Paedor

20000 moles of length 45 nucleotides is 306 metric tons? Spread out over millions of years, that does seem completely feasible.

This only really applies in a world of complete information. Pesticide side effects were an enormous externality, which only the company was aware of. And they obviously worked hard to keep that information out of the public consciousness. Perhaps there could be nuance to producing the pesticide, weighing food prices against health impacts, but that’s no justification for lying about what it does.

The second objective is easier than the first. It may be easier to find any M1 and M2 that collide, than to find an M2 that collides with a specific M1.

Hey cool! I once hacked together a serverless game like this using firebase as an intermediary. https://github.com/amdson/rtcpvp / https://amdson.github.io/rtcpvp. I remember wishing this existed, setting up ICE p2p was truly not enjoyable.

For 1) The asymptotic best for sorting is O(n log n), if you're only allowed to compare the size of elements. If you allow operations like array indexing with elements, which is possible for integers, it gets as good as O(n) with radix sort.

Pretty nice satire once you realize it's a joke. My favorite quote is definitely "(where by curiosity," of course, we do not mean to imply that anthropomorphic categories or judgements should be applied to machines, but merely that the machines have a desire to learn).

Is there a physical difference between using the resistance device, and just breathing through a narrow straw? It seems a lot cheaper to just jury-rig something.

It can, admittedly, be a bit of a problem when you need 5 pistachios per second to survive and you're tripping over the shells trying to collect them fast enough.

I'm doing a comp-bio PhD right now, and the more I learn about the process of playing with genes, the further I think we are from expanding intelligence with them.

In the current state of the field, we simply don't know how cells work (in enough detail). We can't predict what cells do when genes are mutated, we definitely can't manufacture new genes that slot into the cell's existing machinery, and, for a lot of the proteins related to neurons in particular, we don't even know what they do.

If there is a breakthrough, it'll take luck at this point, and probably be something stupid, like realizing we can double production of some cell type without hurting the child *too* much. We're really not close to engineering anything, which might be a requirement for producing more intelligence without some very clumsy side effects.

Given the level of trial and error required for a lucky breakthrough, and the human cost of that error, we might just give up on this until the singularity anyways. That said, there's so much undiscovered now that there could be a perfect mechanism that just isn't known yet. And, indirectly, by just making sure people don't have allergies or a pre-disposition to heart disease... we might increase intelligence just by making people healthier.

Conceptually, every step of applying a Kalman filter in the simplest case is just updating a Gaussian prior representing position with a new datapoint sampled with (assumed) Gaussian error. The result is equivalent to convolving a Gaussian representing position with a Gaussian representing noise.

In the frequency domain, that's equivalent to multiplying one Gaussian by another one with zero mean, which will always put higher weight on low frequencies. No matter what the gain is in the Kalman filter, that'll still be true as far as I can tell. As the gain varies, the cutoff within the low-pass filter will change though.

It gets harder to analyze when you start using non-linear models to update position though. Generally, I think the same logic applies.

The best tradeoffs for humans are also different from the best for plants. Even fully domesticated ones like wheat still have to put energy into completely regrowing themselves every year, fighting pathogens, reproduction machinery... I'd put decent odds on synthetic production being massively more efficient.

Wow, it's uncanny how well this post mirrored my own thoughts, down to the phrase "consciousness is observer independent". I ended up rejecting the conclusion though, for the roughly same reason Maxwell's demon doesn't actually reduce entropy. Normally I wouldn't expose people to my armchair philosophy, but here goes:

1. Consciousness, if present, should depend on dynamics. E.g. frozen snapshots of a conscious being probably shouldn't be conscious themselves.

2. (Building on 1) Because a full definition of consciousness requires dynamics, a measurement of consciousness can't just give one "conscious" snapshot. It needs to dynamically continue to measure consciousness, which is much stricter than Joe's original requirement.

3. If measurements of an iron bar are dynamically changing in order to find consciousness in random spins in the iron bar, then picking the correct measurements actually requires immense computation. In fact, it would require simulating a conscious being, while also simulating the dynamics of the iron bar. I'd argue the consciousness you're measuring is then real, but not a property of the iron bar at all.

In fairness, we only run the AI in response to further input, so it's not even really powered on while waiting for the rest of a conversation. It would only be able to be lonely (if that were possible) while thinking about its response to further inputs.

Fun fact, when you consider the bits required to contain p, this is equivalent to bucket sort with a bucket size of 1.

Aren't you measuring glucose instead of insulin though? I might expect a spike in insulin after a spike in glucose, but the other way around doesn't seem as likely.

You don't necessarily need gravity to make something tilt, it can happen naturally during rotation. For instance, imagine spinning something that distorts asymmetrically, like a pencil with some silly putty attached to one side.

Alternatively, there's stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU. Angular momentum's always conserved, but the axis of rotation might not be.

My, completely unverified, thought, is that under those conditions of stress and focus, we turn off our digestive system to some extent and literally absorb less calories. It fits well with other factoids I have, like getting sudden stomach trouble under stress.

A neuron in the brain is subject to orders of magnitude more noise, from chaotic factors like blood oxygenation, signaling molecules, aging...

For our actual conscious experience though, there's some evidence that we're very noise tolerant. I can't find the paper now, but one recently just came out showing that at certain parts of the brain you won't even notice an electric shock.

There's a great episode by planet money on the difference between Amazon and physical stores, the transcript is here: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/697060225.

They mention two key differences. The first is just that Amazon is arguably more dominant than any physical distributor, and has more power over offerings.

The second is that if you make a new product for a retailer, the retailer usually has to invest in you to some extent, by giving you physical space and buying your product for resale. So, there's some shared risk and for developing new products. Amazon, on the other hand, doesn't need to give you anything to see how a new product will play out, so it might have too much of a position of power.