jhedwards

7 ms·

1.
by jhedwards 20d ago
I think "visual hallucination" is something very different from the minds eye. The imagination is one source of visual experience, the eyes are another. A visual hallucination is when something goes wrong and the data from your ey
2.
by jhedwards 20d ago
This is such a weird response, what do I have to gain by lying about such an event? Why would you want to "verify" it? I am sharing a lived experience: my visual experience of the image of the dystopian landscape was so strong tha
3.
by jhedwards 20d ago
They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part
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by jhedwards 3mo ago
This comment make a couple assumptions I don't agree with: 1. That technological development and a "carbon neutral goal" are incompatible. Carbon neutrality is precisely a problem of technological development, with green ener
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by jhedwards 3mo ago
In my workplace we argue without ego and with the assumption that we are working together to find the best way to do something. If someone realizes that the other person is right, they will say something like "Ah, OK, yes that's t
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by jhedwards 3mo ago
Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started
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by jhedwards 3mo ago
Historically, all speech was considered "intentional". And by speech here I am including two distinct things: the expression of opinion, and the publication of opinion by a magazine/newspaper owner. I separate those two thing
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by jhedwards 5mo ago
> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic. I'm not sure I understand this. We've added hundreds of gigatons of car
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by jhedwards 7mo ago
Ah this reminds me of my first big mistake with PCBs. I have recently started down the hardware track, and my first PCB has a number of BC547 and BC558 transistors on it. Once I had a functioning prototype, the next step was to convert it i
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by jhedwards 1y ago
I don't know if this was in your lifetime, but Bill Clinton reduced government spending through the National Performance Review. Not only did he do it, but he did it in a planned and strategic way, that included an initial phase of res
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by jhedwards 1y ago
I've read quite a bit of classical Chinese philosophy, and in my opinion that major piece that is directly translatable to Western concerns is the discussion of management principles. Confucian and legalist scholars recognized that sta
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by jhedwards 1y ago
Sure, but my whole point is that humans are _not_ passive input/output systems, we have an active biological system that uses an input/output system as a tool for coordinating with the environment. Thinking is part of the active s
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by jhedwards 1y ago
Thinking in humans is prior to language. The language apparatus is embedded in a living organism which has a biological state that produces thoughts and feelings, goals and desires. Language is then used to communicate these underlying thin
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by jhedwards 1y ago
This criticism strikes me as lazy: it zeroes in on some casual introductory remarks made by the author which are intended to serve as a general guideline or frame of reference for understanding the concepts which follow, then invents a prem
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Show HN: Bumble Bee Flower Finder(bumblebeeflowerfinder.info)
1 points by jhedwards 1y ago|0 comments
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by jhedwards 1y ago
I am little confused by the article because it sounds like they are describing "pulse width" which is a common parameter on analog and digital synthesizers to change the character of the square wave. A square wave with a low pulse
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by jhedwards 1y ago
There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a poet robot. They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their culture, and a culture is programmed by th
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by jhedwards 2y ago
Could you help clarify something for me? When I looked into the federal workforce, just looking at raw numbers without much insight about the "inside", it doesn't seem particularly bloated or wasteful to me: it runs at ~5% of
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by jhedwards 2y ago
This is correct. Rhodopsin, for example, is a G-protein coupled receptor, which means that activation of the receptor triggers G-proteins inside the cell which can activate or inhibit any number of cellular processes.
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by jhedwards 2y ago
Sure, here's two: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60235 https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-ref... Every publication I've looked at has the overall spending for fede
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by jhedwards 2y ago
> But on the other hand, something like 40-50% of my paycheck goes out in taxes and I would prefer if my government actually spent it on things to improve my life versus dumb shit domestically or abroad. I agree here, but one thing that
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by jhedwards 2y ago
This reminds me of an ancient Chinese story from the Liezi, where a craftsman presents a robot to King Mu that can sing and dance. After the robot beckons to the kind's concubines, he orders the craftsman to be killed. The craftsman is
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by jhedwards 2y ago
I'm reading an excellent book right now called Cells, Embryos and Evolution, in which one topic is the exploratory nature of certain biological processes. One of the processes described is the dynamic instability of microtubule growth.
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by jhedwards 2y ago
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any reasonable political discourse that is ever* censored by social media companies. During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many
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by jhedwards 2y ago
The point (as I understand it) was not to protect the kids themselves from covid, but that kids are active vectors of illness: they get sick easily and rapidly spread it to everyone around them. Sending kids to school during a pandemic is b
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by jhedwards 2y ago
Based on the classnames in the HTML it appears to be a Wordpress theme called "Sydney": https://athemes.com/theme/sydney/
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by jhedwards 2y ago
This kind of shape reminds me of the "dot" from Chinese calligraphy. It's a surprisingly complicated shape and kind of tricky to get right, and is the foundation for more complicated strokes. Here's an example of someone
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by jhedwards 2y ago
Well, you can give someone anesthesia, which turns most of the neurons in the brain off, and then you lose consciousness. The fact that we can target the brain specifically to turn consciousness on and off seems to suggest that it's a
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by jhedwards 2y ago
Recently I was struck by the fact that some people have an internal monologue and others don't, and some people can see vivid images in their mind and some can't see anything at all. These seem like very dramatic differences to me
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by jhedwards 2y ago
They left out the second half of the sentence: 非 [not] 常 [eternal] 道 [way] Classical Chinese is highly contextual, and characters take on different meanings depending on the position in the sentence and the narrative context, hence the seco

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