My gut answer is that they're real, and that when we're sleeping or when we die our consciousness slips seamlessly into parallel universes. But it may just be that my brain has really long-form ways of trying to solve puzzles by turning them into audio-visual experiences.
[edit] I'm not on any meds, never taken antidepressants, and I've never done psychedelics. I do smoke pot occasionally, but oddly it tamps down the intensity of the dreams; the most vivid or memorable ones occur when I'm completely sober.
no... 3-4 cups of coffee a day, then usually some whisky or vodka.
To be honest, I don't think my dreams are more vivid than other people's; I just think I remember them better because I focus on trying to save them when I wake up. My father and brother both claim they never dream, but once in awhile they've remembered bits of one and they sound as wild as mine.
Take what I say with a grain of salt — please do your own research — but I think both THC (to which you allude earlier in this thread) and alcohol affect REM sleep/deep sleep. In fact, THC might suppress REM sleep, rebounding when sober. That is why frequent smokers (specially before-sleep smokers) experience very tough nightmares when trying to sober up.
What you say rings true. I'm not much of a THC user. Maybe once every couple months. When I do, I sometimes have very wild dreams early in the night, but I'm less likely to remember them. I don't use it much before bed, because although it feels as if I slept soundly, it always makes me wake up tired. I'm much more familiar with alcohol, and my sleep is divided by it each night into two parts. The first four hours of sleep are usually dreamless. At almost exactly four hours, I wake up and drink water. The next 3-4 hours are where the dreams occur. If I'm really catching up and can stay in bed for a full 9-10 hour sleep, the extra hours contain the most vivid, hallucinogenic dreams. So in my experience, I think both those substances impede good dreaming.
I don't mind nightmares. I kind of like them. Even if they're horrific I end up recalling them to help myself get back to sleep; then usually the ending changes.
Yes. Well, sometimes I drink wine or beer. I do my best thinking when the caffeine is at a maximum, my mind is racing, and the first 1-2 drinks are starting to lower my blood pressure and calm me down. Does that seem unusual to you?
While the criticism is valid, I think it misses the points of the book. It's worth reading both but the book definitely has helpful perspectives that eclipse what's mentioned on that webpage
People have definitely asked for that. I don't think I'd be the best person to write a traditional compiler book. Most of my language experience is in front ends and interpreters. Maybe if I get more back end experience. But, also, I think that topic is fairly well covered by Engineering a Compiler.
I have thought about writing something around type checking. That aspect of compilers feels a little underserved to me. Types and Programming Languages does a brilliant job of talking about designing and understanding type systems. But it's less focused on just sitting down and building a working type checker. Most other compiler books seems to gloss over it quickly so they can rush to the fun back end stuff.
But it's hard because the way you implement the type checker depends so heavily on the underlying type system and those vary widely. Does the type system have subtyping or not? Are generics monomorphized? Etc. So I have no plans to write anything about that any time soon.
Also, between my first two books, I wrote almost every day for about a decade, so taking a nice long break from that has been nice.
you couldn't say any of the newer computers were that much better, particularly in terms of raw performance. It was the PC clones that decoupled the system clock from the video clock making it possible to release a machine that was clocked substantially higher than what you could get six months ago, enough that you could buy a new computer in two years that was more than twice as powerful as your old computer.
broke down and the industry has had to multiple cores, GPU acceleration, etc. to be able to make the case that today's computer is better than the one you had before.
