aeorgnoieang

> DNA is not source code

My, admittedly weak, understanding is that the analogy is (much) more apt than not. Sure, the means by which that code is 'compiled' and 'executed' is much different than in the computers we've built, but, for one, DNA, genes, chromosomes, and all of the other various levels of organization of those units of information seem to be remarkably, amazingly stable, for many (most? almost all?) organisms, which seems to strongly imply that 'DNA is source code' is about as true as 'Earth is a sphere'. Sure, they're both only approximately true, but how approximately they're true (or not) is very important. Asimov explained this extremely well:

- [Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong](http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm)

'Epigenetics' itself seems like it might not be a particular thing among different people:

- [The misunderstanding of epigenetics – Insitome](https://blog.insito.me/the-misunderstanding-of-epigenetics-a...)

What epigenetics is not is anything like Lamarckian inheritance, at least not at all to the same degree.

> Rearrangements, microchimerism, epigenetics, chromosome organization etc. are all things that exist and modulate information transfer beyond the standard four letters or the 'environment' (whatever people think it means) and we're still only scratching the surface.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that the central dogma of biology is entirely wrong, just that it's not always and everywhere true exactly. The current best understanding of epigenetics (quoted from my second link above) is that, whatever it is, it is such that:

> very little of [genetic] inheritance is perturbed by epigenetic effects

The contemporary "rationalists" don't ascribe to philosophical rationalism.

Yes, 'rationalism', is a specific thing in the academic discipline of philosophy, but the rationalist community isn't an academic community so using a term that existed and meant something even before the specific academic jargon was coined only seems problematic if you somehow believe the academic philosophers should always and forever be granted linguistic priority.

And anyways, I suspect the idea that "rationality comes prior to experience" is almost certainly true, albeit in a weak, tho profound, sense. For one, nothing can learn, i.e. form or update beliefs or theories, without a pre-existing algorithm to do so.

> ... That's not the way the 'rationalists' are using it, and what's more, the way they are using it is kinda crude, even if we ignore the fact it displays a kind of illiteracy, or at least, a disinterest in the history of thought, to re-use a really common term in a totally unrelated way.

>

> That's also what comes across from the stuff they write. What I've read is clever, well written, well thought out, but also profoundly ignorant of the tradition of thinking about the topics they're interested in. You can't help but be crude if you just try a naive response, without first looking at how other people have addressed the problem at hand. So it comes across as the philosophical equivalent of that guy you met once who's convinced he has invented a new kind of maths without the number zero, because 'zero doesn't exist'. It might have been an interesting debate 2000 years ago, but things have moved on.

The rationalist community is a loose agglomeration of people interested in a bunch of different topics, with the kind of binding focus on forming or acquiring (more) accurate beliefs and acting (more) effectively in the real world. There's an incredibility variety and diversity of interests, backgrounds, and knowledge across a huge number of philosophies, schools, academic disciplines, and intellectual pursuits.

It's interesting that you claim that they "[display] a kind of illiteracy" as it seems clear to me, from reading a lot of the work of the members of the rationalist community, that (a) a lot of those members are perfectly aware of philosophical rationalism; (b) the community doesn't ascribe to anything that anyone terms 'rationalism'; and (c) almost everyone rejects philosophical rationalism as being true or useful.

Among the various members of the community, some of whom don't identify as members too, there's a lot of frequent and deep referencing of academic philosophy, so the claim that the community as a whole is unaware of "how other people have addressed the problem at hand" is just flat wrong. But the rationalist community is more like pre-professional science in that almost everyone is an amateur, there's almost no (formal) gatekeeping. So yes, it's absolutely true that there are many people in or interacting the community that are relatively ignorant of lots of different things like your example of someone convinced that they've invented a new school of mathematics.

And besides all of that, there's a lot of utility, to lots of people, particularly the participants, in debating something that you or academic philosophers might be convinced 'everyone' else has moved on from.

According to that Wikipedia article, Knuth popularized the notation in computer science, which might be what the comment to which you replied is referencing.

From the link:

> This year, the Venera-D team released a report that covered a number of potential additions, including a balloon that could explore the cloudy atmosphere.

From the link:

> ... at the Glenn Research Center. > > The team has already tested the circuits in a Venus simulation chamber — a 14-tonne stainless-steel tank that can imitate the temperature, pressure and specific chemistry of the Venusian surface.

Racket can probably do everything you want (i.e. serve as its own 'LAMP stack').

Clojure with whatever the standard libraries are nowadays is easy to get setup and running.

I'm sure there's a common Common Lisp set of libraries for web apps too.

And there's a variety of smaller Lisp projects for various other runtime environments, e.g. various Lisp-to-JavaScript transpilers that you could run on top of Node.js.

Fraudulent transactions made with a regular bank account are pretty irreversible too. There's a whole extra layer of infrastructure on top of the 'core' banking services that allows them (banks) to 'reverse' a fraudulent transaction. But I'd be very very surprised if fraudulent charges are 'reversible' in any other way than the bank reimbursing the account holder.

In other words, crypto-currency exchanges could do the same thing (but then they'd almost certainly have/want to charge for that).

Double-entry bookkeeping is also, ideally, irreversible.

I'm sure different tools could help somewhat but ultimately anything replacing GitHub issues would still involve some kind of social, i.e. communication, structure and that's just a hard thing to build and maintain.

Ultimately, what else is 'good' other than being the foundation of further far-flung flourishing?

'Just' read the source of something you like:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/learn-to-read-the-source-luke/

Or not – you're not obligated to contribute!

I've used this:

- https://gamocosm.com/

to host an Internet-accessible server pretty easily (on a DigitalOcean droplet).

> I don’t really care what the grade was on a climb if it kills me.

You shouldn't climb at all then. People die just scrambling too. Even hiking can be dangerous.

Do you wear a helmet when you drive a car? That might actually be sensible. It's probably just too 'weird' for almost anyone to seriously consider.

> ... the high rate of death for free-solo climbers.

Honnold made an interesting point in his latest (?) appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast: none of the top free solo climbers has died on a hard free solo climb (and many didn't die free solo climbing, or even climbing, at all).

And of course lots of people die climbing with ropes and protection too, even highly skilled and experience climbers.

Most people would probably consider any significant climb to be 'too risky'. As I disagree, I don't think I can reasonably fault anyone else for choosing some other higher level of risk as being 'too risky'.

Stability is probably much (much) harder to achieve than either growth or decay.

The measures of economic growth are not perfect but even something like improving a product or service is, in a very real sense, economic growth. Are you asking whether every such improvement should be matched with a corresponding degradation?

Personally, if you're happy with your situation, you shouldn't feel compelled to constantly improve it. But then, if you need or want to protect something (e.g. yourself, your family), a certain amount of {slack / profit / extra resources } is necessary to weather unknown future adversity. And a growing capacity to handle such adverse events is as important as the things you wish to protect and preserve.

I used this semantic diff tool before (with Git) and it worked pretty well:

- [SemanticMerge](https://www.semanticmerge.com/)

The really killer feature, to me and a lot of others, is that it let you discover, and communicate with, people that also liked the same feed entries. I had, entirely without planning, accumulated a nice little group of people with which I shared anything and everything I read via RSS.

I use Feedly now too but I still miss my Reader band.

I've actually come around to the opposite conclusion over the course of my career: everything should be hard-coded by default (tho using a well-named variable/constant/identifier). Making data-driven (e.g. configuration data driven) code is always more work and, unless you have strong evidence otherwise, [You Aren't Gonna Need It](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/Yagni.html).

The post covered that, tho not the specific details you mention.

Looks cool!

It'll improve net air quality (if it works) because our current methods of producing fuels themselves require other 'carbon negative' energy.

I'd imagine retrofitting power plants to process their exhaust is itself an extremely expensive process.

Maybe they could setup their devices around plants anyways tho.

> what's the point in a future where EVs dominate?

EVs won't dominate some important uses for a long time, e.g. aviation and marine shipping.

Me too; weird!

Did you look at PouchDB for data storage? It's designed for replication, has built-in JSON import and export, and their are encryption plugins.

Your comment covers the gamut of ethical theories. A 'code of ethics' is going to be some combination of deontology and virtue ethics and will typically prohibit cases like this post describes.

> In many ways what they did was unethical but the result was probably positive overall.

And that kind of thinking is the other, newer branch of ethics: consequentialism/utilitarianism.

My conclusion is that deontology and virtue ethics are necessary heuristics as actually calculating or estimating the consequences of any action are almost always effectively impossible, but, ultimately, what we care about are exactly those consequences, so we're never able to adequately 'cover' morality without, at least sometimes, explicitly considering them.

Your English is great.

> A bunch of fun but barely-profitable things can exist here, that could never exist in a city, simply because of how hostile dense urban economics is to human beings.

The same kinds of things can exist in dense urban environments when they're otherwise terrible places to live, like NYC up-thru the '90s.

I would say or write that they're 'aggressive', not hostile. There's lots of reasons why the (economics of the) same areas are perceived to be incredibly welcoming. Density itself is (or can be) amazing, e.g. more (potential) customers, many more competing employers.

I'm pretty sure commercial leases are more likely 10 year leases.

And I'd imagine the risk is broadly similar to residential rentals, e.g. trouble evicting tenants, the tenant damaging your property.

Actually, I interpreted it as exactly "I have a positive reason to believe there is no malicious intent." and I presume the positive reasons are, e.g. most people not being malicious. "I don't presume there is malicious intent" is significantly weaker than the original.