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ricksunny

1,439 karma · joined July 12, 2019

rick+hn@emske-phytochem.com

researcher, IGDORE-affiliate

Advisor: BiosafetyNow https://biosafetynow.org/

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ricksunny··on Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself (2014)
But you don’t understand it’s okay when Mossad and Shin Bet do it.
ricksunny··on Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself (2014)
>That is how Communists get tbeir cultural revokution, you know

That is how blowhards get Red-Scares and Cold Wars, you know. And exactly the abuses OP posting is decrying.

ricksunny··on Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers–Including Undercover ICE Agents
I wonder why this comments page isn’t anywhere close to the HN front page (couldnt find it at all through four pages in), in favor of the Reuters article comment page that is on page 2 at time of posting this.
ricksunny··on The Fall of Scientific American
If the problem as presented is either invisible or neutral to you then, respectfully, you are of my epistemological adversary.
ricksunny··on CNC Stone Carving
I’m glad to see in their advocacy of technology usage that the Carmelites are so vocal. . . ba-dum pum.
ricksunny··on The Fall of Scientific American
The timing was sadly important too. She started 2020. The pandemic had disputed origins. I would say one can guess which side her editorial take took, but one doesn’t need to; she openly mentioned her views on lab leak in a handbook for scicomm editors she authored.

https://ksjhandbook.org/editing-controversial-science/about-...

“Trumped-up controversies about where the novel coronavirus originated have fueled racism and given cover to politicians who withdrew funding for international collaborations with China.”

That handbook was her leaving her indelible mark on all western scicomms editing.

ricksunny··on Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you
In nomadism (as in digital nomad) this is quite salient to me, relevant to communication with relations, colleagues and potential ones (i.e. job/gig economic opportunities) across time zones and countries. I am constantly on the lookout for tools that create the feeling of geographic salience without actually being in the same area. I’ve learned to avoid answering the remotely-asked question ‘so where are you anyways’ for as long as possible, for answering candidly usually ends any follow-up communications (“this person is ‘out there’, not serious, etc”).
ricksunny··on Listen and read USA nuclear forces Emergency Action Messages, heard on 11175 kHz
Gen-C coming right up.
ricksunny··on The alien space of science: Coherent but cognitively unavailable directions
Brilliant.
ricksunny··on Container ship sinks in Strait of Hormuz as Iran steps up attacks
how convenient to some for us to be placed into such an inextricable position.
ricksunny··on DoD’s Jay Stratton: Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth about [NHI] Life
Jay Stratton’s long-awaited DOPSR-cleared book on his government experiences facing the phenomenon of non-human intelligence (NHI) goes on sale today. He was a central behind—the-scenes character in the Disclosure narrative to date, whose public-facing component started in 2017 with the NYT article by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal.
ricksunny··on Fingerprints are the new cookies
> If you own a house, you didn't have its cash value when you bought it;

> we solved the problem with ramshackle one-room buildings with dirt floors,

there is a fallacy here. People with access to debt bid up the price of an asset, like a house, against other peoples’ similar access to debt. Sans debt access, the solution was not necessarily a small ramshackle house. The fallacy is the belief that the same asset price - whether opulent or ramshackle house, wouldn’t adjust to the reduced level from the bidding environment. The differential cost of construction for a nicer house can be countenanced in the access-to-debt case, but that is second order.

Illustrative straw-man example: Suppose, once one had a parcel of land, that it was trivial to construct one’s ‘starter home’ the ramshackle house if you like. Get one’s family and friends to help build in exchange for future return favors. As one advances in life, rebuild to have something more opulent. The rub is in the parcel itself. Unlike the would-be house, it had no cost built-in, just whatever price the previous owner was willing to accept to release their parcel. That parcel’s (and those around it) price reflects the market’s access to debt, or lack of access to debt. In the market without access to debt, parcel pricing reflects which buyers have accrued more savings vs other buyers. In the market with access to debt, parcel pricing reflects who can access more debt (through the various means we know of today - down payment ability yes, which parallels the non-debt’s savings case, someone co-signing, long term expected future earning potential vs someone retired, the parcel itself put up as collateral, perhaps other non-immobile assets put up as collateral, like the family oxcart).

The point is that there isn’t necessarily a 1:1 coupling between market’s debt vs non-debt access and whether the construction is opulent vs ramshackle.

ricksunny··on Cyril Hilsum invented the flat-screen displays that hold us in thrall
Recommend wariness of technology history narratives, especially “just-so” retrocausal stories and, like this one demonstrates, “great man” narratives (like, but for this person, we would not have [invention mentioned in headline].

For example, the answer to ‘who invented the airplane’ takes different form depending primarily, in my experience, on the matchup between reporting outlet’s nationality and the nationality of the putative inventor(s). Qualifiers like ‘steady level flight’ follow from, and do not precede, the nationality matchup.

* studies technology history

ricksunny··on AI-ready biological data: $1.8B global commitment
Thank you for offering zero evidence to center me as the one who may be at fault rather than engaging with the topic at hand.
ricksunny··on AI-ready biological data: $1.8B global commitment
TFA’s missing info in between its PR pairing of the unknown biohub with the (much more well known) NIH and DoE is that biohub is a Zuckerberg initiative. So just imagine all your biological data paired inextricably tied on an opt-out-but-cant-really basis with your Facebook & Insta account.
ricksunny··on Bill Draper has died
Odd no mention of DFJ as started by his son, the single most familiar association with the name Draper in tech (with apologies to Charles Stark D..)
ricksunny··on A map of every lighthouse
Can we tell the rest of his UAP Science Advisory Council’s 18 members?
ricksunny··on Bill Draper has died
His father is particularly intriguing with respect to wartime / postwar history, Good bet there’s probably more content there buried in the archives worth coming out.
ricksunny··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
Thanks, edited along w/ several other typos (checks glasses prescription) :)
ricksunny··on 'Neanderthals Among Us' review
Yes but draw an arbitrary line around any group. Call them HNdrathals if you want. Define them at one instaneous snapshot in time as 100% conserved gene corpus. Then watch generation after generation, as some of the HNers (against all odds) interbreed with the surrounding populace. After one hundred generations, should we expect many people to be more than 2% HNdrathal? Yet did the HNdrathals ‘die out’?
ricksunny··on A map of every lighthouse
sounds like pulsars.
ricksunny··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
E.O. Wilson / Richard Dawkins?
ricksunny··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
finally, a bonafide non-LLLm (c. 2026) answer! :)
ricksunny··on An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why
There was at least one TNG episode devoted to this - The Measure of a Man - a courtroom drama.
ricksunny··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
>The big lack in Von Neumann's architecture was index registers. He was into storing into the address part of instructions. The Manchester Mark I had the first index register (the "B box"), at which point programs could be read-only and still be able to index arrays. That completed the basic CPU architecture.

strikes me as gilding the lily (I earlier even imagined possibly even a claude-esque stock 'one caveat' flourish, but I know you wouldn't do that given your background). Addressable memory, where any given addressed memory register can contain not just conventional data to be operated on but can also contain an address of some other memory register to jump to. is what strikes me as the highly-enriched uranium of computer architecture. indexing an array is a feature bump by comparison.

ricksunny··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
Perhaps, and thanks for contributing that; and I'm not taking a position currently on this. But I've long been uncomfortable with the term 'random access' for random access memory (RAM) as it implies that the concept of 'randomness' is somehow a required and fundamental property of the memory technology described, when it's not. 'Arbitrary access' is a much more appropriately encapsulating description of the function of the memory at hand. Alas, the incumbency of terminology.
ricksunny··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
> It was established terminology by 1973, as far as I can tell

That's a worthwhile observation. The 1973 article anyway doesn't go into depth about comparative computer architecture. It's also possible the term's currency in computer science circles hadn't yet crossed into Halmos' mathematics circles, but I wouldn't know.

ricksunny··on Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
my comment to that HN thread - feels as appropriate to this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49804189
ricksunny··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
Feels appropriate to mention here recent HN mentions about who deserves credit for 'von Neumann architecture"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870485

ricksunny··on The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]
I'm more of a Vannevar acolyte myself.
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