For unknown reasons, there is a dip in the circadian alerting about 8 hours after the beginning of the cycle. This is why people sometimes experience that “2:30 feeling.”

Hunh. That makes sense. I didn't realize that I was why I feel tired in the afternoon. I thought it was because of eating lunch just before.

Talking at length about the good old days is hardly a way to make progress on local problems.

This is true, but maybe you want to explain why?

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”

• George Bernard Shaw

some of Google's projects are reproducing high-level quirks of the human visual cortex.

While the work that the visual cortex does is complex and hard to crack (from where we are now), it doesn't seem like being able to replicate that leads to AGI. Is there a reason I should think otherwise?

I get the sense that many of the people who have signed up have done it less for the increased survival chances or the sense of comfort, but as a sort of flag waving. It is pretty good signalling that you are opposed to death and part of the ingroup that is opposed to death. Those little medallions are badges of a refusal to submit to the awful thing.