412: 50 Years of Video Games, StableLM, Rivian, Bayes, Sega, Steve Jobs, ChatGPT vs Google, Danny Meyer, and Hyperrealistic FPS
"high standards and self-compassion are not opposed"
You cannot remove struggle from life, but you can improve your ability to handle challenge. –James Clear
😴💭 Kevin Kelly has a very interesting theory:
I have a proto-theory: That our brains tend to produce dreams at all times, and that during waking hours, our brains tame the dream machine into perception and truthiness. At night, we let it run free to keep the brain areas occupied. The foundational mode of the intelligence is therefore dreaming.
Invert, always invert! What if consciousness is not interrupted by dreams, but rather, dreams are interrupted by consciousness..?
Here’s how I got there: For a while I’ve been intensely exploring generative AI systems, creating both text and visual images almost daily, and I am increasingly struck by their similarity to dreams. The AIs seem to produce dream images and dream stories and dream answers. The technical term is “hallucinations” but I think they are close to dreams. I’ve come to suspect that this similarity between dreams and generative AI is not superficial, poetic, or coincidental. My unexpected hunch is that we’ll discover that the mechanism that generates dreams in our own heads will be the same (or very similar) to the ones that current neural net AI’s use to generate text and images.
I have no idea if it’s correct, but it certainly is interesting!
🏃♂️🎒🗓️ Last month, I realized that I had not been running for about a month and had not been taking my heavy backpack on walks and hikes (I wrote about rucking in Edition #337).
I had been pretty good about running and ‘rucking’ up to that point, but I realized that I was unconsciously creating new habits of *not* doing these things. There was always a good reason to skip a run or leave the backpack behind, but too many good reasons in a row and it trains your brain to spontaneously come up with excuses…
It’s useful to think of most things as habits that you are either strengthening or weakening. And if a habit becomes weak enough, it’s often just replaced with a new habit.
Lately, I’ve been working on recreating good habits — I went running 6 times in the past couple of weeks, and I’ve been conditioning myself that it’s no big deal. No need to plan in advance or have perfect conditions… I just look out the window, make a decision and go. It’s very freeing!
Same with rucking — when I’m about to go out for a walk, I grab my backpack and go. No time to overthink it. Keep it simple.
🦷🪥👦🏻🧒🏼 Here’s a pro-tip: Buy an electric toothbrush for your kids.
Years ago, these used to be kind of an expensive luxury, and I had anchored on that. But now they’re very affordable: I got a Philips Sonicare for $39 along with smaller kid-sized brushes on Amazon.
I’m convinced that my kids are doing a much better job with it than they were doing with regular toothbrushes.
Compliance is much higher as they actually seem to enjoy it, and I made sure not to get a crappy kid’s electric toothbrush with a cheap plastic-molded cartoon character on the front that will fail quickly, so they can keep it for a long time.
🧮🧠🕵️♀️🧐 In Edition #411, wrote about Bayes.
Reader Gemma B. emailed me about it and we had a great conversation which led me to find these introductory videos.
If you’re not too familiar with Bayesian probabilities, or maybe you know people who may be interested in learning, I recommend these:
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🕹️👾 50 Years of Video Games in One Chart 🎮 📈📉📈
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