marchenko

I wonder if the researchers considered directly inoculating the colorectal area. Is it necessary for this to pass through the upper gut?

This seems like a pretty grass roots effort to me: mothers horrified that nude pictures of their 12yo daughters are being created with generative AI. These young girls (not yet women) are indeed victims, no narrative construction required, and stories like this can easily spread virally among parents, esp. mothers of girls, without any push needed. I'm not even sure tech regulation is needed or sought: a few lawsuits making this unprofitable as a mobile-first service will probably reduce the barrier-to-entry enough to protect most youngsters. Only the most motivated zoomers can use the command line. I am suspicious of the fact that this appears to stem from a free service: I assume they are collecting data, but I thought using or storing images of minors required consent from a guardian in Europe?

Imputation is a fairly common technique that would be familiar to most molecular or computational geneticists, especially those used to working with poor samples. There are software packages to assist in the calculation.

The Substack is called “mostly Python”. I assumed the author is a programming educator or enthusiast of some sort.

The claim that the real value in art is in the idea rather than the execution seems to be as true as the claim that the real value in a startup is in the idea. Artists are constantly in dialogue with their tools to produce and define their idea, and to discover new ideas and capabilities along the way, in the same way the Intel head Andy Grove advised technologists to be involved in the engineering & production processes.

A game whose popularity & longevity has become a cliché, Skyrim, is usually played in 1st person. Myst & Doom were both known for their ability to engage players in a flow state in their heyday. I take your point about narrative, but I think first-person games are giving players a different experience -- agency & flow -- compared to the identification you experience in a 3rd-person game.

Joel Spolsky used the dilemma of being ambushed on a minefield (to make a different and almost orthogonal point) in a way that illustrates how norms that are not individually useful -- or even rational -- can be essential for group survival. [1](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/08/the-command-and-co...)

Right now we're in a transitional phase where DNA data is integrated with traditional police work, where there may be a priori reasons to suspect someone before invoking DNA data to strengthen the case. Even this raises serious questions about privacy (the BTK killer even moreso than this case: they found him using his daughter's pap smear). What is more worrying is the incentive to go straight to DNA in the future, entangling lots of innocent people in DNA dragnets because of the birthday problem at scale.

Forgive my ignorance, but why do game servers ban Linux players in pvp games? Fear of some sort of modding only available on Linux?

I think the removal of agency and oversight from the public that is often coupled with "solutionism" - not lack of faith in technology - is a primary reason solutionism has met public resistance. People are willing to sacrifice efficiency for accountability & involvement, and they do not want to hand off priority-setting to technocrats. I am personally hesitant to embrace a model where "governments have also found success in working together with the private sector to manage information flows during the pandemic", as the author describes Taiwan, especially when coupled with oversight by a bureaucratic cryptid like Marshall at the ONA. The current US versions of a misinformation "Fact Check Center" and "Meme Engineering Team" [0] have not inspired confidence. The list of top Marshall protégés may hint at tradeoffs associated with broader deployment of the ONA approach [1].

[0]https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/lesson... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_polic...

Women have tended to be over-represented in "support" rather than "line" positions within firms. Maybe it's more historically accurate to say that they are more likely to be tasked with this work. But they do not appear to be rewarded for taking it on. I think low-status is a complete red herring here. Someone with the right background can spend years tinkering on a project without suffering too much status loss, because they have other reserves of capital. It's like the genteel poverty of the grad student, but for founders.

If this were true, and significant, wouldn't we expect to see more successful women in the startup scene? Women appear to be disproportionately willing to do low-status/non public-facing/schlep work, but I don't notice that they are particularly rewarded for it, probably because they tend do this low-status work in the context of an existing organization in which they have little leverage/ownership stake. Willingness to take risks, and having the means to do so (financial and social capital reserved to draw down upon), on the other hand, seems to better fit the observed pattern.

The Titanic is actually notable for being an exception to the rule of every man for himself, largely attributed to the action's of the Titanic's captain:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/women...

I can see what he's getting at, at least if he's focusing on the SSC subreddits and comments. It's easier to be a brave truth-teller when it's not your ox being gored, and I think the demographics of the SSC commentariat explain its openness to e.g. discussing HBD and critiquing feminism, but rather prickly responses to more ingroup-focused critique. The whole 'grey tribe' distinction was often used in a more defensive/obscurantist and less productive/illuminating way than in Scott's original formulation. I think the community is still far more open than average, but this is certainly influenced by the interaction between demographics (which Scott regularly surveys) and blog topics.

I don't think this is unique to SSC, by the way. I think it's why exclusive groups often eventually emerge from inclusive groups, and why apps like Clubhouse are attractive.

What convinced me to give Obsidian a twirl is that there's essentially no danger of sunk costs: I already store my notes as markdown files in a local folder synced via cloud service between browsers and mobile, and accessed via IDEs/plaintext editors. Obsidian merely replaces the IDE as an access/manipulation point.

The only 'cost', so to speak, is adding bidirectional link syntax, which I suspect is soon to become a common standard. I am curious to see what happens when they open up their developer API, as the Obsidian PKM community is quite active.

I've been using Obsidian for about a week, and it may be the first time I've ever felt compelled to comment in an app's user forum. I even installed Discord so that I could subscribe to the Obsidian channel and watch its (rapid) progress. I am quite excited by this tool.

I think the poster has a good point. It's not just the one submariner study he's referencing that's relevant, it's the decades of experience navies of various nations have operating submarine fleets - the armed forces are not shy about collecting physiological data in the service of operational readiness. If the headline article is correct, we should be very concerned that a significant fraction of the world's nuclear weapons are immediately operated by officers experiencing extraordinary CO2 exposure. Every submariner is green at some point (and there are female submariners as well) - how is acclimation handled?

'Late-stage' slavery, if it has a meaningful referent at all, refers to chattel slavery in the United States, which is commonly regarded as one of the worst forms of slavery ever devised, much worse than the forms of bondage recorded in (e.g.)classical antiquity and the system of medieval serfdom.

These kinds of professions are often referred to as "tournaments", a term I think captures their essence nicely. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory)

Iceland has reduced the incidence of Down's syndrome by screening and terminating Down's pregnancies, not by medically resolving the underlying chromosomal nondisjunction. The role that social pressure plays in this process in unclear: the founder of DeCODE genetics has speculated that "heavy-handed genetic counseling" may be influencing decisions. This is precisely the scenario that anti-eugenicists warn about, especially for more complex genetic disorders with a spectrum of potential phenotypes and possible pleiotropic effects. And for the community of non-terminated disorder carriers, who may receive less social support - and less research into medical treatments for their disorder - as a result.

Genetic screening has many great potential benefits, but the Iceland Down's example is not their best showcase.

In fairness, it's not a crazy question - mushrooms contain a lot of undigestable and fermentable carbs (raffinose, chitin) that can affect ...passage...in some people, and cause flatulence in others. Westerners outside of central Europe tend not to eat meat-replacement-sized portions of mushrooms and are probably more familiar with the digestive dynamics of meat.

It's not as formidable as it seems, once you question the premise that perfect enforcement of the laws is a desirable goal. Where, for instance, would the pressure to overturn anti-sodomy statutes come from if it were possible to monitor everyone's illicit sexual activity and pre-emptively embarrass/imprison them to prevent them from coordinating to agitate for their rights? You can replace this example with any ill-conceived outdated law of your choosing; the argument is politics-agnostic and the existence of hundreds of possible examples to draw from illustrates that ossifying our current code by making it possible to perfectly track dissenters is not a great idea for a dynamic society.

The other side of this coin is the Preference Cascade, a concept from economics [0] wherein people formerly in a Spiral of Silence discover that their supposedly unpopular opinions actually have a reservoir of public support. After publicly remaining silent or falsifying their preferences, they suddenly switch to expressing their true preferences. This can make public opinion seem quite volatile.

[0]Tmur Kuran https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580

I think you are discovering that women, on average, have different expectations from a sexual relationship than men. In fact, it is not weird at all to find that men are much more interested in one night stands than women. Even women who are interested in casual sex tend to want their partner to be at least open to the idea of entering into a relationship. If anything in your bio hints that you are only interested in sex, you will pare your respondent pool down to exactly the type of women you discovered to be receptive: adventurous women interested in threesomes and those who want the safety of having a trusted third party along with their new bit of strange.

Evopsych explanations can often be used to argue both sides of any issue. For example, T is implicated in male aggression, which is useful when fending off predators both animal and human, but dangerous when you have a helpless, often extremely irritating Bundle of Evolutionary Fitness around. T is also thought to be involved in mate-seeking behaviour, which one may wish to downregulate for a while after successfully reproducing in order to devote resources to infant survival. Testosterone is also metabolically expensive, and those costs may be paid at the expense of the immune system. It might be advantageous to upregulate immune functions when an immuno-compromised neonate is around. You and the author could both be correct, but neglect important components of the testosterone fitness package.

They are beautiful, grow absolutely huge at maturity, and produce lovely (enormous) bluish-purple flowers. The leaves are comically huge, and the seed casings form a sort of organic baby rattle. It's wild.

It was quite aggravating when my shared Dropbox folder on a dual-boot Windows/Linux System lost support. It was the main reason I switched from GDrive to Dropbox (besides trying to gradually de-Google). Now I have 2 Dropbox folders on one machine.

1. Genetic nondiscrimination laws are under constant attack (GINA, the most comprehensive, faced significant weakening this Congressional session - fortunately, it appears to be on the back burner for now). That's in the US. Canada has significantly less genetic privacy legislation, and the Trudeau government is negatively disposed to that which currently exists.

2. There is no such thing as anonymous genetic data once you move past extremely small SNP panels. Even if the data is pooled.

Perhaps housing availability is sufficient but not necessary in drawing people to a desirable region, in a manner akin to the idea of induced demand in traffic engineering.

This is a good point. The collapse of local social hierarchies makes status competitions much more alienating and intense. It must be weird to have no shot at meeting - let alone dating or befriending - the most popular girl in school. The increase in status legibility - the ability to compare yourself against others and reduced ability to take solace in self-deception and local status - might also have negative effects.