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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Mirror proteins behave much like their natural counterparts, with one important difference: They take much longer to break down. That’s because the natural enzymes that normally degrade proteins have shapes that are adapted for attacking left-handed proteins. They cannot grip mirror proteins and cut them into fragments.

    The virtual non-existence of enzymes that can break down right-handed proteins is almost assuredly because their use is vanishingly rare in life on Earth right now. If mirror life did escape the lab and find some way to thrive, normal life would suffer until some normal bacteria happened to mutate and create enzymes that could break it down.

    I expect it to be like the Carboniferous period. Trees evolved, and nothing was around that could break down lignin, so they thrived for millions of years and caused devastation to ecosystems of the time. But dead trees represented a lot of untapped raw materials, so eventually other life evolved to break them down.

    I would expect the same with mirror life. All else being equal, a few million years of devastation until life evolved ways to fight back. Or humans could dramatically speed that up by genetically engineering normal life (bacteria) with the tools to break down mirror proteins and thus attack mirror cells. It would still be devastating and would completely reshape life on the planet, but it may let humanity squeak through and continue existing.





  • It said the Israeli leader was covered by immunity rules that apply to states which are not a party to the ICC. Israel is not an ICC member.

    “A state cannot be held to act in a way that is incompatible with its obligations in terms of international law with regards to immunities granted to states which are not party to the ICC,” the French statement said.

    While this technicality may be true, it still seems like there should be a mechanism to hold people accountable for genocide that they don’t have to agree to beforehand. Saying “oh we can’t arrest him for crimes against humanity because he didn’t already agree to be arrested for them should he ever commit them” is a diplomatic copout and a moral failure of the international framework.


  • Geoengineering is cheaper and easier than rapid emissions reduction

    I don’t know if your whole comment is sarcasm, but every part of this statement is wrong. We are in the very, very early stages of developing the technologies needed for the level of geoengineering required to mitigate what we have already done to the environment. To roll it out to the levels needed would be far more difficult and expensive that converting our entire way of life to renewables, which should really say how hard and expensive it would be given how utterly daunting of a task full conversion to renewables is.

    Now, putting in token investment and paying lip service to geoengineering, that’s cheaper and easier than switching to renewables. But that’s not even treating the symptoms. That’s just your standard con game against the broader population to try to manipulate the conversation.


  • Not OP, but in my circles the simplest, strongest point I’ve found is that no cryptocurrency has a built-in mechanism for handling mistakes. People are using these systems, and people make mistakes. Without built in accommodations, you’re either

    1. Creating real risk for anyone using the system, because each mistake is irrecoverable financial loss, and that’s pretty much the definition of financial risk, or
    2. Encouraging users to subvert the system in its core functionality in order to accommodate mistakes, which undermines the entire system and again creates risk because you don’t really know how anything is going to work with these ad hoc side systems

    Either way, crypto is just more costly to use than traditional systems when you properly factor those risks. So the only people left using it are those who expect greater rewards to offset all that additional risk, which are just speculators and grifters.







  • I don’t think that follows, because those are temporary conditions, and consuming the drug is a choice made by an individual not currently under the influence. So it’s the person’s responsibility before they consume the drug to prepare their environment for when they are under the influence. If they’re so destructive under the influence that they can’t not commit a crime, it is their responsibility not to take the drug at all.


  • Been the only one in my family for years using Linux, but over the last few months struggles with Windows have basically resulted in all but one computer in the house being migrated to Linux.

    Put it on my 10-year-old son’s desktop because Windows parental controls have been made overly complicated and require Internet connectivity and multiple Microsoft accounts to manage. Switched to Linux Mint, installed the apt sources for the parental control programs, made myself an account with permissions and one for him without permissions to change the parental controls, and done. With Steam he can play all of the games in his library.

    Only my wife is still using Windows, but with ads embedded in the OS ramping up, and features she liked getting replaced with worse ones, she’s getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft.


  • Democratic candidates have raised far more than Republicans and can purchase ads at the cheaper rate offered to candidates. Republicans rely more heavily on independent expenditures from their campaign arm and allied super PACs, which have to pay much more per ad.

    Gee, it’s almost like Republicans aren’t favored by a large proportion of the population who can donate up to the ~$3,300 federal limit directly to campaigns and have to rely on their wealthy benefactors donating much, much more per capita through side channels that shouldn’t even exist in a functional democracy.



  • I don’t see how this wouldn’t be derivative work. I highly doubt a robust, commercial software solution using AI-generated code would not have modified that code. I use AI to generate boilerplate code for my side projects, and it’s exceedingly rare that its product is 100% correct. Since that generated code is not copyrightable, it’s public domain, and now I’m creating a derived work from it, so that derived work is mine.

    As AI gets better at generating code and we can directly use it without modification, this may become an issue. Or maybe not. Maybe once the AI is that good, you no longer have software companies, since you can just generate the code you need, so software development as a business becomes obsolete, like the old human profession of “computer.”


  • This makes sense to me, and is in line with recent interpretations about AI-generated artwork. Basically, if a human directly creates something, it’s protected by copyright. But if someone makes a thing that itself creates something, that secondary work is not protected by copyright. AI-generated artwork is an extreme example of this, but if that’s the framework, applying it to data newly generated by any code seems reasonable.

    This wouldn’t/shouldn’t apply to something like compression, where you start with a work directly created by someone, apply an algorithm to transform it into a compressed state, and then apply another algorithm to transform the data back into the original work. That original work was still created by someone and so should be protected by copyright. But a novel generation of data, like the game state in memory during the execution of the game’s programming, was never directly created by someone, and so isn’t protected.