Udo

The delta between that and "normal work as required" depends hugely on the job type and company culture. If you're flipping burgers, that difference may well be zero - if you're working as a programmer, it may be huge.

Personally I suspect Quiet Quitting is a quasi-immune response to an employer's expectation that your job should be your life's main activity. Again, how well justified that expectation is comes in a huge spectrum.

In a recession, this response is (reasonably) heightened by an inability to enjoy the economic or personal benefits that an employee expects to come with "giving 110%" for the company.

I do actually think the site is unethical, yes. But those are not "my" ethics, just ethics in general. There is sufficient evidence to argue against the Daily Sceptic on purely humanist grounds. On top of that I do find the site personally objectionable, that is also true.

I also believe that the intent and consequences behind opinions matter. If there is a website that clearly influences a lot of people to be anti-science and that tries to promote social inequity then I don't view this neutrally as just another opinion. Ethically, this is not on the same level as, say, someone's opinions about the Game of Thrones finale.

> But if you're ok with companies that should almost be utilities withholding their services

I told you two times already that I'm not okay with this, only that this is one of the exceedingly rare cases where I welcome the way things have already been working for years.

Obviously, the positions held by the site are shared by a lot of people here, but that doesn't change my opinion of it. If you believe they are spreading worthwhile information on there, that's obviously your right and my beef is not with you - I think it should be possible to politically disagree with someone and still be able to go out and have a beer together. My beef is with sites like this which are causing harm on a societal scale.

  The Growing Menace of Bill Gates’ ‘Global Health’
  Whale Population Grows Despite Attenborough Climate Scaremongering
  Headmistress of England’s Most Successful State School Reported to Police For ‘Hate Crime’ After Jordan Peterson Visit
  Pentagon Launches Probe into Woke Diversity Officer After her Tweets Asking Where She Can “Get a Break From White Nonsense for a While”
  Woke High School Defends Trans Teacher With Prosthetic Breasts in Name of Creating “Safe and Inclusive Environment”

But this illustrates the dilemma quite well: ideally we would like payment providers to be a public utility that is not allowed to make whimsical judgement calls, on the other hand we would like them to employ good judgement about facilitating things that are clearly detrimental.

While I share your schadenfreude in this case, I don't see how this is solvable in the general case.

Over time I'm going to extend all of this to a more fully-fledged "sousveillance" dataset. I would love to add health and location data, but alas Apple is such a walled garden. But I did add a note-taking system, Zettelkasten-style.

  GM_xmlhttpRequest({
            method : 'GET',
            url : 'https://myloggingurl/?client='+client+'&url='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)+
                '&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title),
            responseType : 'json',
            onerror : function(e) { console.error('URL-Logger', e); },
        });

Even Loeb acknowledges that alien technological origins would be a long shot - it's probably more about raising awareness and making some headlines.

The fact is we don't see any alien activity in our galaxy as far as we can discern. If a random piece of interstellar material turned out to be of alien origin, a couple of interesting things would follow from that: either the creators are long dead (in which case: why can't we see their structures out there?) or they have somehow learned how to overcome thermodynamics.

Again the null hypothesis here is that we're just a very, very early civilization. Possibly the first one to arise in our galaxy. Let's assume that we're it and act accordingly.

As a counterpoint, I created https://rolz.org - it works as a basic chat with dice rolling functions and has a - completely optional - super-minimalist "VTT" mode.

When I GM remotely, I noticed simplicity is key for me. I don't want to MC what boils down to a supervised session of Baldur's Gate. I want to narrate, let my players narrate, and use some basic utilities to assist.

My general getting-into-RPGs advice is exactly the same: keep it simple, spontaneous, and dynamic. Last week I DM'd a complete beginner's session of Vampire, no rules or background knowledge required - people enjoyed it way more than a complicated and involved introductory adventure I recently GMed for the DSA world/system (it's a German D&D equivalent).

For some people modeling stuff based on complicated rules is a mandatory part of the fun, and honestly, more power to people who feel that way. But as I get older, I find myself and my players enjoy things that don't require homework more.

I didn't say that they should do all of the work. But going elsewhere would diminish everybody's experience. Segregation is always the worse option. If the problem is that we're missing a specific perspective, the solution in a vibrant community cannot be to just accept that and let things calcify.

> HN doesn't actually show any indication of willigness to change

HN is not a monolith, this is unnecessarily reductive. Since this is a collaborative effort, it's a bad idea to drive progressive people out and cede the ground to conservatives.

> all you're asking of women is to grit their teeth and endure it.

How on Earth does this reflect what I said?

  > The probability of selecting the best applicant in the classical secretary problem converges toward 0.368

If the stakes are higher though, more conservative strategies might be in order. For example, you might want to sample a much smaller group than n/e first and make a decision based on their median, or even look at their standard deviation to get a reasonable sense about the value distribution - as in the real world values are seldomly distributed uniformly.

If there is a cost to coming up empty, you may also want to employ a hybrid solution, such as going with "1/e-law of best choice" until you hit the 70% mark and then accept the first candidate that is higher than a linear interpolation of the highest value and zero, lerped across the remaining percentage of samples.

What the article gets wrong, I believe, is the ethical dimension. I would make the argument that for an organism having nociceptors and pain responses is not enough to assume capacity for suffering as we know it (which granted is always a big caveat). I could write a program for a simple robot that shows a pain response. That's not enough.

The missing component here is a brain capable of suffering in a meaningful way. Personally, I suspect there is no convenient limit value for this as you go up the ladder of brain complexity. It's just one big muddy gradient. Where a person draws these lines is almost arbitrary: for example, I don't really care about the well-being of a moskito, but starting with spiders I feel increasingly guilty for not helping them when they're in trouble.

It's a shorthand way of working with incomplete information. In many cases it's not possible to directly point to a concrete organism as a point of origin for a certain molecule. That's why we point to the earliest known implementation and shrug.

> Just to be contrary, is it not at all possible that such and such a feature "evolved" in all the relevant life forms at the same (more recent) time in response to changing external stimuli?

When a molecule is sufficiently complex and all other factors being equal, we tend to assume there was one common ancestor who first developed it.

It seems to me that Quanta is sometimes a bit biased towards the cosmic inevitability of intelligence, while carefully avoiding full-on Penrose mysticism. That's why the title is phrased as it is when in fact this discovery is congruous with current models.

Signal proteins evolving before the majority of systems they're currently used in is in fact well aligned with prior expectations. Once a way to synthesize a molecule has evolved, it can get re-used quite a lot for similar purposes. That's because evolution is a hill-climbing algorithm which is bad at coming up with complexity from the ground up but has no problem with complexity that has developed over extended periods.

> humans are not more "evolved" than single-celled organisms

Well, there is a directionality to evolution, and humans are way more complex than single-celled organisms. Biologists tend to avoid labels such as "more evolved" because they can be misleading and because obviously every organism around today is evolved to the same extent, namely to survive in current conditions.

I don't think they do. Which is much better than correcting for variables and doing it badly.

Anecdotally, I am the only healthy person I know of in my group who voluntarily uses artificial sweetener. It seems to me that the use of artificial sweetener is strongly associated with health problems such as morbid obesity and diabetes: people who don't have to don't use them.

Regarding artificial sweetener itself being causal there is very little reliable data to support that. There does seem to be a link between Aspartame and (bladder) cancer but it has so far only been shown in animal models.

  - MVPs, game development, scientific applications
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  - Interests: working in custom codebases, rapid prototyping
  - Main background: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, 
    vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js

Contact me at: udo@udven.com

https://ud0.io/

For example, if we had a 3-tiered model, "basic", "web app", and "custom" that would solve most of the problems. For "basic", the browser acts like a featureless monolithic platform: no UserAgent header, no (3rd party) cookies, no localStorage, no advanced JS API, maybe even limited DOM access. Anything that needs access beyond "basic" would trigger a permissions dialog. "web app" would be full JavaScript, but no WebGL and only limited media support. And "custom" could be anything the website asks for, preferably in a manuscript file.

This would solve a whole host of issues, including security, for the most common cases. The number of websites that need to ask for more than "basic" is limited, at least as far as the typical user is concerned. Over the lifetime of a browser's settings profile that would probably be about 10 sites that need "web app" access.

The way we're doing capability permissions on the web (to the extent browsers do it at all) is just broken. A barrage of piecemeal modal dialog boxes is not the way forward. It needs to be drastically simplified. A website should be treated exactly like any other kind of app: if it needs to use extended features, it should put that into a manifest so the browser can provide a specific list of items for the user to approve or reject.

If none of these permissions are given, sites should be extremely restricted in what they can do, including cookies and localStorage.

Let's get rid of UserAgent and codec compatibility headers. Especially UserAgent is already useless and both should be replaced entirely by an improved feature detection system.

There are only 3 major browser vendors left. They could fix this within months. This is not a technology problem, it's a question of will and ad revenue.

  - MVPs, game development 
  - C, C++, PHP, Javascript, some C# 
  - Interests: working in custom codebases, rapid prototyping
  - Main background: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, 
    vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js

Contact me at: udo@udven.com

https://ud0.io/

> It is quite energy intensive to produce it

We're talking about a cycle that is supposed to store and release energy. "Quite energy intensive to produce" would be a plus in this context. It would matter though if it was inefficient to produce, which is not the case. On top of all that, H2 is actually a part of the proposed iron cycle system.

> and currently is produced from oil & gas products

It would obviously not be produced from oil and gas products in the case we're discussing here. If you're going to have an H2 cycle, it makes zero sense not to start with water.

> but if you're going to do that, it turns out that just using the electricity is almost always more efficient.

As far as I'm aware, the iron cycle system also does not claim to produce energy in order to compete with solar or wind. It claims to be a good and portable storage solution. Thermodynamics absolutely assures that any such system will always be less efficient than using the electricity right away. It is absolutely ridiculous to use an argument of inefficiency against an H2 cycle system while speaking in favor of an even more complex other cycle system!

'CO2 free' - H2 cycle systems are also CO2 free

'Compact' - the energy density of iron is already pretty low and the proposed machinery also doesn't seem very compact. Maybe storing uncompressed H2 would be somewhat inconvenient depending on your location, but you can always compress it. And if you need longer term storage, you can actually make hydrocarbons from it, although that wouldn't technically be CO2 free (only CO2 neutral if you use captured carbon)

'Cost-effective' - this system seems way more expensive, per kWh and in absolute terms, than gaseous cycle concepts.

'Easy to store and transport' - the iron is certainly not easy to transport, nor is the machinery using or recycling it. It is easy to store safely, just not efficiently.

'Scalable' - while iron is abundant on Earth, most of our iron is actually at inaccessible depths, so we're stuck with traditional mining. If you think iron is cheap, you haven't tried to use it as a building material recently. Cheap and abundant metals would be calcium or potassium. Even cheaper, again: H2.

'Safe' / 'Commodity' - true, but how relevant are these, really?

The PRC's strategists have certainly been doing those same calculations for many years now. If there is an invasion, it would not be to capture TSMC "alive". That may be a bonus objective, but it can't be the main objective. The West would also most certainly put an embargo on electronics manufactured there after an invasion, so we're at best talking about a bonus objective that may help China's internal market.

On the cost side, China would not be able to continue trading with the West in any meaningful sense. The Earth's economic sphere would split in two. That's a huge price to pay for a largely symbolic imperial gain.

Finally, instead of steadily gaining public support for science and technology, we seem to have left even more people behind whom we may not be getting back for generations, if ever. It is fully possible that humanity may split into several completely incompatible factions, and that may be the optimistic perspective! The growing fissures dividing us are very visible even on a technology-centered medium like HN.

Outliers notwithstanding, as a civilization the last two decades feel like we have given up on radical improvements. However, I believe outliers could still fulfill some of the promises of optimistic futurism, even though it may take longer and we may not get to a high enough level in time to master the challenges ahead. It's still worth trying, and it's still worth building momentum towards a better public acceptance.

  - MVPs, game development 
  - C, C++, PHP, Javascript, some C# 
  - Interests: working in custom codebases, rapid prototyping
  - Main background: Websocket brokers, server-side rendering, 
    vanilla JavaScript web apps, Three.js, Pixi.js

Contact me at: udo@udven.com

https://ud0.io/