> The UCSF group hypothesizes that this elevated level of orexin expression partially explains reduced sleep
So, one possible line of investigation would be a table of mammals, their sleep cycles, their orexin levels, and the numbers of copies of orexin and it's regulators in their genomes. For example: compared to humans, elephants have a lower cancer risk. Turns out they have significantly more copies of p53, a tumor supressor gene (1).
Perhaps a similar, somewhat parallel construct exists: elephants sleep 3-4 hours a night. Maybe they have more orexin? Maybe they have different copy numbers or mutations of the relevant genes in the pathway?
The difference between theory and practice is that, in practice, all theoretical exponentials are eventually sigmoid and, in the very long run, bell-shaped.
Hmm. I recognise the similarities ("pay me") but I also see differences ("pay me for work done", as in the video vs "pay me for replicating my work", as in IP laws).
Free culture isn't against the former (therefore this video doesn't actually address the point), but is against the latter, as being restricted from replicating work harms culture and innovation as a whole (e.g. memes and fan art being technically illegal), and imposes a large cost on the public.
That said, I'm not fully against IP laws, just that it should be limited to 14 years and only in situations where it is necessary for the production of it in the first place (e.g. articles behind paywalls). I believe I have a right to an opinion on this as a member of the public, as IP laws are a compromise between the public and the creators. It's not some natural human right.
In this moral view, if AI trains on my HN comment for example, copyright shouldn't come into play because I didn't require it to produce this comment. I had other incentives to write this comment.
As a counter-example, no one cares about statistical analysis (what AI is) when it's just building a corpus, doing classification, or even generating GPT-2 level text etc. It's only when it becomes a threat to jobs when people panic. This reveals the real problem: it is about jobs, not data. And so the solution: financial support, equal education and job retraining. Not expanding copyright laws to cover analysis as well.
> This reveals the real problem: it is about jobs, not data.
I think you're selling "it is about jobs, not data" a little short here.
Let me start off by saying I work on AI for healthcare, my first IRB protocol that contemplated computer vision is from 2012. I'm not an OG, but I've been working on this stuff for a while, and I'm very bullish.
On the flipside, my wife is a pediatric occupational therapist, she works with autistic kids. Kids in the Bay Area. Her clients are Google machine learning engineers. The major issue with jobs is not so much the monetary value of the work, although that's an important secondary outcome.
Humans need an occupation. Occupation is the purpose of life. Long before money was a thing, we needed purpose. Even kings and their courtiers, before money, needed occupations. We need to be doing something. People change their occupations from time to time. It doesn't have to be a job. It could be a hobby, in some cases. Even kids want to contribute. Even infants, as soon as they understand and can, will reach out to console or delight their caregiver. But we need to feel like we are giving back. Our minds and muscles atrophy if we are not occupied.
If we attach everything to solar power and let the machines run the world, we'll end up some version of the blob people in Wall-E's Buy n Large spaceships. The reward at the end of the movie was the people getting off the space ship, thanking the robots for giving them back purpose, mainly to restore their planet.
Purpose and occupation are about so much more than money.
> being restricted from replicating work harms culture and innovation as a whole
I believe that there is no "one size fits all" answer to this, and failing to get in front of that in discussion, harms the resulting thought. The societal situation of an individual using their talent to make arts or design, alone or in self-selected teams, is not the same as large companies who run market systems and have attorneys and accountants to aid that over time.
Lots of excited people argue against copyright and then go directly to the story of the Mickey Mouse image.
It is precisely because copying is so, so different than creating, that the situations within the breadth of this topic are not, and should not, be comparable.
"A great society is judged by how it treats the least of its members" very much applies to working arts and crafts adults IMHO.
The new tab, the web's equivalent of a blank page. Staring at a blank page is sometimes associated with maddening frustration, but in most cases it's actually the possibility of something new that captures us.
Use a warm off-white, not unlike YC's background, and render the brand logo in a subdued grey at the bottom of the tab/page. Make it a link to a landing page on their site: "You love new possibilities. Crane stands ready to serve your imagination."
I wonder how well this would work with laser microphones on a pane of glass. Can you infer keystrokes with near infrared laser? That is, can you identify the heatmap of keystroke events to infer which keyboard they're using, then replay the tape to identify the strings of characters being typed? Can you localize the turning of pages with UV?
This beamforming effect only works well when each sensor is getting a dramatic enough "different angle" on the signal that each one can use phase shifting to cancel out other noise, but with a laser there's not really any noise to cancel out (i mean you're just monitoring a vibrational spot on a window), and you also don't have a far enough "different angle" to shine from, if you're monitoring from one spot.
However having multiple lasers from multiple different locations might be able to create an improved signal if all signals are averaged, but it wouldn't really be due to the phase shifting that's used in beamforming.
Didn't Israeli students show that you can recover audio from the vibrations of bulb filament with a fast photo diode?
I'd test that with a CCD line sensor plus a wide aperture lens and reading it out with 8kHz. Then you have 128 audio pixels that can cover an entire city.
Line of sight might be an issue there. I'm thinking more high-end clandestine eavesdropping. Fun fact: curtains are a pretty good defeat for laser microphones, but if the building is really old and made of solid stone, you can point at the rock instead!
The rock?! That’s incredible. I would have guessed it was too dense to pick up normal speaking volume. Then again, even the window glass vibration seems pretty magical to me.
Evolutionarily, amphibians are somewhat simpler than mammals, they're smaller than a lot of mammals and they don't live as long, so I suspect some of this is simply that "things that aren't there". They wouldn't have as many problems with advanced glycation end products because the temperature is so low. There's at least one other ice survival strategy: antifreeze proteins. The fir tree and a variety of arctic fish have these: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6691018/.
In all cases, I still don't understand how the membrane potentials are maintained or re-constructed in the thawing phase: any pointers?
I think there are threads in Michael Levin's work that suggest membrane voltage potential may be able to be 'encoded' to microtubule structures and converted back into voltage potentials later. I don't think it's firmly established or understood yet but seems like a promising area for research!
Perhaps because ice forms outside cells, freezing ions in place. Even if there was a very small area around ion channels that was liquid that equalized all ion concentrations with the cell, when the extra cellular fluid thaws the original concentrations would be pretty much restored
This is not destabilizing this democracy. The FDP has done that same thing before - twice! In 1966 and 1982.
Abandoning a non-functioning government and calling new elections is part of democracies. Just ask the Italians (68 governments in 76 years), or recently the French and the Brits.
The coalition falling apart isn't really the problem. The problem is that with the strength of AfD and BSW, and the other parties' unwillingness to work with them, it will likely be impossible to form any coalition with a majority next year, which is sure to be destabilizing simply through how dysfunctional the government will be. Again.
The problem is that the far right is ready to exploit that situation with their broken populist rhetoric and look to gain massively from it. Currently, they are the second biggest faction behind the conservatives in the polls. All the moderate parties have so little support that the only coalition government options are the ones that couldn't stop this growing trend of disillusionment and protest voting in the past.
The point though is that we don't have a good mechanism to remove a government that isn't meeting expectations. Impeachment exists, but it is very difficult and has never succeeded at removing a sitting president.
In a stable democracy, whenever there are elections, the losers accept that the elections were fair and they lost. If there are reasons to believe that the elections were not fair, or if the losers refuse to admit that the elections were fair and they lost, the system is unstable.
Peaceful transition of power is the most important factor in the long-term stability of any system of governance. Whenever a leader loses legitimacy or dies, there must be a process to select a successor. If the outcome of the process is contested, the system is at a high risk of collapsing in the power struggles of its elites. It's far more common for a state to fail due to internal power struggles than external threats.
He left office. He wasn't kicked out (other than the election of course), it's not like Secret Service had to drag him out of the Oval. He left. He also went through the whole process again and we know how that turned out.
To imply that the US is an "unstable democracy" is laughable.
The US was already unstable in 2000. Once courts get involved in determining the outcome of elections, it's a sure sign that the system is no longer functioning properly.
Instability does not mean that a collapse is imminent. It means that further shocks may cause a collapse more easily than in a stable system. It makes a collapse more likely in the long term, which in this context means something like a human lifetime.
Stable democracies can preserve themselves even against undue influence. Even if you think Jan 6 was a carefully calculated and orchestrated attempt at a "kill the elected leaders and install sycophants in their place" style coup d'état - or perhaps especially if you think that - the result proved the US's stability.
How about send to prison the main culprit behind it?
> Starting at 11:58, from behind a bulletproof shield, President Trump gave a speech, declaring that he would "never concede" the election, criticizing the media, and calling for Pence to overturn the election results.
At no point did those Jan6 people have the ability to actually overthrow the US government. Let's not exaggerate their ability to take over all US armed forces and government operations. Jan6 was more a barnacle on the leviathan that is the US government.
They absolutely had the opportunity to give the president an excuse to stay in power.
“The electoral ballots have been compromised, Congress is in disarray with its leadership killed. I’m staying in office for the duration of this emergency, and the states will decide on a process to select new electors, or the House of Representatives will elect the next president per its Constitutional authority.”
Virginia and Maryland were on the brink of invading DC (had the government continued to resist deploying the National Guard and the riot got even more out of hand) with all the bizarre consequences of that…
To be fair it’s not like the mob was that determined and capable to actually murder Pence etc. (at least there weren’t any clear signs of it). They scattered immediately after the first guns were fired (I mean those close enough to witness it). So more people might have died but it would have primarily been the rioters rather than anyone else..
There are multiple threat models where you can't trust yourself.
Your future self definitely can't trust your past self. And vice versa. If your future self has a stroke tomorrow, did your past self remember to write a living will? And renew it regularly? Will your future self remember that password? What if the kid pukes on the carpet before your past self writes it down?
Your current self is not statistically reliable. Andrej Karpathy administered an imagenet challenge to himself, his brain as the machine: he got about 95%.
reply