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LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

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Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#181

Post by geraldalewis »

merloen wrote: post #100
geraldalewis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add balance to the statement about asking an art student to give an opinion of your work to get your ego stroked, I had a far different experience. I went to art school, and from foundation year (where you learn a smattering of everything: drawing, painting, sculpting, etc.) to senior year (when I focused on film and animation) I constantly had my work reviewed. Sometimes I got effusive praise, and sometimes I lef…

Code review takes too much time. You can take a painting that took 100 hours to make, and start delivering useful criticism after a minute or so. Giving useful feedback on a programming project that took 100 hours will take much, much longer. Also, art is meant to be examined - that is its primary purpose. Source code, not so much.

I'll agree that while a project is being bootstrapped, peer code review could be cumbersome. Once a project has matured enough, some amount of code review, done incrementally, shouldn't be a burden. At that point, if you're typing out reams of code every day, you might be doing it wrong ( something code review could help catch [ e.g., "Library X does this; you don't have to re-implement it" ] ). The point would not be to circle back after 100 hours of work to review, but rather every (say) 10.

I don't agree that source code is not meant to be examined ( but maybe we work in totally different fields ). I regularly read source code from my coworkers, and they regularly have to read mine. Often, the developer who wrote the code is not available for questions, or isn't with the company any longer. My own code might as well have been written by another developer if I look at it after about a year. All these issues could be mitigated or muted by another set of eyes, either by sharing the knowledge ( "Why did Bob do this?" might be answered by someone else who'd reviewed the code ) or by asking the questions initially ( "Bob, why did you do it that way?" Bob: "Because of X -- I'll leave a comment in the source ).

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#182

Post by blhack »

capstone wrote: post #120
yid wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, my dream has always been the aurora borealis.

I've seen several and they are underwhelming. Those photos of glowing curtains of color are taken from space, here on earth they just look like dim green glow (brief explanation below). You are not missing anything, I promise you. Most of the energetic particles from the Sun are deflected around the Earth by the magnetosphere, but some get trapped. Electrons trapped in the Earth's magnetic field (the magnetic mirror…

>I've seen several and they are underwhelming.

Wow I would hate to have your perspective.

The Northern Lights are breathtakingly beautiful, considerably more wonderful than what you're seeing in photos, do not listen to this person.

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#183

Post by geebee »

moultano wrote: post #172

If you have any predisposition towards psychosis, in family history or personally, please avoid LSD. For those firmly rooted, it might be pleasurable or productive to become a little less so. If you're already sometimes on the edge, LSD can push you over. This happened to one of my best friends. Growing up he was crazy, creative, always saw things a little differently, prone to manic behavior. After a year of regular…

I have no idea if this is rooted in scientific fact, but I've had such a similar experience I almost wonder if we are talking about the same guy. The sad thing is that we almost certainly aren't.

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#184

Post by grandalf »

oggz wrote: post #83
antidaily wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life". source: http://articles.cnn.com/2011-01-17/tech/steve.jobs.life_1_ap...

Would anyone like to speculate what the other thing or two is?

Recruiting John Scully.

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#185

Post by vbtemp »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #150
vbtemp wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mind-bending" is a bit of a weasel word. What is the difference between "hard" and "mind-bending"? Do you have any experience of the challenges of spaceflight software to demonstrate that all problems are of "sub-mind-bending" difficulty?

Hm, fair enough. It just seems to me that it's a lot of number juggling and physics calculation.

While I am not an expert on the shuttle flight software, these are some challenges in flight software in general: Consider the problem of orbital insertion around a moon of saturn, or around an inner planet, or an asteroid. Not only does the guidance and control subsystem have to react (i.e., actuate the thrusters whose thrust can vary by orders of magnitude) within a razor-thin margin, but each scientific instrument has requirements as well, and introduces its own perturbations (e.g., extension of an antenna boom causing vibrations). Plenty of PhDs, and PhD topics to be found in this and associated problems. ANother example, consider space network links. You can't just use TCP (it's been tried, and it simply breaks down), you need to engineer a protocol -- in fact a whole new suite of protocols -- from the ground up that provides the same reliability but over much faultier links. Although TCP is simple in concept (just ACK/NACK till you got everything, right?), 30 years of its evolution shows that it is anything but. Both of these problems necessarily involve some bending of the mind to solve, and I image there are related ones for the folks in the manned-space sector

EDIT: and among other things that I'd consider important to mention, there are significant robotics challenges, autonomous behavior and decision making (with associated problems in formal model verification), along with the general high degree of fault tolerance required in just about every software (and hardware) subsystem. I think many of the hardest problems in CS can be found in the spaceflight domain.

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#186

Post by bliss »

My tuppence: I was an average student, perhaps an underachiever - I was the youngest in my class... Anyway around about the closing years of high school I discovered the recreational joy of LSD, which I took despite superman comics warning me of the dangers. For a while I dropped out (3 years) and enjoyed a life that was devoid of computers (until that point I had spent all my time on 8bit then 16bit computers, leading up to an 8086 pc). I lived in a bedsit and had no outlook or any desire to "get a life". At some point during an acid trip, I found myself alone and spent a long time in introspection about where I was and where I would like to be. Long story short, fast forward 20 years, I'm married with a beautiful daughter, a great senior technical job with a very public FTSE 100 media company, a couple of irons in the fire with personal software projects I'm writing (in fact, I'm actually procrastinating here, I should be coding!) and a generally great life. If I had continued on my "wastrel" route those years ago, my life wouldn't have been as rosy (though perhaps less stressful). I attribute my conversion from waster to nerd entirely to my experiences with LSD. I thoroughly recommend it to others (though I will caution that I have seen downsides in some of my comrades, not deaths you understand, but longer lead-times to achieving their goals). This article (though lacking in specifics) does resonate very strongly with my life experience. Final question (to myself) would I use LSD again? Answer... not sure, I've done a whole lot of living in the last 20 years, not sure I want to reprogram the grey matter at this stage - maybe again in 10 years...

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#187

Post by ellyagg »

TheSOB88 wrote: post #167
utefan001 wrote: post #91

One of my best friends committed suicide at age 18 in 1995. If LSD was not part of his life, I am sure the suicide would have never happened.

That really sucks that your friend killed himself. Having lived through it, maybe you know for sure LSD was the reason he did it. But perhaps he was covering up something else. If I killed myself today, not a whole lot of people would know why. They might attribute it to something they knew about, but very, very few people know about the thing that makes me want to kill myself. So what I'm saying is maybe you're righ…

What makes you want to kill yourself?

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#188

Post by andywood »

parfe wrote: post #3

In college I lived with artists. A few of their artist friends come over with big sketch pads, pencils and whatever else artists use. They all drop acid while telling me they can't wait to see their amazing creations once their minds are opened. I went out for a few hours and came back to find them all sitting around the living room. One sketch pad had a long black squiggle on it, the same design you'd make if you fe…

And then, there is Alex Grey.

http://www.entheology.org/edoto/anmviewer.asp?a=295&z=4

http://www.google.com/search?q=alex%20grey&tbm=isch

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#189

Post by bitwize »

jmtame wrote: post #108
bitwize wrote: post #95

Did anyone else see Limitless ? Did anyone else look at the symptoms of the drug he took (the fictional "NZT-48") and think, "hmmm, sounds like a more extreme form of MDMA"? Haven't tried it myself. Heard lots about it.

why did you think it was more related to mdma versus an amphetamine? i remember when i saw limitless the first time, i kept thinking 'is this movie just about adderall and vyvanse?'

I've heard stories about people who were able to solve problems faster -- and tackle much bigger problems in their head -- while rolling. In fact they recommended using the drug for this purpose rather than just taking it and dancing at a rave or something, because the latter increases the risk that your brain will burn out. A bit like flooring it in neutral vs. flooring it in gear.

Re: LSD: The Geek's Wonder Drug

#190

Post by bliss »

michaelchisari wrote: post #127

I've had a relatively drug-free life, although I've often volunteered to be the sober friend while everyone else imbibes. I've never regretted it, I've had some great times not on drugs. But if you've ever seen Little Miss Sunshine, the grandfather has a perspective on drug use that I've adopted wholeheartedly: Don't you start taking that shit. When you're young, you're crazy to do that stuff. What about you? I'm old…

I agree, with my proven addictive personality (i'm a smoker!), I'm terrified of morphine (and less pure versions), I have been in situations where the big bad H or opium was offered but have always refused not because I was really afraid of harm or of legality but because I was afraid that I would like it too much. I've long held to the morbid fact that as soon as I get my cancer/heart-failure/other terminal diagnosis, then I'll be starting Opium use with gusto!
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