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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 25th, 2023

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  • That is cool.

    I am not a geneticist, but I have had reasons to talk to geneticists. And they do a lot of cool stuff. For example, I talked with geneticists who researched the genom of a hard to treat patient group to find genetic clusters to yield clues of potential treatments.

    You have patient group A that has a cluster of genes B which we know codes for function C which can go haywire in way D which already has a treatment E. Then E becomes a potential treatment for A. You still have to run trials to see if it actually has effect, but it opens up new venues with existing treatments. This in particular has potential for small patient groups that are unlikely to receive much funding and research on its own.

    But this also highlights how very far we are from understanding the genetic code as code that can be reprogrammed for intelligence or longevity. And how much more likely experiments are to mess things up in ways we can not predict beforehand, and which doesn’t have a treatment.


  • We do not understand genetic code as code. We merely have developed some statistical relations between some part of the genetic code and some outcomes, but nobody understands the genetic code good enough to write even the equivalent of “Hello World!”.

    Gene modification consists of grabbing a slice of genetic code and splicing it into another. Impressive! Means we can edit the code. Doesn’t mean we understand the code. If you grab the code for Donkey Kong and put it into the code of Microsoft Excel, does it mean you can throw barrels at your numbers? Or will you simply break the whole thing? Genetic code is very robust and has a lot of redundancies (that we don’t understand) so it won’t crash like Excel. Something will likely grow. But tumors are also growth.

    Remember Thalidomide? They had at the time better reason to think it was safe then we today have thinking gene editing babies is safe.

    The tech bros who are gene editing babies (assuming that they are, because they are stupid, egotistical and wealthy enough to bend most laws) are not creating super babies, they are creating new and exciting genetic disorders. Poor babies.


  • all people contain exactly two personality cores corresponding to the two hemispheres of their brains, that every personality core is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil and less than 5% are good

    If you have one of each, does that make you neutral? Now how is the Lawful-Chaotic alignment constructed? Does it reside in the kidneys?

    I want to roll up a Chaotic Neutral Rogue Halfling.





  • Geffen succeeded with a gift of $100 million to Lincoln Center and — perhaps more importantly — Lincoln Center paid $15 million to Fisher’s descendants so they would not sue. What that means is that the most prominent cultural organization in New York City lit $15 million on fire so that Geffen’s name would be on a concert hall.

    No they did not lit them on fire, they payed of people.

    In order to lit money on fire you need to buy something - like servers, electricity - and then just waste it. For example by running crypto schemes.







  • Even if no one can use the wealth, wouldn’t it be placed in some kind of trust in order to keep accruing wealth rather than be decimated by inflation?

    And then, as the frozen rich wouldn’t use any of their wealth, it would just keep accruing wealth. They would be perfect, frozen, capitalists. The control of that wealth would give power, and controllers of the trusts can gain even wealth and thus power more by coordinating. The power would only keep growing as more rich freeze themselves to keep up with and join the growing trust of trusts.

    Living in a society where the frozen owners would own all the means of production, these frozen owners would naturally be hailed as sleeping kings in order to motivate me system. They may even be seen as something godlike.

    Then one day, if one wakes up, it would cause immediate power struggles, as well as give a flash point for the discontent of the billions of impoverished serfs slaving away for the controllers. But the controllers would mobilise violence, and…

    Oh, HG Wells already wrote this story. Typical!








  • I did jiu-jitsu In middle school. We had two guys who were perhaps about 20 years old as assistant coaches. Pretty impressive belt colours and to us kids really cool and good at jiu-jitsu. I don’t remember their names, lets call them Jim and Peter.

    So nearing the end of a class Jim and Peter gathers us for a bit of pep talk. Jim: Good work everybody! Peter: We will soon end class, but first one thing… Jim: No? No, that was the last thing? Peter: Everyone, get Jim! Jim: What? No!

    And I can tell you Jim was no match for two dozen ten year olds with white belts.