ericskiff
I’d be down for a music creation community! I mostly make chiptune/video game music, but I’ve got a background in composition and musical theater, and I’m working on a pop song of all things currently :)
I highly recommend checking out the Zelda and Chill trilogy - https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoupLnv0rZ6yQYLT-H-lDSkoamYZ_-HzG&feature=share
Factorio. The base must grow
Okay - some weirder takes here but hear me out. I’d love to see a science-vessel focused on anomaly of the week style episodic writing, with moral and ethical quandaries and personal growth and a search for “the meaning of it all” trumping action, adventure, and universe saving.
Accordingly, I’d want that science vessel to be home to a delightfully nerdy crew of pedants, malcontents and misfits, all seeking something outside of the boring federation life or more militaristic vessels.
The list of people that would be amazing to Star or guest:
Neil Patrick Harris as captain
Felicia day as chief science officer.
Aubrey Plaza on tactical, way too smart and capable for her own good (and sardonic style)
William Jackson Harper (Chidi from The Good Place) as first officer
Warwick Davis as chief engineer, with awesome fully custom/adaptive AR controls and a combo of old-man wit and crazy ideas that gets them in and out of jams
With guest turns from David Hyde Pierce (Niles from Frazier), Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, Donald Glover, etc
Just go full nerd with it like discovery tried to, but without the constant intrigue and epic action. Let them be a family growing together and finding a place where they belong, puzzling through each new chapter together. TNG but for 2023 instead of 1988.
Yeah no. As a former IT guy the last thing I want is be tech support for my family’s light switch
A few!
First, keto. Not for the weightloss (although that happened, 45 lbs down and holding there 4 years in), but for the incredible way it made me feel. All my back and knee pain was gone, brain fog cleared, energy levels shot up, high blood pressure episodes went away. It was amazing
Second, electrolytes. Especially on keto but really so many folks are dehydrated and water alone doesn’t always help. It’s super cheap to make your own electrolyte powder with a 2:1 mix of Natural Calm magnesium and Morton’s lite salt (sodium and potassium). Put a teaspoon in a big glass of water with mio lemonade and it will fix headaches, hunger crankiness, and hangovers.
Third, drinking. I took a break and never went back. It was adding nothing to my life, and I’m so glad to be clear of it.
Fourth, taurine supplements. Im in my early forties and this popped my energy back up - I no longer feel wiped and low energy after a day of work/kids. I have time and vigor for projects or whatever else strikes me. It’s also been studied as a longevity enhancement and increases both healthspan and lifespan in test animals. It’s an amino acid we produce less of as we age, and supplementing it helped me.
In my personal opinion, it’s under-hyped. The average person has maybe heard about it on the news but not yet tried it. The models we have show the spark of wit, but are clearly limited. The news cycle moves on.
Even still, some huge changes are coming.
My reasoning is this - in David Epstein’s book “Range” he outlines how and why generalists thrive and why specialization has hurt progress. In narrow fields, specialization gives an advantage, but in complex fields, generalists or people from other disciplines can often see novel approaches and cause leaps ahead in the state of the art. There are countless examples of this in practice, and as technology has progressed, most fields are now complex.
Today, in every university, in every lab, there are smart, specialized people using ChatGPT to riff on ideas, to think about how their problem has been addressed in other industries, and to bring outsider knowledge to bear on their work. I have a strong expectation that this will lead to a distinct acceleration of progress. Conversely, an all-knowing oracle can assist a generalist in becoming conversant in a specialization enough to make meaningful contributions. A chat model is a patient and egoless teacher.
It’s a human progress accelerant. And that’s with the models we have today. With next generation models specialized behind corporate walls with fine tuning on all of their private research, or open source models tuned to specific topics and domains, the utility will only increase. Even for smaller companies, combining ChatGPT with a vector database of their docs, customer support chats, etc will give their rank and file employees better tools to work with
Simply put, what we have today can make average people better at their jobs, and gifted people even more extraordinary.