Even if your claim were correct… with every infection the pathogen potentially gets better at infecting humans, and you’re giving it another opportunity to improve and spread to others.

Entire species have been wiped out because natural immunity doesn’t always outpace pathogens’ ability to adapt—letting nature take its course has no predictable winner.

Those who benefit from the way the police currently operate are incentivized to preserve the status quo—mental illness and all.

Syncthing uses a centralized discovery server to connect device IDs to IP addresses (although you can change this to point to your own discovery server, too).

I don’t know if Funkwhale has a similar option.

Sometime after sunrise.

There are actually two issues:

• The most obvious effect of inbreeding is the increase in homozygosity for deleterious mutations, causing more birth defects.

• A subtler effect is the loss of genetic diversity reducing a population’s ability to continue to evolve in response to future selection pressures. This would be especially important when migrating to a new environment with new selection pressures the species has never encountered before.

Cucumbers or radishes?

You’re not wrong—the protests in their current form aren’t going to achieve anything by themselves.

But adding some specific set of demands will accomplish even less: it will alienate supporters who don’t agree with all the demands, and it will allow Trump to claim to address the issues by cherry-picking and distorting the demands beyond recognition (see the Black Lives Matter protests a few years ago).

If we reach a critical point where mass protests can achieve some real, concrete good, it will be due to contingent circumstances that neither side was able to predict. But the contribution the current protests can make to that moment is to give everyone the confidence that the numbers are on their side, once suitable leverage is found.

If a bus driver is trying to drive off a cliff, the passengers can band together to stop it even if they haven’t all agreed on a preferred destination.

The way Linux treats many things as part of the file system (devices, sockets, etc.) that Windows doesn’t.

Bureaucracy.

Since a theoretical communist society would be stateless, the idea of a fully communist country is an oxymoron. Instead you have countries claiming to be transitional states that are laying the groundwork for true communism at some point in the future.

The “Fall of Rome” conflates a lot of different events, covering over a thousand years:

• The end of the Republic
• The Crisis of the Third Century
• The fall of the western empire
• The fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade
• The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire

The one most usually thought of is the fall of the western empire… and while it was preceded by some stupid policy decisions, they weren’t notably more stupid than many other decisions the empire made over the previous five centuries. From an institutional perspective, it was actually a relatively boring period.

(Many of the other comments here are pointing to things that were pretty much constants for most of the empire’s existence, so if you want to blame them for the fall, you need to explain why the empire didn’t fall 500 years earlier.)

I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)

So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.

But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.

To be fair, the community name is semantically ambiguous.

I think you’d have better luck doing it the other way around: fingerprint known non-AI content, and treat everything else as potential AI.

It’s saying 38 is the maximum lifespan predicted by their model—but it also says their model has an R² of 0.76, meaning it only predicts about 76% of the variation in the actual measured values. And then they discuss other factors that could account for the remaining 24% of the variation, including post-reproductive-age lifespan.

Unless I missed something, the word “telomere” doesn’t occur in the article or its source paper—rather, it discusses the rate of DNA methylation.

IMO, the key passage in the paper is this:

However, any genetic regulation for a species may potentially be a secondary factor as there may be other environmental selective pressures. This may be the case with species which have lifespans post reproductive age and therefore, there may be non-genetic factors that may be more predictive of their maximum lifespan.

I suspect that the methylation rate is actually tracking the end of the reproductive stage of the lifecycle, rather than the entire lifespan—it’s just that humans have an unusually long post-reproductive stage.

Storing information while simultaneously keeping it private requires an ongoing resource expenditure—and every day you’re storing it, there’s a non-zero chance that it gets corrupted or leaked anyway. So secrets have a half-life, just like radiation—and in the limit, all information will either be public or lost.

How much of that reflects an improving assessment of the USSR vs a deteriorating assessment of the subsequent regimes?