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Brain Scientists Discover the Glue That Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime
- ImPostingOnHN 2y agoNot that Scientific American doesn't deserve to be funded, but I'm not sure how I feel about this article being paywalled while the scientific paper it's summarizing is free: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl0030 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl0030
- PcChip 2y agoWhy are there so many paywalled links lately?
- fnordpiglet 2y agoAdvertising based funding was always a scam and doomed to be a race to the bottom as per unit margins can barely support unit costs of production. The incentives for attention capture and sale of private information are the only material market pressure. Sadly in a world of scarcity journalists need to eat too, have families, retirement funds to accumulate, etc. Quality of work requires paying humans, which requires funds from the consumers of the product one way or another. By paying as a first order user you boost the unit margin considerably and change the incentive structure to prioritize your priorities, not the priorities of advertisers and surveillance economy participants. Sadly I don’t think anyone has come up with an alternative way of paying for the people to do the work.
- sgc 2y agoHere is a (not very novel) idea: Netflix for news. I would happily pay for a solid aggregator subscription. But the number of times that some random news site from halfway across the world is the site of the day just keeps me away from news subscriptions. It feels like I am pigeon-holing myself and limiting my worldview to that of a couple of editorial boards / companies. Also, for sites that want to have single-site subscriptions: If you bundle with print, give me the option of donating my print subscription to a library if I don't want the hard copy. Many people for whom the subscription is too much friction / not a great value proposition, will bite if at least they know the libraries are eating for free.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoJust imagine this 2034, and the NewStream service is competing with a bunch of newspapers selling their own news streams. The original NewStream is hiring reporters to make its own news, and some people like them.
- akomtu 2y agoIn 10 years LLMs will be so good that NewStream will hardly need any staff.
- arresin 2y agoThis is what I want also (it’s strange it doesn’t exist yet). I’m not going to pay a subscription to a hundred different news sites.
- sgc 2y agoIt sometimes seems to me that news organizations are suffering from self-inflicted injuries. They would be much healthier financially with aggregation.
- crooked-v 2y agoApple News+ is the shitty cable network version of this, where you pay for access but you still get the ads anyway.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIs that really the best model given how it's an open secret that streaming services aren't profitable? Sure, news expenses are much less, but I imagine demand is too. People who wanted that "news aggegator" have social media (and technically, HN counts here too). >It feels like I am pigeon-holing myself and limiting my worldview to that of a couple of editorial boards / companies. I fear this being an inevitability as well when relinquishing curation to a middleman. Your subscribers will influence what news you approve.
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://archive.ph/MSetk https://archive.ph/MSetk
- bookofjoe 2y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385322
- metadat 2y agoNo discussion == no dupe. (Unfortunate sometimes. You are absolutely one of the most prolific HN submitters, Joe!)
- bookofjoe 2y ago"No discussion == no dupe." Excellent point, taken!
- bookofjoe 2y ago"You are absolutely one of the most prolific HN submitters, Joe!" It took me until I reached 76 years of age to finally discover what I'm good at.
- readthenotes1 2y agoIf you are 38, I would say it is self-deprecating one-liners
- pfdietz 2y agoThis is mildly terrifying. Imagine a drug that penetrates the blood-brain barrier and inhibits the interaction of these two proteins. Administered over a long enough period of time, could it erase your memories... effectively, erasing you? Imagine such a thing being used maliciously, by governments against their critics, or as a covert weapon.
- PaulKeeble 2y agoMy first thought is someone is going to do these experiments, probably on a prisoner. Then my second thought was death row prisoners being given the choice of a memory wipe or death as some sort of attempt at rehabilitation. I can't yet see half the ways this could go horribly for humanity. On the other hand knowing how this works we might be able to boost the process and make people super fast learners, that could be really cool.
- crooked-v 2y agoThat kind of thing is what gets you a society with incentives to produce more death-row convictions.
- akira2501 2y ago> My first thought is someone is going to do these experiments, probably on a prisoner. In the animal model, they surgically altered the animals to have an injection cannula placed in their skulls, it's obviously hard to target, so you just install it and run the experiment, then after the experiment, you kill and necropsy the animal to see if it was in the right place after all. If it was you can keep those results, if it wasn't, you throw those results away. Meanwhile the test is putting them on a rotating platform and shocking their feet on certain platform areas. Then waiting for them to avoid it habitually. Then you inject them. Then you see if they still avoid it. These guys basically know next to nothing about how memories are formed at this point. Their test is so amazingly cruel while being particularly narrow that you can't actually divine anything useful from it. Except maybe more funding to keep shooting in the dark at these animals expense.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoLegacy code saves us again!