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techbio

889 karma · joined June 8, 2010

https://techbio.org
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techbio··on Etaoin Shrdlu
In more recent letter frequency analysis[1] the letter C makes the cut. The distribution also reminds me of anomaly detection using Benford's Law[2]. Wikipedia provides equivalent strings for other languages[3].

[1]http://norvig.com/mayzner.html

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency

techbio··on Simple product management tricks
Whoops, I just continued reading into an emotional strawman argument derogating a transnational CEO's time management strategy.

Not going to do that for the next eight minutes, I'm too busy dividing the rest of my life into annotated 100ms segments so I can get some real work done.

techbio··on Trolls will be jailed for ‘psychological harm’
Sounds like you have qualified immunity, and I am required to report, your status of legal superiority offends my sensibilities.
techbio··on Tao: Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph
Later in the article the name is explained in that TAO is used as short for "The associations and objects" and while it's clever and I'm not really offended it really should be TAAO.

Regardless, I'm surprised not to see anything about caching objects as application state using[1] or similar.

[1]https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.apcu.php

techbio··on We are recreating the entire planet in Minecraft
Yes, the void causing what we experience as gravity.
techbio··on Facebook chooses profits over people
So do both?
techbio··on Apple M1 Max Geekbench Score
I would prefer your machine, though too many negatives to parse all of your post. Maybe too many words? I will shop Xeon laptops, that sounds quick.
techbio··on The Ideal Economy
>> You know, it's [amoré]

FTFY

techbio··on The Universe Is a Machine That Keeps Learning, Scientists Say
Also in vigorous agreement.

Though not necessary to your points, I think GP's post is saying that omnipresent omniscience is not computable everywhere equally in the current best understanding of physics.

techbio··on Spy tech that followed kids home for remote learning
So far, no legislation fix. Other alternatives?
techbio··on Elite Biases Make Policy Biases
That seems to be a distinction without a difference, as they all are removed from net profits.
techbio··on In Iceland, well diggers seek to tap a volcano’s magma
It's been under research in Hawaii for decades.
techbio··on Elite Biases Make Policy Biases
They are not equivalent at all, they are almost exactly opposite. Each would reverse the other.
techbio··on Scientists Claim That Overeating Is Not the Primary Cause of Obesity
I think calorie IO is a rule of thumb, and a reasonable summary though obviously incomplete. Where it is used as an argument against more sophisticated understanding of metabolism, it would be wrong.

Sweet tastes change a number of digestive processes, as does severe calorie restrictions.

techbio··on Elite Biases Make Policy Biases
This is an incredibly important point that I agree with. I would take this further to separate "legal person" from "mind", as I understand the mind is itself an emergent and self-supporting adaptive process[1], very common to find among any persistent complex systems. Politicians don't make politics, it's the other way around.

[1] I use this phrase to replace "intent", because outside of requiring the "intender" to be person who can be held to account with punishment or reward, the reward mechanism is the same environmental pressure.

techbio··on Elite Biases Make Policy Biases
Let's disentangle the players in this in the following way. Because it would be absurd to believe charities are the most powerful entities, and "tricky accounting" etc reduces tax liabilities to the actual powerful, is there a way to discharge the conflict? Yes, there is. The charities are created by and funded by the actually powerful. I read somewhere that Sierra Club (and Greenpeace?) received millions more from the energy industry than in personal checks from concerned citizens, and among other things, one might consider tax policy a firmer decision making footing than organizational altruism.
techbio··on Elite Biases Make Policy Biases
Perhaps? If not individually then collectively, whether as motivation toward a cheaper food supply, or as a caution to those who are not poor but only a couple of defiant decisions from losing what they've gained. It seems counterintuitive, but GPs rule of thumb may hold even there. I think the problem is in comparing a few wealthy individuals or cabals (in control) to an enormous number of real people (each without much control at all). Poverty is negative power under the same hierarchy responsible for controlling positive power.
techbio··on Scientists Claim That Overeating Is Not the Primary Cause of Obesity
The answer is "carbs". Let's not quibble with the details.

EDIT: /s

techbio··on Scientists Claim That Overeating Is Not the Primary Cause of Obesity
Psychiatric prescriptions over the same decades correlate with a large rise in the disorders they treat. Drug addiction has responded to imprisonment more than any healthcare initiatives. Not saying it's exactly analogous, just that obesity health is not so unique, and really only stands out because of its innocuous or "innocent" causes and visible ubiquity.
techbio··on Scientists Claim That Overeating Is Not the Primary Cause of Obesity
The considered ambiguity in this style of headline ("Scientists claim") between "all scientists claim" and "more than one scientist claims" is terribly disinformative in itself, and clickbait because the article must be read to determine where to place this, if anywhere, on an infinite continuum of scientific progress.
techbio··on Tired of dating apps, Vancouver man launches social experiment to find companion
A relationship is a noun and not a verb because it is formed into something stable the people in it can commit to, and because our limits into knowing another person's heart and mind are so profound, and feelings change with, for example, external events, committing to shared goals and life is more realistic than one irrational human to another. Free love isn't free for all.
techbio··on The Reemergent 1977 H1N1 Strain and the Gain-of-Function Debate (2015)
Your point of opposition to OP is noted, but your analogy misses on almost every point of comparison but that they are two things among many that contribute to untimely deaths. Live fire isn't exactly contagious, and people who interact with live fire with any frequency do wear vests. You might do better comparing firearms (begun with gunpowder in China a thousand years ago) to measles which also began[1] a thousand years ago.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html

techbio··on Ask HN: Is anyone monitoring popular apps to check if they're listening?
I think you mean a "false conspiracy theory", because if there actually were a conspiracy to monitor conversation through common apps, as other comments mentioned, it would have been found already.
techbio··on Can We Solve Linear Algebra Problems at Extreme Scale and Low Precisions?
I've heard the phenomenon from your second paragraph called "the miracle of mitigating errors" in the context of old-school (pre-GPS) transoceanic navigation.
techbio··on The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
Oh sure, not relevant because government doesn't literally raise most of the children and there aren't really any government regulations in schools. /s
techbio··on The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
Public school has its influence. The asymmetrical power to focus large resources on ideological targets is a part of modern warfare that most high-school graduates are not going to grasp intuitively.
techbio··on Norm Macdonald has died
That is a University of Science worthy medical fact.
techbio··on How long can a democracy maintain emergency limits and still call itself free?
While I appreciate the effort that went into your replies, and may even have learned something, they seem rather abstracted from the questions I asked and the topic in context.
techbio··on How long can a democracy maintain emergency limits and still call itself free?
Show me it isn't?

If you are simply critical of my brevity and not my message, I agree with you but am surprised that you would be less critical of the message to which I replied.

If you believe there is no evidence of society conforming itself in drastic ways to attempt to control infection rates, we may be operating with different facts, but I unfortunately remain unaware of which facts yours are, and apparently you of mine.

Edit: It is my position that the actions of authorities should be aligned with the preferred outcomes of the governed, and any relevant information made transparently available to the governed to be fairly evaluated. My assumption is that in the case of Australia and others, a mandate to fight a virus has become an outsized metric in the role of governing and some other leading institutions, and other issues are not being addressed that should be.

techbio··on How long can a democracy maintain emergency limits and still call itself free?
It would be fun to see who thinks running a country by using the target of infection rate is better than the (also) deeply flawed target of GDP. Either I've miscalculated or misspoken, but I don't see that my post needed any more elaboration than its final ellipses, and the silent downvotes perhaps could be better explained, but I'll just assume my post was too low effort to merit that and forget all about it.
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