mindfulplay

Quite amazing! Regardless of the profitability or scaling this up, it’s refreshing seeing the modularity where the sum is much larger than the parts. Well, here the sum likely is larger than the product!

I enjoyed this game quite a bit, thank you.

A really cool article summarizing decades of amazing research by some very smart and determined minds.

Would it be possible to walk back the evolutionary chain of events that leads to a specific brain structure?

For example, one of the scientists says that the connectomes mapping might be in the order of peta bytes of peta bytes of data.

But they originated from a seemingly 'simple' millions or billions of pairs of DNA. Would it make sense to trace back from a system design or a theoretical limits perspective? The chain of chemical reactions from DNA to these neurons and so forth.. the combinatorics from a DNA perspective while very complex seems manageable compared to the mapping of neurons after they have evolved into a full 'creature'.

Not sure I follow this.

Flutter uses Skia as the rendering engine - albeit with a different layout engine. JS on Chromium uses Skia.

If you are using JS to talk to Flutter to then talk to Skia, what's the value add? Is it the multithreaded layout engine?

Norm MacDonald and Patrice O'Neal's comedy should be studied by every comedian as they pursued comedy and nothing else. No social saintness or political hackery.

If there were a Michelin star, we just lost two three star Michelins in about a decade... There aren't many (perhaps even any) left to fill this void.

The risk associated with the vaccine (and the magnitude) are orders of magnitude lower than that of natural infection-based immunity.

The vaccine can almost certainly send a few people to the hospital in the same manner that an airbag could almost certainly cause injuries during an accident.

It's very different from a natural infectionimo.

The vaccines also lack a specific abnormal side effect that the infection may carry: risk of death and hospitalization.

Now with death, one could argue that it does provide much longer lasting immunity....

Seriously though, for most people the severity of infection-derived immunity is preconditioned upon them surviving the disease so this looks like the classic "planes with bullet holes" image?

Really fascinating. Does this mean the world "view" is encoded into the DNA somehow and that then gets transformed into neural activity? How could a few billion pairs of acids encode such a world?

What's even more fascinating is that emotions, behaviors, imagination and dreams must all be encoded and not learnt with just a billion-odd pairs / bits.

Meanwhile, it takes a few megabytes for us humans to encode a decent Hello World program in a modern programming environment.

If you are serving static assets then essentially it's pretty cheap. You can use KV / Workers and then use the caching to minimize cost which measures requests not bandwidth.

Great post. Minor rant: However while Cloudflare does not charge for edge-egress, their pricing story is terrible, awful and dare I say terrible again.

It looks like they took their internal evolving developer docs and turned it into pricing for customers.

There is a tree of docs and pricing you have to get to the punchline which is that Cloudflare for the most part is several orders of magnitude cheaper than AWS or any other cloud provider. And each 'team' seems to have their own little pricing page with arcane details - exactly the definition of 'ship your org chart as products'. Just check out Workers pricing for instance. The product is great but the pricing story is silly.

But it's almost like they want to drive customers directly to AWS with Amazon's simple pricing calculator and tools.

It would be one hell of a marketing genius if this wasn't actually an integration test email.

For the first time I actually read their damn email.

I would imagine a shader that converts YUV to ARGB at the time of rendering as opposed to storing it all the way along the pipeline as 32 bit integers.

It's a bit tricky because rendering pipelines composite the final image through many layers of offscreen compositing before the pixel hits the screen.

The core issue is that the offscreen composited layers would still be 32bit textures which is a bigger issue. I would imagine a Skia-based draw list to encode this through the pipeline which could help preserve this perhaps.

Great idea.

There is already some amount of both practical (Swift/IDEs) as well as theoretical (Bret Victor) ways that do simulation of a specific function.

What's often missing is the visualization or simulation of how code blocks, classes, modules, libraries fit together. Modern frameworks and programming languages hide a lot of detail behind layers which compound this problem.

Certainly a great but missing assist to current IDEs.

Congrats to Oxide computer!

Excited to see tech startups do actual tech instead of chasing VC funded growth hacking.

I wonder what sort of enterprise customers this targets.. (definitely not for individual devs)

This is a fantastic project and a great blog! As games start to include RL, it will be a lot of fun that could spawn a while new generation of interesting games (especially if games are made with an RL-first mindset as opposed to using RL later on to beat human beings).

Do you have recommendations to learn more about RL? Is CodeCraft a game?

Thanks for the link, interesting.

Agree that our current understanding is very crude.

I was thinking a mapping between the information theory world to the biology world: say if N DNA pairs can be theoretically shown to only encode a pattern of "blah" complexity (time/space) regardless of future protein interactions, then could a model progressively apply that to find limits to prove/disprove/discover old or new ideas that are correct/incorrect?

We have had a cop out of "it's a magical world that we don't fully understand" for such a long time,so wondering if fundamental laws can help pave the way. Probably very amaterish/arrogant coming from computer science people such as myself, but one couldn't help but be in awe of these gears or octopuses or even basic flower patterns emerging out of DNA.

Truly fascinating. It makes me wonder how such a thing could be encoded inside a DNA.

As in, is there a field of study similar to computer science/information theory on certain fundamental biological "laws of transformation"?

Say, we have six billion or so pairs in the DNA. How could a series of transformations from those pairs with other proteins produce this complexity especially ones that requires a particular 3d shape, time based mechanisms and reactions all tied together efficiently and passed from generation to generation?

Obviously perhaps not a "designed by some magical entity", but six billion pairs/nibbles seem quite magical to encode this complexity... It is certainly hard to study this even over many decades, but I wonder if there are certain fundamental laws or units or theories that help provide pathways to understand such transformations.

Not just the Tesla drivers but the pedestrians and the other cars that have to deal with this unsafe, dangerous behavior.

Watching the live 3d view shown in these videos - it's a very erratic representation of the world around it and should give a pause to anyone that thinks this is "FSD".

This is the same level of expert AI that is being put to use in self driving cars (eg Tesla) and other critical faculty things.

I hope the ethical AI people pursue these foundational issues in these AI ML thingamajiks.

I agree but this new adapted test for cuttlefish is actually pretty smart. They actually zone in on delayed gratification.

That. And the idea that the cuttlefish are perhaps showing their internal state via their changing color patterns and not as a sinajng device. And of course their fairly short lives.

I second this recommendation. I think someone in HN recommended this, very fascinating. My respect and interest for octopuses and surprisingly cuttlefish went way high up after reading this book. Kudos to whoever recommended it!

It feels like we are wasting our time looking for aliens searching for them in the skies (especially the unscientific work around oumuamua).

They are living right beside us in the form of cephalopods. We haven't deployed enough science on these amazing creatures yet (without of course distributing them like putting them in cages), probably because it's not a sexy field as compared to say astronomy or other cool things...

Highly recommend reading the book 'The spy and the traitor' for a similar case where western spy / intelligence failed but somehow managed to save the asset. (Book recommended by Bill Gates)

It's a fascinating read on a long forgotten era, now replaced by hackers sitting in front of computers.

This actually seems quite useful and innovative.

Most of the processing these days involves moving buffers: networking, databases, graphics, and core parts of most OSes would involve a significant amount of slapping buffers together, changing them for which a CPU might not be that efficient for IO bound operations even with DMA or other fancy instructions.

AI/ML buzzword notwithstanding, this is very cool.

I am a bit appalled by the diluting nature of 'tech' in these newfound tech companies. This doesn't sound like a tech company: more like what Quibi did as a media company but thought of itself as a tech company.

At least with Uber and AirBnB you could excuse such tech company label (even though they are mostly legal-oriented companies with a fake tech company air).

You know you are in a bubble when a live audio podcast startup passes for a tech company and has too much hype built around it.

Thank you, I just got hooked to John Coltrane but my view of the jazz world was very limited, glad to see so many new names.

Thank you and others for the suggestions. This is great.

I had previously no idea who he was. Having listened to his music, I now understand how good he is/was and this was a gentle introduction to this genre.

Are there good jazz piano/jazz albums to listen to that people might recommend? (By him or others)

It's great to see someone being able to dictate success on your terms and not by a career ladder imposed on by an imaginary committee.

Importantly she acknowledges that this is not all roses and fun (which makes it a proper job).

So kudos to her for taking a demotion in the minds of career ladderists but in reality this sounds like a great way to managing opportunity costs properly and having fun while getting paid.

This is nonsensical peddling by a techno-crypto bro.

Simple retort: currency is meant to be stable. He points to crypto being a trillion dollar "industry". Isn't that the same with any gambling/poker-like venture?

Edit: removed name calling.