I think I know what platform you are speaking of. Mind if I ask why your experience there was brief? I have been thinking about applying there later this year.
Totally. Why do you need a virtual screen if you have a real life one. I could not imagine myself working in VR, I like to look around from time to time when I'm working, I also like to have some space/depth before me to be able to look far away and I love working from cafes especially. VR seems like a way to get even more cut off from the body / trapped in head (losing body awareness) when working - a problem that is going on which most people are not aware of.
It may make sense for some games, but desktop will be the king of work for a long time - until we get brain-computer interface with some AR glasses, then maybe that would be an improvement.
Zen. I do the "shikantaza" version of it every day in a 40 min session (20 min sitting, 20 min walking - yeah I know shikantaza means "to sit" or something related). It's a very intense type of zazen meant to gain a very clear perception of your body and surroundings. When I first learned about it, the example was that the engagement is not unlike engagement you would have if you engaged into a swords battle to death. That you cannot slip and need to be super duper alert. There are many elements that come into it actually and it's all well described in a book "3 Pillars of Zen".
I have noticed that the intense focus does me much better than calmer types of zazen like counting breaths. I'm only intense during formal practice, but in daily activities I just try to relax and focus on the task at hand - nevertheless, if it was not for the daily practice of the intense version, I would not be nowhere near as alert when I'm more relaxed.
The combination of formal practice (40 min of shikantaza) and the right attitude (to engage well into every task, no matter how menial) did wonders to my wellbeing and quality of life. It is a powerful tool for change and a great way to practice spirituality.
It affected everyone in the room and to a lesser extent the next rooms over if the door was open.
Obviously, we did not shelve it right away since there seemed to be no permanent effect. Some people were really creeped out after they had been exposed in my first try. But this is an engineering lab, so soon enough the lab was filled with cowboys wanting to experience it and trying to figure out how it works. Meanwhile, the more safety minded people took a short break and went for some air outside.
We stopped after the professor figured out something odd was going on on his floor.
I wonder what the physics behind it is. I guess if you have an aquarium of water with low frequency waves and overwhelm it with high frequency waves, you wouldn't be able to see the low frequency ones any more. Presumably (IANA physicist) it's the same thing but with sound waves.
Even if we had a way to stop aging, I guess the brains would be the biggest problem. How likely is it that our brains can function for hundreds or thousands of years? Probably not likely at all. All these things within us of unimaginable complexity work, because they had to evolve in the past. Our brains evolved to work only a few decades.
Suppose we stop aging - this may be great, as we could live at our physical peak until death and the life would be much much longer on average. But at some point, maybe 100 - 200 y/o depending on individual, people's mind may just break.
To truly achieve immortality, we would have to probably reverse engineer the brain and gain complete understand of how it works. Even if we could copy brains atom by atom, or upload it to virtual world, without understanding of how to assemble a brain, this will be useless. A virtual brain, which would not be enhanced in some way, would age exactly like a real world one.
So probably the scenario where people can't die of old age is almost impossible, because that requires technology more advanced than even the ability to backup/restore a mind - which would allow people to die in accident and be restored - although most certainly there would be laws to regulate it, unless we have practically infinite space / land for people to live.
Sorry for going all Sci-Fi on this, I watched the 6th Day yesterday. The antagonist thought he could be immortal because he had a machine that could clone (or rather copy) a person including the brain. He had the ability to get himself resurrected if he died, but he probably wouldn't be able to live even a thousand years, unless he also had developed the technology to prevent data corruption in his brain.
Unless maybe I'm completely wrong and the brains are so flexible they would just work, but there's no way to test it, is it.
It's not as much about hiring people, but if you can afford not having to work for living at all at an early age, you can become a genius in almost anything you pick by spending e.g. 60h a week on that thing, every week, for years and not having to worry you will ever run out of cash.
On the other hand, having the money and luxuries may eliminate the so much needed evolutionary pressure on a personal level. On the company level, there's also the trap of creating a "charity business" that is not profitable, but that's if you really have loads of cash to blow / VC-funding yourself.
Please don't interpret this message as "if I was rich, I would be successful". I just think it's harder and takes more time and more sacrifice when you have to work for a living, but creating a successful company is hard either way and requires full attention.
The offer kinda looks like an April Fools joke to be honest.
> A browser that's always on.
Not when you experience a shortage of service and freeze all your users from doing basic work, not just on one service, but everything else.
They have a point though.
The plague of front-end is that most developers just don't care about performance. Take Redux for example, which for a while was considered a golden standard by many. When you look into it, you see that when one little thing changes in one big global store that has everything, everything else is notified and a comparison is run to see if that item has changed. (If I'm wrong, I'm sorry, but this was the impression I got when I was evaluating that framework). But if I'm not wrong and that's really the way it is, the fact that this framework was accepted by so many, just proves the point that most developers think all their end users have a high-powered Mac.
I could say something similar about virtual dom abstractions. I understand that there were no alternatives earlier (today we have Svelte), but you could still do a good front-end with classic dom-manipulation that was super fast, and with some thought put into it - well organized.
For me if something is super boring, I will try to perceive it as a "free zen meditation session". Just do the boring stuff, but also try to work on my posture, breathing and so on, and engage.
I'm far from perfect with it, but it has changed the way I perceive work forever.
I'm sorry because this is off topic, but how does youtube-dl get away with using youtube in its name? Is it because trademarks apply only to commercial usage?
