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KurSix

736 karma · joined February 3, 2025

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KurSix··on Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active
That's wild to think about. You could be standing inside the largest canyon in the solar system and have absolutely no idea
KurSix··on Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active
I wonder how long the conditions would need to persist for anything biological to actually take advantage of them
KurSix··on Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active
The fact that they managed to narrow this down to a strike-slip event 20-40 km underground using data from a single seismometer is pretty impressive
KurSix··on A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I wonder how much of that was simply being early versus having genuinely better opportunities
KurSix··on Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death
Quite a contrast with the story
KurSix··on Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death
So hares are the locals and rabbits are the French immigrants
KurSix··on What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
Clearly you haven't seen their natural habitat: suburban shopping centers.
KurSix··on What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
The big assumption is that technological intelligence is a fairly predictable endpoint once evolution produces the right kind of general intelligence
KurSix··on What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
Fifty thousand years is basically nothing evolutionarily, yet from the outside Earth would look like it had undergone a planetary regime change driven by one species
KurSix··on What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
Interesting that biodiversity and biomass are almost orthogonal. A tropical forest can have hundreds of important tree species, while a boreal forest can put a huge fraction of its total mass into three or four
KurSix··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
I think the weirdest part of that scenario is that science might become something closer to archaeology
KurSix··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
I'm not sure the scarce resource will be people capable of understanding the AI's work. It may be institutions willing to tolerate the cost of understanding it
KurSix··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
HBM isn't dramatically better in every dimension. You get huge bandwidth and good energy efficiency per bit transferred, but not necessarily a meaningful latency improvement and capacity expansion becomes tied to the package
KurSix··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
Yeah, the scale is kind of mind-bending. You're taking something that's already extremely fragile, grinding most of its thickness away, handling it through several more process steps, and somehow doing that cheaply enough for mass-market products.
KurSix··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
Sanctions can absolutely create the incentive to build a domestic supply chain, but incentive doesn't automatically translate into catching up on the same timeline
KurSix··on Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM
China has had a very strong incentive to recreate lithography and fab equipment for years, but a lot of the specialized HBM packaging chain was probably much lower priority until relatively recently
KurSix··on Data collected by cars and sold to third parties
You probably can't make this reliable across every modern car without breaking something, but that's different from technically impossible
KurSix··on Data collected by cars and sold to third parties
It should be as mundane as pulling the SIM card from a phone (or must be)
KurSix··on Data collected by cars and sold to third parties
At that point "opt out" starts to feel like a UI feature rather than an actual description of what the car is doing
KurSix··on Programming is Art
If AI makes code more stylistically uniform, it might actually make those deeper choices more visible
KurSix··on Programming is Art
If software becomes dramatically cheaper to produce, that may just give investors even more software to invest in
KurSix··on How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
Japan is probably evidence that the surrounding food culture matters at least as much as the existence of UPFs. You can sell plenty of processed food without getting the same outcome if portion sizes, eating habits, school meals, and daily activity are different. The marijuana comparison feels like a non sequitur, though.
KurSix··on How the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
Shelf-stable hummus and Doritos can both be "ultra-processed", but that doesn't tell you much about why one might encourage overconsumption. Hyperpalatability seems much closer to the actual claim the article is trying to make.
KurSix··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
It's probably less "modern antidepressants are uniquely bad" and more "we got much better at starting people on safer drugs than we did at figuring out how to stop them"
KurSix··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
For something prescribed to get someone through a temporary crisis, "how and when do we get you back off this safely?" should probably be discussed at the beginning, not years later when the patient decides to stop.
KurSix··on Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal
What seems most broken is that medicine apparently didn't have a great way to predict which group you’d fall into, or much of a plan for the people who had a really bad time stopping. Also, RIP the anti-spider benefits
KurSix··on The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)
The sound especially feels almost impossible to date
KurSix··on The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)
I wonder if part of that is that Blade Runner doesn't optimize for the first viewing. Once you already know where the plot is going, your attention is free to wander into the production design, sound, background activity
KurSix··on The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)
Wow... The venue almost adds another layer to the movie. You're watching a 1982 vision of 2019, accompanied by live electronic-orchestral music, inside a theater built a couple thousand years ago...
KurSix··on The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)
The sound is probably why the visuals feel so much larger than the sets actually were
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