The app wraps whatever is playing on mac through device convolution (old radio, hifi system) - Room convolution (a bedroom, a forest) and adds ambience (rain, wind, waves) and Apples spatial processing - so it sounds like a real space.

For me - hearing the sound in a space really helps more than just the dry sound.

https://www.surraura.com/

The app wraps whatever is playing on mac through device convolution (old radio, hifi system) - Room convolution (a bedroom, a forest) and adds ambience (rain, wind, waves) and Apples spatial processing - so it sounds like a real space.

For me - hearing the sound in a space really helps more than just the dry sound, the spatial information and ambience lets me focus much more.

At some point I thought- Maybe others will have the same effect? So I took the care and effort to make into a nice app with the option of downloading additional environments etc.

https://www.surraura.com

Thank you for your time, would love to hear your thoughts.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686226

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

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It sounds like you are “failing” because you have a mistaken idea and application of meditation.

Meditation means “getting used to”

Get used to what? Well, that depends on what you are already used to and not.

One example:

Imagine, visualize in your mind, the home you grew up in. Maybe you can even "walk" from room to room and see familiar items.

Now ask yourself, is this thought - the mental projection of your home - "you". Did you just experience witnessing "yourself"?

What about every other thought - how are these thoughts "you"?

* So - are you "used to" thinking that you are your own thoughts?

- If you feel that you "are your thoughts", and they represent "you" - then “who” or “what” is the thing that are observing the thoughts as they happen? Are these two things one and the same?

Getting “used to” and integrating such direct - experienced -knowing of how your reality actually works is in many spiritual traditions considered steps to “awakening”

But even if you are completely allergic to even the word “spiritual”. It never ceases to amaze me, that we all - materialistically speaking - are carrying extreme mental supercomputers - but we never take a second sit down to figure out how these work. You are carrying the one central equipment that determines every aspect of your quality of life, but you’ve never for a moment tried to understand how experience unfolds?

Ok, so how to begin “getting used o” and “figuring out”?

First of all, to do anything worthwhile at all, you need to be able to place and maintain your attention over time - concentrating. This is obvious to you. If you want to get a good education, a good job, be a great sportsman - than that requires effort and concentration. Intelligence can of course offset some of that, but intelligence without diligence is equally as useless as not being intelligent.

To practice concentration and diligence, you should learn meditation with an anchor. What is an anchor? Anything you choose to place your attention on, and return to if the attention has wandered elsewhere.

What is attention? Your bandwidth of experience is limited. If a bee stings you, the pain of that will overpower your experience of hunger. All your ideas about grabbing a burger go straight out the window.

If your experience is neutral, you can willfully shift your attention between your senses.

Let’s try it now.

Now you are just experiencing the sounds you are hearing.

Now you are feeling the sensation of the weight of your body pressing against the surface it is in contact with.

Now you are imagining and experiencing the sensation of tasting a very sour lemon, or strawberry.

Now you are imagining and experiencing the visual playback in your mind of Einstein peeling a banana.

You really can use any anchor (object of attention), but it is usually recommended to begin with placing the attention on the breath - like the physical sensation of air entering and exiting the nostrils, and counting one cycle of in-out as “one”, and then counting to 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how many repetitions of 10 or 21 you will do.

The concentration aspect of the exercise is maintaining the anchoring of attention on the physical sensation. The “mindfulness” aspect of the exercise is remembering or rather - not forgetting - your anchor.

The moment you realize you have stopped remembering, and your attention has moved to a different sense (ear hearing sounds, eye looking at something, mind having a thought) - this is the exact moment to rejoice, because you are learning - and your are remembering, and you are being mindful. So the moment you remember what you were supposed to do, congratulate yourself and re-place your attention on the chosen anchor.

In the beginning, do this for no more than a minute. But do it often- 5 times a day. Once you start getting used to that, and that becomes easy, then increase.

It’s important to know, that meditation like this does not cause you to become unfocused or unconcentrated or distracted - it simply shows you through direct experience how unfocused, unconcentrated and distracted you already are.

And it’s even more important to know that this exercise - this method of getting used to - does not immediately reduce or remove that, but it will naturally do that over time.

How much time? Well, that depends on the mind and mindset you start with. Some people say 3-6 months of daily practice.

And if that sounds like a lot- try to put a value on a life where you are mindfully choosing your actions vs a life where you are simply being a passenger of actions - causes and conditions - being chosen for you.

This is the diligence aspect. If you want to experience the fruit of being able to willfully place your attention wherever you chose- to achieve whichever goal you set yourself - then you have to use your intelligence and recognize the need to train it. If you are unwilling to practice this key instruction that holds to access to everything else, then everything else will - logically - probably not be accessible to you.

When you begin to train in this extremely simple thing, you will experience right away how unwilling and unable you are to do it. Logically you understand that this is perfectly sensible. But still, you may be unable to do this for years. And that knowing, combined with the apparent inability to practice consistently- diligently, is one facet of the suffering of existence we all experience, but can’t put into clear words.

I hope you do not ever dismiss meditation ever again as “not working”, or even “woo-woo” or mystical - but recognize that your inability to appreciate its function, or to train it it - is the actual thing that “isn’t working” and what is causing the suffering and discomfort.

I recommend the book "Attention revolution" by B. Alan Wallace

A most elementary form of meditation, is getting used to placing your attention on a sensation and keeping it anchored there - even when other sensations or thoughts arise.

Following the breath- place your awareness, your attention, on the sensation of air passing through your nostrils. Count one inbreath and outbreath cycle as «1», and count until 10 or 21. Decide before you start, how many repetitions of 10 or 21 you will do.

If at any point your attention has drifted to a different sensation - seeing, hearing etc, or thinking, visual imagery etc, then congratulate yourself for noticing, and restart from «1».

I recommend «The attention revolution» by Alan B. Wallace

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48699925

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

Mathematical optimisation is a branch of mathematics and computer science that searches for the minimum/maximum of objective functions, and has applications in transport, logistics, scheduling etc.

We are exploring where LLMs can add value in optimisation algorithm development, and where they get in the way.

Right now, it works well for rapid prototyping. It does not create production-ready code and requires technical skills to use.

It is noticeably better at creating Timefold code than asking an LLM directly.

Are you an optimisation or GenAI developer? Give us feedback, and send that PR you think might be useful.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48671822

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

If someone feels like an eli5 - What are the use-cases for something like this?

On the previous large benchmark run, i proved 40-50% cost reduction per correct answer.

I'm not sure why the vendors aren't using token filtering/compression more in their tooling, but perhaps they don't mind users feeding them more data and using more data.

https://github.com/jahala/tilth/tree/main/benchmark

Reducing tokens and also turns is quite worthless if the LLM doesn’t solve what you put it to do.

If you're looking for other great sci-fi reads:

John Ringo - Live free or die

John Varley - Titan (-> Wizard / Demon)

Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky

Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Dan Simmons - Hyperion

Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space / The Prefect

Orson Scott Card - Enders game

Isaac Asimov - Foundation