT is really good at goal seeking. It has no idea what should be the goal, that takes wisdom.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#69

Post by hklgny »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #59
oldstrangers wrote: post #54

No one probably wants to hear this but my partner's grandmother was in hospice. Her grandmother had so much anxiety about dying (she was in her late 90s) that the hospice just kept her doped up with morphine 24/7 (this is a lot more common than you'd imagine). When she was sober enough to realize what was happening she'd just scream. Anyway, that really did a number on me for the next few months. Seeing someone so di…

“At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?” — Jack Kornfield

This is reductive in that it implies if the answers are yes you won’t be the one sitting in bed screaming or drugged up.

I’ve seen this situation enough (whole family works in hospice) to know it’s not the case.

Do the best you can, but at the end of the day you either go super fast or it’s super scary and often painful. Drugs help.

Re: ‘Preparing to die has a lot to do with having had a good life’

#70

Post by ip26 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #59
oldstrangers wrote: post #54

No one probably wants to hear this but my partner's grandmother was in hospice. Her grandmother had so much anxiety about dying (she was in her late 90s) that the hospice just kept her doped up with morphine 24/7 (this is a lot more common than you'd imagine). When she was sober enough to realize what was happening she'd just scream. Anyway, that really did a number on me for the next few months. Seeing someone so di…

“At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well?” — Jack Kornfield

I have been inculcated to ask those questions, yet I don’t even know the answer nor how to answer, let alone how to do it.
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