How much is too much?
Today we have a whole new kind of addiction in digital space. We are cluttered by Emails, Chats, News, and what not?
Probably, the latent dimensions of addiction and [[OCD]] (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) have more negative impacts than good for every one of us. We mindlessly scroll through [[Echo Chambers]], just for that dopamine release that could evoke a sense of "false" calmness in us. And in some way that's fine. But then, there's a limit on how much one can really take, right?
Hi, “living” folks!
The week was relatively insomniac in my side. At first, I had thought it to be from caffeine overdose. So, for a few days, I stopped taking coffee during the afternoon. But, it didn't have any impact on me. So, I assume it's because of my anxieties. As days drift, I am starting to get back the memories of having Cigarettes and Weed. But I know I can control myself. It's just that I wasn't able to have a good sleep past week. Let’s see how it goes. Maybe, minimizing stress?
Nevertheless, I have also been re-structuring my browsing habits on the internet now. I have de-cluttered my subscriptions for various Newsletters. Plus, toned down different subs in Reddit. One good way to assess this is to use some kind of activity monitoring tool like RescueTime (expanded on later sections). This allows me to see the areas I spend the most time in the browser. You can have a look at my recent stats here. This is the theme of this week’s iteration of Bits-and-Paradoxes. (That’s the whole point, right? — Minimizing stress and chaos. )
playx has gained a lot of traction these days which has overwhelmed my psyche of "maintainership". And like always, I am procrastinating the implementation of [[BOID]] algorithm (to simulate flocking behaviour of birds) in panim. I have also added a naive OCR to ScreenEat now.
~Reading~
Becoming Addiction Free
Steve Pavlina | 15 min
First thing, this is a good read - relatable to almost anyone since everyone has some type of addictions in their life.
Second, addictions skew our thinking. We aren't objective enough to think about our addictions. We feel these addictions are all the things that matter in our life.
Try convincing a [[Coffee]] drinker to give up drinking coffee forever... What do you think would happen? *coughs*
Perhaps, that's why self-regulation works best in the early stage of addiction. And probably we need some external agent to do the regulation because we tend to have [[Cognitive Bias]]; our brain might lie to us when it comes to addictions.
Third, addictions tend to reward us and thus provide a sense of calmness. However, that's just increasing your dependency on the thing the lack of which has unforeseen consequences.
In hindsight, it's All or Nothing.
Cigarette! Exquisite fiend, ephemeral friend, how I miss you
Caroline Eden | 7 min
I don't want to romanticize [[Smoking]], but this line from the author sums it all - Smoking is a pause, a space to breathe.
Today, as a very occasional smoker who was never addicted, I like to think of smoking as a freely chosen pleasure. But is it really?
I started smoking from once a few weeks to once a week to almost every other day in my long hiatus (a year back or so) of being "jobless" and that's when my depressive episode was at the peak. Smoking helped. Now as I look at that, it reminds me of places and time, especially with "her". :)
Now, it's been more than 3 months I have stopped smoking cigarettes, weed or any alcoholic beverages to have a strong stand on my health! That's fine I guess.
Caffeine: A vitamin-like nutrient, or adaptogen
Ray Peat | 24 min
This is a bit obscured read (more like a self-research from the author who has a Ph.D. in Biology) with "pretty" chemical jargon.
It's interesting to find the history of nutrients in the essay. However, as always, the positive and negative effects of caffeine intake are still fuzzy. Personally, I agree with the bad reputation of coffee because of severe [[Palpitation]] (rapid, strong, irregular heartbeat) it causes when taken in high doses (this coming from personal experiences past 3-4 years).
It’s about how much tolerant you are for caffeine.
Anyway, Too much of anything is probably not that good.
I have a "hate-and-love" kind of relationship with caffeine.
Meanwhile, this HN thread is more insightful, especially the evolutionary perspective. I guess only you can detect good health by paying attention and making decisions in real-time, and that the optimal combo will always be in flux.
~Listening | Watching~
It's not what you read, it's what you ignore
Scott Hanselman | 1 hr
This was recommended to me by Gaurab.
This is perhaps one of the best talks I've ever watched; spot on and most probably relatable by anyone (especially the people who are intertwined with technologies). The title is self-evident of the whole highlights of the talk.
It's not what you read, it's what you ignore.
For complete highlights of the talk, I have the notes in pieces (and peaces) here. The major keypoints are:
Get your shit together with organizational skills.
Organize your emails, notes, works...anything.
Because it's your life. If you don't, then nobody will come to you and make it easy for you!
Minimize stress
Enjoy what you do.
Effectiveness is not the same as Efficiency
Communication is fault-tolerant. If it's important, you'll most probably get it somehow.
Have better “Productivity” just by organizing chaos into something less dissonant.
Use an activity tracker to monitor your habits and assess the metrics accordingly.
Use Read-It-Later tool like pocket (my favorite) instead of cluttering browser tabs.
Use Pomodoro Technique (focus on one task straight for dozens of minutes, say 25, and take a short break to re-start the cycle)
My personal favorite tools are RescueTime and Intention Addon
Overall, I enjoyed the talk. It kinda made "sense".
Possibly The Most Dangerous Animal In The World
Pursuit of Wonder | 8 min
It's undoubtedly one of the best videos from [[Pursuit of Wonder]].
This was beautiful and frightening at the same time, “pondering” about various [[School of Thought]] (a group that shares common ideology), and categories -- about the various interpretations of reality -- using fishes as metaphorical figures to comprehend the incomprehensibleness of reality.
"How can you know that you can't know?"
Art Garfunkel writes a note to his younger self
4 min
I have just one word - "Beautiful"
"What do I know that you may value? It's what you know that I have forgotten."
If Rockets were Transparent
9 min
“To the infinity and beyond” :)
Fascinating animation on rocket launches to orbit. The animation consists of Fuel Burn and Staging.
4 rockets are used:
Space Shuttle
Falcon Heavy (Wait for a nice easter egg in the animation :D)
the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket
~Fascinating Things I Discovered~
The NOW Page
A good concept about sites with a link that says “now” that goes to a page telling you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, a “now page”.
GPT-3
Generative Pre-trained Transformer is a type of [[Neural Network]] which has been the most effective [[Artificial Intelligence]] tool in the domain of [[NLP]] (Natural Langauge Processing — human language in general). A year back GPT was released as the most powerful NLP tool trained on an enormous amount of data with a premise that bigger model and more data (with brute force) will probably work better.
Now, GPT has evolved to GPT-3 from GPT-2. It’s like putting GPT-2 on steroids…A lot of them.
This model has around 175 Billion parameters which is insane even for Distributed System of Neural Networks provided that [[GPT-2]] had around 1.5 Billion parameters. I have no idea what sorcery of training and evaluation is done at this scale.
This hacker news thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379) ha a lot of engaging discussions, especially by the creator of /r/SubsimulatorGPT2. The comment can be found here.
Watch out for this GitHub repository too.
Show HN: A WebGL Tribute to Tron, the movie that made me fall in love with CGI
A cool [[Procedurally Generated]] (using algorithms) Tron universe
This made me nostalgic. Tron is one of my favorite movies (both remake and that from 1980s).
~Music | Poetry~
a small list of things that I normally would hide
YouTube | 3 min
Chilling. This hit me very hard, especially the line:
so I'm leaving behind the people who said I wasn't brave enough
wrote an album called "sleep" and realized it's about waking up.
Space Song - Beach House
Re-discovering this song was a pure blessing. This has been on repeat for the whole week, especially the slowed and reverb version.
Alone with Everybody - Charles Bukowski
:)
the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill
~Ending Thoughts~
Life is a fragile piece of paper and it’s your sole responsibility to handle it. You can leave it mostly blank or choose to draw. Or write. Or create an origami. The choice is yours. Recently, this quote from Conor White-Sullivan (co-founder of Roam) is echoing in my mind-cave:
“Sometimes you get a hold of an idea. And sometimes an idea gets a hold of you…”
I guess our thoughts define us more than anyone else. Like Feynman said…you aren’t responsible for what other people think you are able to do…
Cheers,
Nish
PS: Do share the newsletter to your loved or “meaningful” living entities (cats and dogs included…maybe cactus will also do fine) if you want to.
GPT got me fascinated. I wonder what it was. So, I immediately went through a scholarly article by Alec Radford on the topic. To make bots leverage (themselves independently) more than word-level information from unlabeled text is challenging indeed. thanks for these wonderful collective insights.