5 August 2024

Funniest comment I've read this morning:
We've seen what a Trump presidency is like. Now we'll get to see what a Kamala presidency will be like.

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The music industry is now having to figure out what is copyrightable and what is not. This is very much like a Ship of Theseus argument.

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Some geeks are asking: Does Sundar Pichai/Search team know how bad Google search is?  I think he knows, but can't do anything about it. There's still money being made, and it would be risky to change things.

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Has the AI bubble burst?  AI is already making money. But the low-hanging fruit solutions were just mirages. LLMs were offering illusion of conscious all-knowing human-like entity, when it was all sophisticated probabilistic models. People were provided with solutions that looked like they could be the answers you are looking for, but with no guarantee that the answers you received are actually correct. But hucksters are still selling it.

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I think that there is definitely a genetic determinant to brain capability. This news item strongly supports that. Brains, as with other physical characteristics, developed differently in different parts of the world. Different genetics result in different brains, with different thinking patterns, etc.

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Bravo! Some schools are incorporating meditation in the classroom. This is excellent. It will improve a child's mental health and provide them with a survival skill that will help them in adulthood.

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There is no shortage of people who pursue the sacred quest for Truth. Increasingly, they are not pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge in peer-reviewed journals and university campuses, but in fringe niches of internet discourse.
Could be a good thing, but as I've often observed: once a good thing gets opened up to the public at large, it soon ceases to be a good thing.

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Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine have developed a new class of ring-fused 2-pyridone antibiotic, which they call GmPcides (for gram-positive-icide). These agents are especially effective against Strep pyogenes, associated with "flesh-eating" disease.  It's interesting that this got published in a physics journal, rather than the usual biomedical journals.

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There's always something new. There's a condition where people see grotesque distortions in other people's faces. There's no single cause of this phenomonenon. Could be post-infectious. Could be a delayed trauma effect. It's called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO. I suspect it's related to the flashed face distortion illusion, but you see it all the time.

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