I actually noticed serious mental decline when I was burned out in my late 20s. There were real physical symptoms like not being able to look at a text editor for more than 2 minutes. Post recovery of that, I actually feel like my brain recovered a lot once I started learning languages very seriously (mandarin and japanese), starting a few years ago. Brain feels healthy now but I'm acutely aware of where it's not as sharp as before. Playing around with this felt a little like when my brain is trying to build a new grammar dictionary.

I guess taken to the logical extreme, what does the brain of someone/thing that's good at playing this (or any game of N dimensions) look like?

Hawaii was so flush with productive sugar cane and so technologically advanced, that it was seen as a target by the American cartel there that it had to be violently toppled.

There's great movie footage of the first Waikiki electric street car heading up towards Diamond Head, taken by Thomas Edison when he visited Oahu. I get sad every time I'm on Kalakaua Avenue knowing that we could've had real public transit in Honolulu if it weren't for America.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47513034

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There's still a tiny window of opportunity for engineers to come up with or design technical safeguards, but eventually this problem will move past the realm of what's easily solvable and out of our hands, and into policy makers hands. A big part of me feels like that window is already slammed shut.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47374861

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we've been loyal heroku customers for over a decade. should have switched off long ago, but as a small team, it was too valuable. such a shame.

It's been a while, but I remember enjoying a lot the very early writings that were collected posthumously in Atop an Underwood, very easy to pick up arbitrarily. Other good ones - Desolation Angels, Dharma Bums, The Town and the City, Subterraneans, Satori in Paris. Those are all formative. There was another posthumous release And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks which was just a funny and ridiculous retelling of a murder of a friend.

Of course, lots of fun stuff from Bukowski, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Phil Lamantia, John Clellon Holmes, Richard Brautigan, short stories and poems. Neal Cassady Collected Letters, 1944-1967 was probably my single favorite book back then. I'm sure I'm forgetting lots of stuff.

Oh and Dog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk8cMyCUnoo

But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.

Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.

There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330259

Points: 16

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