hyeonwho4 (u/hyeonwho4)

hyeonwho4 commented on NYC's office-to-residential conversions could create 17,000 new homes 6sqft.com/nycs-first-wave... · Posted by u/geox

kccqzy · a month ago

How does ventilation (the V in HVAC) work for FCUs? If the pipes only bring coolant to each unit where does fresh air come from? Conventional HVAC systems have Heat Recovery Ventilation so what's the equivalent here?

hyeonwho4 · a month ago

I don't know. I don't think that most Asian apartments have central fresh air. Usually the unit owners open windows regularly.

hyeonwho4 commented on No vegan milk is equivalent to dairy, nutritionists conclude thetimes.com/life-style/h... · Posted by u/josephcsible

hyeonwho4 · a month ago

Human infant intestines in the ancestral environment are natively colonized by bifidobacterium infantis, which completely metabolizes oligosaccarides present in human breast milk and outputs highly acidic byproducts. This acid kills most other gut bacteria, allowing B. infantis to consist of 50% of the intenstinal microbiome in healthy infants [1]. Oligosaccarides cannot be metabolized by babies without gut bacteria, but human mothers produce more of them than most other mammals we know of, and the specific oligosaccarides present depend on maternal generics [4]. NICU infants untreated with B. infantis are 5x more likely to fall into sepis as a result of necrotizing enterocolitis[2,3], probably due to increased intestinal permeability to pathogens.

But B. infantis is coevolved for the digestion of human oligosaccarides, and those are specifically genetically coded for in human milk [4]. As a result, "vegan baby formula" or even baby formula without the correct oligosacarides could be a disaster for baby intestinal health, and even cow's milk has a different oligosaccaride profile, and we don't know how adaptable the gut microbes are.

[1] doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-01350-0 [2] doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-1463 [3] doi.org/10.1038/s41372-019-0443-5 [4] doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y

hyeonwho4 commented on NYC's office-to-residential conversions could create 17,000 new homes 6sqft.com/nycs-first-wave... · Posted by u/geox

vladvasiliu · a month ago

I agree with your other points, but does actually each unit need a dedicated AC?

I live in a building with district heating, we all get the same hot water. If I don't want to live in an oven during the winter, I'll turn down the heaters' thermostats, which lets less hot water in.

Couldn't we have a similar thing for cold air in the summer? Send the same temperature to everybody, and allow people to choose how much of that air they allow in their units. Shouldn't this also be more efficient than a dedicated AC unit per home?

hyeonwho4 · a month ago

This is called an FCU (fan coil unit) and is common in Asia. It consists of a high efficiency central chiller run by building management, and pipes to bring coolant to each unit. Then in each unit there is a heat exchange coil with a fan to blow the room air through the coil. Hence fan coil unit.

The advantages of this system are that the only sound in the unit is the fan, and air is not circulated between units. The disadvantage is that building management can turn off A/C centrally if they want to save money.

For some reason Americans are slow to pick up HVAC innovations that are common elsewhere: heat pumps, split-system air conditioners, FCU, etc. I guess it is because energy is cheap to them and they don't mind noise.

hyeonwho4 commented on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/magicalist

hyeonwho4 · 4 months ago

The White House press release had links to the eight grants in question. The claimed values of the grants were inflated by the press release, but they did actually involve studying the effects of cross sex hormone administration, so in this case the claims of confusion between "transgender mice" and "transgenic mice" were the fake news. (Also, the claimed 8M USD over N years is peanuts compared to the money spent annually on developing actual transgenic mice.)

hyeonwho4 commented on People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies rollingstone.com/culture/... · Posted by u/wzm

stevage · 4 months ago

Fascinating and terrifying.

The allegations that ChatGPT is not discarding memory as requested are particularly interesting, wonder if anyone else has experienced this.

hyeonwho4 · 4 months ago

The default setting on ChatGPT is to now include previous conversations as context. I disabled memories, but this new feature was enabled when I checked the settings.

hyeonwho4 commented on Reproducibility project fails to validate dozens of biomedical studies nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/rntn

Darkstryder · 4 months ago

A dream of mine was that in order to get a PhD, you would not have to publish original research, but instead you would have to _reproduce existing research_. This would bring the PhD student to the state of the art in a different way, and it would create a natural replication process for current research. Your thesis would be about your replication efforts, what was reproducible and what was not, etc.

And then, once you got your PhD, only then you would be expected to publish new, original research.

hyeonwho4 · 4 months ago

That used to be the function of undergraduate and Masters theses at the Ivy League universities. "For the undergraduate thesis, fix someone else's mistake. For the Master's thesis, find someone else's mistake. For the PhD thesis, make your own mistake."

hyeonwho4 commented on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale afterbabel.com/p/industri... · Posted by u/cwwc

uuddlrlrbaba · 4 months ago

I love the parents in the tech community. They had unfettered computer and internet access which formed them into the successful people they are today. But they were special and their circumstance was special and their kids are not allowed to use the internet because now its bad.

old_man_yells_at_cloud.jpg

hyeonwho4 · 4 months ago

The unfettered computer and internet access was a desktop machine (which needed to run a minimalist distro) on dial-up in a very public room. The fun that taught me tech stuff was getting to distro to work, and there was no privacy. Parents were much more aware of the dangers back then.

Nowdays everythibg on smartphones "just works", and the OS won't even let the user access system files. I meet college students who have no idea what a file system is, or what a DNS server is.

Times have changed, indeed.

hyeonwho4 commented on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale afterbabel.com/p/industri... · Posted by u/cwwc

bslanej · 4 months ago

Your comment mentions that your nephew swaps between games every 5 minutes but it doesn’t say why that is bad. Or maybe I don’t see how the argument follows.

hyeonwho4 · 4 months ago

When I was a child, my parents had me work on a lot of puzzles. They saw this as a way to build attention span, ability to focus, and persistence to achieve long term goals (not to mention that we had the coolest, most intricate puzzles). I would probably work with my children work on something a bit more constructive and realistic, but the point is that as children we build intellectual habits and attention span from what we do, and being unable to focus on highly addictive stimuli for more than five minutes is a symptom of a strong deficit. One might even consider it an intellectual disability.

hyeonwho4 commented on She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her nytimes.com/2025/04/11/sc... · Posted by u/xnx

hyeonwho4 · 5 months ago

This kind of "smuggling" or failure to declare live specimens is very common in biological research on. This is the third time I've heard of international collaborations playing fast and loose with the law. (The other two were finding ways to send live samples by mail.)

hyeonwho4 commented on Why I don't discuss politics with friends shwin.co/blog/why-i-dont-... · Posted by u/shw1n

vendiddy · 5 months ago

I think this is spot on.

I feel like folks on both sides would stop talking past each other if they were willing to understand the other POV rather than dismissing it as crazy.

hyeonwho4 · 5 months ago

Compromising and using empathy to understand the opposition's views so that you can negotiate for what you need does not satisfy the base, and does not satisfy social media. The (naive) game theory of negotiation says that it is better to stake out an extreme position so that you get more of what you want when you negotiate it away. And the dynamic of primary elections also allows traitors or traders to be punished if they defy the desires of the party too much.