Doesn't strike me as particularly strong evidence. The victim's mother probably stopped a smallpox outbreak by identifying the symptoms as not-chickenpox. Unfortunately COVID-19 symptoms are not as distinctive.
Rather than saying "all the pandemics that we know of started naturally", it would be more accurate to say that all pandemics started naturally, that we know of. Particularly in the case of the 1977 Russian flu, there are suspicions of an anthropogenic origin.
> They will arrive millions of (local) years before you.
No they won't – in the frame of reference of the galaxy, both you and your pursuer will spend most of the journey traveling at very close to the speed of light. The difference won't be enough to catch up.
Put another way, in the frame of reference of the galaxy, you get to Andromeda (2.5 million light-years away) only about two years later than light would. Your pursuer, traveling at 1.1 g, would get there about a year and 9 months after light. So anyone chasing you would have to take off within about three months – and after a year, nothing could catch you.
This arrival time delay relative to light is pretty much constant (for fixed g) for any distance over about 1000 light years. For this reason, sci-fi authors who want ships to be overtaken by later models either slow the old ships down to much less than light-speed (i.e. generation ships) or introduce FTL travel.
> Is it simply that humans have about 30k genes, your children each only get half of your genes, and so after about 16 generations it is possible for someone to be a descendant of yours but not have any genes that came from you?
Yes, the difference between genealogical ancestry and genetic ancestry is just the reason. The modelling which gives those estimates for the IAP assumes very infrequent migrations of individuals – one per generation is enough. That level of migration would likely leave no genetic heritage at all. Probably many Africans have literally zero genetic inheritance from Neanderthals, but almost certainly those same Africans have Neanderthals in their ancestor tree, albeit through only a few lines of descent.
I mean, they're all nonlinear at some point in the range of possible doses. Radiation too. I should have specified I was focusing on the "very low" bit of the curves. Chest X-ray vs two chest X-rays, rather than Louis Slotin vs the guy at the back of the room.
Just that increases in risk are usually approximated pretty well by a linear change with dose. Radiation, poison, allergens, etc. Drugs too – the ones where the toxic dose is close to the therapeutic dose are generally pretty nasty even when used as intended. It's possible for there to be a transition between "very safe" and "noticably unsafe" as the quantity of something increases twofold, but a priori unlikely. For this to happen not only in vaccines, but through an unknown mechanism that operates precisely in this particular range, would be truly rotten luck. It's also contradicted (a posteriori) by the evidence I referred to (overdoses and animal models).
Didn't I cover that in "danger"? The leaks are talking about maybe twice as much broken bits of mRNA in early batches. That's assuming all the not-intact stuff is broken mRNA rather than simple amino acids or something else just as boring. That shouldn't make much difference to anyone's view. If you think it's "doing" stuff that makes you not want to get vaccinated, well you probably thought that before you read this report, too.
Intactness of 55% vs 75% should make no real difference to your view either of efficacy or of danger. Because:
Efficacy: the mRNA vaccines have a large margin for error with respect to dose. 55% of several times more than enough is still more than enough.
Danger: suppose the danger of broken-up mRNA to increase linearly with the amount given. Then the increase of danger would be by a factor of (100-55)/(100-78) ~= 2. The substantiated near-term danger of Pfizer is very low. We're at 5.2 million people vaxxed in Israel now… Twice of very low is very low. In order to argue for "too much" danger you have to argue either for non-linearity or for long-term high danger. If you argue for the latter then you already think the danger to be high, so there's no real difference between your view now and your view before. If you want to argue non-linearity of danger then you are arguing for a very remarkable biological coincidence. You also have to explain why the occasional 5x overdoses, which happen when a someone is given a whole vial by mistake, don't seem to be doing any harm. Never mind that it would have come out in the animal trials.
> since they remove GPS, microphones, have a custom OS and provide anonymous burner SIMs on a subscription
That is, do a bunch of crap that will immediately make you stand out to any modern (by which I mean, total) surveillance agency. The syndicates' problem isn't stupidity but immodesty – typical of organized crime. They thought they were, not smart, but the smartest, and that made it easy for other criminals to sell them garbage security products.
Interesting that the size of the devices is limited by imaging technology rather than the ability to fabricate smaller ones. I guess the trade-off is that imaging small things with X-rays requires more ionizing radiation.
It's a two-step manoeuvre: one, morality is "immanentised", meaning, it's made into an essential and necessary part of reality, and two, immortality is taken as the moral Good. You can also refine this by justifying immortality as the Good on utilitarian grounds (for example, so that euthanasia isn't ruled out a priori).
It's not the technology as such, because the technology to defeat death doesn't exist right now. It's the systematisation of the anti-death instinct, creating an ideology that logically justifies that instinct and fleshes out the full implications of being thoroughly against death. Qin didn't do that of course – this was the "burning of books and burying of scholars" dude. I think modern technology is a prerequisite for transhumanism in the sense of making it possible to think in a transhuman way, but that doesn't make transhumanism identical to technology, or to using technology to live longer.
This would make Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, a transhumanist. His fear of death had him seeking an immortality potion. This was about 2200 years ago. But this wasn't an "-ism" – just instinct, as you say.
Not sure why "lindyman" is on the front page but it's not too surprising. He's talking about the transhumanist plan. Very well, let's talk about that. Hormones, anti-aging, even cryonics are not the plan, but rather short-terms tactics. The transhumanist plan is to change nature – to restructure reality so that morality becomes as intrinsic as gravitation. Death, per transhumanism, is an evil, or even the only true evil. So it follows morally that death must be excised from reality itself. That's the plan. (How's that for impracticality?) Everything else is just doing a hecking science.
If that sounds cool then the places to find out about it and to talk about it are Less Wrong and Scott Alexander's substack. In no way do I consider myself affiliated to transhumanism as a movement, but I do, still strongly encourage exploring the ideas.
"Because of Tether’s inability to conduct significant banking activity during this time, it could not itself hold dollars sufficient to back the hundreds of millions of new tethers that had entered the market."
The word "itself" is doing heavy duty in this sentence. Was there another entity holding dollars in this period? Did Tether issue USDT without a corresponding inflow of USD? We don't know. One would hope that the transparency agreement actually answers these questions for its future operations. It's those questions that matter, after all, not Ms. Letitia James' "efforts".
Sure, you can have a great idea and do everything right with it, but not see it succeed. I'm asking more about the corporate culture at Apple and more generally – is this sort of advocacy encouraged or discouraged, does it improve the chances of a new idea, that sort of thing.
I mean Apple has to see a good bit of value in prototyping things and letting people come up with new stuff, or they wouldn't have job positions with the title "inventor", right? Or is that just part of its self-image, and not really encouraged in reality?
This question is about understanding invention in large companies, not as a knock against Bret Victor:
His job title had "inventor" in it, and he mentions making many things, but he describes the impact of his inventions in the passive voice:
"These concept apps were shown around internally, presumably to inspire the people who did the real work."
I gather from this that he didn't see his role as advocacy or promotion of his work, and from "presumably" that he didn't really know what the purpose was of all this showing-round. My question: would he have been able to get into production some of the things he made and cared about, had he engaged in advocacy, or would that have been problematic in Apple's culture?
This doesn't really work for paid newsletters. The two exceptions I've found are for RSS readers that operate as browser extensions and for substack podcasts, which come with a dedicated RSS address for each subscriber. I like to read newsletters on my Kindle via Calibre and it would really make things much simpler if substack just did what they did for podcasts for all newsletters without exception.
It says something about wingsuit flying that strapping a 25,000 rpm motor to one's chest and pointing it only slightly away from one's groin isn't even close to the biggest risk factor in this activity.
You could use droppable skids or wheels for takeoff, if you don't mind enduring flight at, what, 60 knots at least, in ground effect, with your nose about a foot away from the runway. I can't imagine any sane person doing that, but this guy would probably have had the time of his life.
This gadget doesn't have any hidden layers, though. It does OK in comparison to a simple linear classifier. If you can make and train a multi-layer architecture with perovskite, that starts to get interesting.
"No economic justification"? That has to be faux-naïf. Yes, I was shocked at first to hear of prices turning negative. For about thirty seconds. Once I learned that the oil had to be delivered somewhere without enough storage, and under conditions of extreme low demand, it was perfectly obvious that you'd end up paying someone else to take the oil off your hands. Either Peterffy is too stupid to understand mass-media reports on his own field of business – not likely – or he's disingenuous, which says something about how he sees his clients.
This happened two days after Firouzja effectively defected from his homeland so that he could play Israelis. I see it as something of a credit to him that this is the worst behaviour he displayed in the aftermath.
Possible explanations for the absence of antiviral therapy: lack of availability, reluctance to prescribe untested treatment (all antiviral treatments are currently experimental), some of the antivirals actually work really well and a lot of the people who got them are missing from this study because they recovered. I hope it's the latter.