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HE'S A WITCH!!! (No really please let's not start another one until it's really needed)

So now that there is one less admin, where do I send my application? :)

Chiming in a week later ... I highly suggest that whatever you do, you do it often and in large quantities. Back when I was first learning about this stuff in 2000, I got into "security challenges" (www.mod-x.co.uk is my favorite) and hands down, the skills I learned solving those are the most...

How is that any different from you? Your brain is just a big database of common sense built over {YOUR_AGE} years of constant interaction with your environment. You have pretty good information processing circuitry (audio, video, temperature, tactile, etc), a language engine and a fairly short...

The point of FLAC is that it's lossless and the quality is exactly as good as the CD they were ripped from. This is important when you have fancy 7.1 headphones ;) Converting smaller files into FLAC is pointless because you can't get the quality back, the only thing that makes sense with FLAC is...

Right freaking here, right freaking now. "The only way to predict the future is to invent it" is not going to be true for much longer, but NOW is where all the best possibilities lie. RIGHT NOW. Words cannot express how happy I am to be alive. Only deeds can!

Last time that happened was maybe 3 years ago and I really wanted to punch the guy in his face all evening. Barely made it through the social function and never saw or spoke to him again. It drives me really crazy when people pull this shit.

I am always intensely concentrating on what I am doing, so having TV on will inevitably result in me watching whatever is on at the expense of anything else I was doing. This is great when I don't have anything else going on (40 hour anime marathons? oh my yes) but really annoying most of the...

What about throwing up a slightly modified version of Reddit on a subdomain? It's open source and was designed for exactly what is proposed here. As always, I volunteer coding skills if needed.

Re: Recommend some anime I'm gonna throw Eureka 7 out there, though the conditions I watched it under probably skewed my objectivity a tad.

There was an article somewhere about this exact thing. A restaurant got rid of tips completely and everyone was much happier. I'll post it if I find it.

I freaking hate multitasking because I suck at it. When trying to do a bunch of things at once, nothing ever gets done. It's much better for me to focus on one thing at a time and get it done. Always assumed it's because I am a guy, seems to be the correct assumption so far.

Marvin Minsky and Eliezer Yudkowski. They make up for the massive sucking of rest of the species.

- People still don't care. - You'll figure it out eventually. I often wonder what I would tell myself if I went back in time, but every major point required living through something major and 'previous me' would not 'get it' not having lived through the circumstances yet. The first point has...

From what I've read about DMT (Strassman's [crackpot] book), probably not on that. My roommate in college did DXM pretty often and he swore he had full control of reality in his head. I was out of the "trying to see stuff" phase by then so I never partook. Easy enough to obtain if you are...

I've read a lot about lucid dreaming over the years, but it's something I'm afraid to mess with. Science is still iffy on this, but it does seem like our dreams serve a purpose of some sort. What is lucid dreaming defeats that purpose and you get less of something important every night...

The universe only has a finite amount of 'bits' that can be used to store information. Right now an elementary particle has several properties that contain one bit each: spin, polarity, etc. Bust out a quantum physics book to learn all about those. First law of thermodynamics says energy (and...

I read an article some time ago which pointed out that if we had 1000x (or some large number) more computer power, we could cure cancer. Even from my own experience of writing a MS thesis, I could do so much more with my topic if I had 1000x more computing power. The universe is one complex MF...

The internet grows at an exponential rate too. Servers will be using the same hard drives that you are and there will always be more of them :)

By the way, I finally found the original article that I learned about all this from: http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/ It certainly changed *my* outlook.

I suppose it's technically possible, but it seems needlessly complicated. http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/ is a good article about nature and just how aware it is. I promise it has nothing to do with aliens or religion.

While I don't agree with most of what Kurzweil says, I'd just like to point out that the dude is 61 and he does not look older than 40. Last year one of my roommates was watching TV and Glen Beck on CNN was interviewing RK and I remember being shocked that he was 60 years old. Maybe it was the...

I have to admit that my implicit definition of "human life" only included people that had the capacity to commit suicide. When your example is included, then I would change my definition from "always" to "usually". However, if a deformed baby's brain can be preserved (via cryonics for example)...

Why don't you just remove yourself from your present environment for a while? For example, I spend my days coding in the engineering labs and people at school think of me as a CS nerd that is way too much into in (which is true). But sometimes I take my car to the local drag strip, where there...

"The Incredible Universe" by Brian Greene - I know it's a lame pop book =\ "The Emotional Machine" by Marvin Minsky - Completely altered my worldview "Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos" by Seth Lloyd - Integrated the second one into the first one and...

My first brush with suicidal people happened on this board. There was a thread where a member posted that she was going to kill herself one day and was looking for others that shared that viewpoint, while specifically saying she did not want advice or to be talked out of it because it's all been...

I said this in the witch hunt thread and I'll say it again here: I'd volunteer to look at and implement technical solutions to the troll problem. There are no guarantees (that's impossible), but it should make their lives much harder, without affecting regular members. Come on admins, lemme at em!

Re: "Witch hunt" There isn't a 100% guaranteed way of dealing with it, but there are many things we can do to make their lives harder. For example, there can be a page that lists all IPs that any account has ever logged in from. Then you can trace each IP and see what geographical location...

I had a similar experience in college. My roommate was a really good friend from high school and his GF/fiancee was a total bitch. I tried to be her friend at first, but eventually her constant nagging drove me to hate. Every night they'd be on the phone and she'd be bitching him out for some...

I only pointed it out in case you were not aware, so that you can look it up. In the same way I hope people point out the labels that apply to any of my behaviors, so that I may find out more about them. Perhaps even call BS on it once in a while. The only reason I stuck labels in my sig is so...

While Cog. is picking his nose, I'll address some more points. I am not sure how useful his approach is in (my) life. First and foremost, I have a goal. There is something I must accomplish and it's going to take every ounce of my strength (more mental than physical, but whatever) if I am going...

Mine is cookization.

So then it works the other way too? Psychopaths can "undo" their total emotional suppression? Are there any studies on this?

You have a lot of "what" going on, but not much "how". Perhaps some concrete examples should be thrown around? Pick one of the hardest emotions you've had to deal with and break down how you did it. Change names, locations, etc. Then I can follow in the same way and we can compare which parts...

My argument is that emotions are "wired in", so once they hit, all you can do is hang on. The only way to control them is to make up elaborate mental constructs and *actually believe* they are true. The soldier in your example kept his adrenaline pumping by thinking about certain death, and so...

A neural network just has an input and an output. You can think of input as "data from real world" and output as "classification" of the data. Then the more accurate the weights are, the less errors it makes when classifying data. You can replace the neural network with some other algorithm, or...

I'm not aware of any specific research into this area. But you can imagine a neural network that makes random small changes to its weights and checks for improvement against some samples, keeping only the changes that help. This would be constant and different from training, which happens at...

I see where you are coming from, but I don't think I can relate. Is emotion not tied to stimuli by definition? Is that not how we "feel" an emotion, when it's setting off a positive or negative stimulus and the drive to remove it or increase it is what we describe as "feeling"? When emotion is...

I suppose pessimism is healthy ... You would pass on getting frozen then?

The premise right now is that some of your life insurance pays for it (~$80k) and the rest gets invested. Then while you're dead, your money grows in value until society gets to the point where they can bring you back and it can be used to pay for your "return". They don't really need to...

After seeing the amount of discussion on suicide around the forums, I am wondering what you guys think of cryonics. It's pretty much the exact opposite of killing yourself, since the contents of your brain are preserved in a way that they can be retrieved later. Does the thought that you can...

+1 for Computer Science. I just defended my MS thesis last week and I'm hopefully getting a sweet job and spending a few years in the industry. Or if that does not pan out, then I'm getting another MS degree in the coming year. The goal is to eventually get a PhD and do research on general AI...

During most of my undergrad, the default scholarships almost completely covered me. Had to take out a subsidized loan once or twice though, but those are through the school and guaranteed. I attended a private university, so the cost of attendance was ridiculous, but they offered all kinds of...

Are you an HSP perhaps?

I second that. When I catch something that will alter my mental framework of that person, it usually triggers a specific feeling in my brain that says "this is important". Then I repeat it to replay that feeling again to make sure. It's usually mundane crap, like when someone mentions they were...

Same for me. There are some things that I have been pondering that I literally can't discuss with any other person I know. Because they are not INTPs and don't spend their life deep in thought, their eyes always glaze over far before I can even begin to get to my point. And if they do hear me...

It looks like we are not using the same definition of "emotion" here. My point is that we basically re-wired our brains to get pleasure out of refusing emotional gratification. The feeling we get from refusing to partake in whatever normal people do to get emotional gratification (chasing ass...

But aren't you just defining "happiness" differently? It takes more to make you happy, but is happiness not the end result? Does it not "feel good" to have meaning and a purpose? Would it not "feel bad" to find yourself adrift in a sea of puppets, dancing to their tune? Just because an action...

E.B., have you read Marvin Minsky's book "The Emotional Machine"? He deals with a lot of what you are asking in it.

Ha "emotions are dumb and should be hated" :seriousface: I do agree that emotions are just hard-wired heuristics and should certainly not be blindly followed. The reason a lot of things are so fucked up in the world is that people let their emotions steer them. My mantra has been "emotions...