RupertEisenhart

Too little too late.

Academics pay through the nose for the right to publish open!

Stick it on the arxive.

Elsevier basically. They are always everyones bogieman. Predatory publishing houses.

But yeah academics love piracy;)

see my comment above, TL;DR if you have 32TB spare and an internet connection, you can have your own Library of Alexandria in your living room.

This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy.

They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here:

- piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1]

- piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing)

- for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices"

- that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music

- how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries

Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent)

And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions)

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy

[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p...

[2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz...

EDIT: formatting

This was the best non-technical review of the idea I have read, would recommend:

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.881363

If you ever saw an unbreaking egg, you would have bigger problems!

The big bang explains it on a cosmological level, the sun drives it on a local level. Because basically all our energy is harvested in the process of entropy relaxing from the sun, via earth, to the coldness of outer space, we are in a local entropy gradient that is very steep and has one direction down.

Let me confirm the long stretches thing.

I learned DF by setting aside two weeks and playing ~16 hours a day. Was a piece of cake.

It's not the kind of game you can pick up with an hour here or there.

I wasn't calling out you specifically, more explaining my attitude here in general. Sorry for not being more clear about that.

> My question would be, why not use humans? At what point would the "very high expected return" justify this? Never? Why not?

Very good question! Obviously we are heading into sci-fi territory now, but in a world where all suffering was valued according to some agreed-upon objective metric I would suggest the following:

- yes much more human testing, especially volunteers who are terminally ill/suicidal etc.

- in such a world testing would presumably be much more expensive, so they could afford more complex research substrates that we don't bother with because we can just use animals

- eg. lots of brain organoids and other synthetic experimental substrates

And for the record, I do think such a world would either be some sort of anarchocapitalist chaos or painfully slow to develop. But at least it would be morally coherent!

Joking aside I guess my only real message here is, people who find this stuff disgusting should think about their dinner plates. In my ideal world, we use approximately 50% as much animal testing and 0.1% as many animal food products.

The problem I have with this discussion is it pretends to treat animal welfare as an absolute, when in fact nobody does that or believes in that (apart form militant vegans perhaps).

There is a lot of biomedical research out there killing a lot of animals. Most of it is of dubious utility-- most of the low level stuff can be done in simpler organisms or simulation, lots of it is highly speculative with no applications in sight.

This research has a very high expected return, and it can't be done in simpler organisms. I do agree that it could probably have been done more carefully or more slowly and saved a few animal lives, but I am certain that this is a long long /long/ way from the worst example of this.

Presumably they are utility maximizers who assume that the 'standards of care' for animals won't actually be rigorously enforced.

Humans sue.

Scale matters. There are multiple orders of magnitude difference between the things you are comparing.

You get one or two orders of magnitude just from the lifespan of animals-- a pig in a factory will spend up to a decade suffering, musks monkeys presumably less than a year.

You get the rest of the orders of magnitude from the number of animals involved.

> How do you effectively shift from that negligent approach to the careful diligence demanded when testing with people?

Presumably as easily as people turn from casually eating beef to raising their children without suffocating them at the slightest inconvenience? People have very different standards of care for humans and animals.

Reminds me of Kim Ki Duks comments on the animal cruelty in The Isle[0]:

"In America you eat beef, pork, and kill all these animals. And the people who eat these animals are not concerned with their slaughter. Animals are part of this cycle of consumption. It looks more cruel onscreen, but I don’t see the difference."

I'm vegetarian, but totally condone a (relatively) tiny amount of animal cruelty for art and science. /Especially/ art-- it might make people realize what they are eating.

[0] https://www.moviehabit.com/essay.php?story=kim_ki-duk01

The the Pokémon game, it's insane. I played it for hours once.

I don't want to take away from the seriousness of this but

> we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event.

mischaracterises the reference they link:

> Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia.

'in the midst' != 'may be under way'

My point is not to nitpick, but to say, unlike climate change, we still have a fair bit of time on this one. If you read the relevant literature more closely, it says something like (from memory) "if current rates keep up for 500 years, it will be one of the largest mass extinctions ever".

This is a deeply important issue. If our species ends up responsible for a death-of-dinosaurs scale mass extinction its.. hard to overestimate how bad that would look, from any sort of, I dunno, galactic-UN sort of application-process-review sort of perspective.

But implying we are 'in the midst' aka 'approximately halfway through' might rob people of hope.

We are at the start of a mass extinction event which, like many other terrible potentialities ahead of us, we can very much avert.

Primary school teacher, into to python, intro to anything (I even quizzed it for a while on Hindu philosophy, perfectly fine responses).

Though Codex is a better into to python once you know how to set up an IDE, this would get you going.

Wish I was ten years old and knew about this.

Not sure what your point is, but agriculture needs to change dramatically in the next couple of decades.

Human civilization/all life that wants to keep existing also needs to change dramatically in the next five billion years but I think that is to be expected.

Your references seem to back me up, and not the person I was replying to? Eg:

"There is evidence showing an association with certain types of food processing and poor health outcomes (especially highly- or ultra-processed foods). This association applies mainly to ultra-processed foods that contain added sugars, excess sodium, and unhealthful fats."

From the second one. Maybe you confused my position?

For some reason there is no reply button on the other replies.

Maybe the evidence for meat doesn't generalise, but the idea that fresh vegetables would retain some sort-lived structures that start to break down once processed seems plausible. I was just pointing out that GPs claim could do with some backup.

Are you a climate change denier? Are you unaware of the changes that have happened in the last ten thousand years?

This source says differently [0], at least for meat. Do you have any evidence or reasoning?

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444144/

Are you trying to say, Alexa should be funding the synthetic language nerds over at Lojban[0] or the Universal Networking Language[1]???

That would be a fun universe.

[0] https://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban&setlang=en-US

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

So, this makes sense from the perspective of writing code professionally for a company. I don't buy that the risk is significant for an individual programmer, but I suppose it is plausible that lawsuits could pose a threat to a large organization.

But I find I get most pleasure out of using CoPilot for personal tasks, everyday stuff that isn't for work. Surely there is no issue there?

And to counter the note about the scraping sources-- I have recently (out of work) been experimenting with using CoPilot to translate open-source MATLAB code into python and zig. If I make something useful in this way, it will be open source and I will credit those who wrote the original code.

Surely a use-case like that last would have to tick all the moral and legal boxes?

Do you mind explaining why? What do you think will happen?

This is a serious question, I'm apparently just unaware of the horror-stories that can come out of breaking copyright. (Not from the US so..)

For me its most useful for helping with bash scripts and small simple stuff, just saves a huge amount of time I would spend googling and checking small things. Not sure if copyright is relevant there or not, it certainly isn't something I am worried about. Interested to hear what your fears are based on.

Strong agree. For all the evidence and talk about 'the microbiome is a newly discovered organ', people sure do struggle to look beyond the surface reading of the research-- yes, all the research in this area is research about shit, and often involves putting things inside arseholes. Hilarious as arseholes undoubtedly are, its a real shame seeing this research held back by this.

One interesting corollary of the article-- I wonder if human corpses sink or swim in accordance with their former flatulence-- and how much the old tale about eating after dinner is determined by these selfsame gasses!

There was something like this going around in ~2008, it was a plugin bar that turned the internet into a game, you could leave mines and portals on websites that would take you to other websites, so people could add their own hyperlink layer on top of the internet.

I wish I could remember the name of it, I played with it for a few weeks but then they put up a paywall.

That spirit of communal being-on-the-internet I only saw breifly recaptured again by the Beaker Browser, which unfortuantely seems also to be going the way of all things. There you could fork and remix any website you were on, could in principle afford a much more mucking-in stle of what you are trying to do here.

I think this could be great! Keep at it!

This. You should read up about how recaptcha worked in the early days to do 'authority of the masses'. (I don't know any particular sources, maybe these methods are properly defined now in some framework.)

I do agree about the multithreading, but I think better menus will probably make quite a big difference to the playability. I'm looking forward to getting into weapons and armour and more of the army screens that I never bothered taking the time to really penetrate.

I used dadbod[0] and the following in my vimrc[1] to do a similar thing, only I haven't make the shortcuts for sending a block yet.

Looks nice though, maybe I'll try it out sometime!

[0] https://github.com/tpope/vim-dadbod

[1] au FileType sql nmap <leader>d :%:DB g:db<CR>

Hard agree until--

Copilot changed all this for me. Even using ffmpeg, now I just open a .sh and describe the functions that I want in comments and fiddle with what copilot gives me.

Copilot is at it's best writing dumb little shell scripts. Just today I was asking it to help me extract gps coords from a json with jq. A dream.