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Qem

6,569 karma · joined June 17, 2020

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Qem··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
Gnumeric has montecarlo built-in.
Qem··on Over 12% of links posted to Hacker News are Show HN projects now
Is it just my impression, or programming language posts took a hit. I think I don't see them as often as before.
Qem··on How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
Nice. Suggestion: Add PyPy too.
Qem··on RISC-V is now officially supported by CPython
Did they already test how the proposed jit fares on RISC-V?
Qem··on The Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator (2020)
Szilard is an underrated genius. Also was an early formulator of the nuclear chain reaction concept, to tap into nuclear energy, but did not zero in uranium right at the outset as the element to make it feasible.
Qem··on Online clinics and influencers are promoting Cialis as a longevity drug
Microstrokes, that affect capillary vessels in the brain, don't cause short term acute loss of function, but have a cummulative impact over time?
Qem··on The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment
> How so? You can just... refuse?

It would be like doping in some elite sports, say road race cycling in Lance Armstrong era. Nobody would be coerced by force, but some people would start taking it, making less sleep time the new normal. With time business would adjust to expect and require it, and other people would be forced to take the drug just to not become unemployable in a market with a upshifted baseline. I think this is already happening in education, with ADHD medications. Children are likely being overdiagnosed, because in a environment with many medicated children, just displaying normal child behaviour starts looking odd, pathology-like.

> Doing a job that you hate for 8h and sleeping for 8h is much worse than doing a job that you love for 16h.

Some jobs just suck but somebody still has to do them.

Qem··on The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment
> What is surprising to me is the knee-jerk reaction I see whenever the idea of looking into this is brought up.

It's because if it were achieved, likely result would be employers forcing people to take the drug and increasing daily work hours back to 16+.

Qem··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
Now I'm puzzled if whatever made Mars lose its primordial water oceans and dense atmosphere could be involved in Mars Bar losing 20g.
Qem··on Squeak 6.1
Also SNOBOL/Icon.
Qem··on Squeak 6.1
This looks like Gilad Bracha's Newspeak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak_(programming_language...
Qem··on Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice
Not if it's just microbial life. Anyway it's just one case or another. We knowing what's the case doesn't change it. If the news never break it would be just as bad, perhaps even slightly worse, as we would not have early warning to prepare.
Qem··on Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice
Likely we don't need to replicate. We just need to get a sample of life with completely independent origin to our kind of life here on Earth, to study. This way we would be able to separate what are universal properties for any life from historical contingencies specific to us. To have samples of a single kind of life complicates things.
Qem··on Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself
> Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin?

Or just getting a bad itch.

Qem··on The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)
Reminds me of this comic: https://badspacecomics.com/scour-copy-copy
Qem··on Computational chemistry, Locally? My rant on SSH
> There is also a layer of friction between doing the computations and then analysing the logs that comp chemistry programs spit out. If you want to visualise orbitals or look at the outputs of your simulations, it's really awkward to run Python whilst being in the cluster, and the cluster has no GUI display.

By the description it appears computational chemistry is stuck in batch processing era. They are yet to discover their equivalent to REPL tight feedback loop workflow.

Qem··on EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams
Echoes of the bicameral mind[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

Qem··on Microsoft deleted my account and OneDrive
Related: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/xbox/brazilian-cour...
Qem··on Microsoft loses Brazilian case after telling hacked user to re-purchase games
> Courts elsewhere have gone the other way. Chinese courts have recognized game accounts as inheritable property, while U.S. rulings generally treat games as revocable licenses

Pretty ironic a communist country has stronger assertion of individual ownership rights than USA, the flagship of capitalism.

Qem··on Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing by up to 13 years
> The researchers took account of factors such as people’s age, sex and education, but cautioned that they could not rule out the potential influence of other factors that may have an impact on the brain, such as lifestyle and social engagement.

Perhaps it's just a correlation. Number of spoken linguages may correlate with income, frequent travel, sociability, or other factors that improve or filtre for health, brain health included.

Qem··on Sick leave: Germany rising but not the worst in Europe
I wonder if lost productivity from sick leave days is offset by preserved productivity of all coworkers that were not infected by people that felt obliged to show up sick with flu or other communicable disease.
Qem··on The bottleneck might be the air in the room
That's scary if confirmed. It took 500 million years for complex life to find the right mix of atmospheric O2/CO2 to foster intelligent lifeforms. Then we are undoing it in mere centuries.
Qem··on A martian rock has lots of carbon on it, and it's not clear why
> At least within the precision limits of the Perseverance’s instruments, the material roughly matches terrestrial kerogen. Using the word “kerogen,” though, was a no-go, the researchers decided. On Earth, kerogen is made almost exclusively of biological matter, mainly fossilized microbes that were buried millions of years ago. “The term kerogen implies biogenic source,” Murphy explained. “Macromolecular carbon implies we don’t know whether its origin is biotic or abiotic.”

I'm pretty convinced the catchphrase "There's no Planet B" is imprecise. In fact there is a Planet B, Earth. Mars was Planet A[1], our ancestors came here billions of years ago, perhaps in a rock fragment full of organics like this "completely not shale".

[1] https://badspacecomics.com/apostles-of-mercy

Bad news is that if we screw the Planet B where our lineage took refuge after Mars dried out, there is no habitable Planet C left in the solar system.

Qem··on Is the iPhone birth control? Causal evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 monopoly [pdf]
> Actually raising a child costs more than $1.2M - just $20K/year invested in S&P500 over the last 20 years would have grown to more than $1.2M.

The future markets of a shrinking world, with consumer and worker cohorts dwindling year after year, will be very different from the last 20. This is paradoxal reasoning. Your're counting on going childless, while the market remains the same, other people keep having children to grow the market. But if everybody else does the same it doesn't work. The mean investment probably will give negative returns, in a fast shrinking world.

Qem··on Is the iPhone birth control? Causal evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 monopoly [pdf]
> If you don't have children to inherit your fortune to, you can retire with full exhaustion of capital - that will yield way more than 4k$/month.

As a lone elderly person you're likely to be scammed and lose a lot of that capital near the end, without close people that like and support you. Elders are incredibly vulnerable to financial scams, specially those enabled by technologic means they are not familiar with.

Qem··on Is the iPhone birth control? Causal evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 monopoly [pdf]
> ppl are now having better options than raising a baby.

It gets me beffudled people actually think addiction to the virtual crack of social media is a better option.

Qem··on The first early human eggs from stem cells
Reminds me of this: https://badspacecomics.com/in-the-flesh-copy
Qem··on Michigan bill would bar employers from requiring after-hours coms with workers
> Or, indeed, WhatsApp and Signal.

You can use Shelter from FDroid to create a separate work profile in the phone, with separate accounts, and then pause it after office hours.

Qem··on More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)
> We should be wary of bringing Martian microbes back to Earth, because they may find our environment too hospitable and end up invasive species.

They could even already have invaded in the past, and we descended of them[1]. Earth as Mars ancient lifeboat[2].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-23872765

[2] https://badspacecomics.com/apostles-of-mercy

Qem··on Israel targeted Gaza children resulting in genocide, UN inquiry says
Lots of tech companies involved in this genocide[1]. Unfortunately tech has bad antecedents, as IBM also supported genocide in WWII[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

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