> Now imagine for a second, that the whole universe was a big cycle, and that you are going to be repeating this very same life in a “future” cycle, and maybe infinitely many times
I've heard this called 'Eternal recurrence of the same' in a past life (pun not intended). It fascinates and terrifies me at the same time.
Thank you. Hadn’t heard the name. Apparently it was a central part of Nietzche’s thought and similar to the concept of Eternal Return. Fascinating!
And yes, it’s a bit like the scene in Dune 2 when Paul’s mother, after taking the water of life, tells him he needs to drink it too, that his mind will open so he can see «the beauty and the horror»
Borrowing from signal processing, you could also call this “life aliasing”
Litter box cleaner: A kinect, a digital weight scale, a couple of cameras, a robot arm, a litter box, an internet connection and I would pay 25c for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manipulate the robot arm and clean the litter box for me. And people would wait in line to take the job.
This blows my mind, and I love it. What sort of limits did you put on the Mechanical Turk service to keep people from farming the... you know... turds.
It posted a MT task when it detected weight in the litter box that was less than a cat but more than a little pee. Very sensitive digital weight platform and some fine tuning of the heuristic to get it just right. Then the MT task had to be finished in X minutes from when they start, but the Turker could request extra time on the task. But if they didn't, it would time after N minutes. Then, if they have clicked "done", two more MT tasks would get generated for two new people, where the MT worker would be asked to look at a before and an after shot of the litter box and decide if it was clean.
I kept it online for about six months. It was obviously a "dumb idea taken to the extreme" project, which included "and what can I do with computer vision and robotics for my final project with this really expensive Fujitsu robot arm I picked up from a surplus auction?"
You may be referring to the "farming" to be first in line to get the job. I didn't really prevent anything like that. Cats poop at different times, so no real way to predict when the job would pop up on MT. The Kinect and weight sensor in combination determined there was no cat present, and then the job would post. The job would always be gone in seconds. People got very creative with their cleaning, treating it like a Zen sand garden. I would come back and see pure art at times. Once, the MTurker stacked up the excrement like they were recreating the mashed potato scene from Close Encounters. They were not invited. Much like the popular meme: "Except for Billy. Billy has created the opposite of art."
I did have the usual "if the person who cleaned it last didn't do a job that passed review, they would be barred from taking future cleaning jobs."
I need hearing aids. I even want hearing aids. After finally getting to see an audiologist I looked at the $5000US price offered by the in-house shop and could not stomach it (in part because they were not covered by my insurance). This was back in February of this year, so OTC hearing aids were officially a thing, and I'd hoped against hope that the prices would reflect that. After surveying the OTC hearing aid landscape for the past 10/11 months I may just go ahead and get them, because I've not found any good sources of information on them. Just lots and lots of marketing copy.
First let me say I purchased OTC hearing aids for $799 (Jabra Enhance) out of frustration and the particular ones I use are adequate at best. They tune to your hearing loss via a crude test which only has three frequency ranges categorized as high, medium and low frequency bands. They additionally have three modes that change the mix of in room sound to help to adapt to different listening situations.
The biggest frustration with them is they aren't particularly discrete around amplification or rejection of sound: want to hear someone speaking? You're going to get lots of room noise too because of the wide bands which just amplify everything rather than say just speech and/or where your specific hearing loss is deepest.
In fact even though my insurance does cover hearing aids, it's through a certain discount supplier, and their offerings strike me as lower-end. As you've discovered the most expensive options are eye-poppingly expensive, but they are also have the most features. For example I was quoted between $5k and 7.5k for the best performing hearing aid. And here's the frustrating bit: for that difference in price it's the same fucking hearing aid, just with features unlocked! The audiologist told me the real difference in price is mostly more discrete bands. lol. From memory it tops out at twenty four bands.
I'm currently debating between going to Costco and using my insurance with Amplifon. I suggest you investigate both as Costco's hearing aids get decent reviews. Also apparently the prices vary by state, but here in Texas the cheapest ones are $1,499; less than half the price you quoted.
I went to an audiologist and they found nothing wrong with my hearing, but yet, I have trouble hearing normal conversational tones. Hearing completely fucking annoying sounds like fluorescent lights? That I can do with abandon, but hearing someone in the same room as me comes out muffled, particularly if there is a noisy background. The audiologist actually had the audacity to tell me that my wife may just be making things up.
So, OTC hearing aides may be a solution for me, but while they are far more inexpensive than prescription aides, they are still expensive ($1000+) and what if they do not work or do not work to solve my problems and only exacerbate the issues I have?
Does anyone have recommendations on which ones to try when I eventually bite the bullet?
You may have some form of APD [1], and if so there is basically nothing on the market for you. It affects me, and it's frustrating as hell when people get angry at you for it, and especially when they think you're just making it up.
Librarians in the United States have been moving in a social justice/progressive direction for about the past 15 years. They are also highly online and the community is prone to purity tests and the tumblr-like political drama we've gotten used to in such spaces. This is according to my partner, who has been in the field for 20 years.
I don't know the root cause, but I do know from my own experience that a librarian is a very specific "type" of customer—extremely helpful in diagnosing any technical problem, generally positive and friendly, but God have mercy on you if you step on their politics.
Yep. 3 x 0.5mg a day for over ten years. Started my taper in 2018 and it took 3 1/2 years. In retrospect even that was probably too fast, because things started to go very wrong in 2020 and went catastrophically wrong at the end of 2021.
Send me a DM (email in profile) if you have specific questions. I'm more or less an open book.
If you've been on these long-term, I cannot stress enough how slowly you need to taper.
Edited to add that I wish I could contribute more to this conversation than lived experience, but saying that benzodiazepines "...are associated with an increased risk of suicide due to aggression, impulsivity, and negative withdrawal effects"[0] is like describing the sinking of the Titanic as a fender-bender.
Same at first it was like "Cool, no thoughts head empty, I don't feel anything anymore" but then it was "fck no thoughts head empty, I really don't feel anything anymore".
I got them prescribed by my psychiatrist (~4mg/day). And getting off of them was like going through hell, I really just wanted to stop taking them (I tried it for one day...), but I needed to reduce it by 0.5/week to not completely go berserk. But even with slowly reducing it, it wasn't a pleasent experience.
Yes, I wasn't addicted (as it didn't feel good to take it) and after reducing it step by step, I was off of it (took some time). Though after that my other stuff (the reason why I got benzos prescribed) was there again, but I had no urge to take Benzos again.
The withdrawal can also kill you outright. Most other drugs can lead to a fatal withdrawal due to complications, but the withdrawal process itself isn’t lethal, like with benzos.
I take them occasionally for panic attacks and my god they are strong. A nibble off a corner normally does the job for me. I can’t imagine being prescribed them for daily use — and regular use has a whole bunch of nasty side effects.
There's a theory bouncing around that the medical coma he supposedly used resulted in some degree of brain damage, causing him to really go off the political deep end.
Now this is something I would love to learn more about. I feel like I'm always tinkering with audio hardware, and if I can bring a Teensy into the picture, then even better.
Mitchell's translation of part 50, in particular, has long resonated with me:
The Master gives himself upto whatever the moment brings.He knows that he is going to die,and he has nothing left to hold on to:no illusions in his mind,no resistances in his body.He doesn't think about his actions;they flow from the core of his being.He holds nothing back from life;therefore he is ready for death,as a man is ready for sleepafter a good day's work.
He admits (in the end notes, If I remember correctly) that this is not a literal translation; but comparing it to translations that do stick more closely to the original text I find that there's a lot here I prefer.
I've pretty much given up trying to recycle plastic, and instead throw it in the trash. It's toxic to make (I think?), contaminates food and water when you heat it, and--apparently--can not be recycled safely or efficiently. I realize I can't remove it from life entirely, but I'm actively avoiding it where I can and replacing it as opportunity permits.
I've heard it said that plastic is better off sequestered in landfills than recycled, to reduce the amount of microplastics getting into the environment.
>I realize I can't remove it from life entirely, but I'm actively avoiding it where I can and replacing it as opportunity permits.
I realized this as well and have practically eliminated single-use plastics from my life except for those being those needed for health and safety reasons, like the blister packs that some medicines come in or bottles holding household chemicals.
Even with household chemicals, a strategy to minimize plastic use is to buy high-quality commercial applicators that can be reused for years and then purchase the product in bulk or concentrated form.
It isn't as easy as it should be, but at the same time it isn't difficult. It just requires time and effort.
When I discovered that bar shampoos and soaps that come in cardboard boxes contain the same ingredients as their liquid counterparts, and were less expensive because you weren't paying to transport water or mold a plastic bottle, it started a landslide of plastic avoidance.
Whoa, this takes me back to 2nd grade when I did almost nothing but daydream during class. My daydreams were elaborate science fiction. I got in a lot of trouble for it, both with my parents and the (substitute) teacher. The teacher ended up paddling me for doing it, which was a terrible punishment for being so far ahead of my peers[0] that I had to find a way to compensate.
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[0] I need to be very specific here: I do not think I was smarter than my classmates, or some special genius. I had just been afforded more of an educational foundation by that point in time.
I come back to Calvin and Hobbes regularly as an adult and every time I do I'm reminded just how delightful Watterson's work is. Truly a one-of-a-kind comic strip.
I've heard this called 'Eternal recurrence of the same' in a past life (pun not intended). It fascinates and terrifies me at the same time.