HN user
email: gmr.facebook [at] gmail
meet.hn/city/in-Bengaluru
Blindsight, by Peter Watts, is a good, sci-fi fiction meditation on the pitfalls / dubious value of consciousness / self awareness.. if you haven’t read it, I would recommend it - it’s a dense, perhaps ‘dry’ read for some - but very rewarding nonetheless IMO.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/y19ck8/i_finally_r...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/1fze6sx/blindsight...
Was comparing the remarkable with the kindle scribe and the boox note 5c - and settled on the 5c - though the battery life trade-off is significant (I end up charging once every 3-4 days, with 2-3 hours of daily use - writing and reading) - and I am really happy with the device. Fantastic hand-writing feel, very good on-device hand-writing recognition, and decent to very good integration with google drive, notes export, etc. May be worth considering if you are looking for an colour e-ink device that you can write on (notes, thoughts, journalling), as well as run android play store applications, including the kindle app.
If this can be scaled up, I wonder how useful it would be for use in space for radiative cooling - clearly, you can see I’m thinking of diamond skinned space-craft hulls - how cool is that!
You could perhaps consider looking at some of the class D amps coming out of CN. Remarkable stuff considering the price and power output.
SMSL has some good, well reviewed products; as do WiiM and quite a few other brands.
The Audio Science Review forum (1) has objective measurement based reviews of many of the newer amps, standalone and integrated.
I’m using the SMSL AO300 to drive Boston Acoustics VR3 floor standing speakers in a study, and they’re sound as good as they did when they were on an older Yamaha amp, or a Denon integrated amp.
Edited to add: most (none?) of the class D integrated amps can’t do Dolby -(licensing, I suspect, is the main issue here), so you’ll need to get a receiver in the middle for HTS though.
Edited post edit (sorry!): turns out Wiim streamers can now do 5.1, so some options are slowly emerging. (2)
(1) https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?forums/am...
(2) https://faq.wiimhome.com/en/support/solutions/articles/72000...
From the article:
“Early human studies of ketogenic compounds have improved cognitive scores in patients with mild to moderate AD.”
While it requires behaviour changes (for the diet), this is something that's relatively easy to test & validate, and with a good sample size.
Edit: To elaborate -- getting on a keto diet results in production of ketone bodies; the keto diet is (IMO) hard to adhere to, but not impossible.
And if it is ketone bodies in the brain that are important, iirc, you can supplement the body with exogenous ketones (which the article alludes to, and the authors appear to be planning to test) which could potentially help.
If there's a measurable, significant effect with just consumption of exogenous ketones without even having to enter ketosis via diet- wow!
The books (Battlefield Chronicles as a series) were originally published serially on royal road, where it has quite the following.
There are a lot of excellent authors who self publish, first on Reddit / royal road, and then some of them publish the same work as a book. The promotion channels, including review copies, etc - that a good publisher can facilitate - aren’t often accessible for this cohort. So that’s one big reason why - discovery becomes a challenge.
I echo this. If you liked murderbot, you might also like the Battleship Chronicles series by L. Claire (1), and ofcourse, the Imperial Radh series by Ann Leickie (2), and bobiverse, mentioned below, by Dennis Taylor (3), among others..
(1) https://www.goodreads.com/series/391892-the-battleship-chron...
IIRC, Lisa Su and her team took nearly decade to orchestrate the turn-around at AMD, and they are still a distant second player in GPUs. Expecting Pat Gelsinger to turn around Intel (or any company in an industry with such long development and tech lead times), and replacing him in 3 years - given that he is an engineer with extensive domain and leadership experience - seems - reactive, as opposed to thoughtful and directed.
Wonder if they will approach Lisa Su to take the job now :D
Can you please share some evidence (peer-reviewed scientific research publications / clinical data) supporting this? Curious about the potential mechanisms.
Inflammation is typically experienced when the body is responding to an infection or injury. It is a normal, and as per current understanding, a necessary part of the body's immune response.
The Cleveland clinic has a nice, informative page if you want more information [0]
[edited to add]
The response of the innate immune system to the infectious agent / injury is what causes inflammation - i.e., for instance, fever, swelling, etc. It is a very very complex multi-cascade process, but one of the first responses to an injury, for instance, is the release of signalling molecules that results in localised swelling, slightly elevated temperature (which makes the tissue a little more inhospitable to bacteria / viruses), etc. all of which serve as the front line defense. <This is a severe over-simplification> Wikipedia has a good explanation that goes into the roles and triggers of the inflammatory response. [1]
Acute inflammation in response to infections and injuries is a good thing, and from everything we know, it is a necessary part of the immune response. The challenge is when the same inflammation response is mis-directed to target the body - for instance, in rheumatoid arthritis, and other inflammation related auto-immune disorders.
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/21660-inflamm...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflammation?useskin=vector
I am the founder of an industrial edtech company, with some prior experience in the K12 space.
Your analysis of the market structure and the challenges is consistent with my experience - I'd like to add 2 points though:
1. Building on what you've said about VC-level returns, while edtech (and industrial edtech) may not necessarily be fields where VC funded unicorns can actually form and then survive to profitability, I believe there is sufficient need and space for companies that are investable and can grow into profits / valuations in the 10s /100s of millions - they can follow the startup format, etc.; just not VC investable, as you've noted.
2. In the space of skill development (i.e., adults / professional learning), I would like to add that for many skills, as industries get more sophisticated (I am taking of manufacturing, automotive, energy, oil & gas, infrastructure, petrochemicals, infrastructure), there is value for the company in upskilling their staff - simply because that does directly convert to profitability if done well; and at least puts a floor on issues that poor or absent training may cause - like safety, quality, etc. So even if it is a cost, it is a cost that can directly affect their topline / bottomline, and I believe there is an opportunity here.
/off soapbox
The submission was flagged, and I am not sure I understand why since the only (negatively) critical discussion I see is on the ambiguity over the title in the HN submission; flagging a submission appears to take it off the HN homepage, and I feel a title ambiguity in the face of the significance of the submission itself isn’t a strong reason for removing the submission from HN? :)
There are (at the time of posting this comment) no comments raising any substantive issue with the arxiv submission itself (which ofc has to go through the peer review process of publication, and hopefully the original authors will respond / rebut this new article) - so curious why its been flagged? It’s not dead, so cannot vouch for it.
If folks in the HN community who have flagged it have done so because there are serious issues with what the paper is asserting, please comment / critique instead of just flagging it. If it’s because of the ambiguity in the title, I hope @dang and the moderators editorialize - there are some valuable comments in this thread that helped me understand what the issue is and what the bug is!
In mice;
and there are some anatomical differences between mice and humans..
So its open at this point whether it is relevant directly to humans.
IIRC, mice do not get Alzheimer’s, for instance. There are mouse models (genetically engineered)that exhibit some of the physiological symptoms of Alzheimer’s; but mice make particularly poor models for human neurology [1]- so this reach for using these essentially biomechanical structures to identify parallels and try to target a cure for neuro-degerative disorders in humans: seems more like a grant application attempt. I do wish press releases were a little more circumspect about such claims.
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2019/04/16/trouble-mice-behavioral-...
Gesture recognition using the onboard gyroscope and accelerometer (I think - it was 2 years ago!), and it took me some part of an afternoon.
I also used these two resources (the book was definitely useful; less sure if the arduino link the the same one I referred to then), which I found to be useful:
[1] https://docs.arduino.cc/tutorials/nano-33-ble-sense/get-star...
[2] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/tinyml/9781492052036/
I tried your platform for some experiments using an arduino and it was a breeze, and an absolute treat to work with.
The platform documentation and support is excellent.
Thank you for developing it and offering it, along with documentation, to enable folks like me (who are not coders, but understand some coding) to test and explore :)
Some questions, if you are still around to answer, because this is exciting!
1) Have you read about Vannevar Bush, and what he has written, and his body of work?! :)
2) What sort of people are you looking for / to work with?
3) Would it need to be full-time? Are you looking to hire people full time (the generalists you mention), or are you comfortable working with people who are happy not cashing a cheque from you because they have jobs and other commitments / priorities, but still believe in what you are building and would like to invest significant time in supporting / driving the mission forward for some limited (or no) financial compensation? Because I’d like to check if I fit! :)
(I’ve also spammed you on twitter with a dm, but with more personal details, etc.)
Thank you!
... On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” We were there in the courtroom for his explanation. ...
Perhaps because the peer-reviewed paper was published only recently (23rd Nov) - while not a perfect system (see the recent issues with the retraction of the super-conductivity paper by Nature), I think it not a bad thing that journalists are covering such reports once they have undergone the peer-review process - however flawed it may be, and not just based on the university or research group published press-release announcing the results before the peer-review process is complete.
At some level, I think this is orthogonal to technological progress.
One possible way of getting at this is to ask if people were more ‘happy’ when there wasn’t this level of tech available - and I’m not sure the answer is yes - I mean, there’s the mythos of ‘a simple life’ and ‘noble savages’, but from what I’ve read of life even a 100 years back - I would surmise folks were as unhappy / miserable then too - but likely for different reasons.
I think expecting just tech to make us happy is framing the wrong problem space.
Cannot access the article, but I am not sure these ones can yet access the energies needed for LHC levels of collisions/ resolution.
IIRC, from earlier reports and articles, this will be more useful for biology and chemistry, and perhaps not necessarily for the kind of experimental physics being performed at the LHC.
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The defendants are Welsh Carson, a New York-based buyout group, and US Anesthesia Partners, a business it created in 2012 that has acquired more than a dozen anaesthesiology practices in Texas. The FTC alleged they carried out a “roll-up scheme, systematically buying up nearly every large anaesthesia practice in [the state] to create a single dominant provider with the power to demand higher prices”.
Its a bit surprising to see a journal like nature effectively whine about replication efforts falling short in what’s likely a very temperamental, context / environment influenced synthesis process of a new composition. Its not going to work immediately.
Even if it is a real breakthrough, material synthesis of a new material in any lab, and doing so reproducibly, is tricky enough that I am absolutely not going to infer / conclude from, or pass any comment on any replication efforts this early into the process. Its going to be an iterative process - which means one has to start somewhere.
Some of the quoted folks come across (to me) as just peevish.
Derek Lowe [0] has a far more balanced take on it, IMO.
His article was discussed on HN a few days ago [1].
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-s...
I mean- not really? They have developed / synthesized the material, and they collaborated with another lab that had the skills and equipment to conduct and interpret specific experimental techniques and results.
Fairly common, especially in life sciences, and I suspect chemistry and materials science.
Added in edit: This doesn’t make the result any more or less credible; for that, the true test is independent replication of both the synthesis as well as the experimental measurements. But the fact that the two authors published two papers with different groups is orthogonal to whether the result is real / an experimental error / fraud. I so hope its true - but..lets wait for replication and validation by other qualified experts :)
Stellar lifecycle models are based on a combination of theoretical physics, experimental physics results that set bounds on (in a way) the theoretical predictions, and mathematical modeling - all of which is also validated through observational physics of stars that are, actually, at the red giant stage, and sampling stars at the intermediary stages - based on actual observations.
Armed with all of this data, and working on an assumption that current ‘laws’ of physics will continue to apply in the future, scientists can make reasonably confident predictions.
Similar approach, though admittedly with far less mathematical modeling, is also the case in biology. Even textbooks and scientific resources have to assume, at some point, that we start with a framework of axioms.
But most science textbooks also first introduce the idea of models, hypothesis and the notion that a ‘law’, is only as good as the most recent experiment that supports it - and that the scientific method requires us to discard or amend the ‘law’ if new evidence contradicts its predictions. To keep repeating this foundational idea every step of the way seems tedious - it’s reasonable to treat gravity on earth as a fact in the face of overwhelming observational evidence, for instance.
I don’t see how any of this reflects hubris and unwillingness to admit what we don’t know.
For instance, as an (ex-)biologist, I completely agree we do not have a good model for consciousness; or that we simply don’t have a solid functional model of a cell that allows us to model and predict its behaviour at detail and with all its complexity - we are still, in fact, discovering layers of complexity and nuance. But there are some things we do understand well.
Same in physics - the search for a Grand Unifiying Theory continues. ‘Dark matter’, as I understand it, is an acknowledged proxy for many things we don’t yet understand.
So..not sure I agree with your position :)
'Proxima Fusion, incorporated in January, aims to build a complex device known as a stellarator and is the latest company to join the emerging fusion industry’s effort to generate electricity by fusing atoms.
Although the amount of funding is small at only €7mn, it is significant as Proxima is the first fusion company to spin out of Germany’s revered Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics.' [0]
Joins a few other stellerator-based fusion startups.. what an exciting time..
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/c777f0db-1a4b-4ced-b02a-c27178032... (same link as the title I submitted)
Thank you!
/off topic
Have you documented & written about your microscope experiments (both building them and the experiments themselves) on the web?
If you have, and are comfortable, can you please share the link?
Just curious. Ex-biologist, and among other things, I helped build / assemble an optical trap and other equipment including confocal / TIRF microscopes about a decade+ ago, so curious what a serious (amateur) student with time, passion and resources is able to do.
Thank you :)
From [0] ‘ This is a binding agreement that has financial penalties if we can’t build a fusion system,” Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley tells The Verge. “We’ve committed to be able to build a system and sell it commercially to [Microsoft].”
Assuming the financial penalties are a significant fraction (i.e they are, say, greater than 5%) of the agreement value, I would interpret it as a more serious / confident commitment and expression of intent and viability, than just a contract that’s hope + way to support.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclea...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/room-temperature-sup...
Good article that contextualises the results and concerns about the lab that published these results.
Radio and television, I think. They were a medium for non-literates to also participate in learning and exploration, in a way they couldn’t if the only way to do so was through reading.