File this under highly speculative. I’m sure there is better research on this topic than this writing This past week, for no obvious reason, I considered a few thoughts at the same time: Exercise is supposedly one of the best anti-aging “drugs”, and also highly effective (relatively speaking) against cognitive decline There’s this vague idea that after you become “professionally inactive”, you accelerate your cognitive decline To avoid cognitive decline, one must keep “exercising the brain”, so the incentive for seniors to have hobbies, do crosswords, sudoku, etc Now, from this point it seems that I’d go to a very commonplace conclusion about how exercising is probably better than sudoku or something, and to be frank that’s exactly where I’m going. But another two things crossed my mind at the same time: Recent advances in AI, and less recent advances in computing in general showed that a lot of the things we consider “cognitively hard” - from symbolic manipulation to arithmetic, “...
Note: there's no hidden knowledge contained in this post, it's just a reflection on how reading someone's reaction to an analogous situation changed my outlook Like everyone who works in an information job, I have been worried these last few months about how AI would impact my place in the labor force in the coming decade. Even though I didn't get to the depressed extremes we've been seeing on the Internet, I could not shake off the feeling that what I could offer to a company - no, to the whole economy, which just means "other people" - would get a lot less valuable. Come mid January, I wast taking a week off and had taken to read a few books since I read so little non-technical content on a day to day basis. One of these books was "Founders at work" by author and YC co-founder Jessica Livingston. The book is a series of interviews conducted by Jessica with the founders of some of the most important tech companies - sometimes specific products -...
Recently I got myself a new Macbook which is a lot more capable than my previous daily driver - an M2 Mac mini. But I didn't want to retire the old fellow, it's a very capable personal computer still and I don't think it's a bad idea to have a backup in case I lose the Macbook or have it damaged. Besides, there are some applications that I use which are mostly local and even though migrating the related files would be trivial, if I then lost the Macbook I'd lose them, or I'd have to setup a backup strategy. So I decided to keep them in the Mac mini and just use it whenever I needed them - a good excuse to have it turned it on, headless, instead of storing it away in a drawer, unused. I hadn't done this before so I was a little concerned I might need to install dedicated software (which I'd have to trust with unrestricted access to my home computer) or fiddle with weird settings. I was wrong, fortunately, and modern MacOS makes this a breeze. Bu...
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