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> If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant

Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…

Crypto never fails to impress me with how many problems it creates for itself.

(This is coming from someone with ADHD but not dyslexia)

It's harsh, but it isn't wrong, right? The reason that these states of being are considered 'disorders' is because they interfere with daily life and with tasks that other people consider to be easy.

I need to take a lot of time to edit my writing and to re-evaluate the content that I write because it is easy for me to slip into a multi-paragraph tangent. Fundamentally that happens because my thinking is not sharp/focused.

On the other hand, when I am done writing I get a feeling of great accomplishment. Like I was able to swim through the deep waters of my mind and harpoon all the good ideas. Being smart isn't worth much if you can't communicate your ideas!

TIL about Normal Mapping, which to my layman eyes kind of looks like computing a hologram on the flat surface of an object. In the coin example in TFA, even though I now 'know' that the coin is a cylinder, the normal map gives it very convincing coin shape. Cool!

I very infrequently watch the news. it is obvious to me that major news outlets, at least in the US where I am familar, are definitely attempting to push political agendas and shape public opinion and manufacture consent.

However, Fox news is consistenly the only news source that I see which is explicitly trying to fearmonger, to use identity politics to pit people against each other, and is the only news source that allows airing people that advocate for the reduction or freedoms and rights of certain classes of people.

I can count on the rest of the news sources to be vaguely pro-police, pro-capital, pro-land-owner, pro-status-quo. There are negatives to having news be so favoring to the ruling elite. But on the topics of who gets to live with decency in the US, at least the other major news outlets agree that the answer is 'anyone with money'. The American dream. On fox news though there are 1000 ways to be the wrong kind of person who needs to be shamed and harmed and removed from society.

IMO the "main source of inequality" is that tech allows a small number of people to use technological and fiscal leverage to make an outsized impact on society as a whole. Anyone who has a job that produces value in a 1:1 way is positioned to be 'disrupted'. NLP, etc, just provides more tools for companies to increase their leverage in the market. My bet is that GPT-4 is probably better at being a paralegal than at least some small number of paralegals. GPT-5 will be better at that job than a larger percentage.

Anyone who only has the skills to affect the lives and/or environments of the people in their immediate surrounding are going to find themselves on the 'have nots' end of the spectrum in the coming decades.

Another tech CEO realizing that the only way to sustain growth is to reject reality.

Right, and this is why they fundamentally failed. If their main depositors were traditional businesses and individual accounts they wouldn’t be an issue today. They invested their money as if they had low-risk depositors but a start-up is a high risk depositor——they don’t have a proven business model so it is hard to forecast their behavior.

To me this is classic SV echo chamber thinking. There’s a reason traditional banks are more wary of lending to start-ups and it isn’t because they hate money.

I think of the hiring loops that I am a part of as paid interview practice.

I hate to jump on the bandwagon here, but imagine if Instagram released an update to their app to make it look like it did in iOS7. People would uninstall the app. They would be laughed at.

It isn't because current design trends are 'better', but they are exactly that, trends. If you don't keep up your app will look dated. To my unexperienced eye, the iOS7 design looks like the buttons take up way too much space; they are too visually interesting and distract from the content. But that isn't an objective take, it is just that I'm used to the current trend.

I could write about how Members-only jackets and moonboots were the hight of usability and design, but they were just a passing fashion. Nothing is really gained or lost, just changed.

If you read it aloud, I think it is very punchy. I’m guessing considering the authors pedigree that his writing style was a conscious choice.

The one thing about sushi and peanuts is that they both have a weight…

I do use an external keyboard and mouse with a laptop stand when I am at my desk. When I am out I just type on the laptop stand

Its funny. I have programmed for a decade and at no point I have ever found that an external monitor was the solution to my problems. My coworkers think I'm crazy, but I do all development on a 15' macbook. My path to efficiency and ergonomic work has always been to become more familiar with the keyboard shortcuts for navigating windows and tabs. Along with Spectacle, Vimium, and tree-style tabs, I have never wanted for a second monitor. Mostly I find it annoying because I forget where I put my applications if I have two monitors.

My overall mantra at work is that I can only do one thing a a time if I want to do it well. I feel in a sense limiting myself to one viewport helps reinforce this behavior.

I understand your point, and I'll agree to disagree. I think it just has to do with what we value. Even though it is a tool, tools change what options we have. If you have a shovel, 'digging holes' is now an optional activity for you to pursue that wouldn't have been otherwise. Is the shovel the 'architect' of your ability to dig holes? Maybe no, but the tool-human interaction is a back and forth. Tools generate affordances and humans choose to act on affordances.

Maybe put it this way, if there was an AI that could plan out your day in a way that would optimize some metric of happiness that you agree with, you might start to use the AI. Is the AI the architect of your day because it plans it out and tells you what to do, or are you still in charge because you could choose to stop using the tool, even though it would not be in your best interest?

I think this is the point that we are reaching with AI: it is a tool that is so flexible that it doesn't just offer single affordances, but begins to be used as a guiding function for what decisions to take. At that point I think it /is/ an architect of some kind.

Again though, this is mostly just quibbling about definitions and terms.

Chicken and egg, I think. I am a firm believer that people don't have much better or worse mental health now over-all. But I do think that in the past mental health was something that was more intuitive and that people got more support for from their immediate social circle. Now that society is further isolated, people both have more time to ruminate about the specifics of their mental health, and the solution to having bad mental health is more frequently to talk to a therapist.

Even this would not by itself cause the increased medicalization of totally normal human problems. However, therapists need to bill insurance and it is not really possible to bill insurance for general malaise. Additionally, more people are expected to be rational economic agents more of the time, and rational economic agents don't have any emotions. So people that fall outside of the narrow bounds of what is considered acceptable and exhibit behavior outside of the narrowing band of that which allows for gainful employment means that more people are categorized as having specific ailments.

People that /are/ able to crush themselves into the little boxes that are required of them to not end up on the streets have their own mental health problems as spill-over.

TL;DR: society optimized for money causes people to feel crazy.

There's few thing people like more than for someone to tell them what to do.

I might sound a little bit 'tinfoil hat' here, but I believe that what follows is not hyperbole. AI is already the 'Architect' more than most of us would like to admit. Even if it is not sentient, the various AIs that we use during the day were designed with a purpose and they are goal oriented. It is worth reading Daniel Dennet's thoughs about the intentional stance--we know that a toaster is not sentient, but it was designed with a purpose and we know when it is or is not achieving that purpose. That is why we might sometimes jokingly say that the toaster is 'angry with us' or that when the toaster dings that it is happy. It is actually easier for us humans to interact with objects when we know that they have a purpose, because that is similar to interacting with other humans who we know to have purposes.

Coming back around to AI, ChatGPT was designed with a purpose, and people project intent onto it. People act like it is an agent. And that is all that matters. The same is true of the Tiktok AI, the AI that calculates your credit score, the traffic lights by your house. Hell, it's also true of your stomach.

The point is that objects in our environment do not have to be literally conscious for us to treat them as conscious beings and for them to fundamentally shape the way that we live and that we interact with our environment. This is pretty much the basic tenet of cybernetics. To believe that all of these tools do not have intention and that they are 'just tools' used by some people to influence other people is not wrong, but I don't think that it captures the richness of the story.

Differentiating where humanity/consciousness begins and where the technology ends is already more complicated than most people think. Traffic lights train us just as much as we make traffic lights. I fully believe that people will be saying "this isn't true AI, it doesn't /really/ have feelings" long after the technology that we create is so deeply embedded into our sensory I/O that the argument will be moot.

It's funny that we are always chasing after 'personalization', which is of course only a problem created by industrialization and massive scale.

For anyone disappointed by the headline and who wants to know the answer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star

By which metric a tree is very intelligent and a man with a private yacht is not.

It's not that they don't exist, but the easiest way to gain access to a computer system is always going to be to ask for the password.

https://xkcd.com/538/

And what about as the rock crumbles? Rocks are constantly eroding and re-amalgamating. What is it like to be sandstone? What is it like to be a magma flow?

Is there something it is like to be a severed limb? What about a clipped toenail? A pile of leaves? It is not obvious that just because we as humans identify something as “an object” that it must follow that that object has an internal experience.

Screw that. Unless I can refuse to be tried in a sticky but necessary situation, the cops don’t get that option.

This is so strange. You have been in HN long enough to know that this forum used to be very pro-crypto/coin. After a decade or more of failed promises, failed currencies, scam after scam, and billions of dollars in value squandered, HN is only just in the last year starting to take a more critical stance.

Lunch can in fact be free if you skip it. I feel market forces will almost always prefer a centralized (I.e., marginally cheaper) solution so long as it is robust enough. I would have to imagine an entire economic and cultural shift to imagine S3 being usurped by a decentralized solution.

Sometimes centralization is a benefit because it gives you someone to invoice/sue if it breaks.

> full hour every day

> invested in every feature

Sounds like hell to me.

If someone told me that they worked through a whole data structures and algorithms book I would be impressed but I would not be under the impression that they had 'mastered programming' in the sense that I would not be comfortable working with them. I would rather work with someone who has large gaps in their knowledge but is curious and motivated.

I 'mastered' programming by your definition by having a 2 year long internship at a hardware company where I was asked to make a website, write code that interfaced with non-standard networking protocols, and automate the company's garden. I had a whole lot of help from some graduate students that were there working on hardware design and were kind enough to answer the 1000 questions I had.

The way that I understood it is that what you call an 'ordinary' black hole this paper claims is actually a 'naive' black hole, and that more nuanced solutions to general relativity allow for things that act like black holes that we know but that don't contain singularities.

I only point this out because we haven't been inside a black hole, so we don't really know what an 'ordinary' one looks like.

Yeah but you can't just lay off senior employees as a scare tactic.