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wwwtyro

922 karma · joined October 23, 2011

website: wwwtyro.net
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wwwtyro··on Why humanoid robots won't catch up to human workers any time soon
Also hand washing!
wwwtyro··on Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level
> Bile is used to process food in the gut. It does not go back into our system.

I don't think that's correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterohepatic_circulation

I also think you're mischaracterizing HDL as a VLDL. If you search for Apolipoprotein A here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305896/ you'll see that HDL is constructed from it, while VLDL and LDL are part of the Apolipoprotein B lineage.

wwwtyro··on Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level
My understanding is that:

1. When someone consumes fat, bile is released into the gut.

2. Oatmeal (and other soluble fibers like psyllium husk) capture this bile and it is excreted in stool.

3. In order to create the bile, the liver needs LDL. Because the LDL it used to create the bile was lost when it was captured, it exposes more LDL receptors and pulls LDL out of the bloodstream, thereby lowering LDL levels.

It seems to me that in order to maximize the effectiveness of this LDL-lowering approach, one must not simply consume psyllium or oatmeal, but rather consume them in conjunction with fat. Not saturated fat, obviously, which raises LDL, but perhaps unsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. My expectation is that this would trigger the bile secretion required in order to actually sequester it.

wwwtyro··on The future is not self-hosted
I'm not sure. It seems like the harder they squeeze, the less they can hold onto. Books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music - you can find it all online for free and acquire it pretty safely (torrents/vpn etc). I think the only thing they can really sell us is convenience - and I buy it! But if that convenience is lost to fragmentation, or lack of offline availability (e.g., books), or price, I think people will stop paying and do the more convenient thing. There's a tension there that I don't think they can ignore.
wwwtyro··on Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control
Until we get robots with really good hands, something I'd love in the interim is a system that uses _me_ as the hands. When it's time to put groceries away, I don't want to have to think about how to organize everything. Just figure out which grocery items I have, what storage I have available, come up with an optimized organization solution, then tell me where to put things, one at a time. I'm cautiously optimistic this will be doable in the near term with a combination of AR and AI.
wwwtyro··on Show HN: Game Bub – open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld
I love the idea of open source hardware, but one issue I struggle with is - what happens when one or more components go out of production?

I suppose one solution is that the maintainers could update their component list (which might involve more than one component because of compatibility issues?). But what if I'm in the middle of purchasing the components only to discover I can't get them all? Maybe the maintainers could sell component kits? That might be a nice way to fund their work. Not sure if that would run into issues with IP laws, though.

wwwtyro··on Three Observations
> Moore waited at least five years [1] before deriving his law.

OpenAI has been around since 2015. Even if we give them four years to ramp up, that's still five years worth of data. If you're referring to the example he gave of token cost, that could just be him pulling two points off his data set to serve as an example. I don't know that's the case, of course, but I don't see anything in his text that contradicts the point.

> I don't think that it makes much sense to compare commercial pricing schemes to technical advancements.

How about Kurzweil's plot [1]?

[1] https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2011/kurzweilfig.1.jpg

wwwtyro··on El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender
How does anything swing -1000%?
wwwtyro··on Trump Confirms Bitcoin Reserve Plans–$15T Price Boom Predicted
Do you mean medium of exchange? I think it's difficult to make the claim that the USD is a good store of value.
wwwtyro··on What's Next for WebGPU
Any word on when it'll be supported on Linux without a flag?
wwwtyro··on Mitochondria Are Alive
I'm sure there's a fantastic midi-chlorian joke here.
wwwtyro··on Show HN: AI OmniGen – AI Image Generator with Consistent Visuals
With consistent representation of characters, are we now on the precipice of a Cambrian explosion of manga/graphic novels/comics?
wwwtyro··on Canvas Fingerprinting
I know my priorities are questionable, but I'm more annoyed that I can't expect consistent canvas rendering.
wwwtyro··on Microsoft BitNet: inference framework for 1-bit LLMs
Can anyone help me understand how this works without special bitnet precision-specific hardware? Is special hardware unnecessary? Maybe it just doesn't reach the full bitnet potential without it? Or maybe it does, with some fancy tricks? Thanks!
wwwtyro··on Nasopharyngeal Lymphatics Found to Be Crucial for Cerebrospinal Fluid Outflow
> We aim to investigate in a reliable animal model whether activating the cervical lymphatic vessels through pharmacological or mechanical means can prevent the exacerbation of Alzheimer’s disease progression by improving CSF clearance.

Any speculation on what those mechanical means might be?

wwwtyro··on Anti-aging drug for dogs moves closer to gaining FDA approval
Yes, simply accepting the inadequacy of our current technology is always going to be easier than working to improve it. It's also going to lead to infinitely less progress.

Humanity is eventually going to be able to extend lifespans indefinitely. Whether that happens sooner or later depends on how many people decide not to go gentle into that good night.

wwwtyro··on Housing wealth is meaningless, destructive and fundamentally changing society
I assume people will continue to use real estate as an investment for as long as they are forced to escape the inflation of their currency.
wwwtyro··on French authorities label Vitamin D as endocrine disruptor
Seems like this is some kind of legal inevitability that is acknowledged to be counter-productive:

> The IASDA report stresses: “There is concern that this decision may cause consumers to mistrust vitamin D supplementation, which will be particularly problematic given the high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency among the population."

and

> “Even after ANSES publicly stated that while formally correct, the listing would be counterproductive, this legal mechanism proved impossible to stop,” he adds.

wwwtyro··on The IMF is slowly pushing for digital currencies to replace cash
I'd be worried they'd wait until the population was reliant upon it, and then flip a switch disabling privacy. Seems risky.
wwwtyro··on Meta Quest 3
They now offer color options (https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/)
wwwtyro··on Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent‑style
I love this direction. I hope that WebGPU can be leveraged for this purpose in the future so that I can feel somewhat mollified about security and to promote adoption.
wwwtyro··on Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
What does half-life mean in the context of DNA? One base pair corrupted / unrecoverable? Half of them?
wwwtyro··on Ask HN: Suggestions to host 10TB data with a monthly +100TB bandwidth
If it fits your model, WebTorrent[0] can offload a lot of bandwidth to peers.

[0] https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

wwwtyro··on GPT-4
By that definition, I wonder if we've already surpassed that point. Things on the horizon certainly feel hazier to me, at least. I think a lot of people were surprised by the effectiveness of the various GPTs, for example. And even hard science fiction is kinda broken: humans piloting spaceships seems highly unlikely, right? But it's a common occurrence there.
wwwtyro··on Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations
> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.

wwwtyro··on Anthropic's Claude is said to improve on ChatGPT, but still has limitations
Is there any reason to believe that the first open source chat GPT clone won't consume most mindshare, a la stable diffusion?
wwwtyro··on What causes Alzheimer's? Scientists are rethinking the answer
I'm fine with most researchers pursuing a particular direction, but I get concerned when incentives align that provide a significant pressure for them to research what they wouldn't naturally want to research. It seems like there should be a distribution of research directions, not everyone in lockstep. It's hard to gauge from the outside to what degree that is happening in our research institutions today.
wwwtyro··on 100 Gbps achieved from space to Earth
I'm curious how many households this would support, taking into account usage distributions over time. Would this be sufficient for a medium city? A large town?
wwwtyro··on Intel’s Take on the Next Wave of Moore’s Law
I guess I'm skeptical. This sounds more like an optimization of current technology than something along the lines of vacuum tubes -> transistors.
wwwtyro··on Good Old Fashioned AI is dead, long live New-Fangled AI
Why do the eyes in the generated images always look a little off? Most facial features usually appear photorealistic to me, but the eyes always have a little smudge or something in them that gives them away.
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