Meditation helps me be less reactive to stimulus and also decreases the occurrence of random thoughts.
Think of the human body as an IO system. Your sensory organs constantly giving you inputs from all directions.
Your mind deciding what the output should be.
When you meditate - I feel like you add a latency to your responses which allows you indirectly to focus better.
Second thing that really helps is a non distracting environment (decreasing potential inputs) - have a space where there isn’t much distractions.
Phones with push notifications id say are one of the biggest sources of distractions - I have most notifications switched off and check different messenger/mail apps periodically as I finish blocks of work - this absolutely helps in terms of focus.
My dog fell asleep while I had episode 4 running (the end caught me by surprise, haha).
I mean, she would have fallen asleep anyway, I probably could not. The voice is a little unpleasant and I concentrate too much on the nonsensical stories. But I also can't really fall asleep when the TV is running, so YMMV.
It is kind of hard to sleep to, I agree. This is a deepfake voice, ie it's generated by Google's WaveNet, which afaik is a deep learning thing. Unfortunately they didn't have a more whispered/softer voice, but I like the insanity of the generated stories anyway.
GPT3 does tend to get a bit repetitive, though, with the default temperature (0.7).
ASMR is not about whispering, but about pleasant sounds that make you feel nice and tingly. Most people may react well for whispering in particular, making it very popular in ASMR videos, but that doesn't mean all of them do - others may need a different trigger.
Stocks confer ownership of a company. If Apple remained the same, but everyone went insane and started selling Apple Stocks for $0.0000000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, I would buy every one and then collect the dividends.
Whereas if everyone sold crypto for $0.00000000000000000000001 and people refused to buy, you would gain nothing by buying them all. You can only make money in crypto if people buy it at a higher price.
Except many stocks do not, in fact, pay dividends. Amazon doesn't and it's one of the most highly valued companies in the world. Meanwhile, just as a lot of crypto does not pay dividends I could make use of DeFi platforms to get it on the crypto I do own, or simply get Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies, then you can see the staking process as paying dividends of a kind.
I get your hatred towards crypto, but you're cherry picking. If all money is BS and made up then good ol' stocks have good company with crypto in hell.
Hopefully everyone can see that there is a difference between being a 75% shareholder of Amazon, and being a 75% shareholder of dogecoin, in terms of the real assets that allows you to bring to bear. Regardless of which one is paying dividends.
Proof of stake crypto doesn’t pay a dividend. Stock splits where you hold more shares but total number of shares double are effectively a null transaction. It’s only the underlying value that matters not the number of tokens.
All companies either die or eventually pay dividends in one form or another. So, just because Amazon or whatnot has yet to pay a dividend doesn’t mean it will never pay one. People judge the probability of future dividends not just the pattern of past dividends because companies can fail, but they can also grow. Handing back money in the growth phase is considered an inefficient use of funds.
Amazon had net income of $21 billion on 2020. Were you the sole shareholder you would be entitled to collect that if you chose. Currently amazon reinvests to grow but that doesn’t mean profits aren’t there.
Meanwhile if you owned all of bitcoin and wanted to keep the current hash rate you’d have to pay in about $20 billion a year, maybe more.
From a cashflow perspective, one is certainly better than the other to own, even if you are barred from selling.
So to talk about the killer app we’ve got to differentiate the technology from the first use case, which is digital gold for now
Ethereum goal was to allow people to build different types of dApps by opening up the number of op codes on the virtual machine - this allowed people not only to build bitcoin on ethereum but also other types of apps - like Uniswap (Exchange), Compound (Lending) and dydx (derivatives). These are just a few. There’s a whole other world of NFT’s that is also bubbling up now. Aragon is building a DAO creator and launcher where you can build and run organisations in a digital jurisdiction.
Now as the World Wide Web decentralised the power to distribute information via a protocol, Blockchain’s can allow that for anything that requires trust - such as finance
Though the biggest limiting factor is still scalability of Blockchain’s but the Ethereum team and a bunch of other teams are solving that by being at the breeding edge of mechanism design. Ethereum realised Blockchain’s aren’t scalable and are bad for the climate long long ago - and already have plans to move away from PoW (energy intensive) to PoS (not energy intensive)
P.S - I got into bitcoin early because believe it was a hedge to inflation - realised it isn’t really a value add to society and have been dabbling with ethereum projects since 2016
I get the hate HN has for bitcoin - but deflationary assets are a use case especially when central banks believe they can pump infinite money. Nobody knows where this will end but your best bet is a deflationary asset
I love tech and finance - I believe the next decade we’ll see finance being disrupted by these protocols as ethereum moves to PoS
sumgame, I appreciate this long and detailed response, as well as your insights. That said, here's why I think cryptocurrencies (specifically the underlying blockchain concept) are mostly redundant to us. The answer might surprise you, because it's less about technology and more about human nature and social engineering.
For something like blockchains adding "trust" to finance, I have one big problem with this. Humans on both ends of the transaction still need to conduct their business honestly for this to work. Sure, the so-called smart contracts system, like the one found with Ethereum, allows you to write an immutable record to the blockchain that dictates whatever terms and commit it to what is essentially a distributed append-only database. Additionally, if you make a mistake on a smart contract, d'oh! You basically can't change an immutable record. You'd have to append over it with a fresh one, which, depending on how energy intensive this blockchain application is, contributes to unneeded waste.
Here's where my personal issue is at with all this. Say you decide to take receipt of a delivery from Timbuktu for some fine vases. You receive the items from said vendor and, despite the entry clearly describing what you were supposed to get, you in fact get scammed with a delivery full of sand. So, what do you intend to do? The ledger can be as specific about a transaction as you want, but this won't stop dishonest people from being dishonest. So then you can settle it in a court system, bring the parties to task, and... oh wait. Why did we not just simply use a regular database and time tested ERP systems that have done the job for ages?
I guess what I'm really getting at here is that blockchain isn't some magic bullet that will guarantee specific outcomes in commerce, and in fact, feels like a different way to do the exact same thing we've done forever, but we need to cater to some kind of NIH syndrome.
Back to cryptocurrencies, why do we need so many different tokens out there in existence? Aren't they all trying to generally accomplish similar tasks? That also adds a ton of confusion and consternation, with everyone claiming how their particular cryptocurrency project is truly the best and why you need to use it over INSERT PROJECT HERE.
Fintech is an interesting space to watch, but I see way more projects with less than pure intentions trying to see if they can make out like a bandit down the line.
The world wide web, by comparison, is (and by some sources... was) a truly democratic medium. I'm not sure the same thing applies with cryptocurrencies and blockchain, which all feel like solutions in search of a problem (or projects in search of money from FOMO-riddled folks with nothing better to do).
EDIT: To your point about Bitcoin being digital gold. Yeah... it's nice sounding in theory, but at least with real physical gold, it can survive till the heat death of the universe and doesn't require the constant consumption of resources to maintain it (which I find egregious and unconscionable), as well as not requiring an active internet connection. I'm not a goldbug either, but I can at least concede to gold having a handful of intrinsic properties which lends to it being a hedge in its own right, agreed on over thousands of years in human history.
I agree - both my immunity and energy levels are clearly much better when I do practice Wim Hoff vs when I don't. Though its been only a year and a half or so.
Namecheap is awesome. I switched from godaddy's predatory practices to namecheap, couldn't be happier.
To be honest most providers suck. Another common scam these guys run is skinning you for renewals, its just messed up that sometimes i have to pay double to triple the price of buying the domain for renewals.
There is a caveat that this article doesn't consider.
In India, if you are studying for elite colleges, in this case the IIT's, you write the entrance exam designed specifcally for that, which is IIT-JEE.
Most people go for separate training camps to study for JEE. The 12th grade exams are a cakewalk compared to these exams, and the stuff you study for the JEE is sometimes super advanced, like calculus in super advanced levels.
Most kids studying for JEE ( I was one of them), don't optimize for 12th grade exams because the JEE exam rank is all that matters to get into these "prestigious" institutions.
So a bad 12th grade score is by design more than anything.
Though there is definitely a lot of signaling, the research has ignored a very important behaviour.
What we are seeing is an unprecedent level of supply and demand shock. What this means is that there is going to be much lesser spending and businesses making much lesser money.
If this reflexive loop kicks in people have lesser disposable income and a lot of people will get unemployed ( we can see the early signs in the hospitality and airline industry already)
If this continues, then there will be foreclosures. Asset prices are going to go down. We will enter a recession. If Banks stay alive and liquidity is pumped into the system by the Fed, then we could see a reversal, if the shock persists for longer and finding the vaccine takes more time, we could head towards a depression.
Obviously there are tons of moving parts and there is no way to predict the future, but its likely that we will have a recession. There is a low probability that this will head to a depression because the Fed has been printing loads of money, but if this stops working, they have no more tools in their arsenal to revive the economy.
Fellow Indian here who's been tracking this since Feb.
Highlights of what I think are the biggest risk: The number of tests being performed in India are 20x less than most other countries, though it has ramped up in the past few weeks, there was a free flow of international travel till then.
My fear is that because the virus is asymptomatic, there are a lot of active carriers freely moving around. Most companies in India also find WFH an alien concept, even in tech, so it seems like most people still have to go to work.
I believe that the urban density in India is too high to stop something like this even from a lockdown. Also the lockdown would only help the middle class, there is a large section of urban poor that depend on daily wage that can't stop working. They depend on this money for food and shelter.
Overall, the avalanche is imminent, and I believe that the situation could be dire in the cities.
As tests ramp up the true impact will be seen but I fear that we'll always be behind the curve on this because of the difficulty of mobilizing testing at such scales.
The only way we can avoid large scale impact is if the virus finds it hard to survive in the heat, now that summer is in. Temperatures are rising but there is no consensus on whether that hinders the spread.
>The only way we can avoid large scale impact is if the virus finds it hard to survive in the heat
Personally, I'm hoping against hope that the heat really does slow this virus down. I don't really have much faith in the policies that the various developed nations have enacted to deal with this particular threat. Not really the fault of the leaders, This situation's just something that has not been seen previously. No experience with it at all. I do think governments are emphasizing the wrong things and not being comprehensive. But so are the people. We're buying toilet paper, but leaving soap on the shelves? But overall, governments at least seem to concede it is a threat at this point.
If the heat won't help us? We're in trouble. If India's heat doesn't slow it down, we're gonna be living with this virus for a good long time. Everyone should be rooting for India and Africa at this point. Cut off the rest of the world from those two places so that we can see if the spread is, at least, impaired a little by the heat or the humidity.
> Not really the fault of the leaders, This situation's just something that has not been seen previously.
This is the fault of the majority of our past or present leaders that ignored history and ignored the warnings (recently SARS, MERS, Ebola), and have left everyone unprepared. Not all countries were unprepared.
A civilised, well run country, deals with risks proactively (and ideally develops techniques to decisively act reactively as well).
It isn't necessary and the best example of this is Tesla's autopilot. It uses no Lidar component and Elon Musk's bet is that self-driving cars can just use just cameras, basic radar and ultrasonic sensors with enough compute resources and the right ML algorithms to perform better than a human.
He's been a long time anti lidar proponent because of the costs involved and the aesthetics. He's also betting that the amount of data Tesla receives from its customers, and the neural net they have can achieve autonomous driving with its current hardware stack.
“In my view, it’s a crutch that will drive companies to a local maximum that they will find very hard to get out of,” Musk said. He added, “Perhaps I am wrong, and I will look like a fool. But I am quite certain that I am not.
"Despite being a fancy and expensive technology, LiDAR provides surprisingly little advantage over a combination of cameras and radar. Radar, for example, is much better in the rain and other limited visibility scenarios, because it is based on radio waves rather than light waves. Radio can penetrate through some objects and bounce back from others, thereby “seeing” the environment along a different dimension."
Tesla is not a good piece of evidence. They registered a grand total of 12.2 autonomous miles in 2019. Their "Autopilot" is a particularly fancy driver assist system; if you take their marketing at face value and treat it like an autonomous driving system you are putting yourself and everyone on the road at risk.
That's fair, I've just taken the marketing at face value.
Though I ended the answer at the end asking whether Lidar adds incremental or exponential value? Do you think it adds exponential value ?
I'm not an autonomous car engineer so don't understand the nuances but from whatever basic information I've read it doesn't seem like Lidar's add exponential value.
Exponential. It gives range and shape data, which a pure-optical system needs to infer from a 2D image. This kind of image processing is still an open problem in ML.
The usual metric for self-driving car success is "disengagements per mile", ie how frequently a driver needs to intervene to avoid a crash. From my anecdotal readings of Tesla Autopilot reviews, it's on the order of 0.1 per mile. For Waymo and Cruise, it's on the order of 0.01 per THOUSAND miles. That's a very different definition of "driver" than the one that Tesla Autopilot requires.
I don't know the total number of miles on all Teslas on Autopilot, but it has had much more than one accident.
EDIT: and that Waymo crash was not a self-driving error; it was T-boned by a human-driven car running a red light.
Fair, depth perception from 2D isn’t there yet through ML, but mixed with radar can it be effective enough.
The reason I assumed it works is that lidar on the article above seems more like a redundancy. Because their camera system have the short range covered and radar has the long range covered. Lidar seems to augment over it.
Though the order of disengagement is a great stat, that definitely shows how much better waymo is compared to Tesla
> but mixed with radar can it be effective enough.
The usual solution is actually lidar + optical; lidar gives much better spatial resolution than radar, which is why it's been the standard going back to the DARPA challenge. You really want to have good spatial resolution in order to distinguish e.g. bikers and tail-lights and road signs for your optical systems, which radar typically isn't good enough for; that's the point of that qualifier in "imaging radar". Still probably worse performance (i.e. time and spatial resolution) than lidar, but better range and weather resistance.
(The previous generation of Waymo cars already had one lidar on top; the radar and the close-range lidars are the new additions.)
Their AutoPilot has driven billions of miles. Yes, the driver must still be paying attention and ready to take over. That doesn’t mean the system wasn’t driving.
Miles per disengagement I’m sure is not too high. That would be a good metric to have. But total miles is still ~2 billion.
> He's been a long time anti lidar proponent because of the costs involved and the aesthetics.
I can't help thinking that, whatever the merits of Lidar, Musk is boxed in, because Tesla has sold hundreds (tens?) of thousands of "self driving packages" for cars not equipped with Lidar, so changing course would not just mean raising prices on new cars, but retrofitting large numbers of existing cars at a ruinous cost.
> Elon Musk's bet is that self-driving cars can just use just cameras, basic radar and ultrasonic sensors with enough compute resources and the right ML algorithms to perform better than a human.
I'm not sure that unsubstantiated claims from Elon Musk are actual evidence that lidar isn't necessary.
It's substantiated by the fact that humans don't have radar and ultrasonics, just two cameras on a swivel and a lot of signal processing, and they succeed at operating a car to five-nines reliability measured in miles traversed. So Musk's bet isn't completely bonkers; he knows of at least one reference system that does the task with fewer sensors than even shipped with the Tesla.
... but we do want the SDC to do better, and there are failure modes that human perception is also vulnerable to generally. In addition to closing the gap faster on solving the problem without a copy of the human perception wetware, the LIDAR signal might also improve on those perception error states and be worth keeping in the design even if it could be done with cameras alone (or camera + radar + ultrasonic).
Defininitely agree, and I think that's the devil hiding in the details about Musk's bet that is worth surfacing: he's making the bet "We can just build a computer as good at this complex highly-variable task as a human being," and it's a bet people have been making and losing for decades.
Some day, someone will make that bet and be right. I haven't put my money on this team and this project. ;)
From the systems I've worked with it's usually AND and not OR, you use both a Lidar and a Radar. The Radar images I've seen were quite lousy and are not 100% interference prone.
The problem is Tesla autopilot only works on highways and has been implicated in a number of crashes. Waymo seems to be taking the much more cautious approach of using every advantage they can get. Perhaps one day there will be self driving cars without lidar. But for now I think Waymo's results speak for themselves.
I think it’s absolutely fair to expect autonomous vehicles to have awareness of a probable side collision in an intersection and be able to speed up or slow down to avoid it.
I often see oncoming cars rushing to make a left turn past when their arrow has turned yellow and red, and so I know not to enter an intersection even though my light has turned green.
Autonomous systems in theory should be better than humans at this because they can track all surrounding objects and trajectories, not just ones they are looking at with one set of eyes.
I think the accident rate is kind of a meaningless stats. You can have a low accident rate by carefully controlling the conditions under which you test. Not many accidents means they aren’t pushing the envelope. That’s probably a good thing on public roads. It’s also why the system is not available for general public use except under extremely controlled routes and close (remote) supervision.
I think it’s great we have (at least) two mega-companies in a race trying different approaches to reach a solution. There are good points for and against both approaches. This is what makes life interesting, you can’t just run the numbers to predict the future.
Linking to an article about a waymo car being hit by a car in a side collision seems pretty disingenuous when comparing to the Tesla accidents that people usually talk about
Meditation helps me be less reactive to stimulus and also decreases the occurrence of random thoughts.
Think of the human body as an IO system. Your sensory organs constantly giving you inputs from all directions.
Your mind deciding what the output should be.
When you meditate - I feel like you add a latency to your responses which allows you indirectly to focus better.
Second thing that really helps is a non distracting environment (decreasing potential inputs) - have a space where there isn’t much distractions.
Phones with push notifications id say are one of the biggest sources of distractions - I have most notifications switched off and check different messenger/mail apps periodically as I finish blocks of work - this absolutely helps in terms of focus.