notnot's comments

When I eat a raw vegetable or a piece of sashimi I'm consuming many pieces of mRNA. Does it matter what these molecules encode for? Doesn't my stomach just chop everything up? Would it matter if a baby ate COVID vaccine mRNA?

I don't think this will work. Excuse my nonsense logic but the swastika works well as a symbol of hate (despite having other origins and meanings) in that it has a single center with coherent angular spirals, the center signifying the ego and the spirals signifying logic and order complying with it... or something.

The hashtag has an empty center and four equal points that sort of radiate in multiple directions... seems more oligopolistic and ambivalent than totalitarian and opinionated.

Admittedly without yet reading but just looking at the pictures, I'd love to see examples of where it creates patterns of patterns. Sort of like the biomes in Minecraft: one pattern to draw out where the biomes are, one to fill them in with content. Could it be made to do patterns of patterns of patterns?

If this were used to create level design where the local view is several iterations deep of patterns of patterns but not yet all the way to the bottom, I guess a fractal, that would be a trip.

Awesome work!

Isn't making a robot that looks like a human to replace a human's job a bit like making a mechanical horse to fulfill our transportation needs?

Having worked with robotics for years I can say the amount of setup work that goes into installing fully-functional hardware and software and getting a robotic process running smoothly is enormous. The basic idea is that everything, the robot, all the hardware, all the firmware/software, the end-effector, the workpieces, the sensors, etc. is rigidly-defined and over-spec'd so that with all the tolerance stackup and after all the integration and process debugging work you set it and DON'T CHANGE IT for as long as possible. The chaos that ensues from one little component changing it's behavior can be enormous.

The notion of "smart" robots that you can just slap down or that can just handle all sorts of unknowns and adjust themselves to changes to me always seemed like a really, really big challenge, maybe not as challenging as a driverless car but definitely more of a "general AI" problem.

I'm sure someone has coined the term but there must be some kind of "uncanny valley" of intelligence: a little intelligence (e.g. the PID controllers that actually run robots) is great, a lot of intelligence (fully-blown general AI) is great (if you can get it), but what's in the middle may not be worth the while. Getting the answer correctly 99% of the time doesn't work if you need 99.9% success rate.

From an investment standpoint I would be looking for companies with a REALLY specific well-defined problem that "medium AI" could solve rather than someone who's claiming to take medium AI and apply it vaguely/generally.

I guess that's my take away from this: work on specifying the problem before you work on the solution.

Doesn't plastic, especially white shopping-bag plastic, reflect more solar radiation than open ocean? Wouldn't covering a large portion of the earth with white plastic actually lower global temperatures? I saw a video where an open water reservoir was covered with floating plastic balls to reduce evaporation. Maybe a large plastic island would help fight global warming.

This may seem unrelated but I watched "The Disaster Artist" for the first time last night. It made me cringe, not for Wiseau but by reminding me of all the times I've been a Wiseau in my life as I disconnected from reality caught up in some fantasy of how I was going to make the world love me by something I was going to do. Reality can be a brutal place for the ego, but at least it's real.

"I'm going to make my own Bluetooth smart-lock. It's gonna be amaaaazing. Oh hai Mark."

"I'm really worried"

The first rule of psychedelics: don't worry.

How to not worry? Relax. Keep the body at peace. Be simple. Stay in the heart (stay with how you're feeling, not just with what you're seeing/experiencing). Let go. You cannot lose yourself because you are always yourself. Be grateful for the incredibly valuable experience you're having, even if it's difficult.

So they're using the screen consisting of three monochromatic LED types as a full-spectrum light source? I don't think that works... You still just get three points on the spectrum, same as the Bayer filter on the camera.

I suppose if the three screen LED wavelengths were significantly different from the three camera filter wavelengths then you could:

Illuminate with screen Red to get Rscreen.

Illuminate with screen Green to get Gscreen.

Illuminate with screen Blue to get Bscreen.

Use ambient full-spectrum light to get Rfilter, Gfilter, and Bfilter.

Then you'd have 6 points on the spectrum.

Why no .SLDPRT support?

Biology startup idea:

Since Rhino horn is just like keratin and dirt or something, design a process to create spot-on fake rhino horns and flood the market with them.

You would make lots of money at first and eventually drop the price of rhino horn to the point where it wouldn't be economically feasible to harvest real Rhino horn.