I'd imagine I'm pretty similar to grandparent post in this respect. If I find something interesting, I save it. Even if it's seemingly arbitrary or not immediately useful. With powerful search and tagging it's nice to run a query/update to a personal archive to refresh my memory, browse when bored, catalogue sources, wishfully think about future study, notice patterns in my interests over time, meta-analysis, etc.
More cynically, I've noticed that it's a relatively benign form of hoarding. i.e. I get the quick dopamine rush of "oh this is interesting, now I have it" without, say, crowding up my living space with trinkets. With an abundance of storage that is essentially invisible to me when I don't want to think about it, I can keep what I want, when I want; often while fully aware that I'll never look at most items individually again. I think of it as a kludgey form of external memory / internet butterfly collecting. The only downsides I've thought of are: time frittered revisiting archives, the (small) transaction cost of tagging and placing items into the archive, and the externalized costs of maintaining the hardware.
I was more trying to explain the intuition of why single nucleotide mutations (resulting in non-viability or undesired effects) are probably more likely in a strand of DNA with regions removed versus a strand of DNA left as-is.
Basically, trying to give an example of the grandparent's point. (i.e. fewer nucleotides to be flipped -> more likely that an important one will be). I agree that it was a poorly executed analogy. The metaphor I was trying to make is that on the 'vast field' a random single point mutation is probably going to land on an individually unimportant nucleotide, and in the 'narrow beach' (the smaller strand/higher geninfo density) an individually important nucleotide is more likely to be hit. I'm still probably not articulating my point well, sorry.
But I think your analogy is better for a subtly different point; describing how DNA replication works in a system, where stands can be selected out, errors corrected, and genetic information can be preserved at a systemic level.
Imagine a general with a finite amount of artillery shells and a Howitzer on the fritz (i.e. the intended trajectory of the shots are somewhat off the mark today). Given the choice of where to deploy the artillery, the general may choose to concentrate their fire on the narrow beachhead landing instead of upon a widely scattered formation of units approaching across a vast plain.
The artillery that lands on the plain may strike an advancing unit, or it may fall (possibly harmlessly) between a set of advancing units. The artillery that lands on the narrow beachhead is more likely to hit a unit.
This analogy is far from perfect: sometimes mutations are good, which is one primary driver of evolution. Non-coding regions and/or "baggage to be refactored" (paraphrased great-great-gp comment) in DNA (the regions of the plain/beach not occupied by an advancing unit) can absorb "errors". Also, there are other types of mutations (insertions, deletions, ...), aside from the single point mutations that this analogy was attempting to help convey.
The point is: it's like bunching up a lot of important things over a few points of failure. If you increase "the genetic surface area", you lower the chance of the important thing getting hit.
On evolutionary scales, viable DNA has been selected with a lot of non-coding (and sometimes useful) regions, we know that if we reduce that down, we are more likely to be susceptible to fatal mutations on coding regions (e.g. a region that codes for a vital protein).
This actually kind of reinforces (or at least points to) one of the central ideas of the essay, that we cannot know what it is to be a bat--we would always contextualize or speculate about the bat experience in human terms of experience.
If you accept this, no matter how great We make this simulation (of objective physical phenomena and our best theorized non-human perceptions of these phenomena), this game is always false.
(For what it's worth, I'm not sure yet if I hold any firm viewpoints on this. The essay (at least partially) is an argument against reductionism, but I'm no philosopher; to be honest I'm still wrapping my head around the entire argument. I just think it's interesting to think about.)
For what it's worth [], I'm pretty sure CERN(/LHC), ESRF, SLAC Nat. Accelerator Labs, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Bekeley, Sandia, Princeton Plasma Phys. Lab, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Argonne Nat. Lab, TRIUMF, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Oak Ridge, Research Triangle Park, various institutions within the Max Planck Society, Institute for Advanced Study, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, RAND Corporation, (and likely many others...), all have/had facilities within (at most) 100 km of a city with a population of at least 150,000 people. Several of these institutions are within commuting distance of major world cities.
In the set of nation state funded research facilities (e.g. funded by US Dept. of Energy, European Research Council, etc.) I'm willing to bet that most of the facilities are more often relatively near cities (greater than 150K pop). Many (high energy / high capital cost) facilities, employ on the orders of 1-10K staff alone.
[] (... and that Basic Science, High Energy Physics, Computational Science, Basic Tech, Corporate Research, and/or Public Policy/Economic/GeoPol research are the hard problem spaces you are alluding to...)
I also disagree with the 'firsts' argument, to a certain extent. I didn't articulate my point well enough.
I was responding to the 'I'll trade this time now, for more time later' line of reasoning (which I believe is a false transaction). Not only should one recognize that each epoch is unique (in a child's life, in a relationship, in a career, etc.) and therefore not interchangeable with later epochs; but one should also recognize that "selfish" (OP's word choice) actions now are usually not offset by generous actions later.
I suppose one can recognize those tradeoffs and traverse "borrowing time" reasoning with a bit more self awareness, though not many do. Especially those that subscribe to the 'compress your 40 year career into a 4-10 year startup' meme without reading the fine print.
> But selfish in a good, weird way - working 80 hours a week so someday I don't have to work 40, so I can take my wife and kids to Hawaii for the summer someday, or whatever.
Epochs are not fungible, especially when raising children. Missing a toddler play at the beach for the first time cannot be reclaimed by sharing their first scuba lesson.
If you've got about an hour and a half to spend, and you enjoyed this article, I'd like to recommend a lecture given by Will Wright in 2003.
He covers his background, early computer games, the origins of Sim City, the Sims, as well as more abstract/high-level discussion of game design and simulation.
Some high level themes of the talk: using the computer as a modeling tool, simulation design, Will Wright's game design principles and philosophy, programming for two dynamic processes "the software" and "the player's model of the system", and traversal of possibility spaces in game design and simulation.
IIRC, what you are referring to is in the text-epilogue/credits of the film. It said something along the lines of 'the Camorra even invested in the reconstruction of the Twin Towers.' Agreed that it was a somewhat bizarre 2-3 seconds of information. But I don't remember the film explicitly connecting them (or insinuating connection) to the attacks, just the reconstruction investment.
It's excellent otherwise. Especially in that it doesn't romanticize "the lifestyle"; which is a rubbish cliché, endemic in many criminal enterprise films. Other films that I think are successful in this sense are: "City of God" (Portuguese title: "Cidade de Deus") and "Maria Full of Grace" (Spanish title: "María llena eres de gracia").
This should at least have 2013 appended to the title.
But that supposes that 14-month-old news of a temporary response to customer complaints over a mediocre video game (which have been covered ad nauseam) should be on Hacker News in May 2014. I may be wrong, however. It received at least 3 upvotes in its first 5 minutes.
It would likely be deployed only near human settlements, which cover a relatively small portion of Earth's land surface area. Mosquitos would still be able to breed unabated in, say, protected land in the United States and Canada.
Not that it takes away from your concern, which is valid. It is possible that ubiquitous deployment of this device could select for more resilient phenotypes on human-observable timelines (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution)
I wonder if an advanced aquatic species could/would make use of hydrothermal vents to harness the some of the transformative properties of fire. Hydrothermal vents lack the property of mobility, yet have the properties of persistence and predictability.
If one thinks of fire as a common evolutionary ancestor of all human technology; I wonder if there is, in the same sense of fire on land, a branching point of technological evolution in an aquatic society; a branching point that humans do not comprehend, acknowledge, or notice.
Wow, this book seems cool. I plan on checking it out. However, I couldn't help but think that this book presumes a certain amount of knowledge that I think would likely be absent by the time the book is recovered.
I'm probably missing the point and taking this too literally, but I think a few primers should be written for this book: "A self referential guide on learning to read (bootstrap your English!)" and "A contextual dictionary for out of vouge 21st century terminology."
It seems as if you were to do this as an explicit "restart guide" for society (and not an otherwise cool book on human technological development), you would need to account for the fact that a person born a generation or two after the collapse would likely have little access to education, the English language (or at least the ability to read), and context for understanding phrasing, terminology, and grammar like: "Yet beyond drunken party snapshots...", "Photographic emulsions are also sensitive to X-rays... allow you to create medical images...", "We often hear about the Industrial Revolution and ... mechanical contraptions ... transforming eighteenth-century society", [... and other concepts that likely require the context of a basic, first world, 21st century education...].
As a thought exercise, I think it would be really cool to figure out how to create primers that build on top of this book, ones that help bootstrap collective knowledge from all the way down to the core concepts and fundamentals; perhaps starting with the concept of language itself.
> In some environments, I could see it being much more useful
It is very useful in laboratories. On demand printing of labware with custom geometry is wonderful. Also, it enables certain geometries and properties that would be very difficult (for an unskilled operator) or impossible to produce via subtractive means, like CNC mills. For example: custom reaction chambers with complex internal geometry. Iterative, "in-lab" design cycles are also pretty nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dha...
Whether or not this can be attributed to technical debt, I don't know. But it is an instance of a software failure that resulted in death.