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birriel

6,117 karma · joined September 25, 2020

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birriel··on 1X Neo – Home Robot - Pre Order
Although these particular units are designed for home use, commercial applications are not far off, perhaps in the order of months.

Small and medium-sized businesses will start thinking that it's much better to lease a unit for $500/mo. than $2,000/mo. in payroll for one human. Then they own the unit after 3 years. We're going to need some form of UBI soon.

birriel··on I deleted my second brain
It's baffling to me that anyone would do this in the age of LLMs. All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context. The article doesn't mention that she even considered this as an option. I hope the files can be recovered when she realizes this possibility.
birriel··on Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time
OP here. I made this submission 3 days ago. The thread you're referencing was posted yesterday, using the same exact link.

HN needs to do better.

birriel··on Ibis: Federated Wikipedia alternative
Ok, but that criterion is true for human-generated output as well.
birriel··on The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024
mtRNA = mitochondrial RNA
birriel··on Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later
I hear you, but the problem is that the alternative is much worse. These indefinite detentions lend themselves to all manner of corruption. Maybe a prison guard doesn't like you and falsely claims you committed a violent offense, just to keep you inside. Maybe a fellow inmate attacks you, and when you defend yourself, it gets registered as a violent offense.

The first element of due process is that a citizen be notified that the State is mobilizing its resources with the intention of depriving them of their life, liberty, and/or property.

Another core tenet of due process is that, once notified, you get a chance to submit evidence in your favor before an impartial adjudicator, precisely to avoid the issues in my first paragraph.

birriel··on Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later
I'm an attorney barred in the US, so I'm not familiar with this kind of sentencing. However, I'm having a hard time understanding commenters trying to add nuance to IPP sentences simply by saying that inmates don't get released because they keep committing violent offenses while inside.

The reasonable thing to do in such cases is to give the inmate a new trial for each of those alleged offenses. This is very basic due process.

birriel··on Trove of dinosaur fossils found high in B.C. mountains
I'm not a geologist, but 2000 m in 37 million years is ~0.05 millimeters per year. Is that about the right rate of growth for mountains formed through subduction and volcanism?
birriel··on Metformin decelerates aging clock in male monkeys
It's so frustrating to get seemingly contradictory results across species with the same treatment. The Interventions Testing Program found no increase in median or maximum lifespan in mice, male or female, treated with metformin (though it did in combination with rapamycin) [0].

I realize "decelarating the aging clock" might be subtly different than increasing lifespan, but it's a reasonable enough comparison, imho. Hopefully we can soon capitalize on improvements in AI to faithfully model human biology in silico, and conduct experiments that way.

[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-p...

birriel··on Learn How to Learn
Posting credentials and substantiating claims are two different things.
birriel··on Cure for male pattern baldness given boost by sugar discovery
Those encouraging folks to "just shave it off" fail to realize that it's so much more than a vanity issue. From an evolutionary standpoint, baldness is perceived in the female brain as a sign of poor sperm quality [0].

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S102781171...

birriel··on Scientists discover a new hormone that can build strong bones in mice
I don't know about this hormone, but human clinical trials for a tooth-regrowing drug will begin in September. It was successful in animal models.

https://www.engadget.com/the-worlds-first-tooth-regrowing-dr...

birriel··on Axiomatic by Greg Egan
"Learning to Be Me" is a masterpiece, one of the best short stories ever written. Not only is the phenomenology brilliant, but the literary skill is so good that, even though you suspect what's coming all throughout the tale, he still manages to shock you in the denouement.

You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.

birriel··on Bone tissue reparation using coral and marine sponges
From a cosmetic point of view, almost everybody exclusively focuses on the skin to counter aging, when they should be at least as concerned with bone density.

Lots of people have perfect skin, but they still look old. Why? Bone morphology. The zygomatic bone erodes, and the orbital gaps widen. The mandible degrades and pivots down and backwards (jaw rotation). Issues like resorption are currently very challenging. Skin is comparatively much easier. Also (and besides well-known interventions like collagen, retinoids, HA, and dermarolling), Epidermal and Keratinocyte Growth Factors are already very cheap, and showing much promise.

birriel··on Ask HN: What is your ChatGPT customization prompt?
I believe it was originally written by Jeremy Howard, who has been featured here in HN a number of times.

https://youtu.be/jkrNMKz9pWU?si=0kGhs7gyh0LUXUBJ

birriel··on Sora: Creating video from text
With the third and last videos (space men, and man reading in the clouds), this is the first time I have found the resolution indistinguishable from real life. Even with SOTA stills from Midjourney and Stable Diffusion I was not entirely convinced. This is incredible.
birriel··on The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday
I presume the subject must've been in pretty bad shape in terms of health, to assume the inherent risk of brain surgery at the micron scale. Best wishes to them, and I hope humanity can benefit from knowledge gathered with this breakthrough.
birriel··on OpenAI's board has fired Sam Altman
This is highly speculative, but minute 18:46 in the DevDay presentation [0] struck me as very awkward. Sam's AGI comment seemed off-script, and I don't think Satya liked it very much.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/U9mJuUkhUzk?si=dyXBxi9nz6MocLKO

birriel··on I think I need to go lie down
0.001% is only 17 doublings away from the whole job.
birriel··on Artificial Consciousness Remains Impossible (Part 2)
To say that artificial consciousness is (or "remains") impossible, is to imply that there is a ghost in the machine in conscious lifeforms. Maybe there is, I don't know. But if there isn't, there should be no reason for artificial consciousness to be impossible.
birriel··on Higher Intakes of Potassium and Magnesium, but Not Lower Sodium, Reduce CVD Risk
Not medical advice, but for folks looking to supplement with Mg, it's best to avoid Magnesium oxide, as it is very poorly absorbed. Magnesium chloride and Magnesium bisglycinate are much better absorbed.
birriel··on OpenAI predicted to generate over $1B
This is like 450M tokens/month, assuming GPT-4 32K, averaging I/O to $0.09/1k tokens.
birriel··on Lithium morphology discovery could lead to safer lithium-metal batteries
Li(thium).
birriel··on Linux like original Unix [video]
I first learned about the tty command about 25 years ago, and had always assumed that an actual teletype was a screen and a keyboard from the very beginning. Today I learned that Ken and Dennis were actually typing into a roll of paper, and getting printed paper back.
birriel··on Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?
IIRC, the Wikipedia article for Betteridge's law stated that, statistically, headlines in the form of a question were more often answered with a "yes."
birriel··on Discovery of Chemical Means to Reverse Aging and Restore Cellular Function
Study:

https://www.aging-us.com/article/204896/text

birriel··on GPT4 is 8 x 220B params = 1.7T params
2 orders of magnitude smaller, assuming 100T synaptic connections in the human brain.
birriel··on Was He Apollo’s Son?: Review of Plato of Athens
Thanks for sharing this quote, very inspiring!
birriel··on Ryuichi Sakamoto has died
My favorite live performance of "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence". RIP

https://youtu.be/L49FRjnhrWI

birriel··on The “heat death” hypothesis might not hold
I've always tried to reconcile this idea with the hope that some future advanced civilization (maybe even evolved from humans) might figure out a way to "escape" the Universe, by manipulating spacetime itself, "accessing" other dimensions, &c.
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