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Sinaf

38 karma · joined November 25, 2015

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Sinaf··on A kidney donor at 18 now regrets it
Because then there would be no possibilities for new startups to arise. I already have a good idea: Something Tinder-like for potential donors and receivers ("Let me fuck you for a kidney!", "Suck my dick for a part of my liver.", etc.)
Sinaf··on Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from images at 15MB/s
This [1] is from 2013, so I don't know how it holds up, but I found it in the criticism section of the Wikipedia article for webp [2].

edit: This [3] is a follow-up from 2014 to the article/study from 2014.

TL;DR: "We consider this study to be inconclusive when it comes to the question of whether WebP and/or JPEG XR outperform JPEG by any significant margin. We are not rejecting the possibility of including support for any format in this study on the basis of the study’s results. We will continue to evaluate the formats by other means and will take any feedback we receive from these results into account."

[1]https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2013/10/17/studying-lossy-...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP#Criticism

[3]https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/07/15/mozilla-advance...

Sinaf··on A Nihilist's Guide to Meaning
Philosophy has many different shades and colors (Philosophy of language, science, mathematics), and there is also a "branch" asking questions related to the meaning of life.

I can't tell you where you could/should start, because I feel like I would already influence you too much by taking some sort of choice away from you.

I will link a few essays I could find that are available for free and are not too long. I'm already influencing you a little bit by making this selection, but I urge you to do your own research: If you like one of the stories, try to find out who was influenced by whom (e.g. Kafka doesn't directly address meaning but influenced Camus; Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer), and consider reading things challenging the author.

[1] The Last Question - Isaac Asimov (http://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf)

[2] Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5200)

[3] A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway (http://www.url-der.org/a_clean_well_lighted_place.pdf)

[4] On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense - Friedrich Nietzsche (http://www.jpcatholic.com/NCUpdf/Nietzsche.pdf)

I've often see people link the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I'm gonna do it as well: http://plato.stanford.edu/index.html

While I'm writing this gutenberg.org seems to have some problems, but just search for "Metamorphosis Kafka", and you should find plenty of other sources.

Sinaf··on 25-year-old lived for more than a year without a heart
Please think about becoming an organ donor. It is completely ok to decide against it. At least you have contemplated the idea.

http://www.organdonor.gov/

Sinaf··on The New Atomic Age We Need
Here in Germany we used a salt mine to dispose of our nuclear waste, which backfired, to say the least. [1]

How big the eventual costs (the article speaks of "at least €4 billion ($5.3 billion), but more likely somewhere between €5 billion and €10 billion") will be is uncertain, and I can't back this up by any real evidence, but my guess is that those who profited from the waste disposal might not be the ones paying for the clean-up.

This all makes me think of the Futurama episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" [2]:

>The others quickly dismiss Leela's concerns that the new garbage ball will return and destroy a future generation. Professor Farnsworth replies that it will not be for hundreds of years, presumably by the year 4000, prompting Fry to say "That's the 20th Century spirit!"

[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-o...

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