Crazy Wisdom
Stewart Alsop
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Full-Stack Mindfulness and AI: Allison Durham's Vision for the Future
Intro Allison Durham Focus: Exploring AI, Software Development, and the Human Mind What is the Human Mind? Allison doesn't make a distinction between the brain and the mind. She sees the mind as a dynamic range of cognitive experiences that include thoughts, perception, and self-awareness. The mind exists alongside the human experience and is fully integrated with bodily sensations. On Consciousness Allison discusses the topic of consciousness, noting that awareness can vary in its intensity. She mentions an intriguing question: Can awareness exist without the brain? She recalls an interesting conversation with a friend who asked her about consciousness and awareness. The Experience of Dreams Allison describes a dream she had that was "rooted in Earth," contrasting it with another dream featuring a monstrous, otherworldly creature. She emphasizes her ability to fully visualize experiences in her dreams, even though she struggles with visualization in her waking life. Aphantasia and Visualization Allison brings up the concept of Aphantasia, where people have difficulty visualizing images. She explores the idea that visualization might be trainable, mentioning techniques such as the "candle technique" to improve skill. She notes that while most people can recall memories with images, these people also often have underdeveloped other sensory recall like smell and hearing. Software Development and AI Allison talks about Rust, a systems-level programming language she enjoys using. She delves into the concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), explaining it stems from Google's earlier operations methods. She praises GitLab for packaging all the tools needed for DevOps, making it more accessible. She explores the concept of MLOps, which focuses on getting machine learning models into production. She finds the speed of open-source AI development both exciting and challenging, noting that problems can't be fully solved before new ones appear. Personal Psychology Framework Allison discusses her psychological framework, leaning heavily on mindfulness-based tactics. She believes in being fully aware of one's thoughts and emotional state, and she finds this awareness essential for taking proper action in life. Final Thoughts She mentions her website, AdjectiveAllison.com, and her social media handle, AdjectiveAllison on X. Time Stamps: 2:30 - Discussing the nature of the mind and its relationship to the brain and awareness 5:00 - Allison explains her experience with aphantasia 7:30 - Stuart talks about training himself to visualize through meditation 9:00 - Whether imagination and visualization can be trained as skills 11:00 - Allison's perspective on not training her own visualization abilities right now 12:00 - Allison's interest in learning Rust programming language 14:00 - Using ChatGPT to assist with engineering problems as a "rubber duck debugger" 16:00 - Explanation of DevOps, APIs, serverless solutions like Repl.it 19:00 - How AI may or may not change API and engineering architectures 21:00 - Automation as connecting APIs; engineers building instead of using no-code 23:00 - AI unlikely to change API interface itself, complexity happens behind it 24:00 - Allison's favorite psychological framework is mindfulness 25:30 - Aligning with specific frameworks depending on the problem
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