patcon

60 ms·

751.
by patcon 6y ago
Nothing wrong with "testing" imho. But like in any grand real-world experiment -- except tech, which has split from science in terms of ethics norms, perhaps in its own meta-experiment of sorts -- in experiments, the public should
752.
by patcon 6y ago
Doesn't that make us willfully blind to when they might arrive on our terms. This sort of "let's put it aside" thinking led to some dark places in the past, and we'll eventually come to them again with non-biologica
753.
by patcon 6y ago
replication is still happening in the lower cellular/molecular scales, even when the aggregate organismal level isn't reproducing that pattern. People who take these definitions very seriously aren't implying that elderly peo
754.
by patcon 6y ago
You might be interested in the little-known Chemoton model: http://web.archive.org/web/20210221212235/https://www.nation... 1. metabolic cycle 2. ~~stores information~~ 2. membrane/bou
755.
by patcon 6y ago
Sara Imari Walker has some REALLY interesting things to say about life and information: https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/40 > if you want to understand the laws of gravitation , then you go and study blac
756.
by patcon 6y ago
And maybe viruses, books... languages? Books seems to me a little like tardigrades sometimes, if you squint. Information stored indefinitely (hibernating?), which can be rehydrated and spring back to life within human minds. We talk about t
757.
by patcon 6y ago
i feel it's too wide to get into sharing here, but i have to say I disagree SO strongly with all the subtext of this comment. Just saying it out loud to validate any other readers who are thinking it
758.
by patcon 6y ago
From my perspective as someone who uses it every day for work on a community server my coworkers arduously maintain, this is 100% NOT true for us (I'm not leaving Matrix, but it's def not on par with Slack)
759.
by patcon 6y ago
as someone who just yesterday was working around what seemed to be a Matrix netsplit on our office/community server (coworkers saw different things on mobile vs desktop vs other servers), i feel like you're glamourizing Matrix. We
760.
by patcon 6y ago
Aw jeez, thanks for saying. This sorta of thinking clicks with me. Esp the "discourage not prohibit" framing. I think I have similar hopes, except I maybe hinge my thinking less on direct taxation or regulatory schemes ("if y
761.
by patcon 6y ago
I'd say yes: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/15873 But no, if one were being that particular brand of particular that points out that amorphous aggregates are technically lower energy, which is true
762.
by patcon 6y ago
Yes, adversarialist sentence fragments are examples of thought-porn that does very well on HN :)
763.
by patcon 6y ago
But hey, maybe that's the eternal struggle of being human. Maybe we die on this hill, and keep agency from drifting upward beyond our scale. Also, that likely means an alien civilization that DIDN'T resist entropy will eventually
764.
by patcon 6y ago
Respectfully, this feels like a bit of misdirection. Government is literally an institution grounded in collective welfare (albeit imperfect instantiations of this goal). Google has NO SUCH directive, and the only reasons we don't see
765.
by patcon 6y ago
Heh, thanks for asking instead of downvoting :) I would say it is true: "toxic" is only a word in reference to effects on other biologies. So on the whole, no, biology is NOT toxic to biology. It is non-toxic. (Though yes, toxins
766.
by patcon 6y ago
Let's be careful not to conflate "any aggression" with "psychopathic violence". The values at clash in past conflict are sometimes very human values, rather than manifestations of psychopathic anti-social mechanisms
767.
by patcon 6y ago
Would you call a library inefficient? Miles and miles of books that no one is reading right now? And all that concrete and rebar that no one can read :)
768.
by patcon 6y ago
Really like your comment. And yeah, even cephalization (e.g., evolution of "heads" in almost all species) is a neat artifact of this relentless concentration of power in even a single species. We rightfully cry out against human s
769.
by patcon 6y ago
Speaking as a biochemist, I feel you're too quick to condemn based on what I would assume is an overly rigorous interpretations of these words. I would assume, knowing what I know, and presuming what he knows -- He's not saying bi
770.
by patcon 6y ago
I go back and forth on this. I am NOT in the "decentralize everything" camp. But I fear power more than chaos. Chaos turns over. Power resists that. Power seeks its own structural stasis. But in chaos, there's a fertile and t
771.
by patcon 6y ago
I always assumed this had more to do with the different psychology of how different people wake up. I usually have amnesia in the few minutes after I wake up, and I lose everything. Like when I used to drive my mom to work as a teenager, sh
772.
by patcon 6y ago
oh! thanks. glad i came back to see this. digging deeper :)
773.
by patcon 6y ago
Canada. Canada! Canada! — another Canadian :)
774.
by patcon 6y ago
I don't know why, but I loved this short article. Beautifully written, and subtly raising some metaphors of stone and life and digital... ones that are left quite hazy... to great effect imho, if you enjoy that sort of haze over the th
775.
by patcon 6y ago
Good point. I suppose I just don't think education on frameworks of the individual mind are the main path out of this. Frameworks of the social spaces and relationships between minds are where I'd place my bets. I feel re-educatio
776.
by patcon 6y ago
First off, I appreciate your comment. As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully cali
777.
by patcon 6y ago
New responder. First off: I am NOT a free speech libertarian. I've reluctantly come to consider that lies that are believed by 40% of population are de facto facts. We can't so easily just take them off the menu because we &quot
778.
by patcon 6y ago
I don't have much faith in any single educational approach to deal with changes that are coming at us in sub-12-year timelines. We have to fix education, but that fixes prospective 12-year-out challenges, which I think we can safely as
779.
by patcon 6y ago
Tools like https://pol.is/home give me hope. (It also got it's first big showcase in Taiwan, who sibling comments mention) The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are
780.
by patcon 6y ago
omg thank you, voice of reason. No disrespect intended to parent posters (i appreciate them sharing their anecdotal experience), but def sobering to see that at the top, and realize "oh, this is the common view of hivemind i'm par

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