possiblydrunk

Dammit! I was hoping for advice on improving and maintaining my backyard shed. My shed is not a means, it is an end. And it, too, brings me peace and joy and sometimes despair or a great laugh. Sometimes I even apply principles from work (but orthogonally) to development of my shed.

Nitpicky comment. The article says > "We call this the “light and shade” of AI: the same capabilities that lead to > benefits also produce harms. The two sides are entangled."

Why not call it a "double-edged sword" or something else? Light and shade are opposites but not necessarily two products from the same tool. It just irks me.

Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.

Fair assessment, but you seem to love "creating" rather than "programming", not that there's anything wrong with that! Pondering the merits of AI has made me realize the opposite -- I love the process and challenge of creating (the programming) even more than the final product. AI is undoubtedly helpful, but when it solves my problem for me I'm not nearly as satisfied? as if I'd solved it myself. It's like copy-pasting an answer from StackOverflow, but for a whole program. I doubt my employer will share my feelings, and I'll have to use increasingly more AI to keep up the productivity.

Optimization usually trades complexity for speed. Complexity hinders debugging and maintenance. Don't optimize unless you have to and not before you know where the bottleneck is. Straightforward common sense advice as long as hardware is not persistently constraining.

Inevitability implies determinism and assumes complete knowledge. Forecasts of inevitable things are high probability guesses based on the knowledge at hand. Their accuracy is low and becomes lower as the level of detail increases. The plethora of wrong guesses get less attention or are forgotten and right ones are celebrated and immortalized after the fact.

It's like a protocol handshake, of course. Why transmit information until you've established that the connection works? Consider it a text modem :)

I had the privilege of designing a small 4 office space exactly like this for our small bioinformatics developer core. It was beautiful and worked very well. Then the company's legal department decided Legal would benefit more from it and kicked us out. It goes back to how much a company values its developers.

So when Google Glass came out, people using them were "Glassholes" because of the ability to record surreptitiously, albeit for a very short period. And there was no mistaking Glass. Meta's look normal and I doubt the LED indicator will draw enough attention this time around. Plus as others have noted, by the time you notice it's already too late and anyway the onus is on you to ask the wearer to stop. And this is worse, as it streams directly to social media. There should be some (legal) way to jam these devices within a certain proximity radius.

The best we can do is infer. We can't even know for sure what goes on in others of our own species -- we either accept what they say or infer what they might be experiencing based on our own experiences and the fact we're so similar. The further we get away from things "like us", communication falls away as does inferring based on similarity. I mean, how do you know that we even experience/"see" the same color when we both see something orange -- we agree on calling whatever we see as "orange"; but is my "orange" the same as yours? Consciousness is fascinating!

Cosmicomics is excellent. A beautiful blend of science and fantasy. So poetic.

I look stupid, but wearing blue-blocking yellow lens glasses while driving at night has helped deal with the blinding glare.

Engaging in activities you feel you have control over, in general, will make you happier.

Wow, that's like banning a photorealist because their work looks too much like a photograph.

All things end. The trick is knowing when to move on to the next thing -- quitting when things are bad, but also cashing out when things are good. Don't get stuck in the well.

I know it's frowned upon these days (perversely, in my view), but wow what resilience. @wakana should realize the value of that and how powerful that can be in the next endeavor. Maybe battered and bruised, but survived! In this case, maybe it was the wrong matchup - entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, or [bad] luck. Biggest mistake made was maybe hanging on too long -- resilience can be double-edged, too.

A key point in the article:

"...Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

Hard work increases the likelihood of luck finding you, and hard work also prepares you for when it does.

You can't reliably produce luck, even by imitating people that are "lucky"; all you can do is increase the likelihood that you might capitalize on luck.

It's easy to confuse politeness with friendship if that's what you're seeking. It's a sad story, to me.

It's the recognition of perceived merit based on effort. If you believe the human artist did nothing more than you could have done yourself with your current skills, it's natural to devalue the work. Sometimes that effort is intellectual, sometimes it's just brute force, and most often it's reflective of years of training and honing of skills that might be commonplace. At some point you might value the artwork, but not the human artist because you don't think much effort was expended to achieve that work.

In this case the article says:

  "Allen created Théâtre D’opéra Spatial by entering various words and phrases 
  into Midjourney, which then produced more than 900 renderings for him to 
  choose from. He selected his three favorites, then continued adjusting them 
  in Photoshop until he was satisfied. He boosted their resolution using a tool
  called Gigapixel and printed the works on canvas."

Indeed. Very invasive! Spreads via roots (in addition to seeds) and is very adaptable and drought resistant. Looks pretty and has medicinal value, but beware if you mean to keep it confined.

Genomics was a pretty good place for software engineers that have an interest in molecular biology; however, the pay is not generally comparable with that earned in a tech industry job. Interesting (to me) is that the software engineers that I've worked with in genomics-oriented labs treat biologists and biological data as the gold standard, while the biologists in those labs are fairly reverential towards the software engineers and computational results! Of course, both are overly optimistic ... Unfortunately, the best software engineers I worked with eventually jumped to software startups or tech industry jobs.

From personal experience, one of the most frustrating things about the ICU (if you're there for any anything beyond a day) is dealing with the variability in the availability, skills, and temperaments of the nurses on duty. The 'right' nurse can make a huge difference in how fast the patient recovers and how difficult the stay is.

The picture is from the library's electronics room which has cool gear such as laser cutter, 3D printer, and much more.

Amazing! I've never seen anything comparable in a U.S. library. What a wonderful resource. How do they maintain it?

Yes!

  When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
  "Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya"
  At seven PM, a main hatchway caved in, he said
  "Fellas, it's been good to know ya"

It's a pity that governments have deemed 'interesting' chemistry an illegitimate hobby. Many chemists and biologists I know were inspired as kids by potentially risky chemical reactions - they were fun :). My boss grew up in the UK, relished those experiments growing up, and said they led him to eventually complete a PhD in chemistry. He later went on to win a Nobel Prize (as a molecular biologist, though). Maybe we've made the world safer, but I wonder how many potential great chemists will never get inspired and avoid the field.

Dr. Who - In the forest of the Night (12th Doctor) [1]

1. https://www.tor.com/2014/10/26/doctor-who-in-the-forest-of-t...

Off topic, maybe. What does it mean to have learned to program? Does a trivial program qualify? Anyone could in theory do that. A paying job? Does quality matter? I can (and often do) write crappy code. So, technically I can program. But have I really learned to program?

That's beautiful. Forgive my ignorance -- what's that from?

Oh man, if only we could see the deep sky like the cameras do (with long exposures/filters/etc). Space looks so underwhelming in comparison with plain human eyesight -- though it's still cool to see the stars from a dark site. Andromeda is a tiny fuzzy smudge in our eyes.

Effectively, you are posing a litmus test on whether someone can reasonably comment on an issue that involves virology. I think that's unfair and completely unnecessary. You don't really know anything about my background, so why are you making assumptions? I happen to have more than enough experience and knowledge in the area to make a comment. I'm not peer reviewing the work, I'm commenting on a line of argument espoused by Derek Lowe.

Derek Lowe chose to focus on defining GOF in a rather narrow way - one that can only be applied retroactively if the outcome is critical to the definition -- and uses that definition to say that criticism of the BU experiments is overblown. The general fear around experiments involving ePPP doesn't care about the exact definition of GOF. Just saying that it doesn't qualify as GOF is not going to convince people that fear it. Derek Lowe should have focused more on the points you raise in your last paragraph.

The Omicron spike is already out there. Omicron is already out there. This isn't adding anything to SARS-CoV-2 that isn't already massively spreading in the real world, and there's no particular reason to think that this experiment will create a more deadly or transmissible virus.

Nobody intends to create a more dangerous virus on purpose. But if the outcome were so fully understood and completely predictable, then it's a waste of time and money doing the experiment just to confirm a conclusion that everyone fully agrees on and understands. And if there's little to no risk, why take precautions? Why use BSL3? Why does NIAID feel it should have been alerted? That's what Derk Lowe should have addressed, not a definition!

OK, I'll take the bait ... It's better to attack the argument than to attack the poster. I shouldn't have to defend my credentials to make a comment. I'm not a virologist but I understand how viruses can be mutated and how they replicate. I understand the basics of the BU experiments. Knowledge of a specific set of experiments that were part of developing a specific vaccine does not equate to knowledge of the basics of virology.

My point is that claiming the BU experiments on ePPP were not GOF because they didn't produce a more deadly pathogen is a somewhat nonsensical definition (whether NIAID promotes it or not) and an ineffective defense of the work. Derek Lowe can do much better, but he didn't. In the process, he misses addressing the real concerns of critics and fails to understand or acknowledge their fears (which have nothing to do with the precise definition of GOF as used by Derek Lowe).