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asphodeleon Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?

It's a way bigger leap to go from "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness" to "and we'll see that it's possible for machines too" than it is to go from "humans are conscious" to "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness".

The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.

asphodeleon Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline

There's the "always on" type of birdwatching as well, that allows you to recognize the birds you see and hear in the course of ordinary life. No patience required, just practising staying aware of peripheral vision and sounds, but equally rewarding when you are lucky enough to have a chance encounter.

asphodeleon Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs

Classic joke at university was to sprinkle cress seeds on the carpet of someone's room and water it with a fine mist from a plant sprayer. In the morning the inhabitant would wake up to a neat lawn that had appeared overnight by magic.

asphodeleon New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused with plastic

Can you provide a link to the forums you referenced?

asphodeleon How is music possible

Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.

asphodeleon DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal”

For anyone using the DuckDB PHP plugin and looking to upgrade to v2.0, this is the PR to watch: [1]

[1] https://github.com/satur-io/duckdb-php/pull/72

asphodeleon What Is the Karakoram Anomaly?

There's a documentary, "The Last Mountain", about the sister and father of Tom Ballard, who died on Nanga Parbat, going out there to see where he did his final climb. It gives an idea of what it is like to visit.

Incidentally, Tom Ballard was the son of Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2.

asphodeleon New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused with plastic

From the linked article:

"The oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom. This opens up doors for its use as an at-home recycling system."

asphodeleon New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused with plastic

Bacteria and fungi are like, "Hold my beer...":

Bacteria: https://microbenotes.com/ideonella-sakaiensis-plastic-eating...

Fungi: https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/11/04/plastic-eating-m...

asphodeleon The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable

It's difficult for humans to comprehend the scale of what it would take to stop the planet from heating up. There are 100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system, with an approximate 15-year lag on observed atmospheric and ocean temperature increases i.e. the temperatures we are currently seeing are those caused by emissions up to around 2011. Since then, carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, so we have a minimum of 15 more years of temperature rises to come.

As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.

This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.

[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2

asphodeleon How Corruption Got This Bad

Obligatory H.L. Mencken quote, from 1956:

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." [1]

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/27042-as-democracy-is-perfe...

asphodeleon Why do we have so many meetings?

> Why do we have so many meetings?

They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.

asphodeleon Gold is now the top U.S. export

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_Mine_(South_Dakota)

"The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine (8,000 feet or 2,438 m) located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002, it was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces (43,900,000 oz; 1,240,000 kg) of gold during its lifetime. This is about 2,500 cubic feet (71 m3) or a volume of gold roughly equal to 18,677 US gallons.

...

In 1876, settlers Fred and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh, and Hank Harney discovered the Homestake deposit during the Black Hills Gold Rush. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the land was stolen for its gold."

When the illegal miners moved in on the Black Hills, Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.

asphodeleon I'm sorry, but you still have to think

Socrates was put to death for such.

asphodeleon No Man Is an Island

Contributing to the community posthumously still counts as contributing.

asphodeleon No Man Is an Island

Kafka did publish some of his work during his lifetime, including The Metamorphosis.

asphodeleon Questions for believers in AI consciousness

Thomas Nagel covers explores the subjectivity of consciousness extensively in What is it like to be a bat?, featured on HN previously [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592

asphodeleon Questions for believers in AI consciousness

If they can do that, they are doing better than 2500+ years of human endeavours in the field of philosophy to date.

asphodeleon Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm

It's difficult to get animals in captivity to mate, as environmental stressors affect them physiologically or they instictively know that conditions aren't right for raising offspring.

Applies to people as well in many developed societies.

asphodeleon Ask HN: What are you reading?

The Outsider (L'Étranger) will give you something to think about. Camus' idea with this novel was to see what would happen to a character who went through life only telling the truth.

asphodeleon My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps

If you like going through the historical back catalogue of original satellite images for a place you can try Lucky Satellite Pic [1]. There are often clouds but sometimes you will hit upon a gem. Apropos of another post in this thread that mentioned Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct here is an example [2]

[1] https://luckysatellitepic.com

[2] https://luckysatellitepic.com/x/SATL6AB5A57891542

asphodeleon Small programming tricks

A few tidbits I wish I had known about sooner:

bash: Ctrl-L to clear the screen

VSCodium: Shift+Alt+[arrows|mouse click] to select a rectangular block

scp for moving files (instead of ftp)

asphodeleon Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization

if alcohol can damage your short term memory,

Imagine what effect alcohol has

asphodeleon Exit the Cave

Another word for 'going outside the cave' is 'seeking external validation'. If you need other people to tell you if what you believe is true or not, do you actually believe anything?

asphodeleon Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

At last! My blargs have been in disarray for ages.

asphodeleon Oceans hit highest temperature on record

With less ice around than there used to be, the same incident energy can do a lot more ocean heating. It takes 80 calories to convert 1 gram of ice at 0C to 1 gram of water at 0C. Once the ice is melted, a further 80 calories can raise the temperature of the gram of water at 0C to 80C

asphodeleon Early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells in mice

Sitting Bull killed his first buffalo with bow and arrow from horseback at the age of 10.

asphodeleon Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions

An alternative for PHP full text search is the PHP DuckDB client [1], and using DuckDB with the Full-Text Search extension [2]. It also stores everything on the local file system and can scale to millions of records.

[1] https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/clients/php [2] https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/full_text_se...