Earw0rm

I'm thinking of flying over on the Spruce Goose to watch the first operational launch.

Yep, exactly the sort of thing I was alluding to.

The "DNA is a Turing computer and everyone is born a blank slate" model is a bit too intellectually convenient for a 20th century that gave us egalitarianism and Turing computers.

It's mostly true, but not entirely, and the few percent that doesn't fit that model is enough to matter, and perhaps explains some persistent social phenomena which don't fit the picture.

A study has found that urban air pollution - ozone and nitrogen dioxide - causes changes in general expression in sperm, with potential impacts on foetal development.

More evidence of the environment producing subtle heritable modifications to DNA.

The world we live in is still far more Mendel's than Lamarck's, but it's perhaps more like 95:5 rather than 100:0.

Nope, sorry.

As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for.

But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.

There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres.

The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?

This is a recent phenomenon.

The original reason for low population density was agricultural work, which - even in the early days of mechanisation - was plenty physical.

Living in exurbia to work and consume like a city dweller is a new kind of stupid.

How old were you at the time? Mid 40s here and can comfortably sustain low 150s, but burn out quick past 160.

Absolutely, if you do strength/resistance work that'll counteract the tendency of long cardio to burn muscle.

My point is just that if you /only/ do long cardio, it'll reduce the mass of muscle that you need both to burn calories and remain uninjured. Good to mix it up a bit.

Strength training has more of a positive effect on body composition.

The problem with doing a lot of cardio is that you need muscle to burn calories (especially so without injury and as you get older), and too much medium intensity cardio will start to chew up lean mass.

No harm in doing a bit of both though, especially if your goal is fitness/maintenance rather than maximum strength or a particular look.

This feels like a generalisable cognitive bug with our species.

"Kill all the wolves, die as a result from invisible bacteria carried by tiny arthropods - or from Type 2 diabetic heart failure, as getting out for a hike and staying safe is now too much hassle".

By the time you're that sick, you've likely had years of compromised health. That's going to affect personality to some extent.

It's massive, hugely traumatic surgery, taking the patient past what was considered the point of death a century ago, bringing them back alive, and all with the aid of some of the most powerful drugs in modern medicine's arsenal.

And if your heart is needing transplantation in the first place, you'll be running far below optimal for blood O2 and a dozen other things.

It'd be more surprising if it didn't result in significant change.

IMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.

That's quite a leap. The idea that _semantic_ memories are encoded so as to be transmissible via blobs of neural tissue stretches plausibility.

AFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures.

The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.

Flatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system.

Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.

And while there's no challenging the underlying proposition "AI has value", right now 95% of corporate users are still at the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" level in terms of model usage compute.

It's sheer brute force, tons of waste, seems like very little thought going in to fitting the implementation to the problem.

The value of compute can drop significantly in the event of users figuring out how to optimise for their particular need. And yep, there are wasteful applications that can burn whatever compute is available, but how much demand for that is there when it's properly priced?

Extreme example. Generating novel 4K VR video on demand. I'm certain there's a market for it, at $10/hour probably quite a healthy one, at $100/hour not so much.

It's ethnically rational, and morally right.

However.

It's not rational relative to the short-term incentives of a typical corporation or investment vehicle. PE, VC, fund managers aren't paid to give a fuck about the social contract. Literally not in their job description.

So I think you're right, but my diagnosis of the problem is a little different.

As in: _why_ does everyone want a middle class life? _why_ is only a middle class life that's seen as being dignified?

I've friends across a wide range of ages, from late 50s to mid 20s, and it's notable that the older ones have stories of some incredibly grimy circumstances from their 20s which today's 20somethings would be unwilling to endure, they'd rather stay at home with their parents. Living in squats, bedsits or mobile homes, sofa surfing for extended periods, etc.

Lots of people in previous times started families when they were flat broke. Some out of choice, some it just happened. Granted that's not ideal, but they made it work.

Yep, we can measure ATP and so on at the cellular level, but we don't have much of a picture of how that maps onto the physical/psychological sensation of "energy".

Like we know at a crude physical level, we can give someone a bit of a boost with glucose and sympathomimetic stimulants, but sometimes it works a lot better than others. And it's ineffective for fatigue syndromes, but they can't be the other mechanical things commonly associated with fatigue either. (lactic acid, micro-tears and so on).

Yep - people wonder why we can't treat ME/CFS, we don't even have decent biochemical markers for "fatigue" vs "energy", beyond trivial stuff like blood oxygenation and lactic acid. Nor are there much in the way of markers which will determine whether a competing athlete is going to have a good or a bad day.

For example, we have a concept of "energy" for which calories is a rough proxy, but there's no particular reason why fighting an infection should draw on the same reserves that running either endurance or peak muscle does, especially as most people operate in a state of calorie surplus, and their respiratory system is more than capable of supplying a bit of extra O2 unless they're severely ill. And yet clearly the immune/autonomic system forces people into a "rest" state in case of infection.

Or another one, there's no particular biological reason for older people to have less "energy". Like yes there's loss in muscle mass and some small drop-offs in the efficiency of various systems, but it doesn't seem like directly compensating for those makes all that much difference.

"Cause" is necessarily a slippery concept in a dynamic system governed by feedback loops so complex that we only understand maybe 20%.

Not necessarily fake. Mind/body homeostasis is WAY more complicated than that.

To use a computing analogy, which doesn't map perfectly onto the body, if consciousness awareness is userland, you can have things go wrong which are localised in ring 0 - brain drugs will be to some degree effective on those, that doesn't mean it's fake or made up.

In reality there are fuzzy boundaries and feedback loops everywhere. SSRIs treating this isn't any more mysterious than NSAID painkillers being somewhat effective for acute depression.

It's probably a whole set of feedback processes that get screwed up, hence the panoply of symptoms, inserting a hard stop into one part of the loop can be enough to kick the system back into a better functioning state.

Perhaps because it involves immune system dysregulation.

Sleep is more common across the tree of life because it's older.

Older than bilateral symmetry even - jellyfish are thought to sleep, sponges however do not. Jellyfish don't have spinal columns, lungs, gills, livers, kidneys, hearts, guts or blood, but they do have nerves and they do seem to sleep.

There is widespread consensus as to which processes failing will kill you first in acute liver failure, but it governs dozens of processes that, medium term, are essential to life; not all are widely understood.

In the case of sleep, it seems to be nervous system dysregulation that kills. It's notable that comatose patients don't seem to suffer the ill-effects of sleep deprivation. But still, "the thing that kills an animal subject to extreme sleep deprivation" is not necessarily "the original process for which sleep was evolved".

Human brains do some fairly complicated vital things during sleep (REM, spindles, slow wave activity), but that can't be the original essential function - the simplest animals that sleep (jellyfish) don't really have brains, although they do have nervous systems.

Whereas those animals which lack nervous systems (sponges) can't be said to sleep, although it's reasonable to ask.. "how would you tell?", or ask whether the question itself makes sense for something that lacks the ability to sense, plan, act.

So another framing is "anything which can be awake, must also be asleep". But one might equally argue, we don't know why animals are awake.

We can go one step further and suppose that, in order for an animal to act, to exercise will, it must do so at above its average metabolic rate, and in doing so it necessarily incurs metabolic debt.

In that scenario, the AI owners become rentiers - able to charge as much as the market will bear for brokerage - and everyone else gets to offer their services via said brokerages, which charge the customer the most they can bear, and pay the worker the least.

Any economy of scale - which is, in a way, what allows knowledge economies to exist at all - will accrue to the middleman.

Good news for those able to master manual, craft skills to a degree most cannot. High-end tradespeople, specialist installation technicians and so on. Bad news for everyone else besides rentiers.

What's worth stealing, to a dude with a robot?

Chances are, whatever it is won't be found in a regular residential property.

My point is that, in a higher organism, it may be essential to how a lot of their processes function, in that it was infrastructure that already existed at the time those processes were developed, so they were in turn developed to depend upon it.

So "the reason it originally exists" and "what breaks if you take it away" aren't necessarily the same thing.

As with, say, digestion, or an major organ like the liver, it's reasonable to think that it does simple things in simple animals, and more complex things in more complex ones.

Take out an animal's liver, it's not one process that stops working, it's dozens. There's one or two that will kill it quicker, so those are the ones it dies of, but artificial livers are hard to build as they implement so many vital processes.

Probably because it evolved very early (like before bilateral symmetry, multi layer body cavity, or kidneys early... maybe even before multicellular animals early) and so has been incorporated as an essential pillar into multiple processes layered on top of that fundamental architecture.

"If you pay 3x more for your appliances (TV, dishwasher, oven, etc...) you don't get something 3x more reliable/better engineered."

You do at the bottom of unregulated markets. For dishwashers and ovens, safety regs generally impose a high floor on the market. There is no $40 oven, because it's physically impossible to make a safety-compliant oven for $40. If it weren't for market regulation, $40 death-trap ovens would be a thing for sure.

The very cheapest compliant unit isn't _much_ worse than a mid-market unit, it might be a bit flimsier and wear out sooner; high-end luxury units aren't much better than mid-market units - because there's not much innovation driving progress at the top end. AEG and Bosch are still generally solid engineering, but there's not much point in paying more than that unless you like the aesthetics.

Mercedes and BMW - small-volume performance models aside - are like the big fashion brands, Vuitton etc., they're selling the idea of luxury to people who aren't even nouveau-riche, more like borrowing money to cosplay loudly as nouveau-riche. Compare old 1970s Merc convertibles with today's, the modern ones are just kind of ugly, aggressive and sad.

ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?

Seems we've fallen straight back into false dichotomy land.

In that there are a dozen shades of grey between "fully-automated, no humans assembly line" and "person using only hand tools maintained by hand". Tools _are_ machines, are technology, they've just been around so long we forgot that industrially forged steel needs an industrial steel forge.

Probably the best quality product you'll get is from a person who cares, sourcing materials they care about, working with it using their expertise and discernment, and using the most effective tools to get the job done - most, but not all of which will be power or machine tools.

But the point is that the human needs to direct the machines - sometimes that's just a thinking task, and sometimes it's a bunch more physically hands-on.