photochemsyn (u/photochemsyn)

photochemsyn commented on States and cities decimated SROs, Americans' lowest-cost housing option pew.org/en/research-and-a... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

photochemsyn · 19 days ago

No sane person wants to have to share a kitchen and bathroom with random transient strangers, as in the USA's SRO model. This is really where learning from other countries makes sense - in particular, Japan's high population density has led to the micro-apartment - that's a much better option, though probably still requires some regulatory overhaul (and isn't very compatible with car ownership as population density becomes too high):

> "Japan, particularly in dense cities like Tokyo and Osaka, allows and builds extremely small private apartments, often between 100–200 square feet. Despite their size, these units almost always include a private bathroom and kitchenette."

photochemsyn commented on Palantir is extending its reach even further into government wired.com/story/palantir-... · Posted by u/mooreds

Molitor5901 · 21 days ago

I get the concern bout Palantir but this is not new: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, AWS, have all been extending their reach into government for over a decade. Palantir is the boogey man right now, and it's under a lot of scrutiny because of its work and its political ties, but let's try turning some of the ire to all of the other tech companies empowering the government against people. The others shouldn't get a pass just because of their perceived political leanings.

photochemsyn · 21 days ago

Whataboutism is designed to deflect attention from a particularly egregious example of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence etc. by claiming "everyone's doing it, why pick on my guys?"

Palantir really is much like the private mercenary firm Blackwater - they seem happy to sell their services to anyone with little consideration of the consequences, rather like IBM in the 1930s who saw the rising authoritarian regime in Germany as a good customer, with no concern for what their technology might be used for. This is remarkably similar to Palantir's eagerness to sell their tech to Israel, where it seems to have been used to aid in decimating the Palestinian population. This exposes Palantir to the same kinds of charges IBM faced, as long as we are making that comparison.

photochemsyn commented on A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs addxorrol.blogspot.com/20... · Posted by u/zdw

dgfitz · 2 months ago

“ Determinism, in philosophy, is the idea that all events are causally determined by preceding events, leaving no room for genuine chance or free will. It suggests that given the state of the universe at any one time, and the laws of nature, only one outcome is possible.”

Clearly computers are deterministic. Are people?

photochemsyn · 2 months ago

This is an interesting question. The common theme between computers and people is that information has to be protected, and both computer systems and biological systems require additional information-protecting components - eq, error correcting codes for cosmic ray bitflip detection for the one, and DNA mismatch detection enzymes which excise and remove damaged bases for the other. In both cases a lot of energy is spent defending the critical information from the winds of entropy, and if too much damage occurs, the carefully constructed illusion of determinancy collapses, and the system falls apart.

However, this information protection similarity applies to single-celled microbes as much as it does to people, so the question also resolves to whether microbes are deterministic. Microbes both contain and exist in relatively dynamic environments so tiny differences in initial state may lead to different outcomes, but they're fairly deterministic, less so than (well-designed) computers.

With people, while the neural structures are programmed by the cellular DNA, once they are active and energized, the informational flow through the human brain isn't that deterministic, there are some dozen neurotransmitters modulating state as well as huge amounts of sensory data from different sources - thus prompting a human repeatedly isn't at all like prompting an LLM repeatedly. (The human will probably get irritated).

photochemsyn commented on We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower elektormagazine.com/artic... · Posted by u/obscurette

photochemsyn · 2 months ago

Obviously a lot of design and engineering tasks these days don't have the goal of producing robust, repairable, long-lived hardware and software - where's the profit in that? If iphones lasted twice as long as they now do, wouldn't sales drop by 50% unless consumers decided they preferred the longer-lived phones? This would create pressure on all manufacturers to produce long-lived phones with easily replaceable batteries and publicly available repair kits. And what happens then? The entire market shrinks for all phone manufacturers, and the shareholders throw tantrums over lost profits.

In the late 19th and early 20th Gilded Age era, every industry was dominated by trusts, collusions of manufacturers who set up anti-compete systems to ensure such disruption of their industry by independent innovation wouldn't succeed. This is now being replayed in the tech industry for similar reasons.

There are two solutions to this problem that go together: anti-trust law and open-source hardware and software models - but for that to work, you need an educated population with and understanding of legal and scientific concepts, which is why the education system in the USA has been so deliberately degraded over the past few decades.

That's what happens when you let investment capitalists control everything, isn't it?

photochemsyn commented on AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/tysone

photochemsyn · 2 months ago

How can anyone be sure this story is at all true? Is it taken from an anecdotal story told to a WaPo reporter by a large investor in AI seeking to hype up the ability of AI to take good notes in a meeting, to create a marketing buzz around AI and draw in more investors? The naive credence given to this story in the comment section is probably not justified.

photochemsyn commented on When Did Nature Burst into Vivid Color? quantamagazine.org/when-d... · Posted by u/jandrewrogers

citizenpaul · 2 months ago

One of the most disturbingly creepy things I've realized is when looking at render of a laser scanned environment. The oddly bumpy and uneven gray mass that everything show up as. That is actually reality. The filtered colorful smooth version we see is an arbitrary specific wavelength interpretation that our brains developed. We are actually living in that creepy gray horror movie render of the laser scan.

photochemsyn · 2 months ago

To generate a natural-color image of a biological sample using lasers in the human eye's visible light range, you'd need a great many lasers covering the entire frequency range. This generates hundreds of datasets at each particular wavelength (ignoring issues like laser-induced fluorescence, which can be managed with spectral filtering).

The trick comes in taking all that data from the hundreds of images generated by different-wavelength lasers and assembling them layer-by-layer into an image the human brain interprets as color, aka colorimetric rendering, onto the three-color-cone system the eye's retina employs plus a bunch of neural processing (there's a complex equation for this mapping of 'hyperspectral cube' data onto an RGB display for human visualization).

There's a really strange example - the mantis shrimp - that used to be thought to have rich color vision in a narrow band, but now people think it might be a lot more direct, a kind of color vision without much neural processing involved, with each photoreceptor scanning slighty different wavelengths and directly signalling to the mantis brain, such as it is:

Thoen et al. (2014) – "A different form of color vision in mantis shrimp" (Science)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1245824

photochemsyn commented on Why Go Rocks for Building a Lua Interpreter zombiezen.com/blog/2025/0... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

photochemsyn · 2 months ago

Is it just me or is Go/Rust proseltyzing on HN kind of getting ridiculous?

photochemsyn commented on Personal care products disrupt the human oxidation field science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/XzetaU8

muhdeeb · 2 months ago

This article has a headline engineered with shock value connotations, but when you read it carefully, it takes pains to rein the suggestions of the title in as much as possible while still stirring the pot. It’s a kind of artistry you need to get papers published these days.

All that aside, it’s an interesting thing to think about but it’s not a basis for any kind of personal health recommendation and the authors state that. I have relevant expertise and this is a very complicated area that people routinely want to be boiled down into black and white simple advice. What this article seems to say is that lotion can affect the oxidation chemistry nearby it, but it’s not yet known if that is an effect with consequences that are on the whole negative or positive.

I would criticize the authors for their use of the word disrupt, because of the negative connotation carried by that word when talking about human biological systems. They use a softer, more neutral word, perturb, to express the same idea later in the article, which I think better expresses the idea without an emotional tinge to it.

photochemsyn · 2 months ago

"A commercial lotion composed of aqua, glycerin, Brassica campestris seed oil, Butyrospermum parkii butter, ceteareth-12, ceteareth-20, cetearyl alcohol, ethylhexyl stearate, Simmondsia chinensis seed oil, tocopherol, caprylyl glycol, citric acid, sodium hydroxide, acrylates/C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer, sodium gluconate, and phenoxyethanol was chosen for this experiment."

Personal health recommendation: You'd be better off rubbing down with olive oil or sunflower oil than with that concoction, most likely. The ancient Greeks got some things right.