The majority of my encounters with West Coast Buddhism have been... off-putting.

Particularly in the SF tech scene, there is an unfortunate 'competitive enlightenment' vibe amongst many of those who profess to follow Buddhist teachings. "Oh, you've only attained the second jhāna? I got through all four on my first try."

I am certain there are plenty of genuine and sincere practitioners out there, but my small sample has not included any.

If it's any consolation, they are full of shit. In the second jhana and above, the factors of initial and sustained attention disappear. In practical terms, this means you cannot direct your thoughts away from the object of concentration once you enter such state. You have to decide beforehand how long you will be in that state and give yourself a mental timer. See Dipa Ma's biography for a case of someone actually entering higher jhanas that way.

This is the reason that anything beyond the first dhyana is not encouraged in Mahayana, as it is impossible to apply vipasyana in a state of concentration so deep that you cannot direct your mind.

The teachers popular in the SF scene are inflating their own achievements and the ones of their students by using very lightweight criteria. I had that experience when I attended a TWIM retreat before their founder died. According to them, I reached the fourth or fifth jhana. I can assure you I did not.

Yeah, agreed, there's a lot of misinformation. I'm always encountering people that say they just started, followed a guided meditation on the jhanas and entered fourth jhana within a week. And then the signs they describe are all just your basic things that arise when you first start having some facility over your practice, probably not even stability in the first jhana. Not to mention that it's impossible to be following a guided, external voice when you're in such a state of absorption.

As Chogyam Trungpa would probably say, they're all practicing spiritual materialism.

I worked in SF prior to the dotcom bust. Since I was commuting and made a day of when I had to be in the office. I took yoga with Larry Schultz - the yoga teach for the Grateful Dead, he had a studio near 4th and Brannon (I believe, memory foggy). He was great to listen to stories and learn from.

As mentioned in another post, I've been to SF Zen Center events both in practice and adjacent classes.

The tech scene now has become much more narcissistic than it was then. I didn't see the evolution as clearly as I did in Palo Alto while working there and in Mountain View.

I would not couple the tech scene with spiritual practices themselves. Judge the so called practicioners not the practice / practice instructors/organization.

That may reflect more on the people than the practice.

Thank you for what you're doing, this is an important fight.

The story is tragically illustrative of the maxim that you can oppose terrible legislation a hundred times but they only have to pass it once.

Adjacent but not directly to the point of the article, does anyone remember their dreams or have success with lucid dreaming?

After about a year of trying I can remember at least some dreams most nights, but zero success with lucidity.

Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression, but it seems like this author is either ignorant of a lot of very successful contemporary scifi or is just taking a narrow view of the genre based on their own preferences.

AI and independent publishing certainly make it harder to sort the wheat from the chaff, but the ubiquity and convenience of aquiririg reading materials has never been better in all of human history.

I will never get caught up with all the scifi books I want to read, and nothing could make me happier.

"The researchers tested their framework on nearly 1,000 LinkedIn profiles to see if it could match them to accounts on Hacker News. These were profiles where the real-world identity was known to the team, who removed names, links, and other obvious identifiers from the bios.

The AI-powered framework successfully linked accounts with up to 67% accuracy at 90% precision, whereas the best non-AI methods struggled to succeed."

Many are complaining about banking app compatability, but I've never felt compelled to use anything other than my browser for banking. What's the big deal with the banking apps? Am missing out on some huge advantage here?

Some banks force you to validate transfers on your phone; unfortunately its not the user who decides

Depositing checks by taking a picture of them.

If I knew what a cheque even looks like, that might be a benefit

I don't think that comes across how you intend.

That being?

"Excel's default behavior is to convert certain text entries into dates. It makes sense for general spreadsheet use, but not for geneticists. Genes, like Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1, are given alphanumeric symbols (MARCH1) as a shorthand for their full, complex names. When a scientist would input "MARCH1" into an Excel spreadsheet, the software would automatically interpret this as a date and convert it to "1-Mar"[...]For a long time, Microsoft's position was that this was a niche issue affecting a small number of users"

To be fair, this really is a niche issue. For all that I agree with the frustration for Microsoft's terrible behavior in so many other respects, it's hard to fault them for not being immediately responsive to something like this.

I think it does not make sense even for general spreadsheet use; it would be better to specify the type explicitly. (I also think a "zoned spreadsheet" would be better, although sometimes compatibility might still be needed with existing spreadsheets so a zoned spreadsheet cannot be the only implementation.)

Ok, sure. Now open this .csv

Do you really think that auto converting MARCH1 to a date even helped anybody? Who is writing dates like this?

The option to turn off the auto conversion stuff, should have been shipped way before 2023.

That's not really a counter argument to what was said. Daoboy said (and he's right!) that MS hasn't done anything because the behavior impacts very few users, not because it benefits very many users.

It's also less helpful because it's not very deterministic. A year is a short time and when it rolls over it will pick the current year even when you may have wanted last year.

I do from time to time, mostly for home budgets. I'm surprised every time it works.

My physician prescribed Vitamins D and B12, so a quality Omega 3 is the only supplement I currently purchase.

After an absurd amount of trial and error with every over-the-counter, trendy supplement over the last couple of decades (and lord only knows how much money), these are the only ones that seem to make a subjective difference on my quality of life and an objective difference in my bloodwork.

Many years ago I used to play around with CyanogenMod and Linux.

Life with work and a family became too busy to fuss with that stuff, but I'm rapidly approaching the point where abuse from android and Microsoft make using a less polished OS worth the bother.

You'll be happy to hear then that the experience has improved significantly over the past decade.

Eh, it's better. But it's still a mess unless you're using a device specifically designed for Linux like a Steamdeck or Framework. Expect to spend a lot of time messing around in the console if you install on an arbitrary laptop that came with Windows installed. Wifi problems, sleep problems, external monitor problems, laptop screen brightness problems, graphics card problems.

This is different than the glps, directly targeting subcutaneous fat.

Link to an earlier paper on the treatment: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9384315/ "At a dose of 2.0 mg/cm2, CBL-514 safely and significantly reduced abdominal fat volume by 24.96%, making it a promising new treatment for routine, nonsurgical abdominal fat reduction in dermatologic clinics."