SquibblesRedux

The longer version (105 letters) means "The hill of the flute playing by Tamatea – who was blown hither from afar, had a slit penis, grazed his knees climbing mountains, fell on the earth, and encircled the land – to his beloved one."

I was incredulous when I heard the audio for the short version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20081014111519/http://www.korero...

I would argue the greatest benefit of locally produced food is not necessarily reduced transportation expenses, but instead the consumer's visibility into the supply chain. It has been my experience that people are better stewards when they can see directly what impacts their behaviors have on the environment around them.

A not insignificant amount of the price of gasoline and diesel goes to taxes. [1] What analyses have been done to address the economic impact (regarding taxes) of transitioning from gas/diesel to EV?

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10

I think we need to put considerably more effort into discussing existing and new scientific endeavors before we consider funding. I am not saying we should pause or reduce funding, but rather the reach of our public coffers has increasingly exceeded our understanding of what we are or are not accomplishing with that funding.

The amount of noise, publicity, and politicization of scientific research makes it very difficult to wisely set public policy at both the national and local levels.

This makes me wonder... who matches with whom if we map the current set of space tourists to the cast of Avenue 5? (Only a thought experiment. Nothing to see here, move along.)

A receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC curve) [1] describes the tradeoff between sensitivity and recall. No matter how sophisticated we think our classifiers are, the confluence of physics and mathematics will always limit the accuracy of our automated systems. It is just a matter of what kinds of errors we are willing to tolerate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...

Replace trees with vines and place them mostly on the south side of the buildings and it may be viable. The trick would be engineering a renewable substrate for the vines to grow on.

My first reaction to this headline was, "Wait, how can he be awarded a patent so long after death?"

The article states, "Among the participants in the study, 50 percent refrained from cheating entirely in the experiment; around 30 percent did not hesitate to lie at all, and around 20 percent of the subjects, who had actually opted for more honest earning opportunities, nevertheless seized the opportunity to cheat when it presented itself."

This makes me wonder -- Do we live in a world in which 50% of the human population is inherently dishonest? Regardless of the actual percentages, I also wonder to what extent a predisposition for dishonesty may be heritable.

Bytes, words, etc. can also be stored and manipulated in the CPU, in which case 2-complement, rotates, shifts, etc. do have a directionality about them.

Certain bit-sliced microcode architectures can also impose a certain directionality for the bits.

Finally, serial communications and storage impose directionality upon the bit stream. (Anyone remember writing to magnetic tape?)

The article and the phenomena it describes makes me think of the ending of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World [1]. (I strongly recommend the book if you have not read it.) A line that really stands out:

"Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the heather at his feet."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

All of what I write here is my opinion based on what I have seen referenced in the original post. There could be facts or circumstances that I am unaware of that render such opinion ill-informed. Please don't sue me or take offense -- I offer only insight from quite a bit of life experience.

From the email exchange posted [1], I would say Amjad was right in asking that the repository be taken down. Regardless of intent, Radon's actions had given the appearance of unethical behavior. Bear in mind that, when considering ethics, intent is not as important as appearance. While Amjad's statements were not necessarily optimal, I would not fault him for what he said. There are so many other adversities in life -- we should not make ourselves adversaries of one another.

A couple red flags that stood out:

(1) There is an implication that Amjad's time is owed to Radon. Radon's meticulous documentation and other content posted on the Internet is suggestive of overachievement and perfectionism, traits that can be very valuable in many technical domains. Unfortunately, personal correspondence usually is not one of those domains. One should always be most respectful of other people's time. Time is a non-renewable resource of unknown quantity.

(2) Some of Radon's statements and expressions, whether they do or do not contain truth, are quite adversarial and should be avoided in correspondence. Those that stood out to me are "You are categorically in the wrong," "... you have no legal or ethical basis ...," "... I have acted in good faith ... [and] your conduct ... has been grossly rude and unprofessional," "Despite repeated inquiry on my part, you have refused to point to any specific feature ...," "... your characterization of the morality of my actions is baseless and in bad faith," and "It's a shame that you decided to terminate our relationship this way." In all things, regardless of the circumstances, the first rule should be "Be respectful."

While I can imagine myself in Radon's shoes and empathize with what he did and why, experience has taught me that certain norms of civility, whether they be shallow or even illogical, are expected in discourse. My advise to Radon would be to let the whole thing slide. Life will bring so many more unexpected twists and turns; save time energy for life's truly important battles that are yet to come.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/OaEOwu2

The Thousand Brains reference made me immediately think of Minsky's "Society of Mind."[1][2] Minsky's work was quite an insightful perspective on intelligence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind

[2] http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Singh03.htm

> People like James Burke have been awaiting this for ages.

I would like to more about this. Can you point to any interviews or other materials that shed light on Burke's thoughts on academia?

"There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers." - Kurt Vonnegut [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Conversations_with_Kurt...

While the post covers quite a bit of ground, it feels (to me) like it conflates knowledge representation, language, biological systems (i.e., the messiness of implementation), computability, and realism.

Regarding numbers in particular, there are a practically uncountably infinite number of mathematical truths that apply equally to numbers or to other abstract (non-numerical) mathematical ideas.

I would rather see depth in one area or another, rather than a conflation of ideas providing food for thought. Otherwise there are far too many variables to consider for a worthwhile analysis.

I did some troubleshooting to see why the original link did not behave as expected.

The original link:

    https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/raw/main/static/files/on-freenode.pdf

redirects to here:

    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freenode/web-7.0/main/static/files/on-freenode.pdf

and this command:

    curl -v https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freenode/web-7.0/main/static/files/on-freenode.pdf 2>&1 | less

reveals:

    content-type: application/octet-stream

The application/octet-stream is for "Any kind of binary data," suggesting the correct browser behavior would be to download. To inform the browser that the document is a viewable PDF, a web server normally sends an application/pdf MIME type. [1] The "raw" in the original link is why GitHub thinks the file should be treated as a generic binary.

While this may all seem much ado about nothing and pedantic, I often see this kind of behavior exploited in the wild to deliver malicious payloads. In this case I would say Firefox behaves "safer" than Chrome, but not not necessarily more correctly.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_...

This link initiates a download.

I was courted by corp dev from a big public company. It was quite an experience -- events, dinners, wine, private meetings, large groups of the corp folks hanging on every word. They got pretty pushy, demanding to know trade secrets to keep going with a negotiation. At the end of it I pulled the plug because it was clear they were not working in our interest. (The word "pillage" comes to mind.)

The experience was nice to have, but as the essay claims, it ultimately was a poor use of time.

Regarding the DoD purchasing data from data brokers, I would much rather first focus on laws or regulations that set legal standards for the collection, sale, and other distribution of personal information. For example, make the sale of personal information to a government agency an act that requires posting notice on a public register. Also, a hefty tax on the sale of personal information would be nice to see.

I would focus on the collection and sale of personal information first because it is often done without the informed consent of the person to whom the information is associated.

It's not the size of the project, it's how you use it.

OP (me) copy-pasted the title exactly from the source page. Assuming the title at time of copy-paste was "3,000", I don't know how it became 3k. Is there an automatic search replace done by the HN submission process?

The letter to Nature Astronomy (paywalled): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01363-7

Every now and then I need to compile lists of locations for this or that application. The drop-down of locations in this tracker is very interesting. Does anyone know how the list was compiled?

An important point to keep in mind is that respect and civility do not require a redefinition of language.

When anyone tries to prescribe language, it's time to look for the exit. For anyone who has not read the book Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)[1], or seen the movie, I strongly recommend reading or watching. George Orwell understood the power of language when he wrote about Newspeak[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

The problem may not be task switching, but rather an intentional suppression of inhibitory control.

Another interesting perspective on task-switching (or set-shifting):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_switching_(psychology)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4354620/ (The Attentional Set Shifting Task: A Measure of Cognitive Flexibility in Mice)

Because some people don't know...

http://mj.ucw.cz/geek/

For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code

One more amulet generator, for the road...

  #!/bin/bash
  COUNT=1
  while true ; do
    COUNT=$((COUNT+1))
    SHA=`echo "I adopted $COUNT puppies." | sha256sum | egrep 8888`
    if [ "$SHA" != "" ] ; then
      echo "$SHA I adopted $COUNT puppies."
    fi
  done

Sample output:

  4f3e14ded07eda16a7fb57c42aebf1f97ef67acba4980bf472a8e188887c7726  - I adopted 6484 puppies.
  57c3e9fd05f06a705206d38888b317b5eb596d35c6f308b909a440e2c8e391c8  - I adopted 6627 puppies.
  4624f6bb4c7d3d8328888495c1422a1891b609b81abda3ff4d70bedd1c4f6cdd  - I adopted 12631 puppies.
  9c0be05548139888804d3799ad5729ea424b0487487a6b18803f1aa5746c1904  - I adopted 15663 puppies.
  c60fc3f97f62ee07665325e235faa05fefc445aee7d356a9d81f58888c475147  - I adopted 15861 puppies.

Bonus points if the number of puppies adopted is a palindromic prime. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindromic_prime

Optimization (for any attribute) is left as an exercise for the reader.

  #!/bin/bash
  while true ; do
    W1=`shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words`
    W2=`shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words`
    W3=`shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words`
    W4=`shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words`
    W5=`shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words`
    SHA=`echo "$W1 $W2 $W3 $W4 $W5" | sha256sum | egrep 8888`
    if [ "$SHA" != "" ] ; then
      echo "$SHA $W1 $W2 $W3 $W4 $W5"
    fi
  done

Sample output:

  00b6b668465deadabf11d7296e7de33780643e23c967e255888884f34ecc41de  - frigorifical psittaceous goodeniaceous oostegite handsomeish
  b3096654fa38ca318888b2c4eea4a9d93b9e49b02c54f390d2f06ca74d9e8edb  - refuser skepful assumptive hypostatic toothleted
  ef3a7d3b25a8cffe730b888800884ddde96ea7e58608c8bd714b5db7a5caf3fb  - coenobioid graticulation astrognosy remica swarthily
  c8888957c0105b6ea64b24853ec6c1a34828c0552c2776b6a4bd35d6129c3b87  - barbarously withinside underwing autocratic punkah
  5ca89be465ab472eea785ab950ea28ce03457a09d1fecd2bc75b88888c269e5d  - Malay persuade truantlike binodose suppose
  20bdbfcdb6345888814555c2d0abeaa2f2b7c81506a661c99f7c2675688d4917  - dorsimedian seasonably cuckoo eyewinker hyperthyroidization
  337675d56afb73835c58888f509de783a9385e3f249784d50b9a3e50c6a68a77  - squamous calp choosingly velum forborne
  e08888a15d449e8c2dab2283d53adfa5b1bfc7fe99ccd0fd7bbe45a4ce9b0bdb  - equipartition creatininemia treaclewort Menobranchus undisturbedness