marchenko

I wonder if the researchers considered directly inoculating the colorectal area. Is it necessary for this to pass through the upper gut?

This seems like a pretty grass roots effort to me: mothers horrified that nude pictures of their 12yo daughters are being created with generative AI. These young girls (not yet women) are indeed victims, no narrative construction required, and stories like this can easily spread virally among parents, esp. mothers of girls, without any push needed. I'm not even sure tech regulation is needed or sought: a few lawsuits making this unprofitable as a mobile-first service will probably reduce the barrier-to-entry enough to protect most youngsters. Only the most motivated zoomers can use the command line. I am suspicious of the fact that this appears to stem from a free service: I assume they are collecting data, but I thought using or storing images of minors required consent from a guardian in Europe?

Imputation is a fairly common technique that would be familiar to most molecular or computational geneticists, especially those used to working with poor samples. There are software packages to assist in the calculation.

The Substack is called “mostly Python”. I assumed the author is a programming educator or enthusiast of some sort.

The claim that the real value in art is in the idea rather than the execution seems to be as true as the claim that the real value in a startup is in the idea. Artists are constantly in dialogue with their tools to produce and define their idea, and to discover new ideas and capabilities along the way, in the same way the Intel head Andy Grove advised technologists to be involved in the engineering & production processes.

A game whose popularity & longevity has become a cliché, Skyrim, is usually played in 1st person. Myst & Doom were both known for their ability to engage players in a flow state in their heyday. I take your point about narrative, but I think first-person games are giving players a different experience -- agency & flow -- compared to the identification you experience in a 3rd-person game.

Right now we're in a transitional phase where DNA data is integrated with traditional police work, where there may be a priori reasons to suspect someone before invoking DNA data to strengthen the case. Even this raises serious questions about privacy (the BTK killer even moreso than this case: they found him using his daughter's pap smear). What is more worrying is the incentive to go straight to DNA in the future, entangling lots of innocent people in DNA dragnets because of the birthday problem at scale.

Forgive my ignorance, but why do game servers ban Linux players in pvp games? Fear of some sort of modding only available on Linux?

Women have tended to be over-represented in "support" rather than "line" positions within firms. Maybe it's more historically accurate to say that they are more likely to be tasked with this work. But they do not appear to be rewarded for taking it on. I think low-status is a complete red herring here. Someone with the right background can spend years tinkering on a project without suffering too much status loss, because they have other reserves of capital. It's like the genteel poverty of the grad student, but for founders.

If this were true, and significant, wouldn't we expect to see more successful women in the startup scene? Women appear to be disproportionately willing to do low-status/non public-facing/schlep work, but I don't notice that they are particularly rewarded for it, probably because they tend do this low-status work in the context of an existing organization in which they have little leverage/ownership stake. Willingness to take risks, and having the means to do so (financial and social capital reserved to draw down upon), on the other hand, seems to better fit the observed pattern.

I can see what he's getting at, at least if he's focusing on the SSC subreddits and comments. It's easier to be a brave truth-teller when it's not your ox being gored, and I think the demographics of the SSC commentariat explain its openness to e.g. discussing HBD and critiquing feminism, but rather prickly responses to more ingroup-focused critique. The whole 'grey tribe' distinction was often used in a more defensive/obscurantist and less productive/illuminating way than in Scott's original formulation. I think the community is still far more open than average, but this is certainly influenced by the interaction between demographics (which Scott regularly surveys) and blog topics.

I don't think this is unique to SSC, by the way. I think it's why exclusive groups often eventually emerge from inclusive groups, and why apps like Clubhouse are attractive.

What convinced me to give Obsidian a twirl is that there's essentially no danger of sunk costs: I already store my notes as markdown files in a local folder synced via cloud service between browsers and mobile, and accessed via IDEs/plaintext editors. Obsidian merely replaces the IDE as an access/manipulation point.

The only 'cost', so to speak, is adding bidirectional link syntax, which I suspect is soon to become a common standard. I am curious to see what happens when they open up their developer API, as the Obsidian PKM community is quite active.