My experience with psychedelics is the following: they shift your perception of things temporarily. The way the "adjustment" works is that you are able to "see" and "touch" experiences you could not before, because they would have annihilated you. They open a door to re-living things and re-processing. Hard for me to see that you would come out of that "broken", if there's nothing to process your trip will be a pleasant high.
Which is not to say that psychedelics (LSD, 2C-B, Mescaline, Psilocybin) are not powerful stuff and that they allow for mental states that would be unlivable otherwise (clinically that would be schizophrenia or something like it). I do believe that their therapeutical and recreational benefits do outweigh the drawbacks though. There must be a better way to handle this than Schedule-1'ing the whole bunch.
Powerful they are indeed. Depends on general personality, current mental situation, dosage taken, environment and/or people setting up the vibe. That's why I think they should be 100% available but 100% only under professional supervision, who has chemistry and skills to stop the trip gracefully if needed.
I've only ever done them (mushrooms) alone, mixed with fresh lemon juice that somehow makes them more intense and shorter-acting (say 2.5h very intense trip I prefer much more than 6h of less intensity). A profound, maybe a bit life-changing experience. Laying down, eyes closed, listening to some mellow shamanic music, I went far and beyond anything I can explain with my words, dissolving senses, myself, and putting it back again afterwards piece by piece.
It was pure goodness and positivity, but I can imagine if it was so strong but negative it could have been soul-crushing. Pair it with already fragile personality and the need for professional oversight is always a good idea IMHO. Educate on top. Ignore on your own risk.
If you are willing to argue in good faith (no pun intended), I'd recommend for you to read Spinoza. Spinoza builds on your argument number one and argues that there can only be one substance, and this substance is God. In a nutshell: God is everything that exists, we do not exist outside of God (we are "modes" of God, if I remember correctly). Spinoza also argues that by virtue of being the only substance, God exists necessarily and does not have a choice.
The implications of this logic create problems for the Judeo-Christian stance. Absolute morality goes out of the window and a few other things with it as well.
It might be interesting to read. It's not far from my original guess about these things.
The logic wouldn't create a problem for us due to the weight of our source, the Word of God. Whatever counters it would need perfect character, prophecies that came true, miraculous power, historical evidence, and global impact on most people groups. Then, his followers would have to experience similar things on top of transformed lives. If not, his views remain pure speculation with nothing backing them like most religions and philosophies. Not threatening at all. :)
That is why I prefixed my previous post with "in good faith". If you postulate that your speculations carry more weight without solid logical reasoning, that is not good faith to me.
Granted, that style of reasoning also has a long tradition in philosophers like Descartes, Berkeley, etc. Descartes famously postulates that "God is not a deceiver", and that we are dealing with a benevolent God. You make the same assumption. Back then, there had to be a God, because the church would have showed people how the afterlife looks like pretty quickly. I don't understand what necessitates such a stance today.
In any case: as long as you argue from the conclusion backwards, we can spare some ink and leave this be.
“ If you postulate that your speculations carry more weight without solid logical reasoning, that is not good faith to me.”
I thought my original comment had a link. We have a huge weight of evidence of various types to support God’s Word being from God. There’s usually more types for that than most beliefs people express on HN that are accepted. So, I start with that as a foundation much like proof assistants build on a core logic.
To test your assertion, we can do simple comparisons that Christians often do to justify their beliefs. For instance, you equated our use of the Bible to Descartes stating an opinion. Did Descartes live a perfect life, claim to speak for God, and perform miracles to prove that? Did he come back from the dead? Do his followers experience unlikely transformations and life events in response to praying to Descartes? Do they get healings in the hospital verified by doctors by asking Descartes to heal the person? Would the people I’ve seen who were miracle healed have done better with Descartes?
When a philosopher or scientist counters Christ or His Word, we can just go down the list to find they don’t come close to refuting them. Christ wins the trustworthiness competition. Then, we trust Him based on that.
I would consider switching sides if the others met the same criteria. They’d have to claim to receive visions from God, their predictions come true precisely, work miracles, come back from the dead, have perfect character (trustworthy), and I’d have to get promised results following them. If not, “let God be true and every man a liar” when they contradict.
I find real science doesn’t contradict my faith, though, since it’s a pursuit of truth which God wants us to pursue. Most of it is OK or it doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. I can enjoy it all. :)
No direct replacements, but there are a lot of options. Some of the options are with a different company that would be glad to find out what parts of vSphere you need and for a price (which might or might not be reasonable) make just those for your. Some are open source and you can hire someone to add the features you need. Some are things like AWS where are completely different in many ways and yet have tools that by nature are very different forcing to change to their model, but may be better once you pay that price. And of course nothing says you can't pick multiple from the above - but no matter what it will be significant effort to move to any of them above the cost, which is what Broadcom is counting on.
I really don't think it's necessarily "hard", it's just going to consume some time and planning. If Broadcom is actually banking on that, they're mistaken. I work for a very large multi billion dollar company and they want 3x our current costs. We told them to get fucked and we are moving. We didn't even try to negotiate, we essentially laughed at them. I got to be a fly on the wall for the call and it was hilarious.
It depends on where you work, but some employers extend mental health benefits to post-docs as well. Depending on the country, therapists have sliding scales too. The irony of looking for a therapist while you are burned out is that it can be a long process, but there is the chance of it being worth it and to see more options afterwards.
Thank you for that comment, as someone who has had exposure to the DOE as well (and LBL at that) I can only echo your sentiment. I'd even go further and state that is hard for me to believe that any innovation can happen in the calcified structures of governmental labs. Maybe the classified ones are different.
The "DOE made NVIDIA" myth is a story I haven't seen pushed outside the DOE complex. It is true that the supercomputers the DOE pushes could be considered industry subsidies, by providing industry companies with a steady customer with a very high tolerance for unfinished products. That applies to NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, HPE/Cray and IBM more or less equally.
I also want to stress what often gets overlooked: supercomputers are hell to operate and use. Aurora runs on Slingshot, a Cray interconnect. Those things look good on paper. Examples: Cray Aries (and "network quiesces") or Cray DataWarp. Who knows how Slingshot actually works in practice, for a hero run it only needs to hold things together for a few hours. As long as you get a high TOP500 ranking, a supercomputer is a success.
There is no market for those things anymore and they are beholden to the same economics as everything else, hence codes that can't afford an army of PostDocs to work around the bugs and design decisions that are only necessary due to scale of those systems are better suited to plain old mid-range clusters. And I haven't even mentioned the eccentric userland of supercomputers.
There are many reasons the DOE affords to run those behemoths. Some more trivial and petty than most people would like to believe. Like the author of the parent post, I have come to believe that the best bang for the buck on scientific output can be found elsewhere.
Not that that has anything to do with the original topic :)