Don’t mention carpet anywhere near the campaign in case Vance starts eyeing the furniture again

This is true for only red and green loght detecting proteins (opsins) - the blue opsin gene is on chromosome 7.

The red and green detecting proteins have an interesting history in humans.

Fish, amphibians, lizards and birds have 4 different opsins: for red, green, yellow and blue colours. And the blue opsin sees up into the ultra-violet. Most animals can see waaaay more colours in the world than we (or any mammal) can. So what happened that makes mammal vision so poor?

It’s thought that all mammals descend from one or a few species of nocturnal mammal that survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. The colour detecting cells (the cones) need a lot of light compared to ones that see in black-and-white (the rods) and therefore nocturnal animals frequently lose cones in favour of the more sensitive rods for better night vision. The mammals that survived the Cretaceous extinction had also lost the green and yellow opsins while keeping red and blue - basically the two different ends of the light spectrum.

Consequently today most mammals still have only 2 opsins so your cat or dog is red-green colourblind.

Why do humans see green? Probably because our monkey forebears, who lived in trees and ate leaves, needed to distinguish red leaves and red fruit (visible to birds) from the green background.

But how did we bring back the green opsin? A whole section of the X chromosome (where the red opsin is coded) got duplicated in a dna copying mistake and then there were two genes for red opsins. As there are different alleles (versions), they could be selected for independently and so one red opsin drifted up the spectrum to be specific for green. So our green opsin is a completely different gene to the green opsin in fish, birds, etc. This kind of evolution happens a lot which is why, for example, there are many families of similar hormones like testosterone and estrogen. And steroids too.

It is the defecal standard though.

Someone has to decide whether it is or is not perjury. In this case it’s the Senate and they need 2/3rd majority. So that basically means Supreme court judges (and presidents) are impossible to get rid of, even for perjury.

Great news - apparently if the President orders it, it’s not illegal! Thanks, supreme court!

It is terribly sad - they must live in a world of hurt.

However so many of these people actively try to hurt LGBTQ+ and trans people by inciting hate and changing laws to harm the non-straight. In particular they have been preaching that being gay/trans equates to being a child molester. This is horrific and needs to stop. Exposing the hypocrisy is essential to reducing the harm they are inflicting to real people right now

Typically you need about 1GB graphics RAM for each billion parameters (i.e. one byte per parameter). This is a 405B parameter model. Ouch.

Edit: you can try quantizing it. This reduces the amount of memory required per parameter to 4 bits, 2 bits or even 1 bit. As you reduce the size, the performance of the model can suffer. So in the extreme case you might be able to run this in under 64GB of graphics RAM.

I think that’s a better plan than physically printing keys. I’d also want to save the keys in another format somewhere - perhaps using a small script to export them into a safe store in the cloud or a box I control somewhere

You need at least two copies in two different places - places that will not burn down/explode/flood/collapse/be locked down by the police at the same time.

An enterprise is going to be commissioning new computers or reformatting existing ones at least once per day. This means the bitlocker key list would need printouts at least every day in two places.

Given the above, it’s easy to see that this process will fail from time to time, in ways like accicentally leaking a document with all these keys.

I agree, so much legislation is broken, the legislators aren’t doing shit, so we citizens need to fix it!

But we could start with the right to repair.

I had a Sinclair QL which pioneered the keyboard. It wasn’t great - it was far behind the Acorn BBCs and the Commodores) but it was quite usable.

There was significant vertical travel, and there was variation in the push the key gave back - increasing to a point of no return, then a quick downward movement to the thunk of the end of key travel.

I could type moderately fast on it.

I’m going to suggest food items that we still take from nature and eat with minimal preparation:

• Honey
• Fish like salmon, trout, grouper
• Shellfish (eg oysters)

We have evidence of shellfish and fish being eaten for a very long time - at least the middle stone age at 140kya - in middens which are 10s of thousands of years old.

Honey is likely to have been a food source - a treat even - even before humans left Africa (so before 100kya) but sadly this would be invisible in the archeological record

There is non-zero risk in every surgery, and this is a major surgery. There is non-zero risk of very very severe consequences: brain infection, stroke being just some. While these risks are low, they are non-zero. The volunteers have the possibility of losing everything.

Java programmers are also functionally illiterate

As I was discussing this with my partner we summarised this as:

Humans have always had the capacity for violence and murder; as populations grew, acts of violence could be larger, both in terms of number of combatants and also length of time of continuous fighting. This is a progression of:

• Small bands of people skirmishing with neighbours to
• Towns sending small raiding bands to
• Cities fielding an army for a summer campaign to
• Empires furnishing professional armies and sending them on multi-year campaigns, to
• Nation states using advanced logistics to maintain millions of soldiers in the field for years at a time.

Somewhere between city-states and full modern nation states, there have been full on campaigns of genocide. But genocide can be thought here definitionally as only possible with some significant number of people.

Unfortunately there is a deep dark part of the human psyche that has always been with us.

I hear what you’re saying, but there’s a counterpoint to this.

In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.

In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call ‘genocide’. It’s a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a ‘people’ - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it’s population density.

However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.

I don’t know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.

By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.

The paradox of tolerance.

If people are tolerant of intolerance, tolerance dies. So, ironically, people who are otherwise highly tolerant people (especially when they have thought about this deeply) realise they must reject intolerance loudly and intensely, lest their way of life is destroyed.

Elon Musk didn’t build the company.

Elon Musk invested into the company,

That’s what I said a couple of paragraphs later

Elon sounds like he’s experienced, skilled and is approaching things from a theoretical or ethical or other grand point of view. He used to impress me with his approach on building an electric car company with full self-driving vehicles in the 2010’s. I wasn’t a full believer, but I thought he was competent and wanted Tesla to succeed.

Then he went and bought Twitter. As a software engineer all my life, and in the startup scene, and having worked in a failed social media platform, I have some experience. Everything he’s said about Twitter is crap and everything he’s done is stupid. And the results speak for themselves.

I’ve seen people say that Elon sounds great about things they don’t know too much about. But when the topic comes to things they do understand, Elon clearly is wrong.

He started his career with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he bet it all on a couple of businesses be bought (he was never a founder, always a purchaser).

Basically he’s been lucky twice (Paypal and Tesla), but each of these won 10-100x on his initial stake.

Not even if the pole was the meanest, toughest slav in eastern europe