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Is This World Real? On Realism

I recently watched a discussion involving Donald Huffman, in which he argues that the world as we perceive it is not its true form - our senses are heavily colored by evolutionary adaptations to ensure our survival and reproduction. The analogy he provides is that what we perceive is akin to the icons on a computer desktop, bearing no resemblance to the actual forms which are magnetic charges on a spinning disk. This is similar to the argument he puts forth in his book, The Case Against Reality, as well as a summary online.

Android VM in a Browser (via Apache Guacamole)

Running an Android VM in a web browser lets you run Android applications from any computer. This lets you test out apps, or even suspicious programs without compromising your actual device.

The setup:

Note-Taking

Few of us could live life without jotting down our thoughts somewhere. Throughout the years we have developed some sort of note-taking system, either cobbled together slowly by ourselves, or something off the shelf.

I use electronic notes primarily as they are more accessible compared to paper notes and can be backed up easily.

Previously I used a Word document synced on Google Drive. However, this came with several limitations:

Artificial Intelligence, Language Models and Understanding

Emerson AI, a GPT-3 based chatbot
Emerson AI, a GPT-3 based chatbot

Update: I discuss more on the measure of intelligence in this post.

Every decade, huge advancements are being made in the field of artificial intelligence, and each time we are amazed. In the 1960s we had ELIZA, a convincing human-like chatbot. In the 1980s, the world watched as Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov for the first time. In the 2010s, the resurgence of deep learning completely transformed prior approaches in nearly all domains, from images and video, to text and speech.

Best Practices for Debugging Service Workers

Service Workers are a great way to add offline functionality to your app, as well as speed up subsequent page loads (especially with the app shell model).

I recently encountered many issues while debugging, and to save myself and others the hassle, here are some of the best practices I recommend when debugging service workers.

On Happiness

One of the experiences I've had which cemented my belief that money, or that attempting to purchase happiness cannot in itself bring happiness, was when I picked up the Dvorak1 keyboard layout. At the time, I was in the military doing clerical work, and there were hundreds of pages of documents that we were supposed to transcribe into Microsoft Word documents. The task itself was extremely monotonous and I was thinking of ways to improve it further. Once I picked up Dvorak, however, my outlook on the work changed. The task became fun, as I found myself slowly beginning to pick up the layout, and learn touch typing (something I had previously never attempted).