WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

birriel's comments

birriel | 4 months ago | on: 1X Neo – Home Robot - Pre Order

Although these particular units are designed for home use, commercial applications are not far off, perhaps in the order of months.

Small and medium-sized businesses will start thinking that it's much better to lease a unit for $500/mo. than $2,000/mo. in payroll for one human. Then they own the unit after 3 years. We're going to need some form of UBI soon.

birriel | 8 months ago | on: I deleted my second brain

It's baffling to me that anyone would do this in the age of LLMs. All of the author's concerns could've been solved or greatly mitigated by loading her PKM into a model as context. The article doesn't mention that she even considered this as an option. I hope the files can be recovered when she realizes this possibility.

birriel | 1 year ago | on: Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later

I hear you, but the problem is that the alternative is much worse. These indefinite detentions lend themselves to all manner of corruption. Maybe a prison guard doesn't like you and falsely claims you committed a violent offense, just to keep you inside. Maybe a fellow inmate attacks you, and when you defend yourself, it gets registered as a violent offense.

The first element of due process is that a citizen be notified that the State is mobilizing its resources with the intention of depriving them of their life, liberty, and/or property.

Another core tenet of due process is that, once notified, you get a chance to submit evidence in your favor before an impartial adjudicator, precisely to avoid the issues in my first paragraph.

birriel | 1 year ago | on: Teenager jailed for 18 months still in prison 18 years later

I'm an attorney barred in the US, so I'm not familiar with this kind of sentencing. However, I'm having a hard time understanding commenters trying to add nuance to IPP sentences simply by saying that inmates don't get released because they keep committing violent offenses while inside.

The reasonable thing to do in such cases is to give the inmate a new trial for each of those alleged offenses. This is very basic due process.

birriel | 1 year ago | on: Metformin decelerates aging clock in male monkeys

It's so frustrating to get seemingly contradictory results across species with the same treatment. The Interventions Testing Program found no increase in median or maximum lifespan in mice, male or female, treated with metformin (though it did in combination with rapamycin) [0].

I realize "decelarating the aging clock" might be subtly different than increasing lifespan, but it's a reasonable enough comparison, imho. Hopefully we can soon capitalize on improvements in AI to faithfully model human biology in silico, and conduct experiments that way.

[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-p...

birriel | 1 year ago | on: Axiomatic by Greg Egan

"Learning to Be Me" is a masterpiece, one of the best short stories ever written. Not only is the phenomenology brilliant, but the literary skill is so good that, even though you suspect what's coming all throughout the tale, he still manages to shock you in the denouement.

You come out thinking that the procedure was done to yourself after you're done reading.

birriel | 1 year ago | on: Bone tissue reparation using coral and marine sponges

From a cosmetic point of view, almost everybody exclusively focuses on the skin to counter aging, when they should be at least as concerned with bone density.

Lots of people have perfect skin, but they still look old. Why? Bone morphology. The zygomatic bone erodes, and the orbital gaps widen. The mandible degrades and pivots down and backwards (jaw rotation). Issues like resorption are currently very challenging. Skin is comparatively much easier. Also (and besides well-known interventions like collagen, retinoids, HA, and dermarolling), Epidermal and Keratinocyte Growth Factors are already very cheap, and showing much promise.

birriel | 2 years ago | on: Sora: Creating video from text

With the third and last videos (space men, and man reading in the clouds), this is the first time I have found the resolution indistinguishable from real life. Even with SOTA stills from Midjourney and Stable Diffusion I was not entirely convinced. This is incredible.

birriel | 2 years ago | on: Artificial Consciousness Remains Impossible (Part 2)

To say that artificial consciousness is (or "remains") impossible, is to imply that there is a ghost in the machine in conscious lifeforms. Maybe there is, I don't know. But if there isn't, there should be no reason for artificial consciousness to be impossible.
page 1
more