For a long time now, I've been kinda self-experimenting on inducing these kinds of states in myself, without resorting to hardware or hard/scary drugs.
It all started with my realization that sleep brought me answers in general; i.e. a realization that my general pattern was to work on hard problems all day until I hit various brick walls, then step away and do Real Life and then later at night I'd Sleep, and then often if I'm lucky I wake up the next morning with important realizations that get me past the previous day's brick walls, and then the cycle repeats.
Once I realized this pattern, I started optimizing for more sleep cycles per day and a more-immediate transition from BrickWalls->Sleep, basically by injecting a daytime nap in the midst of my workday if/when I can (working from home has its privileges!), aiming for ~1.5h or ~3h nap increments when I can, since that seems to match well with my sleep cycles for reaching REM in the middle and then waking back out of it on a natural cycle boundary.
I'm also a heavy coffee drinker for the stimulant effects on my thinking, and at one point heard about the "Coffee Nap" idea (TL;DR - it takes ~30m for caffeine to really kick in, so when you get tired you chug a coffee and lay down, and let yourself wake later as it kicks in).
Somehow over time all my random experimentation on these various inter-related things settled into a new pattern that works well when I can achieve it: I try to hit the brick wall while still fairly amped on caffeine (have a last cup as I'm moving away from the laptop if I'm behind on my caffeine intake), then switch over to a nap state.
As I'm laying in bed falling asleep, I initially force my thoughts on whatever my Brick Walls are, and my body's still a bit uncomfortably caffeine amped/buzzed for laying down and trying to sleep, but between the coffee buzzing and the descent into sleep, I now usually end up having a very odd transitional but semi-conscious mental state for a solid 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) on my way to sleep. During this time, free associations and strange dreamy unrelated things start springboarding out from my initial more-directed thoughts, and it's clear this is basically an open channel to get those lateral-thinking associations going while still barely conscious. It's like a psychedelic-drug-free version of a short acid trip or useful lucid dreaming state. Eventually I succumb to sleep, but I have had a very good success rate (relatively - it's still not necessarily high in the absolute!) at getting good intuitive answers to my problems on waking.
Over time I've gotten better and better at achieving these states with practice, but it still requires a lot of these triggering conditions/patterns above. I think/hope eventually I may reach a point where I can induce these mental states at will without actually going to sleep afterwards or relying on caffeine buzz to kick it off.
I recently read "A mind for numbers" which leans on this concept of working hard on a problem (focus mode) and then stepping away from it for some time (diffuse mode) very heavily. I also realized that this works really well for me and i guess for most people.
I've relied on this for decades for complex development tasks. Now when a manager asks me to propose some design solution, I just say flat out that I'll probably know what to do after a couple of sleeps.
FWIW, not every major site on the Internet is out to spy on you.
The Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia, et al) bends over backwards to explicitly avoid harvesting and hoarding long-term analytic information that can clearly identify users and their patterns, even internally. Also, the (very minimal) level of co-operation with state actors (etc) is tracked and published at https://transparency.wikimedia.org/ .
Just to meta-meta this conversation and the article in new and confusing ways, Wikimedia also hosts a map server, using OSM's data, @ https://maps.wikimedia.org/ :)
The injection is currently for non-HTTPS only, but I can easily see this situation evolving for the worse as HTTPS becomes increasingly the default.
What will happen is someone at Comcast will notice that their injections aren't happening often enough anymore due to HTTPS adoption. Someone at Comcast will suggest implementing a MITM TLS proxy service to get things working again. Someone else at Comcast will note that wouldn't actually work because they can't install fake root certs on every client device...
Then Comcast will basically switch to a model where the HTTPS interception is "optional" (requiring the client-side use the proxy explicitly), but they'll start shipping some kind of "Comcast Setup" executable (or mobile app) users are supposed to run on their client laptops/phones so that they can get these important service notices, which turns on the client-side use of the proxy and installs the fake root certs. Geeks may not install it, but the bulk of their customers will, and everyone loses. I don't think broadband consumers are aware of the fact that they shouldn't trust software provided by their ISP...
> The injection is currently for non-HTTPS only, but I can easily see this situation evolving for the worse as HTTPS becomes increasingly the default.
That's my fear too. This has to be handled by other means and has to stop. If everything is HTTPS you can be sure it gets very unsecure by design, as everyone will upgrade its capabilities and inject you certs, than we would need a new more secure protocol.
Why is email still unsecure and sent in plain text? Why is there hype for HTTPS but everyone is fine with sending mail in plain text yet we have SMIME, etc and no one is using or supporting it.
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There's really no way to design a maintenance-free house. A typical house has a lot of parts slowly failing all the time, meaning you will eventually need expensive repairs on various timelines (sometimes many years, so it can be "ignored" for a while at your peril). Roofing, HVAC systems, sheetrock damage, repainting, replacing aging flooring/carpeting, replacing failing major appliances, etc.
You'd have to design and build a custom home way outside of the designs considered normal for the market to make it significantly more (but not completely!) maintenance-free in the long run, at a significant increase in construction cost. But then you've subjected yourself to another hidden downside: the more strange/custom/expensive a home is, the less liquid that home will be on the market if you decide to sell later. A home that's awesome to you but not-awesome to 95% of the market doesn't move. And if you're stuck with it and it's a significant chunk of your wealth, then you can't move cities for that new job or whatever.
if the house is made of icf construction, it wont rot, suffer from termites, warp or burn. if you have a metal roof with steel trusses, your roof will last a very, very long time. all of this also makes the house impervious to fires both inside and outside as well as high winds. they make houses in southern florida that arent made out of stick and that dont simply fall over in a strong wind -- i look at those a lot for guidance. the construction cost is only slightly higher excluding the steel trusses. my house wont be very big so i can afford the steel trusses. even without steel trusses, you can make it practically fire proof. coating the outside of an icf house with cement based stucco will make that house classified as a non combustible structure in the eyes of the code, and you can insure it as such.
you mention hvac. i will not have hvac. you mention repainting, i dont have to paint if i dont want to. you mention flooring, my floor is concrete. you mention sheetrock, the sheetrock will be fine.
all of this is well within code and well within what i would call normal. but i hope that people will find it strange or un-buyable because that would reduce the market value of my improvements to the land and therefore lower my property tax. i am aiming to get the lowest operating cost possible, and having a home that has low liquidity actually greatly helps that. not every home has to be a flipping scheme.
I chose our current house in part because of the slate roof and unpainted structural brick exterior (both very low maintenance). I admire your search for low operational cost housing; I hope that your eventual house comes out just as low cost as your optimistic projections above.
im going to dig into every source of information i can on the subject of houses and their materials. my plan for the house has already evolved dramatically and will probably continue to, terminating in a design that stands a very high probability of satisfying my requirements. i very much hope that it works because unlike some people here, my prospects are not bright -- they are unsure at best. this is probably the only way that i will be able to retire in a house of my own without waiting until im 70.
While the average quality of life in the western world is still currently higher than the global average, there have been recent data points in the US that globalization has drug certain subsets of the US down to 3rd-world levels of life quality[1][2]. Globalization is desirable on many levels and happening, and it is already beginning to pull down on the bottom end of western society (and similarly, pull upwards on the bottom end of non-western societies).
What we're getting is globalization (which essentially causes equalization across geographic/national boundaries) without wealth redistribution (within national legal boundaries), which means that while the global average scales are slowly equalizing, there will continue to be a vast split between the rich and poor everywhere.
To go a little further, I suspect with CP cases like banks the real underlying problem is more fundamental. You can't realistically, under the laws of physics, have a hard notion of transactional ordering (did the account's money come in before it went back out?) without pinning down the concept of an account to a location. At least, not efficiently or quickly.
In other words, eventual consistency in the face of asynchronous remote actors never makes sense when your requirements dictate hard, consistent transactional ordering. You have to think of it as "the transactions happen in the order they arrive at the account's virtual location in New York". To think of them as globally-distributed in nature is always going to cause logical problems at some level. If your database was eventually-consistent, you'd have to build in some sort of after-the-fact safety checks that have the ability to abort the outer transaction, at which point you've wasted a lot of effort patching over the wrong model.
So either you have a need for strong consistency guarantees (order really matters), in which case you have to pin the transactions' locality down (where do they meet up at for their efficient strict ordering?) and CP is your model, or you don't (simpler things like social network updates) and you're better off with AP and eventual consistency to scale things out easier and make it faster for everyone, and really who cares if once in a great long while a user-visible race happens and some people see a couple of posts in a different order than someone else does for a few minutes until things snap back into sync?
> You can't realistically, under the laws of physics, have a hard notion of transactional ordering (did the account's money come in before it went back out?) without pinning down the concept of an account to a location
You've just made me realise that the universe itself is only eventually consistent - that's what all those weird quantum observer / wavefunction collapse events are.
Yep, that's what I was trying to get at, but failed in my explanation.
Everything's eventually consistent on an ever-present sphere around the incident expanding at the speed of light. No faster.
Even if the sun were to blink out of existence, we'd have 8 minutes that we wouldn't know. Gravity would still be there, holding Earth in place. The light would still warm us. Then 500 seconds later, darkness. We'd be flung out on a tangential course.
This isn't quite right. Even with SR and the speed of light its possible to build consistent systems and achieve consensus. Not-eventually-consistent doesn't mean instantaneous. The SoL just sets a lower bound on the speed of consensus.
It's important to not overstate the importance of that bound, though.
Sure. CA fulfills that requirement. Of course, you throw away any semblance of partition tolerance.
Of course, a single machine guarantees there can be no partitioning, and really easy to obtain consensus. It might not be terribly fault-tolerant, however.
CA is a not really a valid/possible thing in the context of CAP. The original phrasing of the theorem was poor and the "choose 2" myth persists. You can choose to (or accidentally) give up C or A but you don't get to choose to not have partitions. Not being partition tolerant doesn't really make sense (you're just broken?) if partitions are going to happen. A better phrasing of CAP is "in a network with partitions a distributed system cannot be both consistent and available." (note: this doesn't guarantee that you are one of C or A, you just can't be C and A.) You can see that definition used in formal treatments, e.g. Theorem 1 in https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/GL-cap.p...
(Briefly, note that the original article is critiquing that definition of availability in practice which is legitimate but not relevant to this sub-thread.)
What I'm saying is that EC is most definitely NOT a requirement of physics/the speed of light (what your original post claimed.) The speed of light only sets a (theoretical) limits on how fast you can implement a consistent system.
The original Paxos paper ("The part-time parliament") uses an analogy of a quorum of parliamentarians occasionally getting together in the the same building and agreeing on something. Of course it being the same building is arbitrary and doesn't actually matter, but it's easier to intuit that the speed of light isn't an insurmountable road-block at that scale.
Special relativity and the speed of light impose some fundamental lower bounds on the cost of consistency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity . This theoretically manifests as lower bounds on the performance of consistency in distributed systems.
SE/QA/Prod/Mobile - No piece of software can see such broad use by millions without constantly evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of users, the ever-changing blend of user agent / browser software, and the ever-changing and hostile environment of the internet itself. If you think you've ever seen a complex internet-based software project simply become perfect and then need no further changes for a decade or more, you clearly don't understand software engineering.
Discovery - This is about discover-ability of the content itself, e.g. search engines both internal and external, and other related matters.
Security - Actually, a lot of people care about hacking an encyclopedia. Just on the server side they care about hacking the ~1000 servers that are servicing or operating on the private data of millions of users.
Traffic - It's a sub-set of Operations that deals specifically with the edge of the foundation's network (e.g. CDN-like things, for which they don't outsource a commercial CDN mostly for privacy reasons: spreading edge caches around the world, low-level performance optimization, SSL encryption, etc).
Cloud Services - This is where the foundation hosts virtual server resources for community volunteers to experiment with and run projects and products of their own that are relevant, e.g. "bot" software that patrols articles for likely vandalism attempts and such.
It all started with my realization that sleep brought me answers in general; i.e. a realization that my general pattern was to work on hard problems all day until I hit various brick walls, then step away and do Real Life and then later at night I'd Sleep, and then often if I'm lucky I wake up the next morning with important realizations that get me past the previous day's brick walls, and then the cycle repeats.
Once I realized this pattern, I started optimizing for more sleep cycles per day and a more-immediate transition from BrickWalls->Sleep, basically by injecting a daytime nap in the midst of my workday if/when I can (working from home has its privileges!), aiming for ~1.5h or ~3h nap increments when I can, since that seems to match well with my sleep cycles for reaching REM in the middle and then waking back out of it on a natural cycle boundary.
I'm also a heavy coffee drinker for the stimulant effects on my thinking, and at one point heard about the "Coffee Nap" idea (TL;DR - it takes ~30m for caffeine to really kick in, so when you get tired you chug a coffee and lay down, and let yourself wake later as it kicks in).
Somehow over time all my random experimentation on these various inter-related things settled into a new pattern that works well when I can achieve it: I try to hit the brick wall while still fairly amped on caffeine (have a last cup as I'm moving away from the laptop if I'm behind on my caffeine intake), then switch over to a nap state.
As I'm laying in bed falling asleep, I initially force my thoughts on whatever my Brick Walls are, and my body's still a bit uncomfortably caffeine amped/buzzed for laying down and trying to sleep, but between the coffee buzzing and the descent into sleep, I now usually end up having a very odd transitional but semi-conscious mental state for a solid 10-15 minutes (sometimes longer) on my way to sleep. During this time, free associations and strange dreamy unrelated things start springboarding out from my initial more-directed thoughts, and it's clear this is basically an open channel to get those lateral-thinking associations going while still barely conscious. It's like a psychedelic-drug-free version of a short acid trip or useful lucid dreaming state. Eventually I succumb to sleep, but I have had a very good success rate (relatively - it's still not necessarily high in the absolute!) at getting good intuitive answers to my problems on waking.
Over time I've gotten better and better at achieving these states with practice, but it still requires a lot of these triggering conditions/patterns above. I think/hope eventually I may reach a point where I can induce these mental states at will without actually going to sleep afterwards or relying on caffeine buzz to kick it off.