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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#191

Post by jspash »

codr7 wrote: post #121
daedrdev wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France has a massive welfare state and pension system (which is causing a crisis as they cant afford it in the long run). People probably are getting 28x more from the government than before those existed.

I'm pretty sure they're paying for it though.

Yes, everyone pays taxes into the system. But don't think for a moment that when musk et.al. are done with their purge that your tax rate will magicaly plummet to 2%. It's going to either stay the same or go up. Unless you are in the 1%. In which case, you can start your celebration now.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#192

Post by bwfan123 »

thenobsta wrote: post #62
snikeris wrote: post #52

> If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived This may seem like impractical advice. How does one increase the scope of perception? Personally, I’ve found that a meditation practice leads to this.

Meditation has totally helped me widen my scope and soften my awareness. I've found these two exercises also help me get out of my default mode of perception. Image Streaming[1] is a fun little exercise that has helped me expand my perception of things or problems. I try to do it in a very high dynamic range way -- where I zoom out of a scene describe it in detail and then zoom in a describe it in detail. There is al…

Mathematician David Bessis describes similar exercises in his book [ref] - wherein he explores a room blindfolded to awaken other senses, or visualize the places he has been to.

[ref] https://www.amazon.com/Mathematica-Secret-World-Intuition-Cu...

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#193

Post by tikhonj »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #140
karparov wrote: post #112

And this is one of the main utilitarian arguments for diversity in teams. If everybody has the same socio-cultural background, it's harder to leave the frame.

It's a sound argument. The argument that culturally homogeneous teams perform better due to more efficient communication (more is "already understood" at the outset, so there's less need to communicate explicitly, and fewer misunderstandings) is also sound. So from a purely team-performance-maximising perspective, the question is: Which coefficient is higher? (More generally: What level of mixture is optimal?)

One aspect seems pretty clear to me: it's much easier to learn how to communicate effectively as a team than it is to massively broaden your collective knowledge and experience.

So, given a sound team culture and environment—great regardless of the style of team you have!—you can start with a diverse team and then collectively improve team cohesion and communication. You need some baseline level of effective leadership to do this, but it's absolutely doable, and I've seen it done.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#194

Post by pphysch »

_def wrote: post #115
pphysch wrote: post #47

I attended a woo-woo university course, where the instructor invited a interpretative dancer to give a lesson. The dancer bright out some paper, pencils, and almonds, and had everyone spend half an hour silently writing about their single almond. As it turns out, it's easier than it sounds; time passed quick and I (and most others) never felt bored. There's always more room for observation and analysis. It struck me…

Sounds like the woo-woo paid off

Yes, I mean it affectionately.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#195

Post by nuancebydefault »

cbracketdash wrote: post #110
nuancebydefault wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact there are much worse things going on in the world than the hollowing of US' institutions. Let's just root for those people in need.

I apologize for my naïevty: I guess I live in a bubble

Don't think you are being naive, no apologies are needed. Still that whole situation puzzles me a lot. USA chooses. Clear outcomem, no surprises. Pro life, pro guns, anti immigrants, anti different, anti regulation. USA complains. What info am i missing...?

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#196

Post by raintrees »

This is also a good argument to me to continue working at being a generalist. The more disciplines I am aware of, even if not expert in, the faster I may come up with an "outside the box" solution that might work.

Details observance, combined with the facility to abstract, is probably what makes me a programmer of the caliber I am. Not that I am great (far from it, when I see and compare others' work) but I have products being used by clients successfully, so good enough, I figure...

Ah, another thought: Also conversations with others about a problem I am facing. My wife has an uncanny ability to suggest things that sometimes cause me to reconsider some of my assumptions, and have the blinding flash of insight that allows me to successfully navigate through whatever my current obstacle might be. And she does not try to keep up with my area of technical knowledge anymore, yet still so valuable!

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#197

Post by ranscendental50 »

tombert wrote: post #127

A bit tangential, but I have been playing the game "Pinball FX" a lot. I really like it (and especially its spin-off/expansion Pinball M), but it's surprisingly taxing on my computer. I mentioned this to a friend, and he was kind of confused, understandably so, and said "...it's pinball...why is that taxing?" It's not a dumb question, we have had virtual pinball games since the Atari 2600 at least, and even pretty fu…

[dead]

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#198

Post by elcritch »

andrewflnr wrote: post #69
amrodst wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship launch pad, etc. Results may vary.

"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake. Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inc…

> Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data.

That’s possible, however, it’s possible it’ll give a chance to remove autocrats who have suppressed the scientific method in favor of their prevailing opinions or preferences.

There will be a painful period but it could rejuvenate the systems.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#199

Post by ssfrr »

Sophira wrote: post #165
sjs382 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by tracking your head? It's a great effect

It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain is probably going to be fairly confused by it.

I remember back in 2008-ish Johnny Lee at CMU built a cool hack that tracked the user's head using a Wiimote as an infrared camera, and used it for this kind of effect.

https://youtu.be/Jd3-eiid-Uw?t=147

Turns out that head-tracking parallax is surprisingly effective even without stereo vision. I'd guess there's some component about the effect working best when your head motion is large relative to the distance between your eyes, and also best for objects far enough away from your eyes that you're not getting a lot of information from the stereo vision.

I don't know exactly where those thresholds are, but I wouldn't be surprised if a pinball machine is in a regime where it works well.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#200

Post by swiftcoder »

Sophira wrote: post #165
sjs382 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the virtual pinball tables that emulate depth by tracking your head? It's a great effect

It sounds cool, but because you won't be getting different views from both eyes, I can imagine the brain is probably going to be fairly confused by it.

There are tons of working examples of head-tracked 3D, and in practice it's good enough to satisfy most viewers (as long as you can deal with the obvious limitation: only one viewer at a time)
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