is
Gunnar_Zarncke
Karma: 6,525
For reference: Young kids catching COVID: how much to worry?
I was slightly disappointed by this post not because it was bad but because it didn’t provide much new or interesting. I see this more as a recap and hope for the next posts in this sequence to build on this.
Meditation is hard to study scientifically for all the reasons it’s hard to study sleep plus all the reasons it’s hard to study weightlifting.
One thing I’d really like to see is pair-meditation or some other type of collaborative meditation. Meditation where body states are copied and/or the inner mental states are mirrored or shared possibly mutually with one or more meditation partners. Obviously, an endeavor that requires an extremely high level of trust. But this approach does have the chance of a) bringing some part of the meditation into the clearly observable range and b) allow a sharing of the experience and observations transitively.
We have to be careful to separate the school from the insights. Whether the school has problems seems almost entirely unrelated to the philosophical questions posed. It does provide some context for the proposal to have safe spaces though. Indeed, I think these two topics should probably be separated more clearly.
I was friends with a good though mostly hobbyist photographer (see here) for a while and we went photo hunting a few times. It was my experience that equipment helps to make more out of a photo but the key ingredients are
an eye for photogenic objects and scenes
experience how to capture that (e.g. from which direction/angle/time)
general rules of composition and lighting
And only the last part you can fix with software later.
To learn the former, it probably helps to hang out with photographers.
Awesome. I feel a strong resonance with many thoughts and ideas and its beautiful cadence and phrasing touch me. While reading I was at the same time thinking that meditation has some (un-)answers and wondering whether you would give answers or not.
When you mentioned your monastery year it made sense that the prose felt a bit like the parts of the Satipathana Sutta that I know. Very wholesome; I hope it will be appreciated (earlier or later).
Please elaborate or foster elaboration on this. Talk more about the safe space you have in mind. I have the feeling that it is subtly different from what Jacob Falkovich touches on in The Treacherous Path to Rationality.
The human lifespan currently is limited to a long: 2^32 = 136 years (google can answer that).
This paragraph has two typos:
If you want an employee someone [extraneous?] to behave creatively and ethically, just using punishments and rewards doesn’t work. A human, a cat or even a machine will try hack your system. Operant conditioning is just one tool in the toolbox. If we want to build a superintelligence we [missing ‘need’?] more robust tools.
In that case, you are probably beyond what I can help you with.
Forwarded to my computer game playing sons. I wonder what your recommendation for Minecraft would be.
Our code review checklist looks like this:
Have GDPR annotations been added for all fields? (all fields that are stored persistently count)
Do interactions with the user happen that should be recorded as events?
Is data collected for later use (logging doesn’t count, anything in a database does)? Are there reports or some other way to find this data?
Are there no unencrypted credentials in any files?
Are there notable changes that should be recorded in an ADR?
(I replaced the links with public alternatives)
This is pretty impressive for 1722 and better in some regards than what I read from Kant.
Thanks for writing it up.
Bugs are common in software development [citation needed].
I decided to introduce checklists in the development process of our team. This page in our wiki explains the reason:
Checklists are an essential component of high-quality processes, e.g. in aviation, medicine or construction. But checklists can also be a major obstacle. We want to build high quality software without losing a fast and flexible process. How does that work? We use checklists in a targeted manner and consider when and how checklists make sense.
A very good explanation of what is important can be found here (refers to the very readable Checklist Manifesto).
Step 1: Identify “Stupid Mistakes” That Cause Failure → see Known Traps and Post Mortems.
Step 2: Seek Additional Input From Others → for example in retro’s
Step 3: Create Simple “Do” oder “Test” Steps → in a checklist, which should become part of the process
Step 4: Create Simple “Talk” Steps → which can take place after the Daily Standup or as part of the Code Review
Step 5: Test The Checklist
Step 6: Refine the Checklist → nothing is perfect; review the success in a retrospective or when things are not going well
Important: The checklist must only contain the most important sources of error. Completeness is not the goal, but to ward off the greatest risks without slowing down the process.
We use checklists at three different points of the development process:
A Ready Checklist is used to ensure key business and architecture aspects are considered, and the ticket can be picked up by a developer without (much) further back and forth.
A Code Review Checklist covers business-critical classes of error and things hard to fix later (e.g. database changes). It leaves general adherence to engineering standards to the reviewer’s discretion (we use MoSCoW there).
The Approval Checklist is used by testers and subject matter experts to ensure the feature is fit for use (e.g. works on mobile).
I can confirm that people sometimes roll their eyes, but consistently using the checklists leads to much better quality.
The book is great.
Here is a link to the Surgical Safety Checklist used in hospitals.
After checking whether German hospitals use checklists with unclear results, I decided to print one out and have it available just in case:
Not sure whether doctors will like it when I come up with them in a hospital but so far, that was not needed, luckily.
The same thing is called Talent Stacking by Scott Adams. Your explanation is higher on the theoretical dimension vs. the usual Talent Stack explanations you see e.g. on YouTube are higher on the relatable/engagement dimension.
Thank you for adding so much value to the challenge of loneliness.
TL;DR: Go out into the wild not only for relationships but for friendship and community.
I have used this in the form of counting down from 3. I use it only with consequences and only for things that are important for me but don’t warrant immediate action. I just let the kid know that I disapprove of something.
Research shows that these kinds of punishments are not effective—except in reinforcing the behavior in the parent!
Related: As I wrote just recently:
The feeling of something being obvious or easy [...] doesn’t mean that [it] is obvious or easy to everybody. It just means that you have understood it. When you deeply understand something it becomes obvious and easy over time.
https://www.facebook.com/Xuenay/posts/10161257148333662?comment_id=10161257444543662
The feeling of something being obvious or easy in the above sense can be mistaken sometimes. It is an intuition or heuristic our brain applies I guess to figure out which things we are supposed to know in a tribe. It can be put on more solid footing by spelling out things and being forced to make intuitions explicit.
How long did you take writing this? And how does that compare to other posts?
You should consider how healthy and fit your kids are. All stats that we see now consider the whole population and there are probably sub-populations (of children) that have significantly worse health than average and these will dominate the number suffering from Covid and long Covid. If your kids are fit i.e. handle most other infectious diseases without problems (or even have few visible ones, to begin with) you can probably divide the number by 10 or more.
For context: I have four boys ages 10 to 17 and got all of them vaccinated except for the youngest.