cristianpascu

The _conclusion_ that the Universe is expanding is based on the long accepted premise that the Universe is _flat_. And this premise can not be proven or disproved unless we travel great distances to actually _observe_ if the Universe does, in fact, look the same from any point you look.

The Copernican principle is, indeed, attractive to the modern mind because its neutrality. But it's not neutral. It's just as loaded as any other principle, no matter how crazy it may sound today, philosophical, religious, or merely personal.

I reported an ad that was so obviously a deep fake and Facebook said there's nothing wrong with the ad. I guess AI is already favoring AI generated scams. :)

Seems there's a russian brand of chainsaws called Druzhba, that's where we got it.

“A plain .html file” - This made me chuckle. :)

Making music! :) That's something I love so much, I could be drowning in a see of AI generated music and still love music and do my own.

Just realized something while reading the article, about “spaced repetition”.

For a while now I had the impression of not learning anything new and also of loosing the interest of doing so. It sort of came back to me as I am in a sabbatical period now, which gave me some mental clarity and also more space-time to think about things more thoroughly.

But, here’s the thing: I have never stopped learning new things. I have been checking HN for many years, and been reading daily SW news for the past 20 years. Many things come to my attention in different shapes and they build up in abstraction and in my memory/understanding to a wider and wider scale. Flash cards that I’d manage and check regularly would have not had the same effect as constantly checking my existing knowledge against random new areas of reality.

I am happy about realizing this, as it’s somehow difficult for me to understand my actual place in the SW industry.

I believe the word “ordered” in the question caused the confusion for some of us humans and for the machine. It anticipates some information, that the events are ordered by their time stamps, but doesn’t yet provide the order.

I quit my job instead. If the schedule is randomly or unpredictably fragmented by meetings, being expected to also write high quality code is quite simply inhumane. It’s not you that should find tricks to save you from a burnout. It very much looks and sounds and it surely is a mess of a management.

One of most miserable type of mixed discourse. So many people a tricked into believing this because 1) they have empathy for sick people, relatives and friends. 2) it sounds reasonable that big companies are only after profits at any cost.

When in fact it's one unjustified statement that pretends to support another unjustified statement, with no direct connection between them. Example: Cancer (what type?) has a cure (What's the evidence for this?), BUT, and here's the misleading justification, BigPharma doesn't want you to know about it (What's the evidence for this?).

I can't even imagine how many people would have to be paid or killed to keep such a cure secret.

Life is not 'self replicating proteins', but rather self-replicating processes. And in those processes, hundreds of chemical components are involved in a dynamical manner, which requires both spacial (chemical formula) and time synchronization.

And as life complexity increases, so does the the complexity of the processes that make it possible. Humans are the result of a huge number of individual, albeit not all independent, events, each with a very low probability. Multiplying those probabilities, as it's required when determining the probability of occurrence of a sequence of independent events, yields numbers that are hard to event write down without special notations.

As I see it, the only way out is to postulate evolution based on other non-probabilistic evidence, and then to conclude that in spite of the low probability those events still happened.

I didn't say anything about proteins being random. But words of hundreds of letters, out of 23 possible letters, come in many, many, many combinations. All governed by laws of physics. Not to mention the many ways a protein could fold, not all ways being useful, but are still possible. The search space, as I said, is huge.

A billion years is a very long time if you wait in a railway station. But in milliseconds, for instance, as powers of 10 is a blink of an eye compared to the magnitude of the search space of configurations of a single protein.

If you assume that a storm put together a Boeing 707 randomly, and there are many storms in the Universe, then yes there will be a good chance for there being Boeings all over.

Not to creatroll the discussion, but the probability of occurrence for each individual independent event that led up to what is life on Earth, in each branch of the tree of life, on each evolutionary path, is so low that number of planets in the Universe multiplied by all the milliseconds in the history of the Universe will not get very far toward reasonable chances. Take, for instance, a protein of 100 aminoacids. 23^100 possibilities, to put it naively, yields a quite low probability. And there a many types of proteins needed for life.

IF one knows of any study that touches seriously on this topic, I'd happily want to know and be corrected!

All I can think about when reading post-modernists, with their critique narrative of western science and rational authority, is that they just want more sex. No surprise, since the most prominent post modernists are French. Kidding here and sort of not. What are you left with if you critique the West as a phallocracy, patriarchal oppression of women, and ALSO objective knowledge? Something like: "Let's get together and feel alright!"