elevaet

There is an infinite supply of computer algorithms. Gold is an element.

I'm so curious what will happen as mining approaches the asymptote. When the mining rewards become more and more rare and if people aren't incentivizing the network with a lot of transactions, will transaction times just get slower and slower until it becomes a stranded asset?

It also needs to scale well, which bitcoin doesn't. This is evidenced by the ever increasing energy demand, slow transaction times and high fees.

I'd love to hear what you're doing with the CZ-101. CZ-5000 owner here.

My partner works in emergency. Someone came in with a blister on their finger yesterday. They had to see the patient and send them home with a bandaid. Not a good use of resources.

Candida species cause thrush and yeast infections. Afaik they are fairly ubiquitous in the human biome but become problematic when Candida gets out of control.

So if you can test for it chemically there could be positives even if it's not a problem. So it would be a matter of looking under a microscope at the gut microbiome and checking if theres an overgrowth. And then treatment is tricky in the gut - how do you target a single problematic species but keep the rest of the microbiome intact? And if you do knock it out, you still need to create the conditions where it doesnt just bloom again since its ubiquitous.

In the end it might be a thing where you have to follow general gut health advice and try to cultivate a healthy gut microbiome.

I think it is doable in a modern lifestyle, but that most people don't make it a priority.

Most people waste a shocking number of hours out of every day scrolling, watching TV etc, and just take it for granted as part of a "modern lifestyle", but it's just an optional way to spend time, and not very productive.

I have full time employment, a relationship, children, and manage to get our for 1hr of running almost every day. (And find time to debate with strangers on HN XD)

It's not a minor contributor though, people vastly underestimate how much exercise our species is adapted for, how much we're capable of, and just how far off from that most of us live.

> It doesn't matter how potent it is if nobody wants to take it.

Nobody? I can't agree, lots of people want to, and do "take" exercise. Most of my friends are super active and they look good and feel good and are living really healthy lives.

It's true that a lot of society is set up such that we can totally avoid exercising, but on the flip side we've probably never had more access to great ways to be fit that are tailored to personal interest, aptitudes, needs.

Sadly I agree that most (north Americans at least) are extremely under-exercised, but it is a choice.

The article said Latin, but I don't know what script that is. It looks like it was written right-to-left so maybe it's Latin written in Hebrew script? I'm not even sure if that was a thing.

Hah fair enough, point taken!

It was pretty low quality compared to later Tintin books, and a lot more racist. No surprise though considering the era, and that this was during the midst of the Belgian occupation of the Congo.

I learned more (dubious) Roman history from Asterix than all other sources combined

My Mom escaped from some suffering by accessing MAID when the pain and suffering from her terminal cancer became too much for her to bear. She died in her own home surrounded by beloved family and friends, on her own terms.

I'm grateful that she was able to do this, and was spared a period of inhumane suffering at the end of her life.

It's hard and it makes me very sad, but I'm glad she could go this way. It would have been more difficult for her and everyone if she was forced to live through a hellish torture as cancer slowly took her life. In the end she beat cancer by taking herself out with it.

To be blunt, the null hypothesis is that consciousness is not required for AGI.

One example of a correlation between AGI and consciousness without any theory (let alone a testable theory) for why there would be causation does not constitute evidence.

It's also true that the only known examples of general intelligence are embodied in meat machines. Is this a prerequisite for AGI? Again, we don't know. I think probably not, but some people think it is, and the debate is unresolved.

Similarly, my argument is that it's premature to assume that consciousness is a prerequisite for AGI.

Finally, I don't think there's anything invalid about disagreeing with someone's disagreement, and then stating the reason why. In fact you also did this in response to my comment!

> It's equally easy to imagine a machine that can't be generally intelligent because it can't experience.

I agree with this. I was just pointing out that the parent comment:

>I post this because I think the current neural-net hegemony of AI research underappreciates the importance of consciousness and implicitly assumes that it can just scale its way to AGI

assumes that you need conciousness for AGI, but we actually don't know if that's true.

I think it's a mistake to conflate consciousness with AGI and vice-versa. It's entirely possible that you can have AGI without anyone being "home" and conversely it's also possible that there is a subjective experience going in much simpler systems. We just don't know, and maybe we never can.

But regardless, I think it's easy to imagine that there could be a machine that is generally intelligent, or super-generally-intelligent. but doesn't experience.

You can do it even cheaper with some painter's tape!

For the mic, perhaps you could disable it by plugging in an unconnected trrs plug into the audio jack. I'm not sure how low level the switching of the microphone source is when you do this, so maybe it's not a good method.

For better or for worse, some people who can afford otherwise do piracy, out of protest. For example several people I know personally buy music exclusively on bandcamp. If it's not on there, they pirate it. No streaming, no iTunes etc.

> People are crazy for vinyl, but CDs are just _so_ convenient.

I feel like I might be punished for stepping out of line here but CDs sound better than vinyl too.

Agreed. Everyone here knows how to use chatgpt. We come here for a different way to share, learn and interact.

This reminds me of the font Roland used on their 80s synth service manual schematics. Maybe it's the same?

What's the typical efficiency of a nuclear power plant? i.e. what fraction of the energy from the fission reaction gets converted into electricity?

> On August 21, 1945, less than a week after Japan notified the US that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment when he accidentally dropped a piece of “tamper” material, used to reflect neutrons back into the core, and triggered a critical mass. Daghlian used his bare hands to pull the mass apart to stop the chain reaction, and absorbed a fatal dose of radiation. He died three weeks later.

They put the most favoured (by entry times or heat results) swimmers in the center lanes, slower ones out from there. You've probably noticed that you usually see the race leaders in the middle, and you hardly ever see the edges winning.

In cases where there are less swimmers than lanes, they leave the edge lanes empty.

This is basically true wrt the 1-sub lysergamide series (1p-lsd 1cp-lsd 1d-lsd 1v-lsd ald-52 etc) but many other lysergamides are quite distinct: AL-LAD ETH-LAD MiPLA etc. And then of course there are the lysergamides that are used to treat migraine, which are completely different.

There's a good arguement that backgammon and bridge are better training for real life because of the mixture of strategy and randomness.

It's that triple-whammy plus the comfort of consuming the spell that Starbucks has woven for their customers.

I think for a lot of people buying a "special" coffee/thing at Starbucks squeezes that "I'm treating myself" gland just right.

This was a great book. It seems less well-known in the HN-sphere than Seeing Like A State, but it's at least as good IMHO. It really changed my mental model of the dynamics of early states and "barbarians", and how agriculture interplayed with the story of how it all unfolded.

My one criticism was that when answering the question "why did people start eating grains", he never seemed to consider that it could simply be that people enjoy eating them.