subroutine

Unseasonably warm weather stopped the Mongolian horde from conquering Europe. Hmm

My point here is they might have given a gene therapy that reverses radioactivity exposure damage, not age-adjacent damage. More specifically their model for harming cellular DNA seems to have been chosen because harming DNA in this specific way can be fixed by their proposed therapy reagent. They did not choose this model for because it most closely matches aging processes irl. Their model passes only because the mice 'looked old'. Lots of things can make an animal have elderly phenotypes (radiation exposure for example). And you might find something that reverses those phenotypes without actually finding anything that would mitigate natural aging (because their etiologies are completely different). It would be like giving an antibiotic to treat a viral infection.

Agree with all the above comments. Making a bunch of rapid DNA cuts outside of genes is not all that convincing of a model for aging. "The mice began to look and act old". You could say that about someone exposed to massive amounts of nuclear radiation - they move slow, they hurt all over, their skin sluffs, etc. Also afaik, aging has been linked to telomere depletion after many cell divisions - not the cumulative effects of random DNA cuts. Lastly, I have reservations about the author's statement that this approach is better "because it’s easier to manipulate epigenetic molecules than to reverse DNA mutations". This might be true if they are globally altering DNA methylation or acetylation. But that will surely have its own side-effects due to globally altering gene regulation. However if it turns out that it'd be best to only target particular methylomic sites, it will be similarly difficult to implement. In general, it's typically better to be precise when it comes messing with DNA and gene expression - of course the tradeoff is that being precise is very difficult. I'm interested to read the original article, to see what they've actually done. as it is my sentiment is the same as those above - I'll get excited when their method significantly extends the lives of mice that have underwent otherwise normal aging.

As the old adage goes: crime doesn't pay.

Synaptic pruning mostly ends before the age of 20 and any relationship pruning has to the psychological concept of 'willingness to change' seems like a wild conjecture you just now plucked from thin air.

If climate change turns out to be wrong, nevermind a deliberate hoax, it would result in incalculable damage to the reputation of the entire scientific community for the next century.

You haven't committed to memory every hn comment from Ptacek over the last decade?

You don't need a control planet. And you don't need to dismiss climate change. And we shouldn't stop aggressively trying to combat climate change. All I'm saying is there's bound to be environmental issues not due to climate change that we can fix rather rapidly, but since they've been chalked up to climate change we have stopped looking into the actual underlying reason. For example California has seen a steady increase in the number of wild fires each year. Someone says it's due to climate change. We accept the reasoning - makes sense. But maybe it's due to aging electrical grid infrastructure? After all most fires are started by downed power lines. And if it is due to old telephone polls, that's something we could fix now. But if we've already accepted that the increase in wildfires is due to climate change, why look into alternative explanations?

LFL, aka the most reliable way to get a pokemon go stop near your house.

Not to dismiss the effects of climate change, but when we start blaming every environmental change we observe on climate change, I feel like we're bound to misdiagnose a bunch problems. That is a serious issue because reversing climate change is likely much more difficult and long-term (and perhaps conducive to forming defeatist attitudes) than identifying solutions to some number of unrelated environmental problems.

Fingerprints and DNA are valuable with regard to identifying a particular person (or to place them at a certain location, like the scene of a crime). It's easy to enter a country with someone else's cell phone. It's much harder to enter a country with someone else's fingerprints or DNA. Isn't that the goal here? To have a more reliable method identify who has entered a country?

> People are especially sensitive about their DNA since they think pharma companies can somehow develop new expensive drugs just by looking at it.

That's not why people are sensitive about their DNA. It's more to do with the fact that health insurance companies could know if they are particularly susceptible to a myriad of mendelian (gene-linked) diseases and disorders "just by looking at it". Another reason to be sensitive about DNA- if my brother's DNA was found at a crime scene and my DNA was in a database like 23andMe, police could start going after my family members as suspects. This has happened.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/a-father-took-an-at-ho...

> I wonder why they would do such a thing?

For me it would be having used "full self driving" mode, diligently, for X years or X miles without any issues.

HN has the best content, best moderation, and best community on the web. I love this place. Happy holidays everyone.

> if you imagine a scenario like a university I find it more likely the Provost's office can figure out how much to give to which Dean than they to be able to figure out how much to give to which lab.

If left to the provost or dean, the money will inevitably be distributed equally between all faculty. Once the money enters the university, there is no longer a separation between funding agency and recipients. And since 'equally' is the least complex/controversial way to distribute the funds, that's where it will eventually settle. (Hm, perhaps I am a misanthrope).

Trust Windfalls sound like a terrible idea. If you allow someone to give out cash and select the next person to give out cash, the money will concentrate within a friend group. At the very least, funding will disburse over much narrower set of research topics (I am most familiar with the work/people who research topics similar to my own).

> Trust Windfalls are a Rorschach test for whether you trust people or not. I’m a guy on the internet going “hey give me a bunch of money and I’ll give it to my friends and it’ll be great!”... If you don’t know me and you’re a bit of a misanthrope, this sounds like the worst idea ever.

Indeed, it does sound like the worst idea ever because I don't know you. That means there is zero chance of me getting the funding. And when you give the money to a friend, it's likely your friend will return the favor and give it back to you. Why nominate a person you know will not return the favor? And when they do, who is your next pick? Well, their wife needs funding, and so does your wife. So you go another round. Then who? Your cousin need funding, and so does your college roommate. You know who doesn't get funding - that person with a rival theory, and that person attempting to replicate your work.

And if the money does happen to migrate to me, nothing against you, its just that if the money migrates out of my 'trusted network' it will likely not return for a long time. And my lab won't survive several years waiting for the funding to return.

> For instance, if the first roll in a turn is 3, 5, 4, and 1, then the options would be 5 and 8 or 4 and 9.

What about 6 & 7?

> with an order of magnitude rarer killings, there is much less of a “we’re at war with the bad guys” culture.

...(assuming EU) apart from hosting some of the deadliest wars in modern history.

I wonder if an account will be allowed to unmute/unblock an account, in order to downvote (block) it again in later posts. Otherwise you're looking at using a lot of blue checks to silence articles from say, NYT.

> Does copyright law protect “in the style of”? I don’t think anyone knows.

I think the is the crux of the issue. I think it would not. IMO the spirit of copyright law protect certain essential elements of a work being reproduced identically or nearly-identically (1), but not a composition that is reminiscent of a general style of some other work, and certainly not some collective body of work. To me the source of the training data should not matter insofar that it does not matter if an artist studies a body of work to create pieces in the style of X. Does it concern copyright law that an artificial rather than biological neural network has been trained on a body of work? Would a copyright judgment ever be made on the basis that an artist studied too much of another person's work, and not simply the similarities between the piece they created and another specific work?

It is against copyright law to release either a computer generated lowfi cover or a human generated violin cover of stairway to heaven. On the other hand you could go and buy an amp, guitar, pedals, etc. to perfectly recreate a classic 'jimmy page sound', and whatever you compose would be fine as long as the song does not borrow specific melodies found in led zeplin songs. See any Greta Van Fleet song. Moreover, that GVF reminds everyone of led zeplin is no coincidence. From wikipedia: "Greta Van Fleet is often compared to Led Zeppelin. Jake said he went through a year of really intensely studying what Jimmy Page did to the point I knew how he thought."

At the end of the day I think there is no basis to claim a copyright over a general "style", and that's a good thing.

(1) https://www.briffa.com/blog/classic-copyright-cases-ice-ice-...

Something like an airtag would probably work.

Have you tried carmax? They don't allow sales people out on the lot. All the cars are unlocked, so you can get inside, and you can get all the info about the car from their app. I bought my last 2 cars from carmax, and was a totally painless experience.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Choosing to not cure cancer is killing people off with cancer. The little girl in the article had leukemia. It sounds like you would prefer to let children die of cancer because of your weariness of population growth.

How does it know when to stop when asked for a description or summary? Sometimes it outputs a few sentences, sometimes a few paragraphs.

Does it know how much output it has already provided when deciding on the next token? How does it decide to start a new sentence or paragraph, or if it's 'satisfied' with its current response?

Would you trade (a) total cure for all cancer for (b) the human population to go from 8 to 16 billion?

Yes, absolutely. Surely population growth can be dealt with more humanely than killing people off with cancer.

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10, the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

> The ball costs $0.10. Let's prove this using an equation. {uses equation}. The ball costs $0.05.

The person in the article.

Just so I understand, your world view is that normality means disliking your job; anyone who enjoys their job is suffering from stockholm's syndrome. Even if you're making a quarter mil per year, if you stay after-hours with coworker buddies to implement a feature that augments the experience of millions of people, you're a total sucker.

> The first two human applications targeted by the Neuralink device will be in restoring vision and enabling movement of muscles in people who cannot do so.

Both of these applications have already been realized to some extent...

Arm movement... https://youtu.be/OHsFkqSM7-A

Vision... https://secondsight.com https://youtu.be/AISQvV0ifYw

Also all the people who stood between you and your boss's job are now gone. If I survived the initial round of firings and then the code review, I'd probably stick around to see what happens - maybe just to watch the place burn. I wouldn't substantially change my work behavior, and get my resume up to date. But it might be interesting to stay for a while.

Probably a combination of a career-first mentality where they don't have the time or inclination to seek / maintain lasting relationships, and also having the means to not raise their own children. To these people children are not burden in the same way as traditional parents because they hardly contribute to raising them; instead they are just another play-thing.

There may also be some game of thrones shit going on where if a boss and a mini-boss have a baby it solidifies rank and power.