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Yeah, so a philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves like a normal human, they can walk around and have a conversation and react normally to stuff, but they're not conscious. Which means something like, they don't have subjective experience. What is subjective experience? One way it's defined is being able to experience "qualia". Like, if you look at this brick wall, it's red. From a physical perspective you can analyze this as like, it looks red to you because it's light of a specific…
I believe in preparing for things, which manifests in ways like making a 150-row spreadsheet of songs I have done or might like to do at karaoke, each notated with their highest note, subjective difficulty, and availability in common karaoke systems. This does not appear to be common practice, but I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it. A few of the commonly available songs on the Pareto frontier between "comfy song everybody can sing along to" to "exciting performance to questionably show off…
Laptop companies report the capacity of their laptop batteries, and also like advertising that their laptops have however many hours of battery life. It's easy to derive their (advertised) power usage by combining these two numbers. As examples to study, I picked three laptops that Wirecutter recommended, as well as what seems like a well-regarded high-end gaming laptop. The MacBook Air (13-inch, M5) advertises 18 hours video streaming and 15 hours wireless web on a 53.8 Wh battery, which…
A nugget of wisdom I received early in my research career that I found myself repeating to a mentee recently. Now you can have it too!: Obviously, if you have an idea, and you try it, and it works, that's great. But if your idea clearly, convincingly fails, you get a consolation prize: you can cross the idea off your list and start on the next one, with no regrets. What's worse than either of these outcomes is when your idea kind of works. You made things better, but it's not statistically…
Before we get to that, here are some things I already knew about credit cards but feel it would be kind of irresponsible not to mention I'm not your financial advisor I only know about U.S. credit cards, sorry. And, based on five minutes of research, the U.S. credit card ecosystem is a weird outlier globally. I imagine that if you're not from here, you'll be horrified at this Kafkaesque labyrinth of percentages and points and credits and exorbitant interest rates that we've imprisoned ourselves…
