topynate

Paramotoring. Bear in mind that elite-level competition is considerably more dangerous than paramotoring as a leisure activity.

Maybe you could outrun a fully-grown T. rex. But what about a juvenile?

This is a great zoom talk by Dr. Thomas Holtz about the role played by sub-adult tyrannosaurids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwxaEsLcU_w

Holtz looks at the hypothesis that juveniles and sub-adults filled the niches that medium-size predators occupied in ecosystems with no tyrannosaurids. If so they'd have needed to have been fast enough to catch smaller prey.

I read the piece. Leaving aside the weighty issue of whether Milo Yiannopoulos' presence can violently shorten people's telomeres or methylate their CpG sites, there's the question of whether broadening a definition licenses broadening a prohibition. People who accept without question that the govt should stop interpersonal violence in the narrow sense may well not accept at all that it should stop it in its broader senses. Think about the friar's famous line from Romeo and Juliet, "These violent desires have violent ends". "Violent" has two different meanings in this line. It should be clear to anyone that the violence of Romeo and Juliet's love or sexual attraction for each other is not susceptible to the same legal sanction as the clan warfare that erupts in its consequence.

The common law prohibition of violence pertains to physical violence. Defining speech as "illegally violent" is absolutely a redefinition.

I used https://genvue.geneticgenie.org/ – it's free and I've found it to be the best starting point for further investigation. I also have access to Nebula Genomics' tools as part of the package I paid for. Yes, there is a fear factor when you're looking at your own genome. On the other hand, seeing you have an increased risk of something can be quite motivating to make some compensating lifestyle changes.

I bought the Nebula 30x product and got my results quite quickly, in under three months. It's hard to tell if my experience is better than average or not, given that people tend not to speak up about services when they're delivered on time. There may be some issues with the data quality. I happened to post about it a couple of hours ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebulagenomics/comments/w8013t/rate...

My current best guess is that more data than usual were of bacterial origin, but I'll have to learn a bit more bioinformatics to test that.

This is a little cynical, but it's not something they'd want to have known. Suppose the worst case is true and the Webb has a useful lifetime of three or four years. What were they going to do if they'd learned that in 2015? Redesign the entire mission? It was already too expensive. One might say that they should have made the measurement back in the '90s, but the Webb was anticipated to be significantly cheaper back then and the cost of a pathfinder mission would have been proportionately greater.

Saves weight, makes it easier to unfold, fewer potential sources of stray light.

The commissioning report, excerpted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32136991, says there were six micrometeoroid impacts during commissioning, and that this was a rate consistent with modelling. The outlier is certainly worrying but it may just be a bit of bad luck rather than a misprediction.

You have a point. Even if the manufacturers needed to reduce power consumption by a half, it shouldn't have led to a 36dB loss. More like 3dB. So why did they make it so much quieter? This has me thinking that regulation of noise pollution in vehicles might be why, rather than the battery issue.

You are referring to Schelling's model, and the threshold he found for segregation wasn't 1/3 but 2/3 'wrong', i.e. that everyone prefer not to be in a minority of less than 1/3. This was just was striking about it – that even if every individual is happy with being in a minority, the population can still segregate. I'm not aware that he ever referred to the degree of preference in his model as 'mild', or small. It's relatively small, compared to what you might otherwise expect – I think most people would have guessed that it took a preference of 1/2 to produce self-segregation.

It literally cannot be answered with certainty, barring some passing ancient aliens giving us the DNA sequences they took last time they were in the neighbourhood. But as a matter of speculation, dinosaurs seem like they were pretty adaptable. Penguins can live in the Miami Seaquarium – I don't see why a dromaeosaurid would do so much worse.

The first quarter hour of this lecture has some good stuff on Permian sharks (technically almost-sharks). Some of them look very shark-like indeed. Others are like eels! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfPLv4oc7PM

That's true. I bought some body fat calipers recently for just that reason. They cost about $10.

Double or triple atmospheric pressure would have lowered evaporation to such an extent that it would have had many other geological and botanical effects that are not seen.

Rather surprisingly, I just found that different oxygen fractions do cause different atmospheric pressures, by altering the density of air, but it's a 15% to 25% difference, not 200%. Maybe it's possible to use this to resolve tensions in estimates of how much oxygen there was. See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1260670

Cretaceous oxygen levels were at times comparable to those today, and possibly lower. In any case dinosaurs probably had very efficient lungs, as birds do. Unfortunately there's no way to get DNA that old.

A video taken down, then found on review – twice – to have been taken down in error, then on the third review to have been taken down correctly, where the video in question is definitely not violating the policy it's under review for. I'm curious what sort of review procedure could lead to this sequence of events. Why would Youtube invest enough resources to evaluate a video four times, but do it so poorly?

It seems to indicate a lack of communication in each review of how thoroughly the video was evaluated. By the third time round, there should have been a note attached saying something along the lines of "I watched this entire video looking for keygens, patchers, or anything that might be a circumvention. There are none. This is a legitimate review of the product in question and nothing more."

Not for Curiosity and Perseverance, which use RTGs. NASA like RTGs for their big, power-hungry vehicles, and use solar panels on the smaller ones. I guess that one problem is that any brush or compressed air mechanism would have to be particularly light to justify itself, else you might as well design around an RTG instead of solar panels.

Rotorcraft are a special case though, because they come with powerful fans attached. Maybe the next rotorcraft will have a way to direct its prop wash over its solar panels.

Yarvin was talking about Google Search in 2010 as a mutated but recognizable version of PageRank. That's correct, I think, but it was already heading in a different direction. By the end of the year the NYT was reporting on malicious manipulation of search results for profit¹ and Google responded quickly by changing their algorithm². Then, as the "don't be evil" era draws to a close, Google gets more and more aggressive about extracting user value and the 'democratic' PageRank (which Yarvin was by no means alone in identifying as such³) is totally subverted. In 2016 Trump wins and 'fake news' – successively renamed to 'false news', 'misinformation', and now 'disinformation' – becomes the issue, and Google responds to that, too⁴. So post-2016 there really is a kind of sociological health and safety factor in the algorithm, and it's only then that Morozov's 'woke' becomes applicable to Google Search.

Now if anyone was going to guess that something like that would happen, it'd be Yarvin – but none of that is in that 2010 blog. When he said 'democratic' he meant exactly what Wired did in the article linked below – the action of masses of people. It's Morozov that makes the association between 'woke' (i.e. P.C.) and 'democratic', which has all sorts of implications. A woke-democratic Google Search isn't one that is powered by democracy, but one which protects democracy – meaning, protects the masses from manipulation by exposure to sociologically harmful 'content'. Sensu Yarvin, that is neither feudal nor democratic. It is in fact oligarchic.

The final irony is that when Morozov fudged the name Feudle, wittingly or no, and omitted a link to the blog in question, it was entirely in accord with the idea of exercising democratic power by not giving UR any link juice, but the result of that when posted to HN – a site not lacking in markers of community reputation – is that two people find the link (thanks again) and a small discussion ensues which otherwise would not have happened.

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html, see also https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15thu3.html ² https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/02/goog... ³ https://www.wired.com/2010/02/ff-google-algorithm/ ⁴ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-..., https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/technology/google-algorit...

Moving goalposts is fine, and I speak as the opposite of an AI skeptic, thinking as I do that it's 70% likely general AI is invented in the next 15 years. You move the goalposts when you discover that the goal you set didn't match what you were trying to achieve.

I think that it's now possible to give goals that you know you probably won't have to change, but those goals, by their nature, are worse metrics for current research. One example would be that the AI should learn in response to human instruction by text, video and audio, as well and as fast as a human being does with the same access to that instructor, across a variety of tasks. This would be something like "online multi-modal few-shot learning" in the current jargon, and you can see that most research isn't really working on it – probably because it's still really hard to get good results. But there's not much hope of solving the harder problems without solving the easier sub-problems first.

That must be it. Thank you for finding the link. Shame that the author couldn't be bothered to leave one…

"Curtis Yarvin, who hypothesized a neo-feudal search engine, which he cutely named Feudl, as early as 2010"

Did he? It's absolutely nowhere on google or DDG except in Morozov's article. Yarvin's blog archives are all indexed.

"3 The ideas behind Feudl are described on Yarvin’s blog, Unqualified Reservations. Essentially, Google was not too feudal but too ‘woke’—too democratic."

Yeah, I call BS. Back in 2010 the word 'woke' (as an adjective) was practically unknown outside of AAVE and had no negative connotation.

I remember when Twitter worked like this as well. It doesn't any more. When I see a tweet with a dozen replies and only one is visible, even in a private tab, it's very unlikely that eleven out of twelve are from locked accounts. It's even less likely that there wouldn't be at least one visible reply to one of those replies. I see this sort of thing often enough that I have no doubt that twitter is futzing with the visibility both of certain posters and of interactions with certain posters.

It's a skewer – the White Queen on a8, the Black King on f3 and the Black Queen on h1 all lie on the long diagonal. The King has to move and it can't protect the Queen on h1.

That is an inherently subjective question, possibly with different answers for people in different circumstances and with different risk appetites.

Same as usual – someone dobbed him in.

Won't matter for highly polygenic traits. For monogenetic disorders like Tay-Sachs, it will provide another line of defence along with conventional pre-implantation screening and pre-natal screening.

It looks like the author was mining a particular sort of cryptocurrency which needs a lot of drive space. I guess he was trying to squeeze as much performance out of his SSDs as possible.

For most applications I can't see why you'd really need to update your SSD firmware, unless the manufacturer messed up their wear-levelling or something like that in the release firmware.

Does anyone know of a wordle that's in sync with the NYT's list of answers but uses the original dictionary? The NYT site doesn't work for me with uBO turned on (actually it barely works with it turned off).

(Edit: I think I answered my own question: https://www.wordel.app. Author at https://twitter.com/m_yxnk/status/1498171177763803140)

Yegg followed up with an argument about relevancy of results:

"Search engines by definition try to put more relevant content higher and less relevant content lower -- that's not censorship, it's search ranking relevancy." – https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501734648417865731

The other premise is that Russian disinformation is irrelevant by virtue of being disinformation – that a user of DDG wouldn't want to be manipulated if he somehow knew in advance that this would be the effect on him. Accepting that arguendo, what about the user explicitly looking for what Russia has to say? I asked Yegg if appending "russian perspective" would give Russian perspectives. I don't expect a reply but it seems clear to me that down-ranking sites is too blunt a tool to allow for this.

So does overpressure.