WClayFerguson

Actually the only one making a nuisance of themselves on this thread is you 'dang'.

Right, that's the obvious argument against gov't regulations, that applies to all monopolies and is exactly what you'd expect their lawyers will say. My counter to your argument is that Twitter is "effectively" a monopoly, even though smaller competitors exist.

Any monopoly can claim that since were all in a free market system, it's merely customers making free choices that's causing an incorrect "appearance" of a monopoly to exist. But you can ask any journalist, legislator, or other public figure if there's another 'competitor' that can provide what Twitter provides, and the answer is simply "no".

If we were talking about gaming consoles or some other type company the monopoly perhaps wouldn't matter, but we're talking about communications infrastructure for the entire nation, and frankly world. We simply cannot let a handful of unelected overlords censor the world.

I have no idea whether you're an admin, or just a prankster "dang", but it's true no one should kick the progressives while they're down.

The important thing is they now realize BigTech censorship is a problem for all Americans, and not just conservatives.

It's the scale that matters. Once a company starts serving many millions of people, and becomes a nationwide backbone for some type of communications like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon services, email providers, telephone companies, etc. then it needs to be illegal for them to engage in discrimination and censorship based on political ideology.

Nobody's saying you can't run a small Federated server on Mastodon, for example, and "play god" with your users, but if you do that on a national level you need to be made to stop.

The MSM has only themselves to blame for their record low levels of trust by Americans. You're right that the term MSM is basically a slur at this point. Great point. Thanks again for helping me make my points.

Well as long as you're on the side if freedom, free speech, small government, capitalism, and patriotism, you're one of the good guys.

I think the biggest "story-telling" that's going on lately is in our schools by our socialist educators.

Well, if you watched the M5M you won't really know about any of it. lol. Thanks for helping make my point!

Our founding fathers and subsequent forefathers fought wars to protect our freedoms, and sadly the current generation don't value or even want to preserve that freedom. Good times create weak men, and weak men will happily surrender to Tyranny.

To me "The Left" means the set of beliefs more than it means the set of believers, but you can't have a belief without a believer.

Labels can be divisive and tribal when used against individuals, to smear them by saying they're guilty of the bad actions of a few in a group. However language itself is built on "labels", so they're required.

It's impossible to criticize bad ideas without some shorthand label for those kinds of thinking and ideologies. The fact that whole entire groups hold those same ideas necessarily is a critique of the entire group, and is necessarily tribal. But labels are nonetheless also necessary for the discussion to take place.

Democracies can only thrive when there's an educated population free to discuss all ideas, and allowed to strongly criticize or even ridicule those they disagree with. Yet people like Jack Dorsey think it's their duty to step in as a referee to make sure everyone's polite and behaves according to his personal political views. He needs to be put back in his place, because no one elected him, and he just fell backwards by accident into a power position over millions by pure luck.

The Hunter scandal was just one random example of countless examples of censorship by BigTech and M5M. I could care less about the laptop story.

I care about the censorship story. One corrupt family can't destroy a democracy, but a loss of free speech rights is guaranteed to.

The left wing is still not wanting to rise up against censorship because they believe it's still benefiting them, since BigTech (+M5M) is their leftist ally...for now.

What they need to realize is that once you give Tyrannical Control over to your leaders (governments, or BigTech censors), because you consider them benevolent today, it's foolish because they won't be benevolent forever.

Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's 20-somethings seem quite unaware. They think we can create a system where all forms of "bad" speech are stopped. But the problem with that is you end up having to define "bad". My definition of "patriotic speech" might be your definition of "mean speech", so unless you appoint power-wielding dictators to make the final decision, the only solution is to just say everyone is free. Once you allow dictators they'll always become corrupt and self-interested.

The left thinks they're in a war against evil and meanies, but really the only opponent they're fighting is freedom itself.

You can tell this article is well over a year old, because it doesn't mention the words Fediverse, ActivityPub, Mastodon (or Quanta.wiki!)

It was summer of 2019 when the vast majority of those who are most 'plugged in' realized we're going to need a new censorship-resistant web, after the Vox Adpocolypse and other totalitarian and dictatorial over-reach by BigTech, which has been escalating steadily since then, culminating even with specific stories being blacked out (by cancelling people, and companies) and leading to a level of election interference that would've simply been impossible not many years ago. Committed by not just BigTech, but by M5M also.

Point of Fact: 68% of voters had never heard of the Hunter Laptop on election day.

(Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of Quanta.wiki, a new Fediverse App)

I never said RNA was built on two types of molecules. I said DNA was.

AT and GC never concentrate spontaneously. Brownian motion makes them 'find' each other and immediately snap together like tinker toys when they find a partner that fits. That's why you need warm temperatures, and it's why all chemical reaction rates are proportional to temperature. Even in a solution with 0.00001PPM reagents, reactions take place rapidly when warm.

There's two kinds of base pairs, is identical to there's 4 kinds of bases.

> Thermodynamics would beg to differ

It's already experimentally proven you can mix up N, H, and O and it spontaneously forms RNA. We've even found entire RNA and sugars on meteorites. It's not rare in nature, it's abundant and self-emergent from the raw atoms themselves.

It's perfectly legitimate to say life stores information using only two "types" of things (AT or GC) which can be oriented one way or another, which is a "binary choice of the type". I explain it that way because it reaches a wider audience (easier to visualize)

However there's always at least one stickler who wants to quibble that the orientation is also a "binary bit" of information. Congratulations, you're him today!!

About the 'card deck' combinations: That's why we can be virtually certain there are no life forms in the universe that consist of a chain molecule (as it's version of "DNA") where there's more than a handful of different types of molecules along the chain.

Nature is statistically guaranteed to find the simplest patterns first and that's why our life is built on 'binary' (two kinds of 'cards' AT/GC). Life on all planets will likely use binary "information storage", especially because of it's modularity (i.e. it can be cut-n-pasted together in different patterns)

AT and GC are such simple molecules we can assume wherever we find 50 of them in one place (first replicator) you're going to have not just 50 but an abundance of them in that place too. And since that's what the replicator needs to replicate it's literally sitting in a bath of it's own "food" with no predators around, so it will grow like crazy and immediately. lipid-bilayer might be needed to find a pattern for "cells" to form, sure, agreed. And in all this 'base' counting math the statistics is the same regardless of whether it's DNA or RNA.

I agree with what you said. Even the concept of "God" seems like it's been 're-framed' by science lately (in a good way) with many scientists having to admit that a simulation theory is as good as any other theory for our origins, and if we're being simulated then by definition the thing doing the simulating is a "god", by most definitions despite whether it is concerned with human feelings or what we call morality.

HN is definitely a great place to find others who are intellectually curious about these topics. It's a shame that most people (in society at large) would rather discuss sports or entertainment, than the actual interesting scientific or philosophical things that matter more.

Humans can't conceive of large timescales nor large numbers. That's why I use my Rubik's Cube example. A single glass of water contains enough molecules that if they were each a random Rubik's cube then there's a mathematical certainty that 512 of them will be perfectly solved (per glass).

For molecules that are a linear chain of only 2 possible items in the chain, it becomes a 'brute force search' of a 'puzzle space' to find a chain that 'does something like computer code', and the earth has the computing power to solve that brute force problem in 30 seconds, not 30 million years.

It's purely the math probabilities I was getting at above. If you take the number of molecules in a large swimming pool, that is the same number of 50-long RNA molecules it would take to statistically cause at least one RNA to accidentally have any specific pattern of length 50.

In actual evolution this number of RNA molecules can be thought of as 'diluted' across the entire oceans, and not magically sitting in single pond.

The fact that life is right-hand twist DNA probably means left-hand was unsuccessful due to chemistry either in itself or in the environment, because an inversion of a molecule (chirality, twist, etc) means it will behave completely differently chemically. So left-hand twist can exist, but not necessarily in a way that can build life...even if it's able to initially replicate.

Thanks for that link! That's amazing. I had no idea that work had ever been done.

According to my math 10 million moles of random sequence 50-base pair RNA segments would be required to ensure a correct 'Hit' on a replicator, assuming only one of those 50-long sequences can replicate. 4^50=10^30. 10^30/Avogadro=10^7. Assuming each enzyme is the size of a water molecule, that would be about one large swimming pool of water.

That's right. Once you have a replicating strand that's modular (linearly able to glue end-to-end) it can also recombine randomly with other completely different replicators to see if the "offspring" can replicate. We know for a fact major sections of DNA are shared among lots of different organisms, so we know this did happen a lot during evolution.

If we found a sequence of DNA on some sample, and another identical sequence in that same sample, we still wouldn't know replication is happening.

However there may be slightly more requirements like the sequence has to be found in an oil film (bubble) up until it can form a skin/membrane, to protect itself, so even if it was happening on earth trillions of times every day no one would be there to discover it, and other life on the planet with a head start (bacteria, etc) would consume it before it made more 'progress' by evolution.

In the early planet there was nothing to "eat up" life as it was starting. Everything was on an equal footing.

Yep, most every serious Physicist today agrees, it's more likely we're not "seeing" everything. Slit experiment, Entanglement, etc. prove we're missing lots of the picture. All the particles popping in and out of existence...seems like really they're just 'passing thru' and we only see them a fraction of the time, because most of the time they're in some 'realm' we've only thus far managed to label as "Wave Probability"

People also underestimate how easy it is for life to get started by accident. Let's say you need a short segment of DNA to randomly pop into existence, capable of nothing but self-replication. What are the odds?

Here's my best analogy: If you take one mole of "random" Rubik's Cubes (the number of molecules in a glass of water), then search for 'Solved' ones you'll find 512 are magically solved, merely by the power of large numbers. The ways molecules can 'snap together' are similarly 'finite', just like a puzzle.

Now think how many glasses of water are on earth. A replicating molecule would have existed probably on the FIRST DAY earth had cooled enough to form water.

If we knew what the shortest sequence if DNA is that can replicate, we'd be able to mathematically state the probability of it existing in any 'random' length of DNA of that length as 1/(4^N) where N is DNA length (number of AT/GC pairs).

DNA is basically digital information. Every rung on the helix ladder is either an AT or GC. Nature found the simplest say to store information in our chemistry set. Couldn't really store any field patterns though.