zerobits's comments

zerobits | 2 years ago | on: Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://wetware.engineering

A site about the most effective techniques to improve your memory, intelligence, and effectiveness. Built with a custom software stack, want to put more time into it soon.

Selection of posts:

· Adults learn faster than children: challenging a discouraging myth that children are suited for learning more than adults. (https://wetware.engineering/adult-learning)

· A new curriculum: The topics we fail to emphasize in school. Was on HN front page for a bit. (https://wetware.engineering/curriculum)

· Everyday memory palaces: How to increase your memory by orders of magnitude, and apply that in daily life (https://wetware.engineering/memory-palaces)

· How to draw a 4D hypercube: Wrap your mind around higher dimensions. (https://wetware.engineering/hypercube)

zerobits | 3 years ago | on: Humans retain ‘ancestral’ understanding of ape gestures, study says

I was pretty excited about this result until actually going through the quiz.

They give you so many hints, I don't think you can draw conclusions from this.

For example:

- In multiple videos an ape is eating, and another ape is trying to grab food out of their mouth. The options presented are like: "Give me that food" or "Move to a new position". Obviously the food is relevant.

- In multiple videos a larger ape presents its back to the other, while the smaller moves towards hopping on or grooming it. Clearly this is the "climb on my back" or "groom me" options.

In addition to providing a highlighted illustration, multiple choice, and slow-mo replays, it really just seems like this quiz was (intentional or not) designed to show an obvious positive result. Looking forward to better research on this.

zerobits | 4 years ago | on: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy

Can anyone explain these timelines better? Can we throw more money at this and scale much faster? Are safety/regulation considerations the main bottleneck?

This has gotta be one of the most important investments for humanity and our planet. Hard to fathom these timeline predictions in the same world where mRNA vaccines and various spacecraft have scaled in <1 year.

zerobits | 4 years ago | on: Lab Leak 2.0?

The author did not claim that Delta's origin was a lab leak. Just that there was one isolated case of it. And so it stands to reason, other lab leaks may also be occurring.

zerobits | 4 years ago | on: Omicron Variant: Early Analysis

Here's an attempt at a summary of this article:

· Became dominant strain in South Africa in like a week (way faster than Delta). Must be either a superspreader event, much more transmissible, or much more evasive of antibodies.

· No real data on that cause, and no evidence for increased lethality. Will find out in next 1-2 weeks probably. Decent chance this becomes dominant worldwide and US soon, but not clear if that will be a problem or not.

· The one worrying data we know is the variant has a lot more mutations than other variants, which would make it likely to evade vaccine/antibody treatments – but not necessarily the other kinds of treatments.

· WHO not recommending countries to limit travel. Also problematic that vaccines aren't updating for new variants, and good chance FDA will be the bottleneck there.

zerobits | 4 years ago | on: Futarchy: Robin Hanson on prediction markets

I didn’t assume that of you at all, I actually had assumed the opposite and that you had experience in the area.

I agree it would be challenging to have deep and useful markets, but perhaps there’s more innovation to be made there — and many of these high level markets that are top of public consciousness I’d expect to have plenty of liquidity.

zerobits | 4 years ago | on: Futarchy: Robin Hanson on prediction markets

It’s a bit presumptuous that these folks don’t understand what makes markets work.

They went into quite a bit of detail but can’t cover everything. Most of the examples were quite top of funnel, fire the CEO markets, economic impacts of new laws being passed. I wouldn’t expect for major bills or companies there would be any shortage of liquidity there.

It’s typical of comments in any forum to mostly be critical, but what takes more guts and cleverness is to connect the dots to improve upon the idea. You seem to have a good mind so I’d encourage you to try applying it in that way.

zerobits | 4 years ago | on: Curated List of Lists

Yeah, I think some light editorializing would help here even if the list content stayed the same.

zerobits | 4 years ago | on: Curated List of Lists

I find the awesome lists not to be that useful. Mainly because they seem to include way too many things.

Rather than 10 library/book/etc. recommendations on every topic, I'd love just a few: "Best beginner book" .. "Best advanced book" and a few alternatives.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get very different results or value from just Googling the same topics.

zerobits | 5 years ago | on: Monkey MindPong

I don’t think it’s a green screen, it appears to be a painted wall — you can see the seams and perspective to it.

zerobits | 5 years ago | on: SARS-CoV-2 spike D614G variant confers enhanced replication and transmissibility

You would think – but viruses don't necessarily become less deadly.

The virus wants to maximize transmissibility, and that might require trading off further against the host's health and increasing its death rate.

An example is Myxoma virus. It was intentionally introduced to pest Australian rabbit populations (to cull them) and studied.

After ~30 years of evolution, they found the dominant strain had a 70-95% death rate and left long-lasting lesions. Other strains with higher (~99%) and lower (~50%) death rates weren't as stable & prevalent.

Once a virus is transmitted (enough), what happens to the health of its host is irrelevant.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbio...

zerobits | 5 years ago | on: AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to suspected adverse reaction

There was a pretty high severe systemic adverse rate in the high dose group (20%). Severe local response rate was 5% in the middle dose. [1]

I have no idea how this compares to other vaccines, and you can pessimistically extrapolate a bit from this tiny, healthy sample from the high dose (n=15 in middle dose group).

I'd imagine some % of people when this scales to millions will have a bad response, and the high dose group might provide some model of the worst cases.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2022483

zerobits | 5 years ago | on: AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to suspected adverse reaction

Yes, but at some threshold wouldn’t this indicate a problem?

103F+ fevers are relatively rare from typical vaccines, and from my understanding a lot of the damage from COVID is immune response related.

mRNA vaccines and our immune responses to these are uncharted territory, so I’m not sure how much we can reason by analogy from other vaccines vs. first principles.

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