beltsazar (u/beltsazar)

beltsazar commented on NASA: Mystery of Life's Handedness Deepens nasa.gov/science-research... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

Terr_ · a year ago

I don't know, I think the arthropic principle is still going really strong: It's like this because if it wasn't we would be asking different questions or not around to ask at all.

It's hard to consider something "so improbable that it must have been God" when we look out at a universe so incomprehensibly bigger that the real question becomes why we haven't evidence of it happening more.

beltsazar · a year ago

The anthropic principle is ridiculous. Suppose that, against all odds, you survive the worst plane crash in history. Then you ask NTSB what caused the crash and why you survived. They answer:

"Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived."

Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.

beltsazar commented on NASA: Mystery of Life's Handedness Deepens nasa.gov/science-research... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

roncesvalles · a year ago

Aside from the mountain of actual evidence, just to build a philosophical intuition against fine-tuning - you need to appreciate the enormous scale of trial and error at play.

- The Earth seems like the perfect planet but looking out into the sky there are trillions of planets that aren't perfect at all.

- Most likely the universe also appears "perfect" for the same reason - there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life.

- Evolution is much the same - many mutations occur all the time, most are fixed by cellular machinery, most that aren't are deleterious, but once in a while a helpful mutation emerges. Take a moment to understand the timescale involved. Don't just handwave away 3.8 billion years as some number - feel it, starting at 1 year and stepping up each order of magnitude. You will realize that a million years is essentially "forever ago", and we had 3800 of those to get here. Consider how many species exist that aren't civilizational sentient intelligence.

beltsazar · a year ago

Fine tuning for the earth might be able to be explained away most easily, like you said. Fine tuning for the universe, though...

Firstly, we have zero evidence for multiverse. Some scientists even argue that the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable.

When you said:

> there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life

You just committed inverse gambler's fallacy. It's like:

> You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing.

— https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-ex...

beltsazar commented on Mitochondria Are Alive asimov.press/p/mitochondr... · Posted by u/mailyk

rsync · a year ago

There is ~1M bacteria in a single drop of seawater.

Now multiply that by (the ocean) and multiply the interactions by X billion years.

It seems impossible for a symbiosis like this not to have happened.

No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty.

beltsazar · a year ago

This is a such common logical fallacy that we should have name for it.

> No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty.

"No matter how low", really? Are you suggesting that your multiplication result is infinite? Otherwise, no matter how big the result is—even if it's Graham's number or TREE(3)—but as long as it's finite, there are odds so low that bring the outcome extremely unlikely.

The thing is we don't know even a ballpark estimate of the odds, but you were saying like we have a lower bound of the odds. The universe is unfathomably huge, true, but we also don't know if abiogenesis is less unfathomably unlikely.

beltsazar commented on Trump wins presidency for second time thehill.com/homenews/camp... · Posted by u/koolba

aucisson_masque · a year ago

Is there some statistical analysis on the reason people vote trump ? I refuse to believe the narrative that Americans are just a bunch of redneck retarded bigots.

Tried to Google it but all I find is a bunch of American news website like CNN and website like https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/the-five-types-t...

I'm trying to look beyond the propaganda, any idea if there has been scientific studies or anything remotely credible ?

beltsazar · a year ago

You're asking as if the other candidate is a no-brainer choice. If the other candidate were Kennedy, then sure—but they were not. In this case, many would be undecided and would vote not the best candidate, but the least bad one.

beltsazar commented on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon reuters.com/world/middle-... · Posted by u/logicchains

beedeebeedee · a year ago

Try a different approach than engaging in war/apartheid. The practice of the IDF "mowing the grass" by harming civilians has been long established and commented on. Certain Israeli politicians also empowered Hamas, in order to divide and discredit the Palestinians, so that they would not be in a suitable position to negotiate an end to the conflict. Practices like that do not produce peace. I suggest Israel do its best to look at its role in this conflict (and not just Hamas's) and then act in good faith to bring about peace, so that there are no more terrorist attacks like Oct. 7.

beltsazar · a year ago

Oct 7 happened and you're suggesting a different approach than a war, i.e. diplomatic solutions? That's too naive—not even the most pacifist country would do that.

And let's not pretend that no diplomatic solutions have been proposed, all of which were rejected. They will only accept it if they own every inch of the land and Israel is obliterated (their own word).

beltsazar commented on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon reuters.com/world/middle-... · Posted by u/logicchains

beedeebeedee · a year ago

> If you can't find any parking lot you keep driving, it doesn't allow you to double park and block someone else's car. If you are too weak to maintain your posture at war you should't fight it on the backs of civilians.

That cuts both ways. Just like hamas should not hide amongst civilians, if Israel is too weak to go into Gaza to arrest hamas, it has no excuse to act illegitimately and bomb civilians.

beltsazar · a year ago

But if they hide amongst civilians and Israel is too weak, what do you suggest Israel should do instead?

beltsazar commented on The Webb Telescope further deepens the Hubble tension controversy in cosmology quantamagazine.org/the-we... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

diob · 2 years ago

So a lot of astronomy is based on the principle that we are not in a special pocket of the universe.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

Basically, if this weren't to hold true, a lot of astronomy would fall over, even physics.

beltsazar · 2 years ago

Yes, cosmological principle is probably the most fundamental assumption in astronomy.

Most people don't realize that science—and even everything in life—has to start from some axioms/assumptions, just like math. I first realized this fact when I was reading the Relativity book written by Einstein himself, who challenges the assumptions in classical physics.

As time goes, some of the assumptions could be proved to be unnecessary or even wrong. There must be still some assumptions left, though—because without them, we can't talk about science, or anything, really.

beltsazar commented on Go structs are copied on assignment (and other things about Go I'd missed) jvns.ca/blog/2024/08/06/g... · Posted by u/misonic

Animats · 2 years ago

The semantics of when stuff is copied, moved, or passed by reference are all over the place in language design.

C started with the idea that functions returned one int-sized value in a register. This led to classic bugs where the function returns a pointer to a local value. Compilers now usually catch this. C eventually got structure return by copy. Then C++ added return value by move, and automatic optimization for that. It's complicated.[1]

Most hard-compiled languages only let you return values of fixed length, because the caller has to allocate space. Dynamic languages where most things are boxed just return the box. Rust makes you declare boxed types explicitly. Vec and String are already boxed, which handles the common cases.

More dynamic languages tend to let you return anything, although there can be questions over whether you have your own mutable copy, a copy-on-write copy, a read-only copy, or a mutable reference to the original. That's what got the OP here, at

    thing := findThing(things, "record")
    thing.Name = "gramaphone"

They thought they had a mutable reference to the original, but they had a mutable copy.

There's a good argument for immutability by default, but many programmers dislike all the extra declarations required.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17473753/c11-return-valu...

beltsazar · 2 years ago

> There's a good argument for immutability by default, but many programmers dislike all the extra declarations required.

That's one little reason why Rust is loved by many: immutability by default. Meanwhile, it's not even possible in Go to declare immutable variables!

beltsazar commented on Show HN: 1-FPS encrypted screen sharing for introverts 1fps.video/... · Posted by u/RomanPushkin

red0point · 2 years ago

I feel like there are so many pitfalls when designing this - is there something standard and trusted (would TLS work?) that you could build your application on top of?

beltsazar · 2 years ago

> there are so many pitfalls when designing this

Agree. When people hear the adage "don't roll your own crypto", they often think it refers to crypto primitives only. In reality, it's also hard to design a secure crypto protocol, even if the underlying crypto primitives are secure.

beltsazar commented on Stop Killing Games eci.ec.europa.eu/045/publ... · Posted by u/r1chardnl

steinuil · 2 years ago

To all the comments who expressed doubts on how this would work in practice: please read the FAQ, it answers a lot of questions and gives concrete examples.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

beltsazar · 2 years ago

> The costs associated with implementing this requirement can be very small, if not trivial.

This is too naive. While it may be the case for single player games that use online connection only as a DRM mechanism (Hitman 3, Gran Turismo 7), for some games it's not trivial at all.

For example, The Division 2 servers do not only act as a "coordinator" between players like CS:GO servers, but also run logics for NPCs and environments. The server and the client are too tightly coupled.