instagraham

Someone was building a similar one where AI agents run economies. I feel like it's a great way to quickly prototype different economic models and their effects.

Eventually we could have live demos of policy interventions the same day as they're announced

there is perhaps a slippery slope between "the poop cubes made me a believer" and "the creation of poop cubes is irrefutable proof of the existence of God" and I can understand why one would want to abhor such thought processes when writing science.

Also, evolution is mostly random, not everything needs natural selection

I think this is the most objective take. Perhaps we hype up the "accidentally brilliant" aspects of it more than the "wow this is a kinda random design choice" facets.

That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren't as likely to roll off from these high perches.

Whenever I read such snippets from biology, I wonder how natural selection pressure can lead to such specific outcomes. Wombats that mark their territory better over centuries or millennia are more likely to survive? Marking territory is more a form of communication than anything else, but its effect are subtly strong enough over time to lead to a discernible selection pressure for square-pooping wombats over others?

I often wonder how more biologists aren't believers (though I'm not necessarily one myself), when they encounter such intricate design in biology every single day

One thing I was sus from the book and which this post didn't clarify for me was whether Carmack truly invented side scrolling for the PC. He claimed to have done so, and even pitched it to Nintendo for a Mario port that never took off.

Also, the idea that it hadn't been done yet by 1990, when consoles were well in the game, suggests the PC market was behind popular gaming in a big way.

Nobody has obligation to use a tool that thinks it is talking to an American

Very very emphatic agree from my end, thanks.

Not my repo, but sharing here in advance of the May 8 end-of-E2EE deadline for Instagram chats

Is this the best option?

I get the sentiment but this is not a real quote

https://factcheck.afp.com/sheikh-mohammed-did-not-say-great-...

It would be quite out of character for him to say this

I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.

I don't think this reveals Satoshi's identity, nor that any prior piece of reporting may have done so. But I do think there's a high probability that Satoshi lurks or has lurked on HN, and perhaps reads these posts with an initial sense of apprehension followed by a chuckle at the inevitable misidentification.

Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?

I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.

"Welcome to the internet. By using this service, you waive your right to privacy, data, any personal IP and the use of your Adblocker. You consent to having all your behaviours, skills and audio/visual likenesses fed to AI models and trained on for eventual recreation. You may direct any or all complaints to Visa or Mastercard, until crypto makes that redundant as well. Have a nice browsing session!"

In some sense, it is a part of one's identity, for one can't easily separate the worldview from the person. But we enter a strange era when your identity is challenged and remoulded by a non-human entity.

People have always derived a tribal sense of belonging from a set of worldviews, but these views are now perpetuated by robots. These anti-immigration or anti-brown or post-renaissance worldviews are lived by very few people of flesh and blood - it's a set of interlinked concepts and ideals in an imaginary post-truth world.

But it lives more in silicon than in some Aryan ideal. And if you had to draw a line from this silicon to reality, you'd still end up in Crimea or in Pokrovsk, watching a 21st-century battle with echoes of WWI. It is about land and power and politics, like it always has been. But the person fighting "woke" in a comment section over a made-up story about a made-up Disney film doesn't know it.

I'm in India, so the second-order effects of all this are even more surreal here. You get Christians cheering the rise of a Hindutva nationalist government because it's "anti-woke" (only to get heckled and beaten up during Christmas) and Trump supporters doing religious ceremonies for the man for the same reason (only to get the nation's entire suite of exports tariffed), and you see cabs with giant Russia Today ads on their sides in the streets (but the discounted oil we buy from Russia has not dropped prices at the pump by even a rupee). Our lived reality has very little in common with these digital culture wars.

Sorry for the tangent.

I find it odd that Americans aren't angrier about Russia running disinfo bot networks for over a decade now, building up to almost everything in the current cultural moment.

Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.

Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.

Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.

The other comments address it well. In the Indian context, I'd say it's all the slum demolition drives that have happened of late, often with questionable reimbursement if any.

Also, I genuinely look forward to setting up a situation monitor when I shift to a bigger place. I've seen the memes about "monitoring the situation with the lads" and always thought it would actually be quite fun.

Thanks for making this project!

It's an elephant in the room and a default instinct to address it

I do want to encourage more BSky use, but a lot of imp OSINT accounts are still on X. Maybe can we have XCancel integration?

Also to better communicate urgency, a scrolling RSS feed news ticker might slap.

I can see myself chaining monitors together and having this in my spare bedroom, in the eventuality that I end up in a house with a spare bedroom

There's a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that resonates whenever I see contrasting debates about this economic indicator or that:

"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."

India's IT outsourcing-led GDP growth can benefit many almost-poor and poor people by giving them access to more spending by the "middle-class" (a very debatable minority in India) and the rich. But it will not benefit the poorest - social welfare schemes do that, but anti-homeless measures cancel it out. Access to formalised lending can do that, but anti-immigrant schemes and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of getting an id-card in India will negate that. And banks won't give you a loan if you're poor (so they go to loansharks).

You can have all the Apples and the Facebooks of the world in California, but putting spikes in places where homeless people could sleep makes Gandhi's talisman stand out far better than any macro-economic indicator.

Inflation can be positive or negative but if you're living in a place with less supply than demand, your rent will go up by far more than the price of eggs. This will hurt you completely independently of the price of eggs.

All this to say - if you care about the poorest, you'll find little to cheer about. But should you care about the poorest? Is that a good measure of healthy economic growth? Is economic growth the only priority after 1991?

You can be poor and destitute in a capitalist dystopia and you can be poor and destitute in a communist dystopia. This is why I hate the language of the Cold War so much - we lose an infinite amount of nuance with terms like "Capitalism" "socialism" "communism" and "GDP"

with that analogy, OP's solution is akin to banning the use of knives to harm people, as opposed to banning the knife itself

Make content for your startup? Window-into-the-life, engineering notes, etc - anything that lets the public see what you're up to and that you're serious about the work.

Genuine content always beats the stuff marketing will come up with

I know this might seem reductive but when you say "look where everyone is looking", the answer hasn't really changed since the 2010s — it's our phones.

(and to some extent, monitors if you account for the amount of time 9-5 people spend on their work laptops or screens. desktop is not dead but that's another matter)

The hot apps are for now, chatbots and vertical shortform platforms. We know advertisers get much better bang for their buck marketing where the influencers are.

Google is "dead" because search advertising is much worse at figuring you out and showing you stuff when you're not necessarily looking for it. But Google can easily advertise where the eyeballs are - your phones.

We must remember that enshittification is an ongoing process and Google has the power to reach billions of people, one shitty update at a time.

From their POV, it definitely feels like a miss that they don't own a successful and dedicated social media platform. Maybe they will make another foray into it.

Thanks for the excellent explanation, I didn't know it couldn't distinguish inhibition and excitation.

It seems then that while oxygenation itself may be a good proxy for brain health, the way we measure it is unreliable

With such medications, besides behavioural changes, how are they able to measure outcomes without fMRIs? Like knowing whether neuron connections are amplified or not?

I might be oversimplifying, but isn't a lot of our neurological understanding about ADHD based on "fMRI shows decreased activity in the frontal cortex"? Or for that matter, our neurological understanding of a lot of mental health conditions.

I know the actual diagnosis is several times more layered than this attempt at an explanation, but I always felt that trying to explain the brain by peering at it from outwards is like trying to debug code by looking at a motherboard through a bad microscope.

(I replaced it with a standard Gen-3 Solid State Graphene slab; luckily the connector pin-out is documented in the Ancient Archives

Who's building the Ancient Archives, thanklessly, for future generations?

Sad but necessary headline (if you don't get attention, no one clicks) that kinda obscures what the report marks as a solution - and no, it's NOT refusing to cure patients.

I'm not even close to being a libertarian, but I find that people expect biotech companies to swallow billions of $ of loss as some sort of public good. Reports like these are an attempt to better harmonise their survival model. Companies need to make money to offset their losses, if not to profit. And while biotech companies can profit, these can very quickly be offset by the cost of a single clinical trial - IIRC it costs $1 billion to take any new drug from trial to completion now. Imagine discovering the next penicillin in your garage and then needing to raise $1 billion to cure people with it?

The analysts recommendations are fairly tame - companies should target cures for diseases with a lot of sufferers (a social good) + note that there are a LOT of genetic diseases that could benefit from a single-shot cure.

Again, not a sympathiser for "big pharma" if that even exists, but I wonder how sustainable a model this can be if companies can get their stock wiped out by a single bad trial. Pharma is notorious as a risky investment - which for some, might sound like a problem for rich people. But really, it then becomes a problem to fund experimental research, the kind that pays off.

I'm not looking to defend pharma companies here, only to frame a slightly more reasonable set of terms for this debate. I'm sure such reports have their harms - rare, incurable diseases will get less attention. But we need a solution that acknowledges the constraints, not one that merely wishes away the limits of capital and sustained long-term research.

I've written about Humanity's Last Exam, which crowdsources tough questions for AI models from domain experts around the world.

https://www.happiesthealth.com/articles/future-of-health/hum...

It's a shifting goalpost, but one of the things that struck me was how some questions could still be trivial for a fairly qualified human (a doctor in this case) but difficult for an AI model. Reasoning, visual or logic, is built on a set of assumptions that are better gained through IRL experience than crawling datasets and matching answers.

This leads me to believe that much of the future for training AI models will lie in exposing them to "meatspace" and annotating their inferences, much like how we train a child. This is a long, long process, and one that is already underway at scale. But it's what might give us emergent intelligences rather than just a basket of competing yet somehow-magic thesaurus.

This is why I harp about platforms needing to become decentralised and un-censorable. I was hoping the fediverse could become something in that direction but I'd also had hopes for things like IPFS, Matrix (Element I think used to host videos), DLive, SteemIT, etc. User adoption and network effects are really the only limiting factors - but as people get more disillusioned with Meta and X, there is always a space for competing platforms.

I take an Occam's Razor to the usual arguments against it - the problems these create (fake news, slander, etc) are already prominent in regulated media platforms, which also rely on community moderation as a result. The solutions it enables (space for fearless/citizen reporting, Streisand effects for censorship rather than big-tech powered banhammers) are wholly absent in regulated media.

Besides tech, and going by the press freedom index, one's only hope for good journalism today would be to incorporate in New Zealand. But you'd still have to face the odds of your content being banned in the countries they report on.

The other issue with the anti-press efforts by governments is that it weaponises the state against on-ground journalism and ends up encouraging out-of-country reporting as a result.

Hi, sorry for the unrelated reply, but I wanted to ask you about a comment you made 6months back about archiving Gamasutra posts. I came across it while searching HN for "gamasutra".

I'd bookmarked a lot of Gamasutra articles over the years and am kinda bummed out that I can't find any of them now that the site has shifted. You mentioned having a collection of their essays? Is there any way to share or access them?

Love how the 2004 catalogue captures that iMac G3 colour scheme and vibe (even though, by then, you'd already gotten the more iPod looking G4).

When we try to remember how the design of a year "looks", it's surprisingly hard to document everything you were exposed to. I've been trying to find this particular graphics card demo animations I'd seen in computer stores in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I remember being induced into a right proper trance by some of them but I don't remember enough detail to find out what it was.