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ve55

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I leave a bunch of comments on HN about diverse topics.

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near.blog 2y ago

LLMs are strangely-shaped tools

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3pts0
www.fda.gov 2y ago

Arizona Company Pleads Guilty for Distribution of phenibut, racetams, adrafinil

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arstechnica.com 3y ago

With Koe Recast, you can change your voice as easily as your clothing

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www.bloomberg.com 4y ago

Will Elon Musk Buy More Twitter?

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www.lesswrong.com 4y ago

It Looks Like You're Trying to Take over the World

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www.asml.com 4y ago

European Chips Act – ASML position paper

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www.cloudflare.com 4y ago

Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Financial Results

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en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Grid Cell

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qualiacomputing.com 4y ago

Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain

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www.pnas.org 4y ago

Blood sugar level follows perceived time rather than actual time in diabetics

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finance.yahoo.com 4y ago

Cloudflare Announces Third Quarter 2021 Financial Results

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en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Timeline of the Far Future

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en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Morphogenetic Field

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engineering.fb.com 4y ago

Update about the October 4th outage

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en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Movile Cave

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en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Vault (Organelle)

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en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Timeline of Senescence Research

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en.wikipedia.org 5y ago

774–775 carbon-14 spike

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biogerontolgy.blogspot.com 5y ago

Roughly a Decade of Progress in Biogerontology

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pair-code.github.io 5y ago

Understanding Dimensionality Reduction with UMAP

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pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 5y ago

Sodium rutin extends lifespan and health span in mice by 10%

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www.ee.columbia.edu 5y ago

Shazam: An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm (2003) [pdf]

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ai.facebook.com 5y ago

AI names colors much as humans do

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fantasticanachronism.com 5y ago

The Two Paths to the Future

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vitalik.ca 5y ago

The Most Important Scarce Resource Is Legitimacy

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arxiv.org 5y ago

OmniNet: Omnidirectional Representations from Transformers

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en.wikipedia.org 5y ago

Reversible Computing

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en.wikipedia.org 5y ago

Anscombe's Quartet

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en.wikipedia.org 5y ago

Turing Pattern

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cloudflare.net 5y ago

Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

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Personality Basins 2 years ago

This is noted and considered out of scope: >Obviously some traits are more genetic, and thus inherent, than others, but that is not the scope of this post as even highly-heritable traits will result in a large distribution of outcomes.

Personality Basins 2 years ago

This is noted and considered out of scope: >Obviously some traits are more genetic, and thus inherent, than others, but that is not the scope of this post as even highly-heritable traits will result in a large distribution of outcomes.

How do they expect to lead in identifying fake content when the problem is intractable if adversaries are even somewhat competent?

You can collect heuristics which may work here and there to stay ahead in this cat and mouse game, but when adversaries use AI models properly, there is no way to differentiate.

I have been taking rapamycin for many years now. It's obviously not ready for anywhere near the general public and is never something I'd suggest to someone at this point, but my own results have been wonderful and my blood panels and energy levels are great. If I had to guess, when properly used, this would probably add a full 5-10 years onto the lifespan of a lot of people. When combined with many other promising treatments, I think we could easily add 10-15 years onto most peoples' health+lifespans.

Links to related projects in anime art generation for those interested:

Waifu Labs v2, referenced in this post (generate amazing custom anime face images): https://waifulabs.com (write-up is the above link: https://waifulabs.com/blog/ai-creativity)

This Anime Does Not Exist (AI-generated anime-style artwork): https://thisanimedoesnotexist.ai (write-up https://www.gwern.net/Faces#extended-stylegan2-danbooru2019-... and https://nearcyan.com/this-anime-does-not-exist)

This Waifu Does Not Exist (AI-generated anime-style faces): https://thiswaifudoesnotexist.net (write-up: https://www.gwern.net/Faces#twdne)

There's also a lot of literate on e.g. automatic manga coloration, auto-translation, image superresolution, anime frame interpolation, and much more. Worth checking out some places like https://old.reddit.com/r/AnimeResearch/ if you're interested!

Koe AI | Machine learning/Audio Engineer | Remote / Austin | Full or Part Time | https://koe.ai/ (full website coming soon)

We are currently a team of one person (me!) working on releasing consumer products that perform real-time voice and singing conversion using machine learning (converting the sound and timbre of voices, generally, but other things as well). Although we haven't shipped our initial version yet, the workload is getting to be a bit too much for me to handle everything on my own, and I'm looking for someone with great passion for this specific mission and some strong engineering ability in machine learning and audio to help make some really exciting products (please only reach out if you have strong machine learning experience!). If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out via email to 'hi' at the above .ai domain with some information about yourself and your CV!

We have better technology (and thus immersion) now. It's a simple answer, but I think largely sufficient enough to explain why things may be quite different now.

The immersiveness that can be attained via modern high-end VR systems is simply not comparable to what we had a decade ago; it enables many more use cases and paradigms that wouldn't have felt usable, interesting, fun, or sometimes even particularly social in the past. To me at least, VR/AR seem like a pretty large medium shift, and I really expect them to stick around and become a large part of society.

Moved to Austin this year myself, I think it's a great choice for everything you've listed (although the cost is getting up there, but still affordable in many areas!). I'm definitely not planning on leaving anytime soon with how nice it's been.

Koe AI | Machine learning+sound engineer | Remote / Austin | Full-time | https://koe.ai/ (full website coming soon)

We are currently a team of one person (me!) working on releasing consumer products that perform real-time voice and singing conversion using machine learning (converting the sound and timbre of voices, generally, but other things as well). Although we haven't shipped our initial version yet, the workload is getting to be a bit too much for me to handle everything on my own, and I'm looking for someone with great passion for this specific mission and some strong engineering ability in machine learning and audio to help make some really exciting products. If this sounds interesting to you, please reach out via email to 'hi' at the above .ai domain with some information about yourself and your CV!

Alright, things that are not work:

- I finally decided to buy a VR headset (Valve Index), and have been absolutely thrilled with it. I am very into Beatsaber currently, and I was also very happy to find out that this all works on linux pretty well, so I don't even need a Windows desktop (in fact, all four VR games I have tried so far worked out of the box with Steam proton, thanks Valve!). It's also helping a lot with exercise habits, and I'm burning an average of ~450 calories a day from it currently and have nothing but good things to say about it (mods and custom songs also work on Linux too!).

- I've been spending more time casually working on improving my diet and researching longevity drugs and other supplements. The best summary of some of the (mostly boring, but a few exciting) things that I take I wrote up on https://nearcyan.com/supplements. Having quantified metrics for my own health really increases my motivation to improve things, and there's nothing better you can enjoy than improving your own health.

- I've also been into cooking a bit more (seems like there's a bit of a theme to these points hmm). It was interesting when I realized that not only could I learn to (often trivially!) replicate any of my favorite dishes from almost any restaurant, but I could also easily improve them with respect to my own tastes, and sometimes my own health (for example, replacing sugar with allulose, which is wonderful if you haven't heard of it - tastes very similar, almost zero calories, and doesn't increase (or even decreases!) blood sugar.

This thread feels pretty laid back, I enjoy reading what people here choose to do with their own leisure time, especially when their motive isn't profit (which although is nice, it's almost too common of a theme on HN sometimes).

Just responding to say that I'm down to meet up with anyone in Austin, check out my profile/website to see if you may be interested!

This sounds like it could provide a lot of value to many users, would love to see something like this! I had a service once that I tried to get a few people to use for this purpose, but having a lightweight one on the website itself would definitely be the best option imo.

Would like to add a few things to these tweets myself:

- It's moderately well-accepted that fasting for short periods such as 8-23 hours in humans is not at all metabolically equivalent to fasting for longer periods such as 1-7+ days in humans. I'd personally believe you could get some interesting (potentially beneficial!) effects by fasting for a week here and there due to mTOR, but we're obviously lacking the level of evidence we'd want to confidently make this claim. Regardless, intermittent fasting can help in other areas, so it doesn't mean it is useless.

- As is always the case, there's some other studies to consider: for example this one a few days ago that showed (in mice!) that fasting periods specifically were what drove lifespan increases, and that caloric restriction without any change in diet schedule did not improve lifespan: https://twitter.com/LammingLab/status/1450121276270514181 (many studies 'accidentally' combine both of them and end up with a partially confounded result. there's also some literature contrary to this, but it's an additional data point).

- As far as fat loss goes, there's some papers that show that intermittent fasting (that is, alternate-day fasting in this case) is worse than eating daily(a recent summary of one from Peter Attia: https://peterattiamd.com/is-alternate-day-fasting-superior-t...). This study precisely manages calories in participants, so one reason this could not apply to an individual is that eating patterns obviously influence how much you eat and of what.

- One of the best points from this thread is that translating results from mice to humans is hard and nontrivial, and there's many reasons for this that go beyond the obvious fact that, well, they're very different organisms. Similar to how translating the proper dose of a supplement may be difficult, translating the time period(s) of various effects and interventions is also difficult!

My takeaway as usual is that science is pretty hard, so exercising healthy skepticism is generally the right option, especially in areas that involve nutrition/diet/biology, since this is even harder than many other areas of science.

Right, I think a lot of the HN audience understands this often happens with public (or 'public') data on the Internet. I still think the article title is a bit misleading when the article is about data brokers instead of Facebook (even if sometimes data brokers use FB) and would hope for more constructive and better-sourced articles from Mozilla.

There's many terrible data brokers involved in many terrible things (especially in the US - they generally get zero headlines because they are b2b and rather secretive), so it's strange to have this headline be about Facebook, when they're the only company being discussed that doesn't sell your data (even if they do many other things with it that we may not like!). I know it's very fun to use them as the worst possible example in any given category of bad things, but I'd much rather have FB handle data than almost every single US data broker, if I was forced to choose between the two. A GDPR-equivalent would still be nicer either way though too!

Every time someone joins the waitlist using your referral link, you'll move up the leaderboard. Be first in line for early access to Coinbase NFT by referring others

Interesting (but not particularly surprising) choice for ranking the waitlist members. OpenSea (which is also a YC company, wow!) has been dominating this market to an amazing extent in the last year, so it will be interesting to see how well this pans out for Coinbase. Here's a graph of NFT MM marketshare by volume for the past year: https://i.imgur.com/C0l9O1Q.png

In the case of NFTs, I don't blame anyone for wanting to be the one selling the shovels, so I'm interested in seeing how this turns out for Coinbase over the next few months/years.

I have some choices, but many of them require astronomical trade-offs in quality of life. For example, I do like the anonymity of cash, but using it for all of my bills, rent, online goods (not everything can be found in the city I'm in), and being paid exclusively in it from work is certainly not very easy (it is worse than this too - it is literally more expensive and we are seeing attempted reporting requirements for all cash transactions $600+, in addition to the ones we already have for $10k+). Even if I spent several hours a day going through tedious routines in attempt to preserve my own privacy to the utmost extent, I would still find I'm not only at a massive disadvantage in life (especially socially), but also that there's still countless sources of data on me that I simply cannot avoid (Sure you can avoid Facebook. But will everyone around you and that knows you avoid it? If not, you will still be tracked!).

To be clear, I don't advocate for a perspective of complete helplessness, there are a lot of things I do to reduce surveillance and tracking of myself. But I cannot have privacy be the sole criterion for living my life, because it would, simply put, result in a terrible life.

I firmly believe that one of our greatest current failures as a society is the extent with which we completely accept these types of dystopic conditions - every single action we take and word we type is surveilled, permanently stored with zero recourse, analyzed or blocked by untransparent third-party data leviathans that share few of our own interests, and often sold, shared, and completely neglected while data breaches happen en masse. Not only do we have virtually no ability to opt out of this, but these practices now begin the moment someone is born.

When I was younger I spent a lot of my time advocating for privacy, informing people of how bad the state of surveillance was, how bad it would be in the future, and what we could do to improve things. Eventually this turned out to be very bad for my mental health, because I not only realized most people didn't give a shit, but also that no matter what I did, I had no power to improve things by what felt like a even single epsilon.

With the advances we're making in hardware and machine learning, I think we are setting ourselves up for future disasters that we have barely begun to imagine - our entire society's communications and thoughts are owned by everyone except ourselves, and our ability to analyze, predict, and censor the populace with this extreme centralization of power and data is currently being scaled up even more by every tech/ad/communications corporation (and government) in the world.

I still try to do what I can, but it feels like I'm able to do less and less with each passing year; I am constantly forced to use products and services that do terrible things with the data they collect on me, yet it is increasingly becoming something outside of my control. Perhaps this makes it obvious why normal people rarely try to use privacy-preserving software and practices: they recognize how difficult and hopeless the endeavor is, and they'd rather not dedicate their lives to such an impossible feat such as communicating privately with their friends and family. The only things I can really hope for here is that we get an actual data protection law or basic consumer bill of rights in countries like the US, but I don't see this happening any time soon.

I also predict that the general populace will recognize the vast importance of this issue in the future (whether that is +5 or +30 years, I have no clue), but likely only after some very terrible events occur (it would seem the current state of advertisements, data breaches, mass surveillance, and censorship is nowhere near what it will take). This comment turned out to be more negative and hopeless than I had wanted, so I'll add that I also donated to the EFF - they seem to be pretty principled and helpful in this area, and they also sent me a cool T-shirt. I'm fortunate that I'm able to use software like Signal/IRC/Matrix with my close friends, but I wish that everyone else could be given the right of private self-expression and communiucation as well.

The potential costs of systemically removing correct but controversial/fringe content are extremely detrimental to scientific progress in general. Sure, we remove thousands of obviously false and likely harmful posts, and there are cases to be made for why that may be good, but sometimes hidden within those thousands of posts was something that may have had a tremendously positive effect, but yet could not be separated from the noise.

"The Crime of Curiosity" is a great way to put it, because we're already banned from questioning a lot of areas of science on most major tech platforms. This system seems to be helpful in some areas until it makes some mistakes, in which case the effects are catastrophic.

Remember that within the first year of covid, "masks work" was considered misinformation along with "a vaccine is likely to happen within a year or two", along with "this may be related to a lab leak", along with... Reality is always changing and uncertain and our policies should reflect that we do not have it all figured out, nor will we (collectively) ever. (Edit: as one commenter expressed skepticism of the mask claim, read over a link like https://old.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/fe2oqg/aita_... about how normal people felt about masks in the first few months of covid. It's pretty shocking and I feel like I'm living in an alternate reality just re-reading it and the top responses).

Now that our infrastructure is being expanded and built out with censoring of 'incorrect' information as a top priority, I fear for how bad the mistakes we make in the future may be.

I'd hope not, but I don't think it's a necessary conclusion. Most subscribers to VPN companies pay $5 or more a month and use almost zero bandwidth (basically just opening Facebook and Twitter here and there), and so it's easy to throw literally thousands of them onto a single high-throughput dedi. The ones with good marketing are very high-margin companies with a high LTV.

I spent some time looking at Youtube reccommendations in fresh browser session (no cookies or account) yesterday and was contiually amazed by the types of videos that would often have 10M or even 100M views. The clickbait styles used by nearly all large channels have gotten so amazingly efficient that it seems like they near-perfectly pinpoint various biases and draws in our psyche now, and looking at the large categories of different genres of suggestions was an almost surreal experience in how similarly they targeted potential viewers. A lot of the content was obviously fake, and much of what was not obviously fake was significantly exaggerated for obvious reasons, with the method of exaggeration varying according to the genre of content.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the platform as a whole after this, about all of the both wonderful and terrible changes it causes for our world. Some sections of YouTube are not just equivalent to television, but much worse and clearly actively harmful, but other sections are so amazing (educational content being one of the best examples imo) that it would be far too careless to dismiss the platform or its incentives as inherently bad.

I suppose the best we could hope for is that we find some ways to improve the viral algorithms (and incentive structures that produce them) that control our Internet ecosystem over time, because there are better ways to align incentives with the goals of humanity than we are currently doing, even if it is hard to get there. I often find that society actually does really care about and improve on these issues, but the reason why it is often easier to be pessimistic is because the changes that we make in response often occur very slowly, often over the span of decades even.

I should add about the government ID part, that I understand why they do it. I've worked with anti-abuse in online ecosystems before, and I undertsand how difficult their challenges are at their scale, but it's nonetheless a pattern that I'm just tired of at this point.

I'm tired of platforms asking me for my government-ID to allow me to use them. I'm tired of having every message I type 'privately' to someone being stored and owned by a company that has no obligation nor motive to treat it the way I'd want. I'm tired of being forced to 'log in' to services just to read important information (now being trialed by Twitter and Reddit as well!). Honestly I am just tired of having what feels like no rights or control whatsoever in the general online sense of my life, having to deal with and accept whichever new 'feature' or 'usage of my data to improve my experience' the products I 'choose' to use decide to rollout.

I apologize for this turning into a such a rant, but this has been upsetting me a lot lately. I have this wonderful illusion of choice of which products I use, but the punishments I receive for trying to opt-out have become untenable in the last few years. I can't even pay my rent without using a finance app that scrapes and sells my transaction data (which app does this? almost all of them), let alone get help with free software when the answers to my questions are now all contained within Discord chat history which asks for my phone-number to join so that I may even search it, rather than on an openly-searchable forum.

While I still am able to use the software I prefer like Signal, IRC, and Matrix with some of my unique technically-gifted friends, the network effects of having millions/billions of users and owning all of their data are a particularly strong force that I have not yet found a way to reckon with.

The percentage of normal users that know how to (and are willing to) setup self-hosted instances of something is definitely far below 1%, as unfortunate as it may be. Discord is definitely here to stay (and IMO will continue to do extremely well this decade - network effects are an amazingly strong force) as far as I can tell. Although I do think it's good news that they have a decent profit model, the future of the platform still may not be as bright as most of its users (who do not understand the business nor the data collected on them) may hope for.

I'm always very thankful that we even have people that work so hard towards FOSS libraries to begin with. It must feel pretty bad to receive those responses from employees telling him about the things he should do that are 'um', 'easy' and 'dope' when there's clearly been many longstanding feature and communication issues already (as if being the person working on a FOSS library for no compensation in your spare time that empowers a company whose employees' are getting 7-8 figure exits within a few years wasn't already bad enough).

My general pessimism with this situation is how proprietary everything has to be to begin with; the idea of a single company storing the full history of everyone's messages and interactions is already bad enough without them requiring the government ID of their users.

I feel like that a lot, so called pay-to-win games (or perhaps pay-to-progress) aren't my thing either for similar reasons, even though I could afford them. I've played GI for a bit, but very casually (even more so as it doesn't run on Linux, so I've only played it on mobile myself), and as long as I am finding things I enjoy, for example the music, voice acting, and UX, I don't mind the game's profit model, but I definitely will end up playing less when/if I reach the point(s) to where I am increasingly penalized for not paying.

That's the rough part with acquiring characters (or anything) through the equivalent of cash-funded roulette: you can set out to spend a certain amount to attain something you want, but it might not work, and if you're sufficiently unlucky it may turn into an order of magnitude more spending than you originally intended.

While you could of course commit to only spending $X and dealing with the results even if they're unsatisfactory, this can be surprisingly difficult psychologically, combining the best of the gambler's fallacy with the sunk cost fallacy (among many other behaviors very cleverly inspired by the game's developers) into one.