You might not literally be destroying your life, but you’re probably flushing a good chunk of time down the toilet if you’re spending hours googling which lamp to buy.
You might spend time on a decision because you’re afraid of making a mistake or regretting your decision. Or you might not have considered the cost of your time – it can feel intuitive to keep researching until you’ve found the best decision, without noticing that the return on your time is miniscule.
Or you might enjoy (online) shopping and learning more about the product. Actually buying a product can be stressful and results in a material possession to take responsibility for, where daydreaming and research might qualify as leisure, education, even social connection and networking (bundled complimentary with whatever you do wind up purchasing, if anything).
When evaluating outcomes, especially if pondering why someone else does what they do, don't discount the value of the time spent googling the lamp. My time is valuable, yes. Perhaps I value knowing lamps.
Yeah, basically scraping and reshaping the wax back into a flat shape. Not sure how much you can get away with before that gets more complicated and how your type of stylus impacts it (see metal or wood available, would guess metal might steal fewer bits of wax).
'Tabula rasa' is from 'scraped tablet', which seems like it might've worked decently well for those used to it. I'm sure contrast is lower on pigmented wax that's soft enough to erase compared to chalk on a slate, but ... chalk sounds aren't my thing and neither are dry erase smells, so I've thought about trying it. Usually use a paper notebook that I don't erase for most things, though.
The stylus has a flat spatula-type device at the not pointy end, that you use for erasing.
Wax tablets with a stylus are a historic solution but I haven't actually tried one yet. If I do I'll come back with a review.
ML being the final paradigm would mean it would have to get 'to the end' before the next paradigm; the next paradigm will probably happen before 30 years; whatever the next paradigm is will be more impressive than the ML paradigm in some way - modest or dramatic. ML paradigm is pretty impressive, already, so anything notably more impressive than getting better at it seems likely to feel like a pretty sharp climb in capability.
My reading was less that 'this is unlikely to be the final paradigm' and more that 'a paradigm shift is likely within the 30 years roughly estimated for this to be the final paradigm', and presumably most paradigm shifts would give us more progress rather than less to catch on in the field. With no prior knowledge of what that paradigm shift would be - maybe we manage to capture the 'soul' of a crow through emulation and infuse it into our starting points, or something similarly odd; maybe it is simple and obvious math in retrospect.
There's a distinction that is important to make when it comes to empathy, between 'cognitive empathy' and 'emotional empathy', that is a good starting place. The empathy divide goes all ways when it comes to neurology - neurotypicals have a harder time understanding autistics and (the opposite neurotype of autistic folk, who might have been diagnosed psychopaths at some point but don't have a definite entry in the DSM-V).
Cognitive empathy is being able to understand another person's perspective and mental state. Everyone needs to learn this, but if people think similarly to you it is easier because you have some baseline assumptions that are correct. It is often more urgent to learn this for people who don't share your neurotype if you are autistic (or the specific neurotype that is psychopathic?-opposite-of-autism) because you aren't in the majority in most circumstances - and assuming that everyone thinks the same way you do leads to wrong conclusions that cause wrong predictions quite quickly.
Affective or emotional empathy. Responding to another's mental state with our own emotions, when we are affected by them. Sympathy, concern, and personal distress tend to fall into this. We vary as much as anybody on this one, with some potential complications - we may be hyperempathic, and emotionally respond more than neurotypicals to a wider range of stimuli, including perceiving impossible things like the emotional state of a toaster due to hypersensitivity. We may be alexithymic, and not understand our own emotions enough to be able to express them at all without some aggressive introspection, much less appropriately. We may be too overwhelmed by the emotion to use it to find an appropriate response (try literally feeling your pain under intense world theory). We may not know any appropriate response, or the generally appropriate response for our neurotype is not the appropriate one for yours (whereas it may have been a good guess with minds more like ours). If we do know an appropriate response, expressing ourselves with a script, with nonverbal communication, or any other 'odd' way may be more difficult to understand or receive on their end.
We definitely often have both sensory-seeking and sensory-avoiding needs. I am not as sensitive to some elements of the world now as I used to be as a child, but unsure how much of that is because I was a child and now am not, compared to 'getting used to' things (or some partial loss of the actual sense rendering it moot).
Reasons it would not be worth a try are that sensory-avoided experiences are, as mentioned elsewhere, extremely painful. Literally painful, as I was surprised I had to clarify at one point - apparently people without sensory aversions can find sensory experiences metaphorically? painful without them quite registering on the same scale as getting stabbed? But I would definitely say that while I have very much not enjoyed bad ongoing physical pain, bad ongoing sensory-avoid is for my normal experiences of both a great deal worse. A migraine makes me miserable; having to endure a sufficiently unpleasant sound on an ongoing basis without recourse could have me attacking walls / trying to hit my head on things if I didn't know better / other means to try to override and distract with other sensory input.
There's most definitely a category of people who would think a billion-dollar startup was decidedly not best, and in fact had failed their intention.