Hacker News Reader

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

Power is one factor informing policy, empathy is another. Neither is sufficient for a policy that sustains the system for long on its own. Only focusing on power would result in e.g. exploitation of Africa. But most don't like this due to empathy.

Focusing only on empathy often misses the point too as it tends to get politicized, overinflating minor issues as in this case, which will ultimately result in power conflicts, degrading long-term sustenance.

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

That would be an out-of-context quote.

I'd say that attempting to prohibit this tradition has a net negative impact on the integrity and functioning of society because the harm in question is very minor but the reaction to such an attempt will be major. I'm sure you are trying to twist this into "but then I could anesthetize and then circumcise you", however, in that case I'd retaliate so drastically that it would negatively impact the functioning of society much more than say 100 circumcisions, hypothetically speaking.

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

Even a few days or weeks after the mutilation the consequences are extremely minor. It is a very low-priority issue.

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

It is very minor mutilation though, it does not matter.

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

Read the [...]. The harm is to minimal that it is a non-issue.

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

Actual barbarism would impair the functioning and productivity of society. The harm in this case is so negligible that it does not matter.

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

What matters the most is the cohesion, functioning and productivity of society, which is unaffected by circumcision.

The notion of consent is arbitrary. You could also regard religious cults as primary, then you would need their consent to imposing your personal aesthetics.

momention Infants' sense of pain is recognized, finally (1987)

This inflicted pain and damage appears to have no significant impact on adult quality of life though. Circumcision may also even reduce the bacterial load and hence reduce chances of infections and cancer: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/10/acc-is-infant-circumci...

It's a non-issue.

momention Lilium achieves first main wing transition for all-electric aircraft [video]

You can always build things more safely with more resources (more maintenance, more checks, more testing etc.), the question at the end of the day is whether it is economical. I don't think this question can be answered upfront in this case.

momention Lilium achieves first main wing transition for all-electric aircraft [video]

Lilium's plane has 30 engines, multiple independent battery packs, and electric motors are way more reliable than jet engines (due to being so much simpler). A Lilium plane may have a 1000x higher chance of a crash in case of full engine failure, but perhaps that can be compensated for by 1000x times simpler/redundant propulsion technology. This seems to be very hard to assess in theory, so we probably just have to wait and see how it performs in practice.

momention Apple Unveils M2

It's behind a paywall for me.

momention Physicists are building neural networks out of vibrations, voltages and lasers

I wonder what kind of speedup can we expect from neuromorphic computing within the next 5-10 years?

momention EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

If they were too competent these bureaucracies would abolish themselves, or at least decimate their own funding.

momention DeepMind: A Generalist Agent

The model only has about 1B parameters which is relatively small.

The language models that produced very impressive results have >>50B parameters, e.g. GPT-3 with 175B, Aleph Alpha Luminous (200B), Google PaLM (540B). GPT-3 can understand and answer basic trivia questions, and impressively mimic various writing styles, but it fails at basic arithmetic. PaLM can do basic arithmetic much better and explain Jokes. Dall-E 2 (specialized on image generation) has 3.5B parameters for the image generation alone and it uses a 15B language model to read in text (a version of GPT-3).

momention EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

This proves that none of these institutions and politicians pushing for more surveillance actually care about the problem (while the urgency of the problem is dubious to begin with).

It's all about power and funding. If the problem was eradicated, then they would lose their purpose and funding.

momention It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

Do you really pay for less? Digital signage displays often run 24/7 in temper proof cases with relatively poor ventilation and heat dissipation. Thus you might actually get a display that lasts longer (which, AFAIK, mostly comes down to higher quality capacitors and capacitors placed where they do not overheat, e.g. not directly next to high current transistors and resistors, which is common planned obsolesce practice in consumer TVs).

momention Dall-E 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-O7AZNzbzQ

See the linked papers if you don't like videos.

momention Deep learning on electronic medical records is doomed to fail

That's not entirely true. Neural networks are fairly robust to noisy training data (a.k.a. garbage).[0] Well, stochastic gradient descent has the noise in its name. More training data can compensate for noisy data to some extent.[1] I'm not sure know if model size can also compensate for noisy data though, but would not be surprised if it did.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10694

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01994

momention New Capabilities for GPT-3: Edit and Insert

Their initial intention was possibly genuine, but there are strong incentives for secrecy (trade secrets), in addition to the U.S. military most likely having an interest in suppressing information to avoid someone else creating AI first.

momention Man given genetically modified pig heart dies

Heart transplant recipients survive 15 years on average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_transplantation

momention YouTube suspends The Hill for playing clip of Trump denying election results

> We all know what happens when content isn't curated, and it's really, really bad.

Not true because law enforcement is still in place to take care of crime. Some amount of crime and confusion are also the price you pay to get the benefits of freedom.

momention Heat people, not spaces (2015)

It's a shame that these are stereotyped as female fashion accessory.

momention Some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting

PI?

momention Laravel 9

Though for a small-ish site (say <150 users), such techniques are typically not necessary.

momention Poll: Where do you live?

And population IQ.

momention LibreOffice 7.3

Be sure to use LibreOffice "still" rather than "fresh", i.e. the bottom one of the two version on their download page (which is the second latest, but more stable release): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

On Chocolatey that's `libreoffice-still`.

momention Europe Is Losing Nuclear Power Just When It Needs Energy

There is a chance that it won't be commercially viable. See e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_0VEmN7Bg8

momention Crows may soon be Sweden’s newest litter pickers

These viral videos of an orangutan driving a golf cart seemed to be fake to me, possibly done with the help of a remote controller or automated steering.