It's owned by Automattic, isn't it? I assume they're simply keeping the lights on for whoever wants to use it.
For about a year I've noticed that it tends to quit on its own on my Mac. Whenever I need to look for a note I realize the app is inactive and I need to re-launch it. Then it works perfectly well, until somehow, at some point, it quits without me realizing.
It's sad that they're not fixing it, and that eventually it probably won't work with newer Mac OS and iOS versions. I should start looking for a way to migrate off of it.
Reminds me of the Ambystoma salamanders that reproduce via kleptogenesis. They are all female, and they "steal" sperm from males of 3 or 4 related species. Most of the time they discard the male's genetic material, but sometimes they incorporate it, which results in embryos that have multiple sets of chromosomes. It's wild. The offspring can contain genetic material from up to 4 different parental species.
Both of my sisters (currently mid-30s) have had their lives on pause for over 10 years due to chronic Lyme disease because doctors in Mexico hadn't ever even heard of it. It took 4 years of pain for the first of them to be diagnosed. Not sure when, if ever, they'll be cured because when you don't treat Lyme disease within a few months of infection, it digs in and is incredibly difficult to kill.
> Not sure when, if ever, they'll be cured because when you don't treat Lyme disease within a few months of infection, it digs in and is incredibly difficult to kill
FYI, the idea that active infection continues to exist in hiding within the body is a fringe theory.
The linked article talks about one of the current theories for why some patients have persistent symptoms after the infection is treated. The theory involves certain components of the past infection lodging themselves in the liver where they persist and can cause symptoms.
This is a difficult topic because some alternative Lyme treatment providers will tell patients they have a persistent infection and then subject them to years of high-dose antibiotics with no scientific basis, which can create a separate set of problems without addressing anything.
> This is a difficult topic because some alternative Lyme treatment providers will tell patients they have a persistent infection and then subject them to years of high-dose antibiotics with no scientific basis, which can create a separate set of problems without addressing anything.
I know someone who has been suffering from what they call "chronic lyme" for years. These people are painfully well aware of the unlikeliness of antibiotics fixing them, and they're very much aware of the problems being caused by antibiotics. But the alternative ("doing nothing") isn't helping them either, so they cling to the hope that the antibiotics will do "something".
It doesn't help that they're stigmatised. They're "lazy". They're "faking it". It isn't a "real disease". None of that helps them. Maybe the antibiotics don't help them either, but at least they have a chance of doing something.
Yes, and they use non-specific testing that will produce a positive result in most people.
There's a massive scam industry around Lyme and it's a shame because it interferes with legitimate suffers' ability to get honest treatment. Or worse, sends those who don't have Lyme down a rabbit hole where their actual condition is never treated.
I read an account here years ago of someone that tried everything and as a last resort did a 2-3 week fast under doctors supervision and it cured it. I always thought I would try this if I got LD.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it’s extremely unlikely both your sisters would have a rare chronic condition related to Lyme that wouldn’t respond to the standard course of antibiotics. The hysteria around Lyme on the internet is ridiculous.
Unfortunately nobody wants to say it to your face, but among females, you can never rule out social contagion when confronted with extremely coincidental outcomes like this.
Or, it could be a genetic condition they both have being misdiagnosed as chronic Lyme via internet research.
How do these kinds of advancements in math happen? Is it a momentary spark of insight after thinking deeply about the problem for 20 years? Or is it more like brute forcing your way to a solution by trying everything?
My experience from proving a moderately complicated result in my PhD was that it's neither. There wasn't enough time to brute force by trying many complete solutions, but it also wasn't a single flash of insight. It was more a case of following a path towards the solution based on intuition and then trying a few different approaches when getting stuck to keep making progress. Sometimes that involves backtracking when you realize you took a wrong path.
Yeah agreed - there are actually many, smaller flashes of insight, but most of them don't lead to anything. I once joked that you could probably compress all the time I was actually going in the right direction in my PhD down to about a month or two. That's a bit glib, often seeing why an approach fails gives you a much better idea of what a proof 'has to look like' or 'has to be able to overcome'. But many months of my PhD were working on complete dead-ends, and I certainly had a few very dark days because of that. Research math takes a lot of perseverance.
Yup, I think stubbornness/perseverance is the most useful transferrable skill I got from doing research math. It's a double-edged sword though as I often just can't give up working on something when I really should in my tech job.
In this case, a ton of progress had already been made. The conjecture had been proved in some cases, reduced to a simpler problem in others. This couple went the last mile of solving the simpler problem in some particularly thorny cases.
You're really standing on the shoulders of giants when you rely on the classification of finite simple groups.
You're really standing on the shoulders of giants when you rely on the classification of finite simple groups.
Giants whose work has (dirty little secret) never truly been verified. The proof totals about 10,000 pages. At the end of the effort to prove it there were lots of very long papers, with a shrinking pool of experts reviewing them. There have been efforts to reprove it with a more easily verified proof, but they've gone nowhere.
Hopefully, the growing ease of formalization will lead to a verification some day. But even optimistically that is still a few years out.
> There have been efforts to reprove it with a more easily verified proof, but they've gone nowhere.
My understanding was that the so called "second generation proof" of the classification of finite simple groups led by Gorenstein, Lyons, Solomon has been progressing slowly but steadily, and only the quasithin case had a significant (but now fixed) hole. Are there other significant gaps that aren't as well known?
Still they have a couple more books of proof left, and I have to wonder how carefully it will be reviewed. This will still be a massive improvement, but I'd be a lot happier if the entire proof could be formalized.
Plus there is still a possibility that there proves to be another significant hole.
If any theorem needs to be formalized, this is the one. No other theorem is this big, this hard to prove, and this important to get right.
The structure of DNA was seen in a vision in James Watson's dream. Some say it's subconscious problem solving and I think most down to earth people agree with that, but some less down to earth people will absolutely attribute it to god (I'm in the latter). If we were to entertain a silly proposition, something in the universe could just move our story along, all of a sudden. These paradigm shifts just seem to appear.
I disagree. What he stole was the pictures she took. He really did come up with the structure.
Mind you he was helped by a nice coincidence. Franklin knew all 230 space symmetry groups, and so had to sort through them. Watson only really knew one - his PhD thesis was on a protein with the same group as DNA.
I can only think of that example because it’s the only one I know of where the scientist admitted to something divine.
This is probably something I need to research more, because the questions scientists are dealing with are too deep to ignore the one big question, and I wonder who struggled with it.
Subconscious problem solving is definitely a thing as far as I'm concerned.
It's happened several times that I struggled with a bug for hours, then suddenly came up with a key insight during the commute home (or while taking a shower or whatnot), while not actively thinking about the problem. I can't explain this any other way than some kind of subconscious "brainstorming" taking place.
As a side note, this doesn't mean the hours of conciously struggling with the problem were a waste. I bet that this period of focus on the problem is what allows for the later insights to happen. Whether it's data gathering that alows the insights to happen, or even just giving importance to the problem by focusing on it. Most likely it's both.
Subconscious synthesis of seemingly unrelated strands of thought is the basis of assessing an event's meaning, for me. A day or two will pass after the event, and I notice the meaning evolves even without new information and without conscious thinking about the event.
For me, the subconscious is the wellspring of sudden insights.
an alternate hypothesis is that all thinking is unconscious with consciousness being the sum of many unconscious processes. So, while it's true as you say "that some kind of subconscious "brainstorming" taking place", that would just true all the time, and you only notice it when your conscious thoughts are of something else.
(n.b. historically speaking in the literature, "subconscious" was the word used to describe Jung's "woo-woo" ideas about a collective subconscious shared across populations, and unconscious was the word used for ideas about a single brain a la Freud which is what we are talking about here)
For me, the functionally useful bit of these ideas are that pushing pushing pushing your mind on one problem is not an effective use of resources. Alternating pushing with not pushing often finds good solutions faster.
Having only been exposed to Mullenweg on the Tim Ferriss podcast, I perceived him as the benevolent, zen-like steward of one of the biggest open source projects ever. Watching this drama over the past few months has been... interesting. It's like the dude on the podcast hit his head badly and had his whole personality replaced.
Maybe this is the performance. The podcast, based on the GGP, is a far more realistic form of human behavior. The current mode seems like a performance, following the trend of other SV CEOs.
For people who claim to be really smart, original thinkers, they follow the herd right toward the cliff.
As a snake keeper, I imagine the best way to attract them would be with food (i.e. rats), but then you run the risk of also attracting other native predators as well.
But to build on your idea, a trap that a python can enter but not exit without human assistance could be interesting. You can check the traps periodically and free any native wildlife that happens to enter them.
I was listening to a podcast today where the speaker wanted to fight against the way that entrepreneurs and business people were portrayed in the media. In many movies and TV shows the bad guy is often an evil billionaire.
This guy's argument was that in fact, entrepreneurs are the ones who can really change and improve the world, and while I don't disagree completely, corporations and executives have earned the way they're portrayed.
I'm all for well-targeted, useful ads, but this sounds like a horrible intrusion of privacy.
Just as an aside, I think the bad guy should always be rich / powerful, because how boring would a story be if the bad guy is easy to defeat? Imagine a Bond villain with no advantage over the protagonist. There would be nothing for the forces of good to overcome, and thus no drama.
In reality society needs a healthy crop of entrepreneurs vigorously innovating every which way, with a minimal amount of common-sense regulation to prevent obvious abuses like this. Easier said than done.
Last I heard he said he wasn't planning to make a 4th season of Bluey. But it was worded in a way that made it sound like it wasn't ruling it out completely.
One thing I admire about the show is that all the children actors' identities are a secret. No one outside of the show's team knows who voices Bluey and Bingo (other than the fact that they're the daughters of someone who works on the show), which probably affords those girls as much of a 'normal' life as possible, something that celebrity children wouldn't ever get to experience.
That also makes me wonder if the reason we're not getting more than 3 seasons is that their voices will change. But man, I really hope he puts out more stuff, whether in the Bluey universe or elsewhere.
I read a conspiracy post about how the kids' voices were AI (clearly not) but the post also pointed out many examples of audio clips being recycled across episodes. I notice it while watching now, so I think you're on to something here.
Conversely other shows have had many different voices actors without noticeable detriment by their targets audiences, such as Peppa Pig, discussed elsewhere here.
For about a year I've noticed that it tends to quit on its own on my Mac. Whenever I need to look for a note I realize the app is inactive and I need to re-launch it. Then it works perfectly well, until somehow, at some point, it quits without me realizing.
It's sad that they're not fixing it, and that eventually it probably won't work with newer Mac OS and iOS versions. I should start looking for a way to migrate off of it.
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