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ScottBurson commented on Decreased CO2 during breathwork: emergence of altered states of consciousness   nature.com/articles/s4427... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
maebert · 4 months ago
So the tetany in breathwork is generally caused by the decreased CO2 concentration causing respiratory alkalosis (ie blood gets more alkaline and has a ph balance of > 7.5), which in turn causes the protein albumin to bind more strongly to calcium and not release it as it's supposed to, and calcium is an important regulator in voltage gated ion channels in neurons.

Long story short, your neurons get just a tad bit more excitable because calcium that usually acts like the bouncer to the hot club is busy snogging albumin. That has very little effect in places in the body, but in motor neurons that control your smallest muscles (face and hand), and in sensory neurons under your skin it does move the needle — that causes the muscles to contract and your skin to feel tingly, both exactly the same cause.

This is the reason people with epilepsy should _NOT_ do breathwork, but for otherwise healthy adults there are no negative long term effects of respiratory alkalosis — a few normal breaths to balance out your co2 and the symptoms will go away.

ScottBurson · 4 months ago
I've done breathwork for years, and at some point the tetany simply stopped happening and hasn't returned.
ScottBurson commented on Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations   old.reddit.com/r/cursor/c... · Posted by u/scaredpelican
lynguist · 4 months ago
https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

The section about hallucinations is deeply relevant.

Namely, Claude sometimes provides a plausible but incorrect chain-of-thought reasoning when its “true” computational path isn’t available. The model genuinely believes it’s giving a correct reasoning chain, but the interpretability microscope reveals it is constructing symbolic arguments backward from a conclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

This empirically confirms the “theory of bullshit” as a category distinct from lying. It suggests that “truth” emerges secondarily to symbolic coherence and plausibility.

This means knowledge itself is fundamentally symbolic-social, not merely correspondence to external fact.

Knowledge emerges from symbolic coherence, linguistic agreement, and social plausibility rather than purely from logical coherence or factual correctness.

ScottBurson · 4 months ago
> The model genuinely believes it’s giving a correct reasoning chain

The model doesn't "genuinely believe" anything.

ScottBurson commented on The failure of the land value tax   worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/eamag
ScottBurson · 5 months ago
The thing to understand about the LVT is that we are pretty much all already paying it; not to the city in which we live, but to the previous owners of the land we live on. When we buy a house, we have to pay the previous owner a certain amount for the land. That amount is the present value of the expected income stream that could, hypothetically, be realized by renting out the land. Divide by the number of months in our mortgage term and multiply by the interest rate, and the result is our effective monthly LVT.

All George is saying is that that money should be going to the city (or other controlling locality) instead of the previous owner, because it's the city that created the value in the first place.

ScottBurson commented on OpenAI O3-Mini   openai.com/index/openai-o... · Posted by u/johnneville
genewitch · 7 months ago
> If you learn something from someone debunking an imaginary article, that is just as good as learning something from debunking a real article.

An argument for synthetic corpi (plural of corpus..esses?) - AI ingesting AI.

ScottBurson · 7 months ago
The plural is "corpora" :-)
ScottBurson commented on CrowdStrike ex-employees: 'Quality control was not part of our process'   semafor.com/article/09/12... · Posted by u/everybodyknows
daedrdev · a year ago
Two things are clear though

Nobody ran this update

The update was pushed globally to all computers

With that alone we know they have failed the simplest of quality control methods for a piece of software as widespread as theirs. This is even excluding that there should have been some kind of error handling to allow the computer to boot if they did push bad code.

ScottBurson · a year ago
> there should have been some kind of error handling

This is the point I would emphasize. A kernel module that parses configuration files must defend itself against a failed parse.

ScottBurson commented on Snowden: The arrest of Durov is an assault on the basic human rights   twitter.com/Snowden/statu... · Posted by u/hggh
ath3nd · a year ago
> love when everything inconvenient to the United States government and it's affiliates is "disinformation"

I thought and still think that Snowden is a brave and righteous man for airing the US government's dirty laundry.

Not him becoming a Russian citizen, but rather his silence on the bloody war of Putin, however, makes me think that I should take Snowden's words with a pinch of salt.

ScottBurson · a year ago
Do you really think Putin would hesitate to arrest him if he did that?

Snowden knows he is being watched closely. I suppose that is itself a reason to take what he says with a grain of salt, but I certainly don't take his silence on the Ukraine war as evidence of assent.

ScottBurson commented on Writing a Rust compiler in C   notgull.net/announcing-do... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
akira2501 · a year ago
Then you look at the assembly for the old Cray-1 computers (octal opcodes) and the IBM System/360 computers (word opcodes), and you realize, they made it so amazingly simple you can mostly just write the opcode bytes and assemble by hand if you like.

Then x86 came along, without the giant budgets or the big purchasers, and so they made that assembly as efficient and densely packed as is possible; unfortunately, you lose what you might otherwise conveniently have on other machines.

ScottBurson · a year ago
I've read somewhere that Seymour Cray used to write his entire operating system in absolute octal. ("Absolute" means no relocation; all memory accesses and jumps must be hand-targeted to the correct address, as they would have to be with no assembler involved.)
ScottBurson commented on Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate   twitter.com/JoeBiden/stat... · Posted by u/jsheard
goatlover · a year ago
I wonder strategically if it would help Kamala Harris if he did step down so she could be acting president heading into the election?
ScottBurson · a year ago
Probably not. She needs to spend her time campaigning.
ScottBurson commented on Joe Biden stands down as Democratic candidate   twitter.com/JoeBiden/stat... · Posted by u/jsheard
tim333 · a year ago
I liked James Carville's idea of picking maybe eight contenders and having town hall type events to choose the most popular. Game show element to take publicity from Trump and also kind of democratic rather than anointing a connected insider, which of course Trump would then go on about endlessly.
ScottBurson · a year ago
Not a bad idea, but it remains to be seen how many people are up for starting a run at this late date.

Also, I just read that Harris has money pouring in. The donors may effectively decide this before anyone else can get traction.

ScottBurson commented on CrowdStrike debacle provides road map of American vulnerabilities to adversaries   nytimes.com/2024/07/19/us... · Posted by u/jmsflknr
Osiris · a year ago
Even unikernel applications have an OS compiled into the application. It's necessary to initialize the hardware it's running on, including the CPU and GPU and storage.

I suppose you could build it as a UEFI module that relies on the UEFI firmware to initialize the hardware but then you get a text only interface. But then the UEFI is the OS.

But this outage was not an OS problem. It was an application bug that used invalid pointers. If it was a unikernel it still would have crashed.

ScottBurson · a year ago
I've read that it was a driver of some kind, not an application. Applications can't cause BSODs (I hope).

u/ScottBurson

KarmaCake day10305August 31, 2010
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