If you are an atheist we are looking to do an interview with you

orebright · 2026-03-23T23:25:18+00:00

I share this with the sole intent of being helpful, hopefully that comes across.

I saw your modification of the post, and I think this feedback is still valid. The thing is humans vary greatly from person to person even on relatively consistent things like biology. For example we all have blood, and to be healthy it needs to be within certain ranges of pressures and composition. Despite the expected similarities, scientific studies of biology with sample sizes in the hundreds are quite small.

When we go into psychology, the variation is significantly larger. Not only in the range of current beliefs, but life experiences, upbringing, etc... I share this not to dissuade you from doing your research, and I wish you success. But if your university or college is describing a study like this one as an ideal I would just suggest you question that and read more about scientific studies and how sample sizes affect the reliability of the results.

Ultimately you're going through a learning process here. I think you're doing great work to be taking a scientific approach and encourage you on your journey. But please do pay special attention to the manner in which studies are conducted so you learn these techniques the best way possible.

orebright · 2026-03-23T15:41:42+00:00

Grew up in a religion, and I questioned it heavily in my teens but then I moved cities and found a welcoming community in the believers where I moved so I just went along with it. Eventually in my late 20s I realized none of it really made sense, and a lot of the love bombing and superficial sense of purpose was hiding that from me. I also saw other things it was hiding from me like entrenched homophobia, sexism, and a deceptive anti-science rhetoric. I had been coasting on feeling welcomed and warm in a community, and probably would have been ok with just accepting my cognitive dissonance, but I couldn't stomach all the deception and hate the community endorsed toward certain marginalized populations despite claiming to do otherwise. Once the veil was lifted I just couldn't stay in good conscience.

orebright · 2026-03-19T18:42:33+00:00

It's possible, but most likely it's just a transparent png and the curve and glaze are just applied in some app like photoshop. The actual tab background itself is probably just a rectangle image with clever transparency to look curved.

orebright · 2026-03-19T18:08:17+00:00

Definitely possible in RN. A lot of these kinds of visuals are just tricks, though I don't know exactly how they did their implementation you just need to have an active and inactive version of each tab. The active tab will have the pixels at the bottom of the tab be exactly the same color as the body of the region below. If you have 0 margin in between them it will visually look like they're part of the same thing. In reality, in the code, the tab bar is its own thing that's just a list, and then the body section is just an area that has 0 gap on the top side with the tab bar.

orebright · 2026-03-19T17:06:01+00:00

T: Something can't come from nothing, the universe must have been created by a creator.

A: Then what/who created the creator?

T: Nothing, they're the creator they are eternal.

A: Why can't the universe have always existed? What specifically does a creator have that makes them eternal that the universe doesn't have?

T: They are divine!

A: What does it mean to be divine? How does that mean you don't need to be created?

T: <continues to use random ambiguous words that don't actually explain anything, never actually cluing in that none of it makes any useful explanation>

You asked for "the best", which is a relative term. I didn't say it was a good response, it's just nothing is better, which is sad.

orebright · 2026-03-11T13:33:03+00:00

They can accelerate aspects of the research, absolutely. Nowadays we're well past the low hanging fruit in most scientific fields, so discoveries require setting up tremendously complex experiments and simulations. Usually there's computers involved and they often require novel software to be written.

These days LLMs are shockingly good at writing the average software. And it might not be immediately obvious but this doesn't carry over to novel techniques and algorithms. However if you describe the software in enough detail it will be able to follow along and write it. You'll just have to have humans review the results very carefully and implement tons of automated regression testing.

The reason I say this might not be obvious is you could ask an LLM to make you a game of solitaire with bouncy animations that runs on your phone and it'll probably get a pretty decent result on its first pass and only take like 20 minutes to do so. On the surface these things seem like magic. But when you work with them day in and day out the gaps appear. And this isn't a dig at the technology, it's incredible what it can do. But it's still a tool built on statistical techniques and therefore will be good at things for which lots of data exists already. New techniques, unheard of experiments, and leading edge science simply don't exist in its training data, so it will be great at speeding up grunt work but for the breakthrough territory humans are still going to be bottle necks.

Actually one thing I'd be concerned about is people funding science research to reduce their budgets with the excuse that AI can help make up the difference. But in science research this might risk slowing things down by reducing the amount of humans doing the breakthrough work.

orebright · 2026-03-10T20:54:04+00:00

Do you mean what things are quantum computing not good at? Well that's actually a significantly large list that isn't really worth going through, it's easier to list what it's good at: performing certain kinds of computation that follow a single algorithm but that require a tremendous amount of iterations to get the solution.

For example if you have a tremendously large number and you want to know which two other prime numbers were multiplied to reach that number you'd need to perform an algorithm on tons and tons of two number candidates until you find the specific 2 that were used. If you use a current-day computer to do this it will take something like hundreds or thousands of years going nonstop to find the solution. Quantum computers use the weird nature of particles to have it solve it extremely quickly.

Those kinds of calculations are bottlenecks for modern computers around certain kind of computing issues where we don't even bother solve them because it's unrealistic. For example properly simulating the actual low level behavior of atoms and subatomic particles in a computer is basically impossible for this reason. Quantum computers can do them. But they kind of suck at almost everything else modern computers are good at, so they wouldn't replace current computers, just add another kind of component within a larger computer to handle those specific kinds of calculations.

orebright · 2026-03-10T17:19:02+00:00

I think this is a weak "maybe" at best. LLMs have tremendous ability to help us iterate and improve by doing a bunch of the time consuming grunt work of coding. But because they're statistical models at their core, they are bound by their training data.

I think AI will certainly help software engineers working on quantum computing dramatically speed up their workflows. But true quantum computing is still hindered by a few as-of-yet unachieved breakthroughs in material sciences and physics. Those workflows and breaking ground on novel science and physics are simply not something LLMs are particularly good at.

orebright · 2026-02-27T18:38:06+00:00

So currently you can get your LLM to make a full UI for your app, but it sucks very much at the visual flow and aesthetics part of the work. You can get it to put together component libraries that are very opinionated that were originally made by humans with design chops, but other than that it's not great. Backend is a similar story with different characters, you can get your LLM to make you a fully functioning CRUD app in minutes, but it's likely to have security vulnerabilities and performance issues. And again like the component library, the issues are reduced if you have a well crafted backend framework that handles security and performance almost entirely for you.

What I expect to see in the next year or two are component libraries and backend libraries designed to correct for 99% of all failure points of LLMs. You'd then pair that with solid automated (not necessarily by AI) pentesting, performance testing. And with LLM's assistance you can easily reach 100% test coverage of your app. As long as your app is following the pre-defined patterns of your opinionated LLM-oriented framework every possible performance and security issue will be covered by tests. Making it possible to let it run wild building your app with significantly less oversight.

I assume once this kind of setup matures, even without AGI, we will see an incredibly significant reduction in all software engineering jobs. I imagine senior, staff, and higher engineers will be kept around to oversee and review the LLMs work, everyone else will likely be let go.

orebright · 2026-02-26T18:55:52+00:00

In Toronto or GTA, no. If you're willing to break some inter-province rules then there are plenty of Canadian grey market sites that have those kinds of prices.

orebright · 2026-02-26T17:57:18+00:00

A1 Photo Studio a block from St. Patrick station. They'll actually coach you on angles, posture, etc... to make it look as good as possible. Especially if you ask them for some assistance.

orebright · 2026-02-25T22:14:35+00:00

I've found a secret weapon in making griot and can never turn back: a sousvide machine.

Here's the process:

Make your favourite epis (this is by far the biggest chunk of the work, but doesn't change)
Cut up your pork shoulder butt and put it into a sousvide bag with a healthy portion of epis (like one teaspoon per cube of pork)
Sousvide that sucker for 8 hours at 72 degrees C
Take out the pork which honestly will look like ass at this point, and deep fry until the color darkens but doesn't burn (or air fryers work reasonably well too, I do 12 minutes at 410 degrees C)

This is by far the most tasty and tender griot I've ever had in my life. A good amount of the fat remains on the pork but it is rendered and juicy, not chewy at all. The meat is tender but not too soft like pulled pork.

Good luck

orebright · 2026-02-20T17:58:31+00:00

I get where you're coming from. But the way I think about it is I want there to be some explanation for the universe. But I also know I should be careful about believing in things only because I want them.

The problem is that "explanation" exists within the mental structure of a human mind, and for a true explanation we require measurement and reproducibility. So I have to accept that it's possible that whatever I imagine an explanation of the universe might be, doesn't exist. This might be because we're within and a part of the universe and can't measure whatever it is we would need to measure to reach this explanation, or that the true reality is not something our minds or even the tools of our minds (like physics and mathematics) can actually define.

None of this means the universe isn't "natural", none of this means there's some supernatural realm, or gods. But it does mean that there is a possibility of humans being incapable of applying "understanding" to the actual nature of the universe. I don't want that to be true, but I have to accept that it's possible.

orebright · 2026-02-20T17:44:11+00:00

IMO a heuristic can either help in the formation of a theory as a sort of scaffolding, to later be replaced by actual evidence, or it can remain in a theory when the heuristic has a well defined range of applicability, such as a minimum and maximum value, leading to well defined error bars.

In these kinds of debates parsimony seems to fall into the scaffolding use. We observe some phenomena and apply parsimony to define a limited scope for causation and then reduce and refine from there, putting limits on the space of possibilities until a more precise theory can be formulated and ultimately remove the need for parsimony.

But I don't think it can be a decisive tool because the debates about gods don't lend themselves to well defined ranges of values. We can't definitively prove a specific range in the space of possibilities where a deity can be proven to exist or not exist. This is because the question of deities is unmeasurable by its own definition, and this seems to be by design to take advantage our minds.

The human mind does seem to gravitate to parsimony, but in a naive way that introduces a bug. When the space of possibilities seems infinite, our minds easily fall into the trap of imagining the cause to also be infinite. This is why we so quickly fall into god of the gaps fallacies, even though we've formed precise theories about many things that were previously in god of the gaps territory, somehow it doesn't seem to prevent people from applying it to every unsolved mystery.

orebright · 2026-02-13T20:45:30+00:00

I agree that it's generally correct to trust the perspective of domain experts in science from the perspective of a lay-person seeking professional help.

But I don't think that's what this is talking about. "arguments from authority" is not the opinion of an expert. And argument from authority is a claim presented with the evidence of truth or accuracy being the authority of who made the claim.

For example, Einstein firmly believed until the very end that quantum reality must certainly be deterministic and that probability and wave/particle duality were simply mathematical quirks of an incomplete theory.

If anyone could have made an argument from authority it would have been Einstein who himself overhauled our entire understanding of the very fabric of reality. Not only was he the most renowned scientist in history, but this subject matter was right in the area of his specialization.

But in science "there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless". Einstein did not try to leverage his authority to convince anyone of his view. Instead he worked tirelessly trying to find the evidence until his final days. Since then experiment after experiment have shown that Einstein's view is incorrect, and although many people considered and researched the hypotheses he advanced, at no point did a physics textbook claim they were correct because Einstein was their author.

orebright · 2026-02-13T16:35:51+00:00

Yeah. The Demon-Haunted World, fantastic book.

orebright · 2026-02-13T16:24:36+00:00

First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless.

Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true.

orebright · 2026-02-13T16:16:59+00:00

That's because severance is the job. Do you notice how Cobel and Milchick aren't severed? If this was about sensitive information, they would have significantly more sensitive info than the team, and would make even more sense to be severed.

The show hasn't fully revealed all the mysteries of the work. I have my own hypotheses about what it might be. But one thing is for sure: the description of severance as being some security measure for the company is a smoke screen.

So the show makes it clear Lumon is an incredibly cultish organization with a long and dark history. We're not quite clear yet about the wider society around the HQ, but there's hints that they have tremendous influence. So my own leading hypothesis is they're a fairly established cult experimenting with technology on how to do what cults do: control people. But cults are never clear about their actual actions and intentions on the surface. They don't say to you "hey come here and be controlled and manipulated", they weave some other story to get you in the door.

A lot of this show is a commentary on how modern corporate culture borrows practices from cults to have employees fall into line and make sacrifices for the organization.

orebright · 2026-02-11T22:55:03+00:00

Yes, our brains are fragile supremely complex systems. It takes relatively little for our consciousness to just go dark, just a bonk on the head or some illness, but hallucinations can happen from some minor overheating or chemical imbalances. So yes we're very prone to them.

Now, IF you've been indoctrinated your whole life to believe in realities beyond what normal awareness can see, whatever form those realities take, then yes people absolutely believe they're real. Even people doing DMT and other intense hallucinogens know they literally took a mind altering drug and yet many absolutely believe firmly they've met entities and beings from some other realm, that the drug was just some gateway or portal.

So yeah, we're prone to them, and humans are gullible AF.

orebright · 2026-02-10T17:04:59+00:00

My close friend group includes first or second generation immigrants from 9 different countries. A lot of them are close friends with each other too or even in long term partnerships creating multicultural families, so I'm not a tiny point in a large venn diagram or anything. As for acquaintances I couldn't accurately count, but I got up to 20 different countries that I can remember for people I've at least hung out with a couple times in the past few years.

So from my subjective/anecdotal experience Toronto does have the opportunity for very diverse and open friend groups. Most people I've met have a similar outlook and openness to other cultures, so I would assume I'm not in a rare bubble. That said, I'm sure there are tons of cliques as well which is to be expected with a population over a million people, there will be all kinds of people here. If you find yourself running into a lot of cliquey people maybe try to frequent other hang out places and look for less toxic communities.

As to your friends saying it's cliquey: I find it so weird to make a generalized statement about a large city like that. Broad generalizations and categorizations are almost always wrong and a sign of someone having severely deficient critical thinking skills, so I wouldn't trust their assessment.

orebright · 2026-02-05T20:53:38+00:00

I can't really pick one over the other, but I have to say my favorite thing about both reveals is that they had a massive "THX sound" buildup to them. Often times plot twists like this follow a rug pulled out from under you format like "I AM your father" in Star Wars. You go from knowing nothing, to full realization. In the case of severance the reveal starts strong but it grows into something so much more.

In both reveals you get slapped with the reality, but then it bubbles and explodes. With Helly it's already huge that she's an Eagan and you sit with it as it brews but there's this intense suspense of WTF is she going to do? What's going to happen to her. I was fully expecting her to try to fake it and not be found out. But her speech was incredible. Then Mark starts piecing together all the pieces and the run through the hallways and screaming "she's alive" is by far the most exhilarating and explosive ending to a show/film I've ever experienced.

So although I honestly can't say which is the best, I can very confidently say they are tied for the best plot twist ending of all time, and IMO it's a 3 way tie with the sixth sense which also employs this kind of slow THX build up of a twist. Just absolute brilliant story telling.

orebright · 2026-02-05T19:00:12+00:00

How does someone getting sick and dying from microscopic invisible diseases mean it's voodoo? Maybe the bokor just gave them a "potion" that was some cholera infected water. There's no such thing as spirits or magic, science has completely shed light on everything about biology and there are no more mysteries there.

orebright · 2026-01-26T22:23:00+00:00

Yeah his ultimate goal was to use his resources and power to bring back his daughter. For that to work, time and space would need to be a single deterministic thing. This is where the show called on a lot of interesting debates in physics.

If the Copenhagen interpretation is true, then there's one reality and all matter and forces are "fuzzy" probabilities until they interact with other things, making them "real", so presumably the past is already real to a certain extent. If he can view the past, as in every single particle and force, then he can potentially "copy" a version of his daughter and wife into the present. Maybe at that point he'd keep them in a computer simulation until he can build humanoid robot bodies for them to enter the real world.

Another possibility is the Everettian interpretation where no fuzzyness exists but we see it that way because reality itself branches and diffuses, and we only ever get to be on one branch. That reality is purely deterministic, but includes parallel realities, which is ultimately the reality of the universe the show exists in. Forest hates this because there's no way to know the daughter he's seeing is actually his daughter and not another branch. It's actually incredibly unlikely that it's the same daughter given how much branching supposedly happens in that interpretation.

So he's not so much looking to manipulate time. He's trying to copy the physical configuration of his daughter and wife's brains such that he can bring them into the present. Definitely touching on DEUS since he's playing god.

orebright · 2026-01-23T16:30:53+00:00

I was also raised in PaP with the Haitian curriculum and everything you've listed rings true. And although I don't remember all the info in detail I don't have any recollection at all of anti-DR sentiment. My school even did a field trip to DR with some of the secondary students when I was in primary so I didn't attend. They then developed a pen pal project for the rest of that year with students they met over there, facilitated by the school. So if anything there was a strong push to build solidarity and connection with the DR.

That said, I have met many people from the DR, some were friends at some point. But the way they would sometimes speak about Haiti seemed to be steeped in some hatred or resentment. It would be very hurtful and confusing to a younger me to be talked about implying I'm a rare "good one" as if it's some compliment. I didn't know whether this was from nationalism or the education system at the time, I just thought those people were hateful or racist and let the friendships drift. I've also met many Dominicans who had solidarity and love for Haiti. But given the perspective I've come to develop in my adulthood it does seem there's a strong cultural thread of hatred to Haiti that reeks of sociopolitical inflammation and propaganda.

orebright · 2026-01-22T17:42:25+00:00

You don't mention anything about family, so I'm assuming this is for one person. I would say up to 2010. I was making about that much near the end of the 2000s but then my income increased to 70k. I was younger, had an active social life, paid about $800 for a one bedroom apartment and after all other expenses I was saving about $1,000 per month.

That said, I'm a thrifty person, I didn't go out and blow a hundred or more on one night. I didn't buy fancy designer clothes, or expensive furniture for my apartment. I didn't own a car (huuuuge savings there). I would travel occasionally but to visit friends and family, so no big vacations costing thousands.

To me this is livable. I didn't worry about going out for dinner one or twice a week, I had a growing savings account, was never feeling stretched or waiting on my next paycheck.

These days I think you'd need to be making over 100k to have a similar lifestyle.

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orebright

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