ClaraForm

As a neuroscientist: no. Not what I mean.

Right? Where's the substrates of consciousness, or the actual solutions for protein/rna folding, or the requirements for evolution?

Right? "Go find outsized success, but I'm going to put a non negotiable cap on the size. You can pick a bad direction for good reasons, but only you will be responsible if there are no good directions."

To be more clear: Failure can happen due to both internal and external forces. This advice enshrines internal power structures and ensures their systemic faults are permanent. It's not a seat at the table if you don't have a say.

I've been running Affinity Photo on Fedora for a while by running this installation script[1]. Works flawlessly and they recently upgraded the script to install Affinity 3.0. I haven't encountered/solved your second use-case, but I'm /sure/ someone has.

[1] https://github.com/ryzendew/AffinityOnLinux

You’re getting awfully close to being rude. There’s no reason to try to go around imposing your perspective when it’s just you venting about feeling stuck. We all feel stuck from time to time, the solution is generally to wait it out until something that genuinely excites you comes along and you ask to hop on that opportunity. That’s possible in all work cultures, including egalitarian flat organizations.

Thank you for that! I think I read about this a long time ago, internalized it, and forgot it. Pretty on the nose in this conversation... haha.

Hey, I know what the article wanted to say, see the last two-ish sentences of my previous response. My point, is that the article might be mis-interpreting what the causes and solutions for the problems it sees. Relying on the brain as an example of how to improve might be a mistaken premise, because maybe the brain isn't doing what the article thinks it's doing. So we're in agreement there, that the brain and LLMs are incomparable, but maybe the parts where they're comparable are more informative on the nature of hallucinations than the author may think.

Yes, I agree. I'm not against the idea that the brain can "store" things. Just whether our concept of how a "memory" "feels" is useful to us further understanding the brain's function.

I mean an LLM (bad example, but good enough for what I'm trying to convey) doesn't need any sort of "memory" to be able to reconstruct something that looks like intelligence. It stores weights, and can re-assemble "facts" from those weights, independent of the meaning or significance of those facts. It's possible the brain is similar, on a much more refined scale. My brain certainly doesn't store 35,000 instances of my mum's image to help me identify her, just an averaged image to help me know when I'm looking at my mum.

The brain definitely stores things, and retrieval and processing are key to the behaviour that comes out the other end, but whether it's "memory" like what this article tries to define, I'm not sure. The article makes it a point to talk about instances where /lack/ of a memory is a sign of the brain doing something different from an LLM, but the brain is pretty happy to "make up" a "memory", from all of my reading and understanding.

I'm not convinced the brain stores memories, or that memory storage is required for human intelligence. And we "hallucinate" all the time. See: eye witness testimony being wrong regularly, "paranormal" experiences etc.

It's a statement that /feels/ true, because we can all look "inside" our heads and "see" memories and facts. But we may as well be re-constructing facts on the fly, just as re-construct reality itself to sense it.

I think the play was something along the lines of being "the new iOS". Lots of new apps (see: LLMs) are browser-first, forgoing building platform-targeting apps entirely. When they couldn't see any app devs lining up to build Arc-specific extensions, apps, or such, they pivoted. Dia was more of an LLM-host browser, with the play being they're hoping for OpenAI or Perplexity or one of the big foundation-players to "pay" to be the "exclusive" AI provider, like old-Google pays to be the default on Safari. But ... both plays didn't find any audience or customer, rightly so, as they didn't try to "fix" anything anyone actually considered a problem, just tried to build a niche their own. :(

As someone who grew up in Dubai, the tourism industry everywhere breaks the soul of the place. Dubai, especially the places where people actually live and set up a livelihood, is a place like any other.

What a terrible day to be literate and be able to read into the ugly belly of self-righteousness disguised as morality.

Other commenters are wrong. Live-cell can be done with older single-molecule localization microscopy using techniques like PAINT. The fluorophore is usually strategically added in a way that binding-unbinding events cause excitation. Algorithms can then infer identity of single fluorophores based on their excitation pattern/strength and can predict whether it's two distinct fluorophore molecules or the same molecule moving over multiple frames of image acquisition.

Couple more notes:

1. Stephen Hell has been theorizing about how to do super-res microscopy since the mid-90s, so the article saying it was sci-fi "20 years ago" is off by about 10 years.

2. Stephen Hell has recently given the world another new technique, MINFLUX, which seems to be his best gift to super-res researchers so far. :)

If you ask most neuroscientists they’d say the same. Only a small subset of us would cite the literature that the brain’s caloric neuronal activity is ~10-15% unaccounted for by the amount of glucose neurons have access to. It’s a niche within a niche. And debated by the majority.

Access logs + maintaining backups + version control + relying on the hope that no one’s cat runs on their backspace key during the session where access control says they logged in … that’s the stack you’re recommending vs sharing a file in an email and saying “have a nice day”.

Bingo! A file sent out creates a specific paper trail and accountability for all parties. If I want to make sure there’s a record of me sending documentation to someone, I’m not relying on giving them write permission to the critical piece of text… this isn’t even about distrust but about clarity for all parties in the file transfer.

Never. The Apple bet, the North Star, is that personal computing is both the present and the future. The minute an exception gets carved out, like “personal computing but not in Europe” then Apple enters a death spiral. They’ll deal with each blow that comes their way because it will come for everyone else in the market too, but they’ll still be in the lead.

I have disorganized thoughts about this, but it's not just a debate about vertical isolation vs not.

1. The size of Apple/Alphabet/Samsung makes it difficult to enter the market (see: factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing), pushing everyone else out.

2. The size of the smartphone market makes it impossible to not have to deal with one of the above companies for certification, market penetrance or such. This makes them kingmakers. If a company somehow manages to become Facebook, Netflix, or Amazon, then the phone companies slide them a secret deal under the table. Everyone else gets a market-limiting set of terms that makes sure "tech" stays one of the "top" industries.

Combined, with no entry allowed, and with forces exerted outwards, we see broad social structures orienting /around/ how we use our phones, rather than the other way around, and that includes ad-monetized-absolutely-everything.

Phones and social media, today, are where TVs and broadcasts were in the 1950s/60s. Ubiquity and centralizing forces. If someone told us in the 1950s a TV manufacturer was exerting pressure on our forms of information distribution and was choosing which voices get a seat at the table, we'd rightly call that archaic and wonder why people would accept a technology provider as a market-shaping force. But today we accept it nonetheless. I refuse to believe the argument that the world's largest company can't figure out how to build a secure pipeline without making plenty of my decisions on my behalf...

The funny thing is, I think either goals or a constraint are a tool that should serve the user. Constraints that don't automatically allow the user to achieve goals they would have otherwise accomplished, and that are meaningful and important to them, are useless constraints.

I think figuring out the constraints one likes to work with can act as a great filter once someone knows what kind of success, goals, values and life they want to inhabit. Otherwise, it's as arbitrary as goal setting.

For me, I parroted other people's cool-sounding goals for a lot of my life, achieving varying degrees of success and happiness. Only in retrospect can I look at my favourite success and failure stories and consider which constraints, if I held them earlier, would have helped me narrow down to those favourite storylines from the get-go. Those constraints, I keep near and dear to my heart and attention in my daily life.

I don't think there's a way to set a meaningful constraint before practicing setting goals first. Walk before you run, etc. etc.

Not if (a) it misses a line of research has been refuted 1-2 years ago, (b) the experiments at recommends (RNA-Seq) are a limited resource that requires a whole lab to be setup to efficiently act based upon it, and (c) the result of the work is genetic upregulation of a gene, which could mean just about anything.

Genetic regulation can at best let us know _involvement_ of a gene, but nothing about why. Some examples of why a gene might be involved: it's a compensation mechanism (good!), it modulates the timing of the actual critical processes (discovery worthy but treatment path neutral), it is causative of a disease (treatment potential found) etc...

We don't need pipelines for faster scientific thinking ... especially if the result is experts will have to re-validate each finding. Most experts are anyway truly limited by access to models or access to materials. I certainly don't have a shortage of "good" ideas, and no machine will convince me they're wrong without doing the actual experiments. ;)

Thank you for that. Downloaded.

@OP: I'm wondering if more than just sorting, whether filtering could be added? I would want to find both highly rated books with high numbers of reviews.

A revelatory read that is surely going to end as up one of the year’s standouts. I didn’t expect the twist at the end!

The move fast and break things mantra, at least in my estimation, was always about not being fearful of trying new things. The things that break on the way were always going to break in the long run with enough changes accrued over time anyway. Implicit is an assumption that the things that were breaking were the most dysfunctional, or most restrictive parts, of incumbent systems of work or thought. Moving fast for the sake of moving fast, or for the sake of breaking things, was never the goal. It became a slogan of misplaced pride aimed at making movement the goal. At least that’s how I feel about that era.

I think the world at large today could use a few more people appealing to our better natures. For that, this is a wonderful statement.

I wish there was a way to moderate our modern discourse to be closer to finding ways forward together, rather than dividing ourselves further. Elon’s entire schtick these days is to move faster than regulatory bodies can align. I hoped for an attempt at amending the RS statutes for clarity and boundaries, rather than resignation from the battle entirely. Perhaps as proof that some boundaries can be reactive to anyone regardless of influence.

I can’t think of many causes worth fighting for that can be won through resignation, certainly never within research or scientific contexts.

What if there was one further section in the left column that runs across the y axis and tallies ingredients?

That way there are three "segments" of the spreadsheet: shopping; prep; cooking.

I have been evangelizing this message to my close circle of friends and colleagues lately. None of us are devs. I switched my laptop to Fedora this summer. All my windows problems evaporated. Search works, and is a button away. File organization works and my file manager doesn't freeze if it can't access a remote share for whatever reason (usually work VPN inefficiency on Windows). What is installed and uninstalled is genuinely under my control (not Microsoft's). And once I learned my way around the fifteen software installation methods (AppImages, repositories, flatpaks etc.) I even enjoy having the choices. My battery life is under my control, as is all interface with hardware on my terms (speaker/webcam behaviour/drivers).

I've been telling everyone who asks that Windows has lost the Laptop market. The market just hasn't realized yet.

Edit: It very much feels like being on a Symbian phone in 2005 or 2006. They were horrifically broken, couldn't load a web page, had no path forward towards even basic note taking, calendar organization, social media, or anything. But the iPhone hadn't shown up yet, so a majority of the world still used Symbian.

The only winning move … is not to play. Strange game.

Would you consider incorporating the AT protocol into it? It would be nice if every reader had their own moderation filter, like a web of links, but-bluesky-ified.

I completely agree. Yesterday I stumbled on a backup I had made of an old Internet forum (2002) I was on. Just the amount of trolling and shooting the shit in every comment was awesome. The internet was the place to get away from the seriousness of life. Now it’s as bland as all the rest of it. I realize I’m doing the same in this comment , pontificating on the merits of humor. But I’m not like the rest, I swear! I remember when it was fun!