HN user
It's cheaper than many other additives.
Graphene flakes are all that is needed for concrete reinforcement, and it's trivial to produce, even at scale. Carbon chunks are thrown into industrial blenders with water and detergent, resulting in graphene flakes sheared and then separated in suspension. The flakes are separated, washed, and dried.
Large graphene sheets are hard. Tiny flakes are trivial, gradeschool kitchen science.
This is where you might use a variation of that "healing cracks" bacteria in conjunction with the "eats plastic" bacteria. If you could get the plastic digesting bacteria to excrete rigid oxides, then most of the plastic would be replaced with an interlocking 3d mesh of concrete and rock-like bacteria waste.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09500...
It'd eliminate the plastic waste and leave much more environmentally friendly remains, and it'd be self healing.
This is one of note thousands of videos of cats and dogs using buttons to talk.
Cats, and all mammals, have a neocortex. Theirs is not as deeply layered or large as humans, but they most definitely have the ability to reason abstractly, are aware of themselves, think emotionally, and engage in complex, time aware planning over long periods.
Your views are wrong. Language areas like Broca's region in the human brain are a consequence of physical distribution relative to the connectome and sensory endpoints. If you were to rewire the millions of connections to the lips, tongue, mouth, ears, and other body parts to be locations on the neocortex, broca's region would be somewhere different. You have about 1 square meter of neocortex responsible for all of your perception and cognition, and almost all of it is uniform. Neurons aren't differentiated by function, and animal experiments show that plasticity allows for arbitrary rewiring.
The literature in the field shows that human cognition is likely superior to other species in the depth of cortical layering and size of the organ. It's likely the only reason elephants and whales or other animals with larger brains can't compete with humans is the mere absence of hands and vocal organs. Our range of colors and audible senses are important but lesser than many animals.
Give an orca hands and human speech and there's nothing we know about neuroscience to imply that the animal wouldn't be smarter and more capable than humans. There's a lot of evidence that the killer whale would be more intelligent than humans in many ways.
The cortical layering and columnar architecture of neuron clusters differs between species, and seems to dictate the cognitive depth of abstract reasoning. There may be different algorithmic constructions in neural connections that favor human level cognition.
In principle, however, human brains aren't terribly different from many other large mammals, and elephants certainly display complex, emotional, symbolic, and abstract reasoning well within a range comparable to human experience.
Your notion of animal cognition is unscientific and biased toward an assumption of human superiority that isn't grounded in fact. Neuroscience is slowly and tirelessly matching toward reverse engineering the brain. The more we learn, the more we find similarity in the basic functions of mammal brains, from mice to humans to blue whales.
Was. They've sold out to the ad churn, laying off journalists, and some genius middle management is steering the company toward profits over quality journalism.
They're a dead outlet, unless they restructure their management to preserve journalistic integrity. That's expensive and they seem more interested in cashing out their reputation.
Yeah. It might as well be in flash.
Advertising incentivizes lying. The best presentation wins, in this current ad market.
Metrics that track good faith interactions are needed, like eBay reputation - if someone isn't 98% or higher, they're going to be overlooked or bypassed in favor of someone with a higher score.
Product reviews and ratings get gamed, because current systems don't reward good faith transactions - Amazon and Google customers purchase attention and shuffle facts around top maximize purchases. If quality reviews and curation were incentivized, there would be a thriving class of reviewers and experts playing a role in the marketplace. Their absence is glaring, and the horde of product influencers and professional reviewers underscore the deep corruption of adtech. Those people leech money from the market by selling the ability to lie. The lies are sanctioned by adtech firms, and often laundered through otherwise reliable data sources.
Any legitimate attempt to compete threatens the entire adtech ecosystem, so a majority of all consumer marketplaces are incentivized to cultivate the corruption and prevent any changes or reform that threaten the sanctified lies.
Things like Angie's List and product review vlogs and expert podcasts are stuck within the system, regardless of their intent or functionality when they start. They eventually converge into niches that support the system as a whole. Even reddit, requiring individual human dialog and interaction, has been infested by professional reviewers shilling crappy products.
You can't trust the data sources because trustworthy sources are incompatible with adtech. Google has sufficient data to fix it, but they'd lose money by allowing reform, so they maintain the ethically gray areas ferociously. Their business is not quality search, it's maximizing advertising profits, and it's more profitable to have 50 people paying a premium for scraps than 5 high quality vendors with vetted products earning those spots through quality and service.
The system is working as intended.
They shouldn't be doing stupid things like hosting anything important on Facebook.
I have zero sympathy for Australia's inability to elect competent government.
They signed up for free services like every other chump on the planet, with the same terms of service, with the same naive, zero-fucks-given attitude toward privacy, service continuity, or responsibility, and it bit them in the ass while highlighting their stupidity. This story is going to get repeated over and over until western governments catch up to social media.
Steelmanning is your own good faith attempt to understand the opposing argument so well that you can articulate it as coherently as your own position.
If you're simply repeating what the other person said, you're not using the concept to full effect.
If you're framing your own argument as a strawman instead of clarifying the opposing argument, you've missed the plot entirely (unless your opponent is arguing for the use of strawmen in debate?)
The utility of steelmanning is to minimize assumptions. Everyone has to demonstrate their comprehension. You can take it further and in order to 'pass' the steelman stage, you have to agree with your opponent's steelman argument, or have a dialog to refine it until you're satisfied that both of you understand your argument.
A cluster of many $8000+ gpus. You're looking at around 350GB of vram, so 30 12gb gpus - a 3090 will cost around $1800, so $54k on the gpus, probably another $15k in power, cooling, and infrastructure, $5k in network, and probably another $20k in other costs to bootstrap it.
Or wait 10 years, if gpu capacity scales with Moore's law, consumer hardware should be able to run a ~400GB model locally.
The smaller models, yes. I'd bet dollars to donuts that gpt-neo and EleutherAI models outperform most, if not all, of Facebook's.
Check out huggingface, you'll be able to run a 2.7b model or smaller.
Web scraping is legal. Reddit users, like all other members of public forums, put their comments on the internet for the whole world to see. And collect, parse, process and manipulate. If you don't want the whole world to have access to your writing, you'd have to join a private forum.
Trying to shoehorn social media posts into some contorted post-hoc bastardization of the concept of privacy is ridiculous.
Shockingly, things that people post to publicly accessible websites are accessible by the public. We're starting to see social damage from this, with facial recognition and authoritarian governments using people's posts for tracking and oppression.
Decentralized services with strong legislation protecting personal data, and globally recognized content licensing will all be needed to prevent future abuse, but everyone currently in the planet over the age of 20 is more or less personally responsible for the massive and naive oversharing. We know better now, but 15+ years ago nobody except Sci-fi authors and fringe activists had a grasp of how badly unprotected globally shared streams of consciousness could go wrong.
Well done! This is a beautiful tribute.
Every argument for death strikes me as silly. If anything, functional immortality would incentivize people to be better. Your want relationships to be stable and mutually respectful at a minimum. Marriages would be somewhat hard to maintain - if you were in good health, mid 20s body, and expected to live centuries in that state, lifelong commitments achieve that "quantity is sometimes a quality all its own" effect.
We'll need a different scale of maturity, too - an 18 year old adult in a relationship with a 300 year old adult makes the term "adult" ridiculously ineffective in describing anything meaningful.
Age and death and maturity tie in to almost every aspect of life and culture and human experience. We don't have the cultural tools and concepts that allow for immortality to fit. If it's achieved, the world radically changes and we won't know what those changes will be until it happens. It'd be like tasking Edison with predicting how the internet would change life, or cell phones, or asking Julius Caesar to write about how the germ theory of disease might improve the human condition. We're smart enough to predict small parts of it, but there's a whole world of ideas and behaviors that get unleashed by immortality, and a non-trivial percentage of them are probably counterproductive with regards to humanity at large (immortal Putin, anyone?)
Your assertion depends on his evening meal being deleterious.
https://naturallystrong.me/david-sinclair/
He's got an excellent diet. He's also got very solid reasoning behind metformin supplementation, having done years of research and investigation. He's a smart and respectable guy, operating in good faith with his research, so if you find yourself disagreeing with him over something trivial, it's unlikely you're right and he's wrong.
Implying that metformin is useful only to mitigate hypothetical harms from nutrition (a trivial dispute) is probably wrong.
Across various interviews, he's recommended metformin for exactly the mitochondrial effects you're talking about. He doesn't supplement on workout days to prevent disruption of the healing and recovery. Metformin isn't something that anyone should start taking blindly or blithely, as it can amplify damage from other circumstances, but it's got a clear place in Sinclair's regimen for very good reasons.
Metformin's longevity effects work on a lot of species. It's got solid science recommending it for life extension, like the other things Sinclair uses, but unless you're a doctor, or work with one to create a comprehensive life extension, health, nutrition, and fitness plan, metformin probably isn't a great idea. Sinclair is doing something similar to juggling chainsaws - it's really cool that he can do that, but it's dangerous for amateurs. Too many unknowable factors can blow up in your face.
Then again, maybe it'll be part of a standard regimen in the next decade, and the immortals are living among us.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt1_2_3_2_1...
Here's some good context for what the limitations look like in practice.
Well, god wants you to wear a hat. https://youtu.be/vudEvu1yUiM
Man, i think they'd want stuff like: How to create a budget. What does a 401k do for you. How to plan for retirement. How to do your taxes. Balancing a checkbook. Psychology of debt versus paying in cash. How to save money. Nutrition planning under constraints - feeding yourself or your family cost effectively without eating garbage food or wasting money.
Don't get me wrong, intermediate economics topics are useful and valuable, but I think people are overestimating the level of basic knowledge young people have by a huge margin. It might be good to culminate in a crash course in investment banking and hedge fund management, but let's make sure we have a rock solid foundation of practical personal economics that empowers people to take advantage of any level of income, even chintzy $9/hr teenage summer jobs.
Also, workers rights and financial security of identity - cover basic workers rights, unionization rules, benefits, drawbacks, when you need a lawyer, where to report employer misconduct, small claims court, identity security and credit bureaus, credit freezes, and so on.
These are entirely artistic/ceremonial objects. Someone found a dried out pufferfish and then realized they could make a badass looking hat out of it, they did, and the meme stuck. insert quasi-religious cultural narrative here after it's passed down a few generations.
If we're doing something stupid, the correct course of action is to stop doing the stupid thing, not to refine the stupidity. Software patents are stupid.
This leads to the notion of being taxed for having a brain.
Software patents shouldn't exist. The concept is patently absurd.
I bet they'd send marines to recover him and his family if he asked. They'd get disappeared to a US black site and lost to history, but barring that, he's pretty much fenced in. The fog of war and chaos might provide him an opportunity to escape to Europe, and from there to Africa and maybe South America. Whatever regime replaces Putin might end up being friendly to the US and give up Snowden as a gesture. I don't envy Snowden's choices.
It could be his last opportunity to escape to someplace where he can raise his kid in peace.
And it's possible to acquire the equivalent of a PhD through the vast wealth of information and literal college courses online. Degrees don't mean what they used to.
The dilution of quality caused by profit based perverse incentives, the cultural issues grounded in grievance studies, and the enormous wealth of high quality material and alternatives to formal education have radically changed what academia means to society going forward.
Gatekeeping for profit and not discriminating between the value of a degree in mathematics and a degree in underwater basket weaving, eliminating political, ideological, and epistemic diversity have resulted in a world where degrees increasingly mean you simply paid money to exist in the presence of other folks with paper over a sufficient length of time that all parties involved felt satisfied with the kabuki show.
Accreditation through a legitimate culture of intellectual peers in which institutional academia has earned the respect and dedication of its members approaches the ideal case. Few, if any, American institutions pass muster. They're not without value, and some departments are world class, but they exist in relation to near total institutional failure, and they are infecting the rest of the world.
Academic journals, outdated pedagogy, DIE gatekeeping, woke babysitting and infantilized students are just the most obvious rot.
American academia has a lot of soul searching and hard work to do, or it's going to be displaced by something better that serves the need for legitimate accreditation in society. I personally don't want that to be private corporations, and I'm rooting for the professors and alumni who want to preserve the integrity of their institutions.
Nina Jankowicz is well known for being among the first and most vocal people involved in the Hunter Biden laptop story, reinforcing the DNC narrative that it was Russian disinformation.
This woman is a political hack and not a good faith operator. Now she leads the ministry of truth. Doubleplusgood, comrades!
Yeah, Edward Snowden was foiled by the Russian state firewall.
I think it's likely he had the epiphany that he'd be a pointed lesson in not mouthing off about Putin while you're exiled in Russia, especially with his wife and kid there.
Run out of the village, into the forest, to fend against actual wolves, preferably.
Some perspectives still hold that degrees are critical, but unless it's from less than a handful of the top programs in a field, the degree is barely worth the paper it's printed on. Degrees are useful to get into corporate work, but having industry experience, a competent body of work, recognition from your peers, and a demonstrated work ethic can get you into almost any type of job at a competitive rate of pay.
In some cases, degrees can be harmful by elevating incompetent, ignorant, entitled graduates to positions they shouldn't have, particularly in middle management. Getting a degree is not paying your dues or putting in time toward something useful. It can be, but it depends on the individual, so degrees fail as a shibboleth for utility.
A lot of the signal is going to be identical, so a hierarchical distribution with in-place modification based on location would be better than calculating the modification of the sound and sending to thousands of channels.
No offense intended, but it's "exclamation mark" - it's a common mistake.
This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale.
We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood education and standard parenting.
Our genetics are the same, but our quality of life is radically better, and that allows us greater potential.
Demonstrate its use as such. Extraordinary claims, etc.
The level of scrutiny on SpaceX is incredible, and rightly so. Any unethical conduct or illegal money shuffling would be caught out quickly.