jayajay

I am skeptical of the 16 metrics used to rank harm on a 0 to 100 scale.

I can't accept that heroin and alcohol are equal in that sense. I would be very skeptical about any sources claiming this equality. Ease of production, pharmacodynamics, etc.

Edit: Ideally, humans wouldn't be consuming poison? But, what is poison? It's a lot more complicated than "alcohol is bad" or "heroin is bad". Maybe you are right, letting down the flood gates will surely kill people who don't have control, and we'll be OK asymptotically. Making alcohol legal certainly killed people who wouldn't have died, and saved people who would have died. At some point, this is just a variation of the trolley problem. If heroin was made CVS-able without prescription, I would not guarantee that I wouldn't try it, and that scares me because I know how dangerous it is.

Yes, people don't realize that this "solution" doesn't work for any drug just because it makes sense for marijuana. For the people who disagree: In the limiting case thought experiment, imagine a drug which provides a complete DMT + MDMA experience with a single molecule, but has a 50% chance of killing you. Should this drug be easily available in a store? Run a simulation, let me know what the half life of your population ends up being...

Heroin isn't too different, really. It's very addictive, has a low LD50, and when it's easy to get, people effectively get a free ticket to a brothel on an accelerating rocket-fuel train with rarely stops. If a drug can have that much power over the body, people might think we could create microdoses, and sell those, and then it'd be safe. But then, the market for heroin/tar/etc. would still be there, and would continue underground.

It's not as simple as "selling it at CVS w/o prescription will lower overdoses and dissolve the underground H market"

I am not convinced that that it will reduce overdose or trafficking. It depends on the drug's economics and pharmacodynamics, ease of production, addictiveness, LD50, etc. What's better? More people using high-grade heroin in a controlled, safe environment, or less people using low quality heroin in an uncontrolled, dangerous environment?

If the LD50 is very easy to arrive at in everyday usage, then I don't see this helping out very much. You could sell heroin in doses << LD50 for a high regulated price, but then you will end up with black markets which sell much larger doses at lower prices (if the substance is easy to produce in various quality levels). If the price to get "safe" heroin is not artificially increased, then it would be way too easy to accidentally have too much, especially if herion is highly addictive, which, it supposedly is.

People would just end up riding their doses up to dangerous levels, in which case they would now have a dependency on heroin. Would it bet better for everyone to have a safe, controlled dependency on heroin, or for 5% of people to have an unsafe, uncontrolled dependency on heroin?

Everyone should read this, and forward to their loved ones. This is very close to home (not literally) because it could happen to anyone, and is something that many people do not consider. Have up-to-date CO detectors, do not operate large appliances without considering their byproducts. Literally, the environment matters more than anything, and this acts as a grave reminder of this. Take care of the environment, especially the tiny one in your home, as it could save your life.

exaclty my thoughts, it seems a bit strange to claim "completely isolated" and "virtually no" communication.

> virtually eliminates all communication between the cerebral hemispheres, thereby resulting in a ‘split brain’

> their cerebral hemispheres can hardly communicate with each other and do so at perhaps 1 bit per second

"Virtually all"? "Perhaps 1 bit per second"? Is it definitive that the corpus callosum accounts for exactly 100% of hemisphere communication? I am too skeptical that the brain could be that simple.

> The [previously] established view of split-brain patients implies that physical connections transmitting massive amounts of information are indispensable for unified consciousness

> although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent

Seems like a contradiction of the assumption that they are "completely insulated". Overall I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that the two sides have "virtually no" connectivity and are "completely insulated" from each other, because of a mere corpus collosotomy. Does anyone else find this to be strange?

Edit: According to another comment "anterior commissure and posterior commissure" regions can still communicate some signal.

> objects don’t magically construct themselves from unstructured data

Very out of context, and very off topic, but this is a profoundly deep statement... its veracity is questionable and unknown.

Too meta, cannot stop thinking about how much meta...

Interesting, and introspective. I think I now remember doing this in 2nd grade. We don't wanna forget about the things in the circle of concern, but we don't want to dwell on them unless we can actively influence them. If one is keen to dwell on something in the circle of concern, they should make an effort to move it into the circle of control.

This site reminds me of https://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon

This is not what I expected when I read your comment. I was expecting a platform where you upload the parameters of a hardware system, the platform digitizes that system into a virtual sandbox, and people can then write arbitrary programs for that system and showcase them in the sandbox, where the uploader can buy, comment, and rate those programs. Something along the lines of https://openai.com/blog/

You mentioned people's "ability to problem solve", and that it "takes forever to find people that can do the job". This is very interesting. How do you measure "problem solving ability" in your applicant pool when all you have are resumes? Do you simply look for points on the resume which reflect positive improvement? Do you have more than just a resume to base your judgement off of?

E.g. consider these two similar points on a resume: "improved loading times tenfold by using compound indexes and denormalization" would reflect an improvement from a problematic situation to a better situation. Whereas "designed schema and implemented indexed database" does not explicitly name a problem and its solution.

I hope my point makes sense, and I am wondering if little differences in the wording make a big impact in how you perceive someone's ability to identify and solve problems.

And this, too. I can sleep really well if I am not working on anything that spans multiple days, or if the problem I am stuck on is succinct and self-contained. A lack of closure on whatever I was last working on is the root cause for my disturbed sleep. Do you also feel this way, or is there some other source for you?

Thoughts are mainly about work and problems that I need to solve. When I am trying to sleep, I will sometimes work on a problem in my head because it's "bothering me", and this can postpone my sleep by up to an hour.

This happened to me a lot in college on homework sets. Some sets would take hours to complete, and if I could not solve a problem before sleeping, I would "give up" and go to sleep, only to continue thinking about the problem.

The best way to describe what is happening is: I'll be trying to sleep, and I will think about the problem statement. Sometimes I will find a new perspective, and follow that. If it doesn't lead anywhere, I will go back to the problem statement, and the process repeats. Sometimes I'll just repeat the problem statement in my head hundreds of times over the course of an hour, hoping I'll find a different path to the solution.

It's tempting to keep thinking and not sleep. In my experience, this is an affliction more than it is an asset. This is why I am interested in L Theanine.

If you are checking a feed like email, or chat, you are expecting a new item. If you fail to get a new item 9/10 times you check the feed, it certainly makes sense that you may feel stressed or feel like you have less control over things. You can't control when the items come into your feed. 9/10 times, you are hyping yourself up to expect something, and then getting disappointed when it's not there. I think this kind of result is true for anything that requires waiting for something out of your control. The train, the doctor's office, replies to your comment, etc.

I was given some L Theanine by a friend of mine, because I complained about not being able to silent my thoughts when I sleep. Apparently, L Theanine is great at reducing this mental crosstalk. I tried some for a few nights, but I didn't notice an appreciable change. Did you notice the effects after taking it for a few weeks, or do you get them immediately?

you said none of the bootcamp people that applied were hired. out of those bootcamp people, how many had bachelors, and what was the distribution of their degrees? i.e. how many had degrees in CS, Math, Physics, Biology, etc. Alternatively, out of the math degrees that applied (regardless of bootcamp), how many were hired?

Would you consider someone with a physics and math degree, and some online ML course experience differently than someone with a degree in, say, CS?

Some big colleges in the US are banning vaping on school grounds (indoors and outdoors). I think it's a reasonable rule to have for a hospital or laboratory, where the environment needs to be as controlled and contaminant-free as possible. Nicotine being fundamentally bad? Unstable batteries? That does seem a bit kneejerk, and unsubstantiated. Some airplanes or confined environments ban heavy perfume, out of respect for people with asthma and sinus issues. This is a much more justifiable reason IMHO. Either way, banning it outdoors seems a bit far... it seems like less work to equate vaping with smoking, instead of actually treating it as its own thing.

These days, I would think they would recommend vaping over smoking. Vaping is apparently much safer, and only contains nicotine (plus glycerin/glycols). In my experience, cigarettes are much more relaxing and calming than vapes. I would think that the other compounds in cigarettes add to the overall soothing effect. Something about pure nicotine doses like through vapes just doesn't feel as good as a cigarette. One of my friends with cancer said the same thing about THC pills compared to smoking marijuana...

This is why I have stopped reading articles on Washington Post, and other similar article sites. The standard they are creating for the web is not one I can support.

People seem to start drinking coffee with sugar and cream, and slowly wane to black (if at all). I did a Google search, and I couldn't find any progress on genetic modification of coffee to produce sweeter beans. Most of the research seems to be related to caffeine content, pesticide interaction, and quality. I am not a geneticist or a plant biologist, so if there's an obvious reason why sweetening might not be possible, I can't see it. I would imagine that an inherently sweet coffee bean might be able to infiltrate the entire coffee market. I wonder how much Starbucks spends on sugar and syrup? It would be interesting to hear your thoughts, since you have been in this market for a year now.

Edit: Does Sweet Coffee Exist? http://coffee.stackexchange.com/questions/2424/does-sweet-co...

According to this link, most people prefer sugar and cream. http://www.statisticbrain.com/coffee-drinking-statistics/

Lately I have been questioning whether or not we need large-scale peer-reviewed journals anymore.

For example, if I knew that Leonard Susskind read a paper and cited, shared, liked, or bookmarked it, then that could easily replace my fundamental need of having the paper stamped by a trusted authority. If scientists could share, cite, and discuss papers on an open source platform (like Facebook, but for Academia), I believe that we wouldn't need these gatekeepers anymore, and they would become obsolete. The real authority has always been the scientists who are doing good, promising research, not some contrived group of scientists who are solely reviewing papers for the sake of assessing their quality.

An (possibly flawed) analogy: do need CNN/ABC/FOX when we have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to propagate news?

Pilot wave theory only postpones the question of "what is a wave function and how does it collapse?", it doesn't actually say anything new. I think Wigner's Friend is really no fundamentally different than Schrodinger's Cat.

I think most people are "realists" as Weinberg mentions in his article. A lot of people (including myself) have bashed on so-called "instrumentalists" like Hooft, but after reading this Weinberg article, I am grateful for people like Hooft who are not here to "give up" and accept that there are necessary unknowns, and that there might be something going on underneath it all -- the Einstein way.

> In this musical analogy, the act of measuring the spin somehow shifts all the intensity of the chord to one of the notes, which we then hear on its own.

People can accept that measurements and observables are operators which act on the wave function (which can be expressed as a linear combination of eigenstates of the operator in question). People can even accept that some observables cannot be measured simultaneously, because they do not commute, and cannot share eigenstates.

People cannot accept that particles can only be found in eigenstates of the observable in question, without some mechanism to explain why this happens. If a particle's measured value can only be one of the eigenvalues of the operator, it begs the question "which eigenvalue is it going to show us?". Alternatively, if nature let us measure the expectation value instead of "one of the eigenvalues", then quantum mechanics would not be "weird" at all. Too bad, nature isn't like that, or maybe, be thankful that it is.

> But if the corrections to quantum mechanics represented by the new terms in the Lindblad equations (expressed as energies) were as large as one part in a hundred million billion of the energy difference of the atomic states used in the clock, this precision would have been quite lost. The new terms must therefore be even smaller than this.

I always see people (physicists) complaining about String Theory, etc. because they play around in regimes which are too small for us to actually work with. We have observed macroscopic effects which are due to a build-up of quantum mechanical effects (superconductivity, solid state, etc.). It would be expected that a correction to quantum mechanics would also make macroscopic predictions...

This is a cool idea. I see people on youtube recording themselves painfully while driving and stuff, and the entire video is just them in the front seat driving. With this, you can rant while doing activities that require your entire visual field (washing dishes, laundry, errands, etc.)

Edit: hellban, post invisible. (content good). classify bad content vs. good content, hellban bad content specifically. possible improvement to an umbrella hellban

i love how you posted this ironically.

"we might be able to see this with the naked eye! why bother when you can see it through JWST?"

Awesome... I found this on December 17th:

https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/ponderthis/challenges/Jan...

I can't remember if I stumbled upon that from HN or not, but it's a neat little problem to think about, and seems like it would have been nice to see Allen's algebra at the time.

It's not as simple as "we are fine now, so we don't need to think". These words are typical of people in first world countries who have grown comfortable with civilization. You should think about things more deeply, first. Here are some questions you might want to think about:

Do you think being prepared for a possible scarcity situation is not useful? Will the human population continue to grow indefinitely? Will humans ever run into resource saturation? Are cataclysmic environmental events actually possible? Name 3 examples. How would each of these example events effect population size and resource availability? Are there societies in our world today which are more or less social islands (hint: yes)? How would the luxuries and rights you have grown comfortable with fare in those societies?

After pondering these questions, it's hard to justify that nobody should be thinking about these issues, or that it's too early or not the right time to be thinking about these things. It is never not the right time to think. Do not let anyone convince you otherwise. You can and should think about anything and everything. I am deeply saddened to see your statement, actually. Is this what we are?