So, is this based on the model where infinite coffee make you immortal?
Who reads this anyway? Nobody, that’s who. I could write just about anything here, and it wouldn’t make a difference. As a matter of fact, I’m kinda curious to find out how much text can you dump in here. If you’re like really verbose, you could go on and on about any pointless…[no more than this]
So, is this based on the model where infinite coffee make you immortal?
It’s called research. You search for something, can’t find it, so you try again; hence the prefix.
Either way, NASA is already exploiting it. I guess, next they’ll find a way to glitch through the very fabric of the universe to teleport to a distant galaxy without moving at all or even using any energy.
The idea of modern medicine is to sell chemical compounds that actually have an effect. It’s a philosophical and ethical thing. All products have a unique psychological effect that gets intertwined with their biochemical effect. If you can’t study them individually, it’s impossible to tell if the biochemical effect even exists at all. If your medicine relies heavily, or even entirely, on the psychological side, it’s no different than homeopathy. The idea of modern medicine is to be better than the old stuff that preceded it.
I prefer to think of this as an equation like this: Pm+Bm=Pp+Bp
Pm=psychological effect, medicine
Bm=biochemical effect, medicine
Pp=psychological effect, placebo = surprisingly big
Bp=biochemical effect, placebo = 0
If these sides are equivalent, the medicine is just as effective as placebo. If the medicine side is bigger, you’ll want to know how much of it comes from the P and B terms. In order to figure that out, you would need to know some values. Normally, you can just assume that Pm=Pp, but if you can’t assume that, it you’re left with two unknowns in that equation. In this case, you really can’t assume them to be equal, which means that your data won’t allow you to figure out how much of the total effect comes from psychological and biochemical effects. It could be 50/50, 10/90, who knows. That sort of uncertainty is a serious problem, because of the philosophical and ethical side of developing medicine.
Statistical tests are very picky. They have been designed by mathematicians in a mathematical ideal vacuum void of all reality. The method works in those ideal conditions, but when you take that method and apply it in messy reality where everything is flawed, you may run into some trouble. In simple cases, it’s easy to abide by the assumptions of the statistical test, but as your experiment gets more and more complicated, there are more and more potholes for you to dodge. Best case scenario is, your messy data is just barely clean enough that you can be reasonably sure the statistical test still works well enough and you can sort of trust the result up to a certain point.
However, when you know for a fact that some of the underlying assumptions of the statistical test are clearly being violated, all bets are off. Sure, you get a result, but who in their right mind would ever trust that result?
If the test says that the medicine is works, there’s clearly financial incentive to believe it and start selling those pills. If it says that the medicine is no better than placebo, there’s similar incentive to reject the test result and demand more experiments. Most of that debate goes out the window if you can be reasonably sure that the data is good enough and the result of your statistical test is reliable enough.
Yeah, that’s the thing with placebo. It’s surprisingly effective, and separating the psychological effect from actual chemistry can be very tricky. If most participants can correctly identify if they’re bing fed the real drug or a placebo, it makes it impossible to figure out how much each effect contributes to the end result. Ideally, you would only use effective medicine that does not need the placebo effect to actually work.
Imagine, if all medicine had lots of placebo effect in them. How would you treat patients who are in a coma or otherwise unconscious?
I’ve seen a bunch of Terminator style movies where an AI slices, dices, scorches and/or nukes humanity to oblivion long before climate change gets us. I have it in good authority that we don’t need worry about the temperature change.
That just goes to show how complex the immune system is. Even though we learn more about it all the time, I get the feeling that we’re only scratching the surface.
Space is mostly empty anyway, so the chances of crashing into anything is pretty low. That’s why space travel is so safe.
If that gets implemented, it would help AI devs and common people hanging online.
A few years ago, people assumed that these AIs will continue to get better every year. Seems that we are already hitting some limits, and improving the models keeps getting harder and harder. It’s like the linewidth limits we have with CPU design.
LOL, I recall seeing HD sunglasses somewhere roughly 15 years ago. That was the period where everything had to have an HDMI port. I guess someone must have made an HDMI compatible toaster too.
Basic internet etiquette. Never read the article. Disagree with everyone. You are always right. Everyone else is always wrong etc.
Very sneaky! So basically some people have found an exploit in this game. Are the devs going to patch it any time soon? If not, this could become the next meta.
That’s a very good addition. The old filters are still there and any one of them could still come back and bite us. However, when better technology becomes available, the older filters become less and less of a problem. Let’s take the bioweapons as an example. At the moment, we can develop cures and vaccines, but that technology has its limits. Perhaps one day our biotech is advanced enough that stopping a bioweapon from harming the citizens is as trivial as updating some software and changing a few passwords. Likewise, the climate catastrophe becomes less and less of an issue if the species is no longer bound to a single planet, but can also thrive in space.
Will this antimatter reactor consume the entire planet?
Meh, probably not.
Yep. That’s the Great Filter concept. Certain stages on the evolutionary path may lead to extinction, and only the smartest species are able to pass the filter unharmed. In our case, the discovery of fossil fuels and nuclear weapons may be those kinds of stages.
Imagine what happens if we pass this filter and become an intergalactic species. Maybe one day we’ll start tinkering with technology capable of destroying a star, galaxy or the entire universe. If we are smart enough to squeeze energy out of the very fabric of space, we might also be dumb enough to cause the entire universe to collapse or something like that.
It’s a proposed solution to the fermi paradox. The idea is that we don’t see aliens out there in the stars, because they all nuked themselves to oblivion at some stage. Maybe they never reached the stars, before they destroyed their home planet. Maybe they blew up their own star and didn’t reach another one in time. Maybe their entire galaxy got sucked into a home-made black hole.
Did you craft a very unorthodox and complex system? If so, I can believe you.
However, I went with a very traditional system with ext4, no fancy partitions, X11 and Gnome. I didn’t want my system to have anything experimental, because I knew I had to learn a bunch of stuff anyway. Just made everything as simple as possible, so that I can understand what’s going on.
So far, there hasn’t been a lot of system maintenance. Obviously it’s still more than what a Debian system would require, but nothing too crazy.
If you’re already an admin at work, you might not want to do any system administration at home. Well, until you find out that Microsoft is making some obnoxious decisions on your behalf, that’s when you suddenly find the motivation to do some research and tweak a bunch of settings. Situations like that will also lead to frustrating moments when you find out that your hands are tied, and you end up looking for workarounds. Spoiler: It doesn’t get any nicer after that.
On the other hand, if you’re running a system that requires you to take responsibility, a lazy admin will end up in frustrating situations too. It’s not that simple to balance these things. You need to know what your priorities are and what kind of sacrifices you’re willing to make.
I’ve sometimes thought about that. Maybe in an alternate reality there’s a someone with my face who isn’t held back by any sort of morality whatsoever. Once you open that door, you can totally start spreading the stupidest ideas you can think of, and you’ll find someone who believes it and becomes your devout follower. I have a feeling that Scientology came about as a result of this sort of thinking.