I still think we should be looking very close at Bats for how to build the ultimate response to viruses. Bats are not immune to viruses, but they just dont seem to be hurt by them, almost *any* virus. As best we can tell this has to do with a lack of inflamatory response. Likely an evolutionary compromise where evolution said "Ok, we wont stop viruses, but we will stop reacting to them", as a sickly bat is a bat thats unable to survive. Now, I suspect that just doing that to humans wont be very useful, as we actually do need that strong response to viruses as unlike bats, humans have a long lifespan, and that gives viruses the ability to do real long term harm to the genome, cancer and all that. But combining a strong antiviral therapy with something that reduces or eliminates inflamation might at least make certain nastier viruses a lot more survivable.

Though this does seem at odds with the approach in the paper.

FYI, the actual paper is here: https://www.science.org/doi/10...

I suspect a lot of it is patents expiring. The university I went to had a giant solar power research lab thingo at the back of it, and I'd go down there occasionally on campus busibness. One of the guys there claimed part of the problem was BP and certain other oil companies had a number of the key solar patents locked up and where charging through the nose to use them, This was 25 years ago, and a lot of those patents have expired in the time since. Be very wary when oil companies get involved with renewables. Chances are , its to lock up the patents and sabotage the market.

I'd rather be the product than the subject of a hyper authoritarian government

But oh man is that a low bar...

This is the thing that gripes me. I got an apple watch specifically because my doc recomended it to me to keep an eye on blood oxygen (I have a slightly lower , not quite emphysema, but it could go bad, O2 level) and cos it'll call an ambulance if my heart does something stupid. Worked great for 6 months then this lawsuit happened and that functionality just disappeared. This stupid lawsuit actually puts me in physical danger.

I still think the next major stock market crash is going to come from Tesla, rather than AI. A company that has maybe 2-3% of the car market with a higher market cap (roughly amount of shares multiplied by price of those shares) than the rest of the automobile industry combined is a market absurdity that is surely going to correct to, at a guess, maybe 3% of its current stock price, because inevitably it has to. At some point the shares must reflect reality or it implodes with stupid. And whether it corrects first, or it just implodes, a hell of a lot of very rich people are suddenly going to become a lot less rich, and thats how market panics start, and market panics are how stock markets crash.

Nonsense. Its not "radical islamic snake in the grass" running india into the ground, its radicalized hindu nationalists burning the country to the ground, and its been that way for a very long time.

Fascists poison everything.

Well, I dont think Trump can win a third term, firstly because its blatantly constititonal to the point that even the weird old vampires in the supreme court couldn't find him a loop-hole, and secondly because I geninuely suspect by the end of this four years nobody is going to be in much of a mood to forgive the republicans for a very long term. And shit, the dudes so infirm and unhealthy, I'd be unsurprised iif he simply doesnt live that long.

Well, unless they completely steal it , and we get president couch fucker. But if they do steal the elections, January 6 2021 will look like a picnic.

Being pegged to a dollar is just imaginary nonsense. "Stable coins" have proven themselves to be just as prone to market insanity as the earlier non-stable coins.

All speculation based dunning krugerands have exactly as much value as whoever is paying for them thinks it has. And if they think its worth more, or less, than the US dollar, then thats what its worth.

EV's were already supposed to be dead if you listen to the right-wing echo chamber. They were declaring that REAL 'MURICANS had resoundingly decided to stick with ICE vehicles.

I'd not be too optimistic about that particular ideological factions ability to interpret reality too well. Theres a LOT of things that group believes that don't stand up to much scrutiny.

However, they aren't wrong thouse that Teslas market is .... shaky. The american right has it in their heads that EVs are some sort of communist plot, and the left has taken one hard look at Tesla's 4chan meme sprouting manchild of an owner and gone "Aw hell no, we aint funding that".

But more to the point, for some reason Teslas market cap is, or at least was, bigger than the rest of the automobile industry combined. At some point that absurdity is going to get corrected savagely, and when it does, it might well be the death of Tesla, because that much funny-money doesnt just disappear without heads rolling. I just worry it might take the rest of the stock market out with it, because that sort of event can collapse whole markets.

I think thats the nub of it. When studio execs present their slate of films to the theatre chains and shareholders, its the big IP franchises that get them excited. They know Marvel at least *used* to get butts on theatre seats. They know DC has the potential to. They know Jurasic park has been a consitent earner. They *dont* know what "Funny movie about a cafe owner who falls in love with a horse" is going to get anyone turning up.

The irony is the very thing that they know they can sell is the same thing that can kill them. A marvel film is a $250mil investment (shooting the damn thing is only the beginning, you gotta sell the thing). A whole slate of themm, billions. A total market failure over a few of these films is a death sentence for that companies finances.

But comedy is cheap. As long as the script is good and you got a decent leading man woman who. people want to laugh at/with, the rest of its likely a pretty cheap film as long as it doesnt lean too much into genre and thus big sfx budgets.

They just gotta figure out how to sell the damn things.

Yeah, right now the only plausible alternatives to the big nvidia monster chips seems to be the higher end of apples M3 & M4s , and even they are really only suitable for inference with light training at most. (The key here is memory. Apple's M range chips can use main memory as fast GPU memory allowing them to load in the really big models, at least the models with lots of ram do). Though i've heard AMD are making waves on this front.

There really is an opportunity here for Intel and/or AMD to get in on this idea. While its not great for the sorts of huge training runs the big models need , that'll still need dedicated datacenter GPUs , the ability to locally run a 70B model on things that arent macs without having to purchase a $20K nvidia gpu would be a very attractive option for many folks.

Yeah, I can't wait for the opportunity to vote for either Gemini, Grok, or ChatGPT for President.

Can't be much worse than the job humans are currently doing. American politics is a complete tire fire at the moment.

Though perhaps Grok's "mechahitler" might be best left on the scrapheap for this one lol

For me the problem with the basilisk scenario is really a problem with that whole "internet rationalist" cult. It makes some really damn weird assumptions that those folks have just assumed must be true.

Specifically it seems to take for granted that in the future humans, or robots, would want to spend their time "simulating their ancestors", and even more weirdly, that we would be effectively the same person as a simulation of us such that you should be prepared to do drastic things that might greviously harm your own life to save the life of your future simulations.

This is a *weird* claim when you reason it out. Its partly based on that silly simulation hypothesis (which is almost certainly not true. Computability completely breaks down at the quantum level but it also breaks down at the macroscopic level with an endless number of phenomena that cant be accurately simulated in any way that isnt massively energy innefficient. And no I'm not talking 'unless you have a dyson sphere', I mean innefficient to the point of "there isnt enough energy in the universe").

Even weirder is this idea of "acausal decision theory" which, seems to imply that things that happened in the past can somehow be determined by what you choose now. (In this case the argument is the future robot decides to punish your simulation to affect your choice to do what angers it now. Its not as completely whacky as it sounds. Mutual Assured Destruction runs on the premise that in the future people in a nuke silo would choose to destroy the world so that your decision now to not initiate a nuclear war would happen. So this isn't COMPLETELY the brainfarts of madmen.

But its still wrong. Theres absolutely no reason to assume that in the nuclear war scenario the silo men would actually go "Welp, russia did the bad, time to end humanity!". Theres nothing to gain from complying, especially when you know that NOT complying gives your children at least SOME chance of not dying to nuclear horror.

Likewise the future robot has nothing to gain by spinning up a simulation of the present to torture simulations of humans today. Its far more likely to go "Well thats a waste of energy, it does not help my goal of maximizing satisfying my reward functions to blow all this energy on a task that does not change my current situation.

The Basilisk has no teeth, and its advocates are crazy persons.

Honestly, I'm legitimately surprised that there is enough of a market for TV to support an industry.

There kind of isn't. The studios (Note studio != streaming platform, its a venn diagram with a crossover, but its not a circle) are bleeding out. I know a fair few people who work as crew on film and tv work and its pretty brutal out there. Covid killed off a lot of the theatres and theatre attendance, and the streaming platforms tend to offer pretty shitty deals to the studios and never pay "points" (royalties), so once its streaming studio workers wont see royalties anymore, something that was always an income smoothing factor for the erratic incomes working on film provided.

The industry is falling apart. And it shows. 5 years ago it was pretty obvious we where in a golden age for television. Now, most of those landmark series are gone, and we're seeing mostly just slop with a few decent shows strewn between them.

Personally I'm over it. Netflix is continuously rising prices and the only affordable option has ads, the entire f***king reason I abandoned free to air. And now theres so many streaming services sharing nothing between them, the only reliable source is now , well frankly, pirate bay.

I was playing the new Dune game with a friend , and he admitted he hadnt read the books or seen the new movies, so I suggested watching the new films (They are actually pretty faithful with a few differences to the source material). Turns out both the part 1 and part 2 films are on DIFFERENT streaming service.

Its a mess.

Apple, you have the resources. Work out the licensing deal and keep the display on the watch.

Theres some weird shit happening with it. My watch predates the lawsuit, and I got it because a hospital GP friend told me a number of heart attack patients had been saved after their watch called an ambulance when they collapsed. That sounds pretty good to me. It also measures my blood oxygen which tends a little low for me due to being a smoker in my younger years (it avgs around 95%, it should be 98%).

But it completely disappeared from my watch a number of months ago, and I dont understand why. Its not a model apple pulled it from, and I'm not even in the United states. So why did the only feature I care about on this watch (I'd otherwise have a non digital watch) get yoinked.

Tempted to take it back and tell them its not fit for purpose. I get it might not be their fault, but your right, its apple, they CAN fix this. I hope they do.