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> If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant

Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…

Crypto never fails to impress me with how many problems it creates for itself.

(This is coming from someone with ADHD but not dyslexia)

It's harsh, but it isn't wrong, right? The reason that these states of being are considered 'disorders' is because they interfere with daily life and with tasks that other people consider to be easy.

I need to take a lot of time to edit my writing and to re-evaluate the content that I write because it is easy for me to slip into a multi-paragraph tangent. Fundamentally that happens because my thinking is not sharp/focused.

On the other hand, when I am done writing I get a feeling of great accomplishment. Like I was able to swim through the deep waters of my mind and harpoon all the good ideas. Being smart isn't worth much if you can't communicate your ideas!

TIL about Normal Mapping, which to my layman eyes kind of looks like computing a hologram on the flat surface of an object. In the coin example in TFA, even though I now 'know' that the coin is a cylinder, the normal map gives it very convincing coin shape. Cool!

I very infrequently watch the news. it is obvious to me that major news outlets, at least in the US where I am familar, are definitely attempting to push political agendas and shape public opinion and manufacture consent.

However, Fox news is consistenly the only news source that I see which is explicitly trying to fearmonger, to use identity politics to pit people against each other, and is the only news source that allows airing people that advocate for the reduction or freedoms and rights of certain classes of people.

I can count on the rest of the news sources to be vaguely pro-police, pro-capital, pro-land-owner, pro-status-quo. There are negatives to having news be so favoring to the ruling elite. But on the topics of who gets to live with decency in the US, at least the other major news outlets agree that the answer is 'anyone with money'. The American dream. On fox news though there are 1000 ways to be the wrong kind of person who needs to be shamed and harmed and removed from society.

IMO the "main source of inequality" is that tech allows a small number of people to use technological and fiscal leverage to make an outsized impact on society as a whole. Anyone who has a job that produces value in a 1:1 way is positioned to be 'disrupted'. NLP, etc, just provides more tools for companies to increase their leverage in the market. My bet is that GPT-4 is probably better at being a paralegal than at least some small number of paralegals. GPT-5 will be better at that job than a larger percentage.

Anyone who only has the skills to affect the lives and/or environments of the people in their immediate surrounding are going to find themselves on the 'have nots' end of the spectrum in the coming decades.

Another tech CEO realizing that the only way to sustain growth is to reject reality.

Right, and this is why they fundamentally failed. If their main depositors were traditional businesses and individual accounts they wouldn’t be an issue today. They invested their money as if they had low-risk depositors but a start-up is a high risk depositor——they don’t have a proven business model so it is hard to forecast their behavior.

To me this is classic SV echo chamber thinking. There’s a reason traditional banks are more wary of lending to start-ups and it isn’t because they hate money.

I think of the hiring loops that I am a part of as paid interview practice.

I hate to jump on the bandwagon here, but imagine if Instagram released an update to their app to make it look like it did in iOS7. People would uninstall the app. They would be laughed at.

It isn't because current design trends are 'better', but they are exactly that, trends. If you don't keep up your app will look dated. To my unexperienced eye, the iOS7 design looks like the buttons take up way too much space; they are too visually interesting and distract from the content. But that isn't an objective take, it is just that I'm used to the current trend.

I could write about how Members-only jackets and moonboots were the hight of usability and design, but they were just a passing fashion. Nothing is really gained or lost, just changed.

If you read it aloud, I think it is very punchy. I’m guessing considering the authors pedigree that his writing style was a conscious choice.

The one thing about sushi and peanuts is that they both have a weight…

I do use an external keyboard and mouse with a laptop stand when I am at my desk. When I am out I just type on the laptop stand

Its funny. I have programmed for a decade and at no point I have ever found that an external monitor was the solution to my problems. My coworkers think I'm crazy, but I do all development on a 15' macbook. My path to efficiency and ergonomic work has always been to become more familiar with the keyboard shortcuts for navigating windows and tabs. Along with Spectacle, Vimium, and tree-style tabs, I have never wanted for a second monitor. Mostly I find it annoying because I forget where I put my applications if I have two monitors.

My overall mantra at work is that I can only do one thing a a time if I want to do it well. I feel in a sense limiting myself to one viewport helps reinforce this behavior.