Hacker News Reader

Emma_Goldmanon Hacking the genome of fungi for smart foods of the future

Food, and therefore nutrition, is significantly more complicated than a ledger of macronutrients. In this particular case, I was getting at this:

https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310

Emma_Goldmanon Hacking the genome of fungi for smart foods of the future

How far is that from pre-existing products, like Quorn[1], which here in the UK is probably the main producer of vegan/vegetarian meat simulacra? The problem is that people don't like eating straight fungus, and so it is serially transformed through elaborate processing, to create meat-like products. Which it turns out are extremely unhealthy.

I think you are on more promising ground in your final remark. There are plenty of whole food plant-based sources of protein that are tested, economical and low-carbon, while possessing none of the health drawbacks of 'high tech' alternatives.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn

Emma_Goldmanon What Is Enlightenment? (1784)

"Criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological -- and not transcendental -- in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom."

It's worth reading Foucault's entire discussion of Kant's essay, published on the second centenary of the original:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/bmclean/hermeneutics/foucault_...

Emma_Goldmanon New York medical school eliminates tuition after $1B gift

> Cute

Sorry, this is childish and you don't substantively respond to the core point. I am not going to waste my time.

Emma_Goldmanon New York medical school eliminates tuition after $1B gift

I agree you should be paid properly. But I don't understand why, if the US has a privatised healthcare system, hospitals are not paying to train their own labour?

Emma_Goldmanon New York medical school eliminates tuition after $1B gift

Growth is a useless indicator. The whole point of Piketty's argument is that the return on capital tendentially outstrips the rate of growth, and that large investors have access to especially high return assets. The OP is right that a 5% average annual return is conservative.

Emma_Goldmanon Enhancing Factorio with SAT solvers

I get that this is a humourous and offhanded comment, but it's the equivalent of saying that basketball is 'just bouncing a ball'. A surprising amount of complexity emerges from putting teams of humans into a competitive sandbox environment with conflicting goals to, in each example, 'put the ball in the other team's basket', or 'click on the other team's avatars until they die'. They also overlap in that both are ultimately based on entering a skillful kinesthetic flow state, of becoming one with the ball, or your digital avatar, and gliding seamlessly, through muscle mechanics you've trained over hundreds of hours, through situations which are dynamic and non-identical because they involve opposing humans capable of interactivity and learning.

I've never really understood why FPS games are considered 'dumb'. All video games leverage our innate capacities of entertainment to fix our attention on unreal worlds, often to distraction, even addiction. Given that, it's difficult to transpose ideas of high and low brow onto the medium. The whole enterprise is dumb by design.

Emma_Goldmanon San Francisco now at 35% office vacancy rate, highest ever recorded: data

I think crucial over the medium-term is the comparative difficulty of decarbonising building heating and home-to-work transport at scale, through what technologies that is achieved, and the energy intensity of those technologies. It also depends on house size and grid design.

My understanding is that the annual kWh energy consumption of a heat pump will be slightly greater that an electric vehicle. But most two-adult families each have their own car, doubling the energy demand. It also require a lot more energy to build an electric vehicle than a heat pump, and requires more scarce minerals - with their own security and environmental problems. But then if people commute by walking, cycling or train, that's a very different calculation.

Emma_Goldmanon The Norway Model: How the Scandinavian country became a literary powerhouse

I do think this is a crudely banausic perspective.

> Their novels are surely enjoyed by far fewer people than an only-relatively successful niche Youtube or TikTok content creator. Literary novels don't make money, and don't shape the culture, so what does it even mean to be a 'powerhouse'?

Mere numerical impressions is a poor standard of influence or staying power. Very many great works of culture, philosophy and history are little read by the standards of social media. I have no idea why you think that means they 'don't shape the culture'. I doubt that, each year, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is read even one hundredth the number of times that Mr Beast's videos are watched. I very much doubt that the future historian will take the Philosophical Investigations - by consensus the most influential work of philosophy in the twentieth century, whose effects on our intellectual culture are deep and pervasive - to be an incidental footnote when compared to Mr Beast.

But cultural value isn't just a function of influence, clearly. Knausgaard's books are to many people, myself included, simply great works of art, and should be celebrated for that fact. They show a level of cultural excellence, ingenuity and craft that the average trending YouTube video doesn't, whatever merit it might have besides.

Emma_Goldmanon My techno-optimism

The depletion of fossil fuels is not the problem. In fact, the opposite is true: we need to leave a very large proportion of present-day fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we're to avert catastrophic increases in global radiative forcing, and leading fossil fuel states don't particularly want to do that. Renewables, and potentially nuclear, can deliver all the energy we need if we are intelligent about it. Some things will be more expensive in the medium-term (producing extreme high heat, flying), but that's far from a doomsday scenario. Other things (average electricity prices, road and rail transport) will be cheaper.

Emma_Goldmanon My techno-optimism

You are conflating absolute resource scarcity with planetary boundaries.

There is no absolute resource scarcity on any meaningful timescale, there is only a related question about the size of the resources which will become economically recoverable over succeeding centuries. Resource-to-production ratios are often used to suggest that certain resources will run out within a number of decades, but that is just a form of corporate book-keeping - new exploration, technologies, and rising prices, can and do push the search for new reserves. The R-P ratios at the heart of the Limits to Growth argument have actually improved since the 1970s despite rising consumption, for exactly that reason.

You are right, however, that there are clear tensions between compound growth and planetary boundaries like ocean acidification and topsoil depletion. That is really the crux of the issue - how many times can we multiply the size of the economy without, through sheer weight of exploitation of natural resource sources and sinks, and of material power and artifice, destroying the planet.

Emma_Goldmanon San Francisco Streets with Andrew Callaghan [video]

Why do you 'love' him? According to multiple people, perhaps including himself, he is a sex predator.[1] Regardless of whether you think a figure like that should be at the forefront of the public eye (I don't), it's strange to express 'love' for a person of such low character.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1149748975/a-full-guide-to-th...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD8g_ZfcrEo&t=80s&ab_channel...

Emma_Goldmanon UK government blocks MP questions about Gaza-related activity at its Cyprus base

For background, there seems to be three things going on here.

First, the UK has deployed surveillance assets to support Israel.[1]

"The military package, which includes P8 aircraft, surveillance assets, two Royal Navy ships – RFA Lyme Bay and RFA Argus – three merlin helicopters and a company of Royal Marines, will be on standby to deliver practical support to Israel and partners in the region, and offer deterrence and assurance. "

Two, the UK is delivering bilateral military aid via Cyprus - the 30 transport flights pointed to in the article. We know nothing about what's included in these transports.[2]

Three, the UK regularly grants arms export licences authorising the sale of arms to the Israeli state, most importantly for essential components of the F-35s used in Israel's air campaign. According to Campaign Against the Arms Trade[3], which has been around for a long time and is reliable at what it does:

"UK industry provides 15% of the components in the F35 stealth combat aircraft that are currently being used in the bombardment of Gaza. The contract for the components is estimated by Campaign Against Arms Trade to be worth £336m since 2016.

Between 2018 and 2022, the UK exported £146m in arms sales via Single Issue Export Licences. However, a large proportion of military equipment exported is via Open General Export Licences. These open licences, which include the F35 components, lack transparency and allow for unlimited quantities and value of exports of the specified equipment without further monitoring.

According to the SIPRI Arms Transfer Database, Israel has ordered a total of 50 F-35s from the US, of which 36 have so far been delivered, up to the end of 2022. According to the detailed delivery database,114 a total of 6 were delivered in 2022. While the value of UK companies’ F-35 contracts with the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, are not known, based on the 15% workshare and the estimated $80m a plane unit cost of the F-35, this would suggest that each aircraft involves around $12 million to UK industry. This would imply a value of $72 million (£58m) for total UK deliveries of F-35s to Israel in 2022, far higher than the value of Single Issue Export Licences, and around $432 million (approx. £336m.) since deliveries began in 2016."

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-deploys-uk...

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions...

[2] https://www.declassifieduk.org/raf-admits-to-making-17-milit...

[3] https://caat.org.uk/news/statement-on-uk-arms-exports-to-isr...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n22/james-butler/up-in-a...

Emma_Goldmanon Bypass Paywalls Clean combines all soft paywall hacks into one neat package

Does anyone know what if anything is substantively different between the original bypass paywalls[1] and bypass paywalls clean? The implication, obviously, is that the original is unclean.

[1]https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

Emma_Goldmanon Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding

Not really, and your own description is little different from the person you're responding to anyway?

Emma_Goldmanon Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

I can't reply to your comment so posting here: Growth rates can be misleading when starting from a low absolutes. The EU and the UK, the two cases I'm most familiar with, do not look set to meet their renewable targets. The UK climate advisory body, that sets each phase of the national carbon budget, specifically include energy security, weather sensitivity and deployment rates limits into their modelling of the future UK energy mix and the role of hydrogen storage (though of course 'limits' are not fixed but relative to competing priorities and alternatives):

https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/delivering-a-reliable-...

Emma_Goldmanon Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

> "If gas plants can be replaced by something cheaper then they will be"

This is a simplification of what is a highly complex, interdependent, path dependent and regulated system, with long lead times, and more priorities than just least-cost. The energy system's development isn't the unfolding of an endogenous economic rationality - it's very messy! For all those reasons, it's usually best understood through the lens of political economy.

Also, I don't know why you think there's an anti-green sentiment implicit in my comment. My own views are precisely the opposite.

Emma_Goldmanon Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

Interesting and bold proposition, but I suspect the reason why this has not been treated as a feasible vision by any government is that it is optimised for least-cost in the median scenario, not high energy security in the extreme scenario of wind and sun droughts, and that it does not factor in the limits to wind and PV deployment rates. Also, the first scenario still favours electrolytic hydrogen over li-on batteries anyway.

Emma_Goldmanon Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Gre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Emma_Goldmanon Giant batteries drain economics of gas power plants

> "Without providing price detail, which companies say is commercially sensitive, Clarke said Carlton had struggled to finance the planned gas plant in part because of uncertainty over the revenues it would generate and the number of hours it would run."

This is the crucial point. Political uncertainty about the future energy system is jacking up the rate of return investors are demanding of gas plant projects without contracted revenues. This is the main reason why gas projects are falling through. At the same time, there is currently no scalable storage system for time-shifting surplus renewable generation over weeks-to-months, so that it can offset renewable troughs. This means surplus renewable generation is simply being wasted, and for that reason, is so low cost that even hours-to-days battery storage - which is a mature storage system - is economical. It's far less clear this is a long-term proposition for at-scale storage, as the longer you can store energy for the higher the efficiency of matching surplus to deficit. Hydrogen and pumped hydro can store energy for far longer.

Emma_Goldmanon Sam Altman exposes the charade of AI accountability

That Reddit thread[1], if genuine, seems to raise the probability that Altman is a through-and-through operator who has been actively politicking against the board to hijack OpenAI for his own commercial ends. The resonances with OpenAI are striking.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

Emma_Goldmanon OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

I agree, it's an extremely non-obvious assumption and ignores centuries-old debates (empiricism vs. rationalism) about the nature of reason and intelligence. I am sympathetic to Chomsky's position.[1]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

Emma_Goldmanon OpenAI's employees were given two explanations for why Sam Altman was fired

> "We know enough now to know that the “safety-focused nonprofit entity versus reckless profit entity“ narrative doesn’t hold up."

Why do you think that? It still strikes me as the most plausible explanation.

Emma_Goldmanon OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

I disagree.

First, there are strong diminishing returns to well-being from wealth, meaning that moving oneself from the top 0.5% to the top 0.1% of global income earners is a relatively modest benefit. This relationship is well studied by social scientists and psychologists. Compared to the potential stakes of OpenAI's mission, the balance of importance should be clear.

Two, employees don't have to stay at OpenAI forever. They could support OpenAI's existing not-for-profit charter, and use their earning power later on in life to boost their wealth. Being super-rich and supporting OpenAI at this critical juncture are not mutually exclusive.

Three, I will simply say that I find placing excessive weight on one's self-enrichment to be morally questionable. It's a claim on human production and labour which could be given to people without the basic means of life.

Emma_Goldmanon OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

Really? If they work at OpenAI they are already among the highest lifetime earners on the planet. Favouring moving oneself from the top 0.5% of global lifetime earners to the top 0.1% (or whatever the percentile shift is) over the safe development of a potentially humanity-changing technology would be depraved.

EDIT: I don't know why this is being downvoted. My speculation as to the average OpenAI employee's place in the global income distribution (of course wealth is important too) was not snatched out of thin air. See: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charit...

Emma_Goldmanon OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns

I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman. The core of the narrative thus far is that the board fired Altman on the grounds that he was prioritising commercialisation over the not-for-profit mission of OpenAI written into the organisation's charter.[1] Given that Sam has since joined Microsoft, that seems plausible, on its face.

The board may have been incompetent and shortsighted. Perhaps they should even try and bring Altman back, and reform themselves out of existence. But why would the vast majority of the workforce back an open letter failing to signal where they stand on the crucial issue - on the purpose of OpenAI and their collective work? Given the stakes which the AI community likes to claim are at issue in the development of AGI, that strikes me as strange and concerning.

[1] https://openai.com/charter

Emma_Goldmanon Cats are no match for New York City's rats (2018)

Probably raptors and owls. But the problem, for any predator, is that rats live within buildings and the city's subterranean.

Emma_Goldmanon 'Energy independent' Uruguay runs on 100% renewables for four straight months

A fun theory, but it's wrong. The likely explanation is tectonic:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-ancient-fo...

Emma_Goldmanon Omegle 2009-2023

>"If you think being able to take all variables you can into account and have your model spit out "better" or "worse" is crude, than you can't be asked anything cause any answer to anything is crude."

That doesn't follow logically at all!?

Trying to reduce human history down to a summative, categorical and dichotomous judgement of '-1' or '+1' is outrageously simplistic, almost by strict definition. Incidentally, precisely this observation is baked into common idioms, like 'black and white thinking', and Manichean 'good versus evil'.

You also seen to be taking an incongruently natural scientific approach to what is a largely a meta-ethical and historical question - two fields with their own, distinctive methodologies.

I don't think this conversation has been particularly constructive, so let's wish one another the best and park it.

Emma_Goldmanon A door at a Swedish library was accidentally left open

Perfectly possible, but if there were no staff, that means that the denizens of Gothenburg were conscientious enough to police themselves. They checked out their books even though they probably could have just walked out the front door with them.