pigpop · HackerTrans

16 ชั่วโมงที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

True, it would need to accelerate somehow. Maybe there could be some kind of on board propulsion that would be enough once it's in space. Solid rocket motors could be fabricated as part of the process but the timing and control systems would pose a problem. Maybe something clever could be done mechanically that leveraged temperature or pressure changes.

pigpop

3 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I'm not sure what you're talking about, my initial comment was a (sort of silly) idea about building a mass driver on Titan that uses native materials to launch payloads on an inward bound trajectory, not to ferry them back and forth with a rocket.

pigpop

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

That's not really a problem if the supply is continuous. Think of the last time you drank a 12-year scotch, that distillery had to be set up and start producing at least 12 years ago for them to label the product that way but they've continued production constantly since then which ensures there is a steady supply to be delivered to stores.

pigpop

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

They have lower crime rates, more modern infrastructure, plentiful housing, lower cost of living (especially electricity), they're the place to be if you want to manufacture anything, affordable childcare, incredibly well educated doctors, many of the most incredible leisure and entertainment events in the world and they don't ban air conditioning.

So yeah, if I had to choose to live in a country where I had to toe the party line and bite my tongue when it came to political expression it would be China. At least they would be providing a high quality of life and a secure and peaceful society in exchange even if I had to deal with the negatives of being a minority in their country.

pigpop

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Given a choice between China and the EU at this point I would choose to live in China.

pigpop

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

It's much more of an oligarchy where even though the members of the elite are elected the body of them as a whole appears to have enough influence over new members to force them to act in accordance with an ongoing plan. It seems like any real change would require a very large super majority of new members to be elected at the same time in order to change course. Even a country like the UK seems to still be under their influence after leaving the union which speaks volumes about the amount of backroom dealing that must be going on.

pigpop

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

The inner solar system was what I was thinking, returning to Earth like you said is a bit pointless but even a slow trajectory with a constant supply would be useful to have fuel and feedstock already in orbit near Mars and Earth.

pigpop

4 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I wonder if you could design a plastics production plant, injection molding system, propellant plant and an extremely large potato canon in order to launch large canisters of hydrocarbons and oxygen on a slow return trip.

pigpop

5 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I'm sorry those other things haven't worked for you and I can understand the struggle of giving up on pursuits like that. I was hoping to communicate through what I wrote that you don't need to do things the traditional or recommended way. If you like exploring trails then by all means just explore trails, you don't need to do it as a gateway to exercise or meditation, just do it because you enjoy it and if you get other benefits out of it then so much the better.

pigpop

5 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

This feels like a marketing ploy to sell the book.

pigpop

5 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I did say that starting with something active may not be the best introduction if you want to improve your general ability to control your attention. That said, it does work for many people including myself since I became aware of the ability to train my attention through both programming as well as weightlifting. Funnily enough doing bicep concentration curls is something that has all of the aspects of a meditation practice for me and where I can really find a complete and singular focus and exclude all other thought and distractions. Building mind-muscle connection naturally leads you to focus solely on the muscle you are working, the sensations of adduction and abduction, the proprioceptive sense of maintaining the same path for the weight to travel and keeping the muscle under tension and flexing it fully. If you're doing it right then you are focusing on nothing else, you're not thinking of anything else, you have no inner monologue other than counting reps and sets and it becomes a flow state.

You can only tell people so much in words about how to maintain and train their attention. The better way is to learn by doing and it's easier for people to learn when it involves doing something agreeable to them rather than forcing them to do it the way you did. The original poster said they had tried the standard way many times even with help from a therapist and they didn't make any progress. That's why I felt it necessary to point out that there isn't just one dogmatic way to do it since your attention can and is applied to many different things and just like using your muscles and body to do many different physically demanding things you can train it in a variety of ways.

pigpop

6 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

More of a Roman fort I'd say.

pigpop

6 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

You should include the same advice that is given for exercise, it can and should occasionally be a bit painful but you have to discover your safe limits and only push yourself a little past them each time. You don't want to rack weights in 45lbs increments until you tear a muscle, you do it in 2.5lbs or 5lbs increments and practice for several sessions of work/rest at the same level for a while before making another small increment. People often quit both exercise and meditation because they just try to push through the pain and often end up with negative results due to injury or emotional and cognitive strain in the case of meditation.

pigpop

6 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

It's all exertion, for both "meditation" and exercise.

I'm convinced that meditation doesn't work for a lot of people because it has too much dogma about what it's supposed to be, and maybe those aspects are valid for certain pursuits, but it obscures the core principle.

Take exercise as an example first. It's also a practice that is layered under heaps of nonsense and complexity or fluffed up with idealisms and systems. If you strip all of that away it's about one simple thing: strengthening the muscles and connective tissues of your body including organs like your heart and lungs. Muscle and living tissue only responds to repeated exertion and rest (rest includes nutrition). If you never exceed your current capacity, it will never grow or strengthen and will probably weaken. So exercise becomes simply pushing yourself a little beyond your current capacity and then properly resting afterwards. How you do that is up to you, taking a longer walk than you did last week, slowly mastering calisthenic poses, progressive overload weight training, becoming actually good at ballroom dancing or ballet, competing in field sports, the same principle applies and you get much the same results.

Now returning to meditation, the first thing we should do away with is the label because it is almost as much an error as calling all exercise bodybuilding. It should really be thought of as "attention training" where you are improving your control over and the capacity of your attention. Like with your body, your mind responds to exertion and rest. Both are required. How you train your attention is up to you, sitting without distraction is perhaps the most accessible but it's about as challenging as limiting yourself to doing prison cell bodyweight exercises. Walking without distraction is a very valid practice but is harder to manage since it requires isolation and freedom from interruptions that many people would find on a walking route. Many other techniques have been developed with many different aids and systems but the important thing to remember is that you are trying to do the same thing for your attention as you are for your muscles, push it a little more beyond your current capacity each week and giving it sufficient rest between sessions (including proper nutrition and sleep). If the usual things that are sold as meditation practices don't work for you then try things that seem more natural to you but which still stretch your attention. This could be viewing a piece of art for a set amount of time, finding a location with a fairly static view and doing the same, holding or placing an item you own in front of you and examining it, repeating a line from a book or a poem, listening to a single note repeated on an instrument or hummed. It doesn't really matter much what it is as long as it takes effort to contemplate it for a long duration and isn't so complex and changeable that it overwhelms your untrained ability to fully consider each part of it. Even more active practices can train your attention like writing, penmanship / calligraphy, painting / sketching, yoga, dance, martial arts and others but they are probably not the best place to start if you are fully untrained.

This dovetails into the point of the article, that programming is a form of "meditation" for many people. Really, it's something that you can infinitely stretch your capacity for and exert your attention on.

pigpop

6 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

It turns out things are more complex than they may initially appear.

pigpop

8 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I have experimented with that a bit but not in a rigorous way, it's good to know that there is value in doing it so I'll try to integrate it into my process. Thanks for the tip!

pigpop

8 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I've had the same experience and it has really put me off working on personal projects using AI quite a few times, though I keep coming back. My recent experience with Fable and the latest Sonnet have actually been very positive though. They seem to be capable of working for much longer stretches without constantly stopping and requiring further prompting to finish up large features. The place where I feel flow the most now is when I'm planning large feature sets and I use the Claude web app as a sounding board while doing this and prompt it to not write any code but focus only on asking questions and clarifying aspects that I haven't fully thought out. This results in a very detailed plan for implementation which seems to work very well with Fable or even Sonnet 5. I can then actually leave my computer and go do other things without the constant nagging feeling that I need to check if its stopped and needs nudging. After its done I review the changes and do QA and testing and then formulate a plan for the next set of tasks. It feels like this problem is getting solved, which is wonderful.

pigpop

8 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

I think this is a really good insight. It's definitely the back and forth in Claude Code or whatever harness you use that breaks flow and leads to frustration. This seems to be what Fable is solving since it is capable of doing much larger chunks of work without needing input constantly. Having a much more involved planning session than just turning on plan mode and then handing that off to be implemented is a much better approach. It's sort of what I've arrived at by accident where I often start planning changes in the web app and spend a long time going into detail about my vision and then working through the details without having Claude write any code other than perhaps a few small exploratory artifacts to visualize certain things and then taking all of that and moving over to Claude Code for implementation.

pigpop

9 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

Rare earth metals aren't rare, it's a misnomer.

pigpop

11 วันที่ผ่านมาdiscuss

This is such a defeatist and low agency take. "means of production" are not a limited resource like gold that you have to extract from natural sources or divvy up. They are fundamentally skill and knowledge that anyone can attain and put to use, maybe not on the same scale as a well funded business but even those businesses had to start somewhere in order to grow to the size they are now. So rather than casting aspersions on them, your time would be better spent learning how you too can create some means of production and start producing value.

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