v_krishna

I’m not a Jain so take this with a grain of salt. Their philosophy of nonviolence believes in two sets of rules - one for ascetics and one for “householders”. The former renounce everything in service of nonviolence (they often wear masks to prevent breathing in any organisms, carry canes that they use to tap the ground when they walk, etc). The latter have more “reasonable” restrictions (but are still pure vegetarians, etc). So maybe for the former group?

There are varieties of Jainism that won’t pluck fruits (will only eat what has naturally fallen) and many mainstream varieties of Jainism that won’t eat any root vegetables (because digging them up would harm insects), or seeded vegetables (eating it harms the plants ability to reproduce).

I have a friend with a PhD in linguistics, worked for years in the SF tech world in i18n, not quite a PM, not an engineer, not a CX person but somewhere between the three. He got laid off and found it impossible to get another role, I think in large part because he’s super over qualified by education and years of experience, but in such a niche skill set that doesn’t really fit into traditional tech company roles. He ended up taking a job at the airport doing plane loading and such!

I used to read it while pooping as a perl programmer at one of my first jobs

https://arewereorganizedyet.com/ lol already updated

Sounds like something a neonatal cannibal would say ;)

You likely absorbed them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_twin

Haha my first thought seeing this meme is “do you want to start writing LaTeX by hand? Because this is how you start…”

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Oh interesting I’ll tell my wife. I still continually deal with the unibrow myself. But high quality microblading is way different than normal tattooing esp in the appearance of texture, it’s quite amazing. Also pretty freaking expensive.

In the early 2000s plucking and waxing your brows to really really thin was fashionable, esp in certain places. Then people realized it is dumb but if you are around 40 now it was too late. So microblading helps you not look like a MadTV sketch. Source: my wife turns 40 this year, grew up in a particularly hood area of the sf bay area, and from 30 onwards really regretted plucking her eyebrows to almost nothing.

Dr bronners for skin and hair (I have very thick indian hair in jata style dreadlocks down to my knees). For a long time I used a charcoal based face wash (lush until they changed their formula for coal face, then some similar brand I found on amazon) but for whatever odd reason after a few years my skin stopped tolerating it and kept breaking out, so I switched to Kate Somerville’s sulfur face wash which works wonders (but does have a bit of a smell to it unfortunately).

It’s the part of ruby that replaced perl. For whatever eldritch horror perl was it was very, very good at doing text manipulation, and IME the only language to really match that experience was ruby.

I don’t get the downvotes. I’ve hired probably 30+ engineers over the last 5 or so years, and have been writing code professionally for over 20, and I fully agree with your sentiment.

I think that is overly simplistic. Embeddings used for LLMs do definitely include a concept of what things mean and the relationship of things to other things.

E.g., compare the embeddings of Paris, Athens, and London to other cities and they will have small cosine distance between them. Compare France, Greece, and England and same. Then very interestingly, look at Paris - France, Athens - Greece, London - England and you’ll find the resulting vectors all align (fundamentally the vector operation seems to account for the relationship “is the capital of”). Then go a step further, compare those vector to Paris - US, Athens - US, London - Canada. You’ll see the previous set are not aligned with these nearly as much but these are aligned with each other (relationship being something like “is a smaller city in this countrry, named after a famous city in some other country”)

The way attention works there is a whole bunch of semantic meaning baked into embeddings, and by comparing embeddings you can get to pragmatic meaning as well.

Sorry missed these comments before but I’d HIGHLY recommend reading The Human Condition, great work that goes into the different types of human activity (labor, work, and action)

It’s funny how people always cite Einstein on this letter but not Hannah Arendt. Given the subject matter I’d think of her as a way more relevant expert. Probably more about overall pop culture fame than sexism but interesting nonetheless.

the human race as a whole isn’t a distinct intelligence

I don’t know it’s quite that simple, (some) cognitive scientists and Marvin Minsky might disagree too. Pedantic asshattery aside, AGI might be an intelligence that’s so fundamentally different from our own ego/narrative/1-person perspective intelligence that we have trouble recognizing it as such.

That scares me. I also have family members who got it decades back and for the most part they all still have to use glasses.

I have ridiculously bad vision (-9.5 contact prescription) and bad astigmatism already, thankfully every optometrist ever has told me I’m a horrible candidate for it so I’ve never even had the possibility in my mind.

Balmer Peak