On a long enough timescale, things with a small chance of occurring become a virtual certainty. This includes the best of the human experience and the worst, which can get pretty dark.
There is a vast amount of difference between growing old and dying by 100+ and living until the heat death of the Universe trillions of years from now. Surely something in between, say centuries or millenia without death from the ravages of old age would be ideal. Life is too short and tends to end in a bad way, would be nicer if it was a bit longer and more open ended without the decline until something fails.
I wonder about this at 50. Being an odd duck, my philosophy here is based on a Conan story about a race that lived forever and had an actual ceremony for when the decided to end things.
Stuff accretes over time. One shoulder, the opposite arm due to compensation, both big toes, etc. But take away all of that and there are still accretions: I’ve started to track the point where I know more dead people than live ones. Of course you can compensate for this and my wife and I have a wide social circle that we tend like good gardeners, but that feels like a delaying action. At some point I’m going to hit, “Hey, fellow kids!” if I haven’t already. Put more simply, will there come a time when the idea of falling in love with one more dog just to lose them will feel like a bad bet?
On one hand, death is the single most terrifying concept imaginable. In lieu of faith that explains it away, consider being conscious one moment, having been conscious most of your waking like and then it just ending. It being categorically different to the time before you existed, because you now exist. After passing away, never perceiving time, never having a thought, never experiencing anything, not even being aware of that and just being... gone. Forever.
It doesn't sound peaceful to me, or like sleeping, or resting in any way. Instead, that's insanely fucked up, it being common or "inevitable" doesn't make it any less so.
Like when my dad passed away, obviously I was sad about it happening and grieved it, at the same time I can acknwoledge that it was a small mercy that he wouldn't end up bedridden or trapped in a decaying body, and he didn't seem to fear it as much after having lived a long and fulfilling life and being religion-adjacent, but at the same time I very clearly don't like the idea of dying myself some day.
So as far as I know, the only reasons for people to accept the concept of death and permanent nothingness is somewhere between either believing an "after" (and rejecting the possibility of it being a permanent end), being ignorant or indifferent about what it means (the non-solution of "Oh I'll just live on in the memories of other people" which completely doesn't concern your actual consciousness), or simply being more busy with their present lives and such, since it's generally far away.
It rubs me the wrong way, that alongside with research towards more graceful aging (if not to say reversing it, curing cancer etc.) should be way more of a priority for all of humanity, instead of the current realpolitik bullshit. I don't lose much sleep over it, but a feeling of dread, it does evoke. Maybe I'll become even more ignorant with age, but I don't think that'd exactly be a conscious choice.
I think what you're saying is you need purpose? So even with your dad not really fearing (or expressing his fear about) death you still feel that the benefits were him not having to suffer etc. etc.
I think that's what religion gives, and it doesn't have to be organized religion. I'm not proselytizing, I'm just pointing out why across so many human cultures people always come up with stories and thoughts about the afterlife. The cold unknown means basically nothing and the fear I think comes from the nothingness -- imagine a life full of the sorrow and joys, and then it just vanishes. And worse of all, if nobody even remembers much it of it, it literally vanishes. For example if a war veteran never tells his experiences to anyone, he basically just vanished from earth and one can ask so did the things he went through happen? If a tree falls and nobody hears it and all that.
I'm probably expressing it poorly but I've been thinking about it too after experiencing some loss too. In my case the person just graduated college. I think the dead have it easy, the suffering lies with the living…
I think if humans didn't age past 20, we'd still eventually get tired of life and want to die on our own terms instead of on a timer. We wouldn't stick around until the sun exploded.
Even introverts need social connection (perhaps more so) - research here [1]. Introverts are people who feel they have used energy when interacting socially, rather than gaining energy from social interaction. It's not shyness or anti-social traits.
It will feel like more of a chore for introverts, but it's like a chore you need to do even if it feels bad in the moment, like doing laundry or exercising.
And worse for introverts - people who never invite other people eventually stop getting invited themselves, so to maintain social connection requires introverts to sometimes be the driver of the event.
Its unlike a chore in that there are obvious benefits to doing laundry and exercising. The same isn't true for socializing more than you require. As an introvert I definitely do need some social connection, but I don't need very much of it and I'm happiest being alone most of the time.
> The same isn't true for socializing more than you require.
That seems very much like exercising, no? You need a certain level of exercise to maintain basic physical capability but past that point there are diminishing returns. So if you truly detest exercising (or socializing) then you can stop there and still lead a healthy, functional life.
Sort of. Specifically the amount of exercise needed to maintain basic physical capability is roughly the same for everyone (barring injuries or chronic issues) where as the amount of socialization people need to not feel lonely varies quite significantly. I don't find my minimum amount of socialization to be a chore, but my minimum is quite low. Anything beyond that does feel like a chore.
> the amount of exercise needed to maintain basic physical capability is roughly the same for everyone (barring injuries or chronic issues)
Is this true?
This is only anecdotal but my experience has been that the amount of exercise people need to maintain basic physical capability seems to vary with age, gender, diet, genetics, and other factors.
Personally, I find that as I get older I have to be more diligent about exercise to maintain basic physical capability, and I have older relatives who spend time exercising just to maintain sufficient VO2 max to be able to do things like walking up stairs.
And it's not just age. I have friends who can take a break from rock climbing for half a year or more and when they come back they're climbing routes at roughly the same difficulty as before they left, whereas others take a couple weeks off and have to work their way back up from easier routes when they return.
This is probably not the primary way people use the tool, but if I log in (desktop, Chrome on macOS), click "Start a board" on the sidebar, and go to click any of the inputs, I can't type text in them (the inputs are "Start from an example", "What are you building", and "The brief".
If you scroll down they want you to "Connect copperhead to GitHub first." The bottom should have a page where you can give them access to a repo for handling stuff.
Am I understanding this right by thinking - if I was walking toward the black hole past the event horizon, and then I turned around, I would still be walking toward the black hole?
Once you pass the event horizon, every direction leads to the singularity in your future. Directions "away" from the singularity may still visibly show what things looked like outside of the event horizon before you fell in, but that is from your past. Heading in that direction will not get you back there anymore, you will only find the singularity along that path in your future.
> if I was walking toward the black hole past the event horizon, and then I turned around
Note that, once you're inside the horizon, you can't "turn around" and go back outside again. You're inside the hole for good.
And once you're inside the hole, yes, no matter which direction in space you move, you're moving "towards" the singularity. But a better way to look at it is that the singularity is a moment of time, not a place in space. You're moving "towards" the singularity in the same sense as you're moving "towards" next Tuesday. You can't stop moving towards next Tuesday by changing which direction in space you move. The same is true for the singularity once you're inside the hole's horizon.
You can't turn around though. Everything goes toward the black hole. If you turned around, atoms would be moving away from, or at the least changing their direction in respect to the black hole. And that's not possible. You wouldn't even see anything because all light is going toward the center, and it wouldn't go into your eyes.
Unless you went in butt-first, but the path of the photons would have changed and would now be going toward the black hole, and everything would look probably all smushed together.
Kerr spacetime contains closed timelike curves inside the inner horizon. You can reach them from the outside universe, but you can't escape back out.
Also, the region inside the inner horizon of Kerr spacetime is widely considered to be not physically reasonable, not just because of the closed timelike curves, but because the inner horizon itself is unstable--there is an infinite blueshift there which, it is believed, would cause it to be destroyed by the first tiny bit of incoming matter or radiation.
Most pharmacies are having financial issues basically due to being stuck in the middle of the battle between insurers, drug manufacturers, and PBMs over reimbursement rates, and having the weakest negotiating position of all of the parties.
AI probably will save the pharmacies some money, but IMO this will probably cause reimbursement rates to decline further, leaving the pharmacies in the same position as before.
Weakest negotiating position other than the customers.
The funny part is probably a majority of pharmacies are owned by CVS or Walgreens each of which are insurance companies in their own right, and often people with company health insurance will ONLY allow reimbursements through their company pharmacy.
Tbh, this is most industries. Very few have much of a moat and have some wedge/pressure from their suppliers (land/labor/capital), their clients and competition.
Insurance companies and PBMs would probably say the same they have competitors (ie:replaceable) and can’t just pay more for this or that, or reject any cost saving measure available.
PBMs gained control of drug pricing and squeezed out the small pharmacies that don’t offer additional services like compounding.
CVS And Walgreens both own and operate PBMs. And UHG (Optum), 19 Blue Cross plans collectively own Prime Therapeutics, Kaiser owns one, the DVA has one, Express Scripts is owned by Cigna. There’s likely more I am unfamiliar with too.
The federal government could potentially oversee the most populous areas of the state and those near a military installation pretty easily. They don’t have to look at every one.
AI is great at reading, so give it things to read. Claude will try to throw big markdown docs in your repo, but you don't have to do that. Make it keep docs by the code.
I include a line in AGENTS.md that says "We *always* add docstrings to methods, classes, structs, and namespaces - there should be 100% coverage of docstrings."
It will make better choices about what functions to make or remove if you force it to justify why the function exists.
And when you have to go back and understand, it becomes easier.
It’s clear at this point that agents don’t actually follow agents.md
They try to but they don’t. As an example, we use perforce in games. I regularly have to stop an agent and remind it to use p4 edit rather than blasting through the read only flag, despite the first paragraph of Claude.md being “this is a project using perforce. Batch call p4 edit on all files before modifying, do not manually remove the read only flag”
You have to make or use just enough productivity tools not to fall behind, but otherwise it's a trap.
I used to check once a quarter. With AI, I devote 1-2 days a week to the meta-task of improving my tooling, but I'm sure that will fade once AI tooling becomes more standardized.
It's not worth being one of those guys who gets too into the tools, because it can keep you from the actual valuable work. Plus, you are then judged not as a regular engineer, but as a person who is supposed to have some secret productivity sauce, and when people see that it doesn't make more of a difference they can start to discount your opinion.
I first learned about endless scroll in a Ruby on Rails meetup, where the presenter was showing how to craft snippets of HTML with ERB and using a bit of JS to insert them below the existing entries. It's definitely possible.
Maintaining a code path with a snippet for each possible viewing experience, back when REST was all the rage, was a bit obnoxious though.
