elliotec

EU explicitly embracing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity for heterogeneity has brought more peace and prosperity than ever before to a continent in perpetual conflict for nearly all of human history.

Comment · 1 month ago

Apparently it may surprise you that driving on both the left or right side of the road depends on which country of the EU you’re in.

Another great example of the perverse idea that “same == better”

Comment · 1 month ago

I don't know where "here" is, but yes, translation can be hard. That's fine. It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding.

Comment · 2 months ago

A robots.txt explicitly allowing LLMs has nothing to do with whether it was made for humans or not and is generally the right move assuming you want your site picked up and recommended by AI tools. No different than allowing search engine crawlers to pick it up and the authors focus on that is bizarre when the rest of the evidence is so stark.

Comment · 2 months ago

We know with extremely high certainty that classical psychedelics effect other animals similarly given the neuroscience [1]. But this is not a classical psychedelic. We don't know how it works yet, what receptors it operates on, or what the pharmacology is doing.

So would dogs see little humans or little dogs? We can't say for sure. But the best guess might actually be most likely little dogs, or maybe little smells of little dogs. Dogs show conspecific preference (species-focus) while we show facial preference [2] and they have a strong focus on olfactory sense while we're more visual. The vividness might show up in ways we can't really perceive through smell like they can.

And the answer to "does that mean the fungus has targeted humans genetically" is almost definitely no. The study the article is based on [3] mentions that lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom, appear across cultures' folklore, and are reported in alcohol withdrawal, dementia, and macular degeneration. The effect seems fundamental to how the human mind and brain work. So it's more likely that the mushroom is disrupting something and the brain is resolving that disruption into little people, because that's what it does with pattern matching.

This mushroom is an ectomycorrhizal symbiote of the Yunnan pine tree, is ancient with the genus being at least 5 million years old compared to modern humans 300k, and requires undercooking which isn't compatible with human targeting so it doesn't make sense to have any genetic human target.

The fungus supplies a non-targeted disruption and the resulting little people content we describe is the human brain's response. A dog getting the same disruption would resolve it into whatever a dog's machinery produces, or maybe they metabolize it into nothing recognizable.

Pretty damn cool.

[1] https://consciousnesslibrary.org/research/29070-correlation-... [2] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/43/8396 [3] https://consciousnesslibrary.org/research/27751-phylogenomic...

Comment · 2 months ago

They just said they work on Gemma at Deepmind. That stands to reason that as of time of writing, we should assume the answer is yes.

Comment · 2 months ago

Rails 8's default Active Job backend is solid_queue. It lives in the same single Postgres as everything else (including solid_cache). No Redis or anything to have to wrangle. Recurring scheduling is built in. Another big plus for using Rails for this.

As I understand, it uses Postgres's "FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED" job claim feature. I don't run most jobs concurrently because they need to build on each other. Postgres advisory locks sit on top for mutual exclusion and solid_queue handles queuing. It's akin to good_job which is the pg-native thing from before solid_queue existed, but I just stuck with the easy Rails default and this is the first time I've even thought to remember how it works.