Zaak

But what is the effect on lifetime of not having any CNO present? If a present-day massive star would have a lifetime of 10 million years, how long would it live if it was a population III star with no CNO?

There is a range of wavelengths of light that humans perceive as green. The same is true for every color that is part of the rainbow. In contrast, the "pure purples" do not appear in the rainbow, and there is no single wavelength of light that humans perceive as purple (it requires red light plus blue light).

There's an important distinction between anatomically modern humans and behaviorally modern humans. Behaviorally modern humans were the ones that were able to migrate all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

Fabulous idea. I will definitely use this for future early-stage demos.

> “Recursively self-improving systems, because of contingent bottlenecks, diminishing returns, and counter-reactions […], cannot achieve exponential progress in practice. Empirically, they tend to display linear or sigmoidal improvement.”

Moore's Law. Use computers to make better computers. Exponential growth over more than 7 orders of magnitude and, although the growth rate is slowing, it hasn't run out of steam yet.

If AI eventually exhibits anywhere near that level of recursive self-improvement, godlike superintelligences lie in our future.

But there used to be a stigma around wearing glasses.

That's a very interesting idea, though it wouldn't significantly affect people with vast resources such as botnet owners, corporations, and governments. It would certainly slow down the garden-variety troll, however the determined troll would just keep a core burning to create a steady stream of sock puppet accounts.

This is really impressive. What would it take to persuade you to fix the 3D performance issues? :)

While Larry and Sergei were running Google, the company often (though not necessarily always) chose doing what was right over a more profitable wrong. A specific example was when they discovered the Chinese government was behind a major security breach targeting dissidents, they refused to continue to comply with Chinese censorship requirements.

However, as the founders lost interest in the day-to-day operation of the company, any pretense of being more than just another soulless profit machine was discarded.

> is meiosis and mitosis the only two way to reproduce?

Well, from a high-level view the only way a cell can make more cells is to divide, and if it divides it either makes a copy of its genetic material first, or gives half of it to each daughter cell. So in that sense, they're the only two ways possible.

From a more detailed view, I wonder if the machinery of meiosis is evolutionarily the same in every sexually-reproducing species, or if it has evolved more than once. My guess is only once, because it has a specific sequence of events which is always the same.

As a counterexample, imagine reading a book on mathematics that did not use any special notation, instead relying on natural-language descriptions of formulas and algorithms. Or imagine reading a book on molecular biology that didn't use any technical vocabulary or diagrams, instead relying on colloquial language and descriptions.

There is a place for specialized notation and vocabulary. Exactly where that line should be drawn in programming has been an ongoing conversation since 1953 when John Backus proposed the concepts that would lead to the development of Fortran.

They're not /really/ connected, at least historically. But the author sees a reasonable progression in ease of use, while maintaining a lot of flexibility. And the idea of starting with a forth-like system, building a lisp-like system with it, then putting a python-like syntax on top of it is very interesting.

I heard that submarines are called "boats" because "ships" are targets...

> This bug is probably going to end up infecting most of the people in the United States.

Exactly. As you say, we need to flatten the curve to keep hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, and we need to use the time to develop treatments to save the vulnerable when isolation eventually fails.

Thank you for this. You make the essential point that others are missing: flattening the curve isn't to buy time; it's to prevent massive loss of life and societal collapse. Buying time to improve prevention and treatment is of secondary concern.

SHA-2 is based on similar techniques to those in SHA-1, which prompted the SHA-3 competition when weaknesses in SHA-1 were first discovered (as they could conceivably have been present in SHA-2 as well). As it turns out, SHA-2 appears to be resistant to the attacks found thus far.

SHA-3 (originally named Keccak) is built on an entirely different foundation (called a sponge function), so it is unlikely that any attack against SHA-1 will be relevant to SHA-3. However, sponge functions are a relatively new idea, and weaknesses in the basic principles could conceivably be found in the future, as could weaknesses in the Keccak algorithm specifically.

Exactly. Big companies move slowly. A small, well-funded company may be able to approve an X-thousand-dollar payment in a matter of days, but a large company just can't react that fast. There are too many layers of process and approvals and vetting and negotiation to wade through.

So you're defining "AI" to be anything that we can currently program a computer to do, and "I" to be anything we can't yet? That doesn't seem like a useful distinction to me. Unless you're using "I" to mean general (artificial) intelligence, in which case you should probably use the more well-known term.

In my case, my current income provides a comfortable lifestyle for my family of five. But yes, if you have kids, your expenses are definitely going to go up.

> "if you don't have a backup for it, you only have it temporarily"

Fabulous line. Is that attributable to anyone in particular?

I agree with you. For example, if I had 100 times my current yearly income in savings/investments/etc, I could live my current lifestyle indefinitely (barring eg, a market crash) because even with zero interest, the money would last 100 years, and with minimal effort (ie index funds) the money would grow over the long term at a rate greater than 1%.

Of course, that would require persisting in my current lifestyle in the face of a massive increase in wealth, which takes nontrivial self-discipline.

I have some Pacific Islander friends that consider me rich because I live in a nice house (rented), own three cars (bought used), and have a steady desk job (after many years of recurring job instability).

Of course, that's wealthy compared to most of the world.

1. It's homoiconicity in general. It's most obvious in arithmetic expressions, but homoiconicity (as far as I've seen) eschews semantic indicators besides function name and argument position. I find that keywords and symbols are almost indispensable for smooth eye-parsing of code.

2. No, I use syntax highlighting and indentation all the time. Trying to put words to my vague thoughts, I think the main issue is that, for example, in a let block the only indication of the meaning of all the items is the single function/macro name at the beginning of the block. Whereas in an algol-type language you have assignment operators in each item to indicate what they mean.

Gotcha.

I do agree about homoiconicity. It's great for writing macros, and terrible for everything else. Of course, go too far in the other direction and you get perl, so... yeah.

I know that Python and Javascript have their warts (as do all languages in my experience), but what decisions in particular are you thinking of?

> Don't worry about the others. Don't worry about testing, or cleaning up, or documenting why the mistake was made or how it should have been done.

Sounds like getting management to truly understand the concept of technical debt is the core problem.

Thanks for the info. I tend to have a carb-heavy diet. I wonder if doing a low-carb diet for a couple days before fasting would help. Or do you think it would take longer than that to acclimate?

That's good to know. Fasting for me is partly an exercise in choosing to do something that's uncomfortable for my body to achieve a higher purpose. It is explicitly not supposed to be damaging or unhealthy in any way (people who are sick etc are discouraged from fasting). I will look into staying hydrated while abstaining from food.

Indeed. It's abstaining from all food and drink for a goal of 24 hours. I generally manage about 12, but it's something I'm working on improving.