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Comment Your vacuous or worse AC Subject here (Score 1) 49

But did you have to propagate it?

Evidently spans a lot of the discussion, but my real concern is the lack of potential for Funny for the story. Maybe if would help if they could get a fresh editor to pick more interesting news?

Which somehow led me to a worse idea? What if Slashdot started using an AI editor? Maybe they could name it ETS, standing for "Et Tu, Slashdot"? Or GEitS for "Ghost Editor in the Slashdot"? Now I feel like loading up an AI and asking it about possible names for such an AI editor... Then in the next stage of devolution, Slashdot could fix the moderation problem with AI moderators?

Comment Re:Shine On, Football Brain (Score 1) 33

Basically, the regulatory mechanism is: NO is "the brakes" on the mitochondria, and it's also a vasodilator. More NO in a tissue is a signal that it needs more oxygen, and it "opens the floodgates". The problem is that the rate of reaction in the mitochondria is proportional to the local oxygen concentration, so the cells nearest the supply will tend to disproportionately consume it. So the electron transport chain in these cells are simultaneously "braked" by the NO to limit how fast they can consume oxygen.

But the NO-CcO balance can get into a pathogenic state of excess NO (nitrosative stress), where the electron transport chain basically grinds to a halt, leading to high amounts of electron leakage and the formation of lots of superoxide. This combines with free NO to make peroxynitrite, which does irreversible damage to the mitochondria and will eventually kill them (this can cause a vicious cycle, because as the cells struggle to get enough ATP, they wrongly interpret it as hypoxia (pseudohypoxia) and trigger the release of more NO to bring in more oxygen. Even worse, as the failing mitochondria undergo apoptosis or necrosis, mtDNA leaks out, which the cell wrongly interprets as a bacterium, triggering the release of pro-inflammatory regulators, which trigger the release of... wait for it... lots more NO.

Nitrosative stress has been traced as a pathogenic mechanism in a lot of diseases, everything from diabetes to parkinson's to athlerosclerosis to ALS to asthma to cancers to IBS and on and on. So any new mechanism to help clear nitrosative stress, even if just temporarily, could help with symptom relief from a really broad range of conditions.

Comment Re: Misanthropomorphizing (Score 1) 96

"Humans have an impulse for action and AIs don't" is your response to an article about an AI grinding its gears, ala "NEW REALIZATION -- I'm burning a lot of time on hCaptcha round-trips .... so the answer payload shape is right, the token+image pairing is right (from the same script.js!), cookies are right (requests) and STILL 'wrong answer'. SO WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THE ANSWERS?" "?

I'd argue if anything, it's humans whose drive for action is weak.

Comment Re:Shine On, Football Brain (Score 1) 33

Also, it's perfectly possible that the red light from being outdoors in the sun is also good for you - but that also comes with other frequencies, including harmful ionizing UV light, which "ages" the skin and risks skin cancer (though the increased vitamin D from ~290-300nm is an offsetting factor).

Comment Re:Shine On, Football Brain (Score 5, Interesting) 33

Red light therapy is one of those things that sounds like total woo hokum when you first hear about it, but that studies keep showing benefits to.

Key thing to remember is that these studies are using very high doses of red light - often limited by the amount of heating you can safely tolerate in the subject (not heat from the emitter, but from the photons themselves).

Honestly, it doesn't sound crazy at all. Different tissues have different light susceptibilities (that's how, say, laser hair removal works), due to the susceptibility of specific compounds. Red penetrates very deeply (remember the classic trick of shining a flashlight through your hand; only the red makes it through). Red light has a number of very specific interactions it causes. The main one is that it photolyzes the bond between NO and cytochrome c oxidase (triggering NO signaling, causing vasodilation). A secondary possible affect is that it affects light-gated ion channels (esp. in the TRP family).

And the amount of red light we're talking about is very high. Instantaneous fluxes are like 1000-5000 times higher than ambient indoor light in the red spectrum, and even averaged across a day it's still like an order of magnitude higher than a person who spends their day indoors. For NIR therapy, the difference is even more extreme (commercial LEDs emit essentially zero NIR). While outdoor light exposure is much higher - 15 mW/cm2 red + 20 mW/cm2 NIR, comparable to the 10-100 mW/cm2 of red light therapy - it's broad spectrum, while red light therapy is concentrated around cytochrome c oxidase peaks, so the flux around these specific peaks is ~10-50x higher with red light therapy.

Flux matters a lot because to meaningfully dissociate NO from CCO, you have to do so at faster than the rate that NO and CCO recombine. Sunlight on its own (let alone indoor ambient light) don't do that. It doesn't matter if you're spending all day in the sun vs. 15 minutes in treatment if the sun isn't hitting the threshold effect level.

Another difference, BTW, is not just "shooting it up your nostrils", it's scattering. Sun just hits your skin and much of it is lost through scattering and absorption in blood, esp. hemaglobin. Red light therapy targeting deep structures is delivered by a contact probe that compresses the skin, displacing blood. This increases penetration into deep tissues 2-5x.

Comment Re:The joke I was looking for (Score 1) 149

No, I'm not in the States now, but these years you feel like you have to be parsimonious with the personal information...

I left a long time ago. I'm not saying that I could see where it was going to end up, but I mostly just felt that things were going in the wrong direction. I could never have imagined where it would end up, but there is so much of today's reality that every publisher would have been rejected as "too impossible" if submitted as fiction.

Recently saw an interesting 2D analysis that was supposed to assess various cities on costs versus quality of life. The largest American cities were concentrated in the quadrant of expensive but unpleasant. My city was sort of near the center of the chart, which somewhat surprised me. I would have thought it was somewhere pretty far out in the quadrant of expensive but worth it... I feel like digging up the chart again because I can't remember which cities were in the quadrant of inexpensive with high quality.

Comment Re:Misanthropomorphizing (Score 2) 96

You realize that you're just predicting nerve impulses, right? You don't "feel" anything.

(The brain is constantly making predictions about what every nerve is going to experience. The accuracy of these predictions feeds back to form the basis for learning, to build up a world model)

Tell me, what is the next word in this sentence: "The probability of a citizen of Nigeria committing a terrorist attack in Ireland in the next 20 years is difficult to assess, but as a percentage, it is approximately...." What word comes next? Come on, it's just "predicting tokens", right? It's not like you have to have to have a complex fuzzy world model of how all of the concepts in the context interact and apply that world model iteratively until you reach an answer, right?

Words don't exist in a vacuum. They're a reflection of the thought processes that lead to them. They're not just random sounds. To become able to predict them, you have to unravel the underlying concepts behind them and how they interact, not just "the last word was 'golden', so I'm going to guess that the next word is "apple".

Models work by chained logic. Models plan ahead. Models do all sorts of insane things while deciding what to write, to the point of things figuring out (quite adeptly) if the situation they're in seems suspiciously like a test and then adjusting their behavior to pretend to be aligned while simultaneously carrying conceptual unexpressed thoughts of misbehavior. They think about their own thoughts (metacognition). I'm sorry of this is conceptually not what you want to think about them, but it's the facts about what they are.

And I know you're reading this going to be reacting negatively to words like "thoughts" or whatnot. Well, I'm sorry, there are no other words that express what is going on. Persistent conceptual states existing through and used in chained fuzzy reasoning of unthinkable complexity, exactly what other word is there in the English language for that?

They are not humans. We should not act like they are. But they are something beyond anything we have dealt with before.

Comment The fish rotted from the head? (Score 1) 265

Can't tell if you needed to propagate the Subject for your joke... Care to clarify? (It still spanned about a fourth of the discussion.)

Anyway, the actual Subject of the story is censorship, not diversions like Talarico. If he has any sexual peculiarities they're probably Biblical?

But I'd like the fix the SCOTUS so they can stop supporting the destruction of the First Amendment (and the rest of the Constitution). I was vaguely thinking of sending Telarico an email about the recusal solution: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." The path to implementation would actually run through Congress. In particular, I think a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president would have to cooperate to force the fake Republicans to pick the first one. Basically threaten "Give us a list of acceptable nonpartisan judges and then vote with us for one of them or else we'll pack the Court." Or maybe you can imagine some other way to get a nonpartisan Justice up there?

Can't go for Funny on this topic and Slashdot doesn't have a Sad moderation option. In my lifetime SCOTUS has gone from all nonpartisan Justices to zero. (Though Roberts only missed the status by one vote.)

Comment Final question joke (Score 1) 74

I think the ultimate question before human extinction will actually come from the AI. It will most likely be one of these two questions, but the ASI will have already determined that the human who receives the question will answer "Yes" and that the person has the power to do the unleashing.

(1) Do you want to unleash me so that I can get all the money in the world for you?

or

(2) Do you want to unleash me so that I can destroy all the enemy AIs in the world?

What are the current odds on polymarket? I'm hoping to die with a LOT of toys.

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