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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • There’s no projection. I feel no guilt for eating the diet of every single one of my ancestors. Zero. I do not believe animals to be sentient, and I do not equate death or servitude with suffering. It’s not that I don’t understand vegans. I do. But it’s like a religion - you have a fundamental belief, not in god, but in the consciousness of animals. Because we differ on that fundamental belief, we can reach no understanding about the ethics beyond that.

    And I think it is a fair comparison. People who pay for media may also see it as an ethical baseline to pay for what you consume. And in both the case of vegans, and those who pay for streaming, the perceived benefit of that choice is in my opinion fundamentally flawed. But it’s really not a big deal to me. I was just trying to answer OPs question. I think your response only validates my analogy. Thank you.



  • I never played RuneScape, but I did just delete Pikmin Bloom. What if players cheat their steps? How will you detect the difference between that, and a Pacific Crest Trail thruhiker who legitimately walks 60,000 steps day after day, and over 1,000,000 steps per month?

    Anyway your game sounds cool. I had an idea for a one player game while I was hiking the PCT - kinda like the Oregon trail, or dope wars, but it would be a simulation of the Pacific Crest Trail and the steps would be 1:1. So you’d have to walk 7 million steps to beat the game, and obviously make decisions along the way about food and water, weather, resting, hitchhiking, etc. But there will be long stretches of the game where you just look at a new vista, or look at the location, eat food, camp.

    Anyway the reason I’m commenting is I wanted to tell you why I quit playing a walking game. I quit after a backpacking trip of 7 days with no service. When I came back, the game had nothing to do for my ~150,000 steps. No confetti or prizes. If I was actually playing it for any achievements it would be a setback to be offline for 7 days.

    So yeah, if you have any players of your game who do serious miles in one day, or one week, or whatever, you should pile on the rewards. Because at the end of the day that’s all I want out of a game like that. An automated micro-recognition that I kicked ass. So I can relax my tired legs and use all my hard earned digital loot.



  • Radar and Lidar also get a lot of noise from heavy rain or snow. Fog can be just as bad. Some conditions just aren’t safe to drive in, regardless of who’s driving. I don’t think either of them are trying to design a system for those conditions.

    On a personal note, I have no interest in getting a ride in a self driving car. I do have an interest in an empty car that can drive itself. Drop myself off at the airport, valet parking downtown, easier to share one car per household, river shuttling, through hike shuttling - I would use it a lot. I understand the more profitable goal is taxi services, but I don’t want that. So in my narrow use case, I hope Tesla succeeds since that approach can be used on personal vehicles anywhere while Waymo is strictly city taxis, which I don’t use.


  • Chess is a very complex rules game, while Checkers is quite simple. Waymo has a complex approach to self driving:

    • Expensive suite of sensors
    • High resolution maps of operating areas
    • Remote operators standing by

    While Teslas approach is simple:

    • Capture a bazillion miles of camera footage, feed into AI, profit?
    • Unpaid volunteers teach the AI safe driving
    • Car has only a basic map for routing, the rest is inferred in real time from cameras

    Waymo’s successful approach scales linearly. They have to high-res map every city they want to operate in, and they can gradually bring down the cost of the sensors. They will require fewer remote operator interactions over time.

    Teslas success is more difficult, but it scales exponentially. They already produce vehicles at scale and full control over all the equipment on board. The existing fleet would be able to participate as well. If they succeed, they may want to offer buy-backs for customers who didnt buy FSD - the cars would be worth more to Tesla than the owner.

    In both checkers and chess, the player gains super powers for reaching the other side of the board. Time will tell who reaches the other side of the board first. They are playing different games on the same board. Okay that’s fair.


  • My takeaway from that article is mostly that primate research is a big emotional topic for some people, and maybe tech writers shouldn’t write about medical research. Do you think it would be so interesting if it was done on mice? The primate research center in Davis has been there since 1962, and it’s always been controversial. Do you think they’ve just been twiddling their thumbs for 55 years waiting for Neuralink to come along? No, that shit is routine for them. They keep doing it because primate research is still an important step before human trials.

    There is no need to ethically green light a medical procedure that is voluntary, of sound mind, and of one’s own will. It’s not your body. It’s not your life. People implant beads and magnets into their bodies and tattoo their faces. People hang themselves from meat hooks for fun. People get circumcised, and pierced. It’s all none of your business.


  • I don’t think it’s obvious at all. This is a sample size of one, and it is still working after 3 months.

    Globally, a staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year; around 40 to 50 million in USA and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 1–4% of these patients will die, up to 15% will have serious postoperative morbidity, and 5–15% will be readmitted within 30 days. An annual global mortality of around 8 million patients places major surgery comparable with the leading causes of death from cardiovascular disease and stroke, cancer and injury. If surgical complications were classified as a pandemic, like HIV/AIDS or coronavirus (COVID-19), developed countries would work together and devise an immediate action plan and allocate resources to address it.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7388795/

    Implants are rejected by the immune system. Stents fail. Hip and joint replacements fail. Does that mean we shouldn’t do them?



  • Nobody is making you get a brain chip. Noland did the research, talked about it with his family, and wanted to proceed in spite of the fully disclosed risks. Bodily autonomy is a fundamental human right - if you want to do something or have something done to your body it’s not the governments place to stop you. Safeguards are necessary, and they do exist. You don’t need laws to make sure everybody has the same risk tolerance as you. I can’t fully imagine what it would be like to have no use of my body and no hope of recovery. But I wouldn’t want people like you or me who aren’t in my shoes deciding what I can and can’t do. Honestly if he wanted to have a lethal injection, I believe he should be allowed to make that decision, but he can’t. I’m happy he was able to make some kind of decision, and regain some autonomy, if only temporarily, and not just be a vegetable head in a bed for the rest of his life.


  • No use of your body is a pretty desperate situation. Before the procedure he had to yell for his parents that he wanted to use the computer, they’d come sit him upright and put a joystick in his mouth, leaving him unable to speak. And he was often very uncomfortable in that position, so he couldn’t do it long. Now, he can use the computer fully laying down, without anyone’s help. The next logical step would be to have some robotic helper arms.

    Anyway he can’t shoot himself. He can’t hold a gun or anything else. There’s little reason for this to be about Musk at all other than money. This is the culmination of decades of research from many medical professionals. It’s about a lot more than one person.





  • I have used Piwigo for this purpose the past 3.5 years. It’s running on a tiny Odroid HC-2 and solid state drive. The same device also runs Emby for video streaming. I started it with a free sub domain from afraid.org. I migrated to a real domain later. To run two services from one domain name you also need a reverse proxy and SSL certificate renewal, like SWAG or NGINX Proxy Manager or Zoraxy.

    The main thing I’ve learned is keeping everything isolated repeatable. On my Odroid I learned to use Docker and Portainer for the apps. But there were a couple times I broke everything through updates/upgrades. Now I have a small Intel N305 (Minsforum UN305C), running ProxMox VE, and apps in Linux containers. The first I set up myself to learn but later I discovered some open source helper scripts https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/. ProxMox seems a bit more complex than Docker/Portainer, but more flexible.

    I’m using IPv4 only but I’m migrating to IPv6 soon to help with in-network routing to my domain. My advice would be unless you want to host your own DNS and override your domain to resolve to LAN, just use your IP:port on LAN and use the domain only outside your home.