But what is the effect on lifetime of not having any CNO present? If a present-day massive star would have a lifetime of 10 million years, how long would it live if it was a population III star with no CNO?
There is a range of wavelengths of light that humans perceive as green. The same is true for every color that is part of the rainbow. In contrast, the "pure purples" do not appear in the rainbow, and there is no single wavelength of light that humans perceive as purple (it requires red light plus blue light).
There's an important distinction between anatomically modern humans and behaviorally modern humans. Behaviorally modern humans were the ones that were able to migrate all over the world.
> “Recursively self-improving systems, because of contingent bottlenecks, diminishing returns, and counter-reactions […], cannot achieve exponential progress in practice. Empirically, they tend to display linear or sigmoidal improvement.”
Moore's Law. Use computers to make better computers. Exponential growth over more than 7 orders of magnitude and, although the growth rate is slowing, it hasn't run out of steam yet.
If AI eventually exhibits anywhere near that level of recursive self-improvement, godlike superintelligences lie in our future.
That's a very interesting idea, though it wouldn't significantly affect people with vast resources such as botnet owners, corporations, and governments. It would certainly slow down the garden-variety troll, however the determined troll would just keep a core burning to create a steady stream of sock puppet accounts.
While Larry and Sergei were running Google, the company often (though not necessarily always) chose doing what was right over a more profitable wrong. A specific example was when they discovered the Chinese government was behind a major security breach targeting dissidents, they refused to continue to comply with Chinese censorship requirements.
However, as the founders lost interest in the day-to-day operation of the company, any pretense of being more than just another soulless profit machine was discarded.
> is meiosis and mitosis the only two way to reproduce?
Well, from a high-level view the only way a cell can make more cells is to divide, and if it divides it either makes a copy of its genetic material first, or gives half of it to each daughter cell. So in that sense, they're the only two ways possible.
From a more detailed view, I wonder if the machinery of meiosis is evolutionarily the same in every sexually-reproducing species, or if it has evolved more than once. My guess is only once, because it has a specific sequence of events which is always the same.
As a counterexample, imagine reading a book on mathematics that did not use any special notation, instead relying on natural-language descriptions of formulas and algorithms. Or imagine reading a book on molecular biology that didn't use any technical vocabulary or diagrams, instead relying on colloquial language and descriptions.
There is a place for specialized notation and vocabulary. Exactly where that line should be drawn in programming has been an ongoing conversation since 1953 when John Backus proposed the concepts that would lead to the development of Fortran.
They're not /really/ connected, at least historically. But the author sees a reasonable progression in ease of use, while maintaining a lot of flexibility. And the idea of starting with a forth-like system, building a lisp-like system with it, then putting a python-like syntax on top of it is very interesting.
> This bug is probably going to end up infecting most of the people in the United States.
Exactly. As you say, we need to flatten the curve to keep hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, and we need to use the time to develop treatments to save the vulnerable when isolation eventually fails.
Thank you for this. You make the essential point that others are missing: flattening the curve isn't to buy time; it's to prevent massive loss of life and societal collapse. Buying time to improve prevention and treatment is of secondary concern.
SHA-2 is based on similar techniques to those in SHA-1, which prompted the SHA-3 competition when weaknesses in SHA-1 were first discovered (as they could conceivably have been present in SHA-2 as well). As it turns out, SHA-2 appears to be resistant to the attacks found thus far.
SHA-3 (originally named Keccak) is built on an entirely different foundation (called a sponge function), so it is unlikely that any attack against SHA-1 will be relevant to SHA-3. However, sponge functions are a relatively new idea, and weaknesses in the basic principles could conceivably be found in the future, as could weaknesses in the Keccak algorithm specifically.
Exactly. Big companies move slowly. A small, well-funded company may be able to approve an X-thousand-dollar payment in a matter of days, but a large company just can't react that fast. There are too many layers of process and approvals and vetting and negotiation to wade through.
So you're defining "AI" to be anything that we can currently program a computer to do, and "I" to be anything we can't yet? That doesn't seem like a useful distinction to me. Unless you're using "I" to mean general (artificial) intelligence, in which case you should probably use the more well-known term.
In my case, my current income provides a comfortable lifestyle for my family of five. But yes, if you have kids, your expenses are definitely going to go up.