colbyn

Something I’ve been thinking about.

Your eyes are broadly sensitive to the visible light spectrum.

But this is not uniformly distributed.

Emission in the green - yellow band is bright, equivalent intensity at higher energy wavelengths such as the 450nm emission pump of most LEDs can be quite dim.

It makes me wonder, IR is invisible, yet it can be very intense. Because you can’t perceive it, your eyes can’t adjust… Just as you can fry your reta with invisible light, what about ordinary LEDs that have a sharp spike at the 450nm region?

Could your eyes be slightly overexposed because it’s physically brighter than your perception?

I believe some damage does occur. But the eyes can heal. Blue light toxicity is a thing. But I think the threshold is based on irreversible damage… But I sometimes wonder if it’s too generous in favor of LED manufacturers.

> As a native speaker, it feels like reading an impression of a literature book by a high school English class’s most overconfident student who’s only ever read LinkedIn-speak.

You wouldn’t happen to have gone to Westlake HS? lol i may have been that person… Life has since slapped me in the face a few times.

I’ve thought about this. Or at least something like that.

When reading dune there’s a class of women who can control their biochemistry in such a way that they can eg prolong lifespan, or anything else within the realm of feasible biochemistry.

Here I was like: how does the nervous system function in that way? How could signals from the mind control the behavior of molecules?

The mind cannot itself feel pain, similarly the mind has sensory limits within the body. As argued in a book called the body a guide for occupants: cancer is a very good example of a disease that our nervous system should be able to detect but for whatever reason we don’t, probably because cancer is something we can only now treat.

Not all of the body can be made legible to the mind.

Although maybe a better question: why don’t we have a dedicated organ that can sample blood with laboratory like precision and make anomalies available to the conscious mind beyond whatever faculties we currently have?

PS

One thing that definitely should be within the realm of conscious control: body fat. There are ways of forcing the body to metabolize more fat for energy and the biggest problem is managing excess heart (easily becomes lethal). But this could be super useful in cold climates. Imagine being able to literally burn body fat to stay warm? The amount of heat that can be released is enormous. Nowadays most of us could probably afford the otherwise superfluous expenditure of body fat (beyond essential functions).

In my experience Grok is the least likely to push back on crazy ideas out of all major chatbots and it’s more often wrong on technical matters. Although I suppose this isn’t necessarily bad. I go to Grok for subjective explorations.

…

I can’t get downvoted further but as a friendly FYI this page can’t be opened in iOS safari (too many redirects).

But I was thinking some time ago I disabled algorithmically prompted content even though it had its advantages for work related content… In some ways the transition was like quitting smoking. I kept going back to such platforms, getting a blank page, closing the page, then repeating some time later and so on.

Oh I guess I stand corrected. I sometimes wish AI wasn't a thing because any natural talent for writing has now been rendered almost meaningless.

Why should we presume it’s an AI description? The writing seems reasonable enough. Some people are more naturally inclined towards articulate writing than others (seems like projection) and furthermore the OP claims to be a screenwriter.

Design can go a long way when reading long form text. If someone here is in contact with the author please tell them to improve the typography; most notably smaller and justified text for mobile phones. Other designers could probably weigh in. I’m not an expert, but well designed text goes a long way towards comfortable reading.

Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.

The title could have been a line out of Dune.

It’s interesting that many of us myself included once thought that the butlerian jihad was silly until now. Frank Herbert wrote something that is particularly prescient.

(Usually writers are just a decade ahead of their time. Whatever Podcasters are talking about today, has usually already been discussed in literature a decade ago. Prediction markets come to mind. Socially, over vs under population as discussed in popular books like the rationale optimist or the accidental superpower.)

Nope. For all I know it’s due to the sins of the people. The reckoning of heaven.

For context there are many theories for why younger generations are less “cognitively capable” than older generations. Nowadays we call it the reverse Flynn effect. IMO this article is nitpicking, probably confirmation bias at play.

Okay I see. Are people being attacked for engaging in AI research/dev irrespective of their character or other personal attributes?