The author doesn't go far enough into the problems with trying to convert information theory to SI Units.
SI units are attempting to fix standard measurements with perceived constants in nature. A meter(Distance) is the distance light travels in a vacuum, back and forth, within a certain amount of ossilations of a cesium atom(Time). This doesn't mean we tweak the meter to conform to observational results as we'd all be happier if light really was 300 000KM/s instead of ~299 792km/s.
Then there's the problem of not mixing different measurement units. SI was designed to conform all measurements to the same base 10 exponents (cm, m, km versus feet inches and yards) But the authors attempt to resolve this matter doesn't even conform to standardised SI units as we would expect them to.
What is a byte? Well, 8 bits, sometimes.
What is a kilobit? 1000 Bits
What is a kilobyte? 1000 Bytes, or 1024 Bytes.
Now we've already mixed units based on what a bit or a byte even is and the addition of the 8 multiplier in addition to the exponent of 1000 or 1024.
And if you think, hey, at least the bit is the least divisible unit of information, That's not even correct. If there Should* be a reformalisation of information units, you would agree that the amount of "0"'s is the least divisible unit of information. A kilo of zero's, would be 1000. A 'byte' would be defined as containing up to 256 zero's. A Megazero would contain up to a million zero's.
It wouldn't make any intuitive sense for anyone to count 0's, which would automatically convert your information back to base 10, but it does prove that the most sensible unit of information is already what we've had before, that is, you're not mixing bytes (powers of 2) with SI-defined units of 1000
Because arrays simply do not deal with fragmentation. Yes, you could probaly get decent performance on a modern system that has memory overcommit strategy where you could allocate sparse adress ranges where you would probaly never run out of pointers unless you actually write to your variable array.
But its just kind of mediocre and you're better off actually dealing with the stack if you can actually deal with certain fixed sizes.
array-like storage with dynamic size has existed since forever - it's vector. over or undercommitting is a solved problem
VLA is the way to bring that into type system, so that it can be it's own variable or struct member, with compiler auto-magic-ing size reading to access members after it
> auto-magic-ing size reading to access members after it
From the article
>we now have everything we need to calculate the size, offset and alignment of every field, regardless of their positioning in the struct.
>init to allocate the memory
>get to get a pointer to a field
>resize to resize the arrays
>deinit to free the memory
You're now suggesting to do exactly what the article is about without being aware of it.
Dosing seems correct, they established that psilocin (the metabolite of psilocybin ) increases lifespan. The on hand mouse expert likely understood roughly how much psilocybin could be metabolised safely by the mouse.
The mice also had some head jerk indicating that they were under influence and they also established that the mice didn't lose more weight compared to the control group.
Some comparisons between animals and humans just aren't compatible with understanding dose and volume. Some smaller animals eat their weight in food, I just wouldn't recommend basing your own dietary fiber intake on that.
I would also imagine that there could be a food and drug safety prover that would simulate billions of prompts to see if the replicator would ever have a safety violation that could result in horrible nerve agents from being constructed.
That’s just throwing more probabilities at the problem, and it doesn’t even solve it. You don’t need horrible nerve agents to kill someone by ingestion, it could simply be something the eater has a sufficiently nasty allergy to. And again, replicators aren’t limited to food.
The better idea is the simplest one: Don’t replace the perfectly functioning replicators.
>That’s just throwing more probabilities at the problem
Think about protein folding and enzymes. That's all solved with probabilities and likely outcomes for the structure and the effect it has. Any replicator would already need to prove the things it is allowed to create, adding the items that it is not allowed to create is probaly needed as a safety protocol anyway.
The evolution of our species was based on the carbon lifecycle. Yet the machines we produce are not evolving in a similar manner at all, just the ability to redraw everything from scratch is a luxury that evolution cannot make use of.
To reiterate, The belief that evolving machines have to match the kind of evolution we're subjected to is illogical. Machines wouldn't be there without us and we wouldn't have what we have now without evolving our machines.
Its impossible to properly seperate biological evolution from current day enviromental pressure. There have been many natural and man-made disasters that have killed or otherwise economically robbed millions of people from a good future in their lifetime. Its difficult to say what the fitness function actually selected for.
If you could look back far enough and understood most of the enviromental pressures we faced, then we are all lottery winners of our tumultous history.
Again, sure. However, this is still looking at things at the timescale of millenia at best.
In my original comment, I was claiming that biological evolution is not relevant for this:
> as people and societies become wealthier and better educated (both correlated with intelligence), their reproduction rates drop precipitously. Perhaps we've overshot the intelligence cliff and evolution is now gradually pulling us back.
Biological evolution is also impossible to measure on small timescales. that does not mean it does not exist, clearly it exists. It has an exponential effect on the future. I think we fully agree on this definition.
>as people and societies become wealthier and better educated (both correlated with intelligence), their reproduction rates drop precipitously.
There is also the unmistakeable influence of evolutionary psychology on people throughout human history, that seems to have accelerated. When people decide to have fewer kids, especially the more affluent ones, doesnt yet point to any biological influence. Other than the correlation between wealth, IQ and genetics. I dont think there are any risks of a reduction of intelligence through evolution. The world population reduction we're seeing might accelerate it instead.
I do like hyprland, Its what I have installed. I hope they can offer 5$. of value to people with their 'premium' experience, I just think its either way too little or way too much additional support for what their price suggests.
Things that are close to this value proposition:
Video streaming services
Email
Online game subscriptions
Data backups
VPN
Very few of these actually offer anything for 5$ a month and they do not offer 'customer support' or 'forum support' in the way you would probaly expect from people that offer that for your linux desktop. If anything, I expect the value proposition to be more like custom art pieces, where someone actually sits down with you for an hour, writes down what you want and programs up an entirely artisic desktop representation for whatever theme/idea you have. That would cost hundreds of dollars and would be a far better value proposition and the person in question could always be called upon for aftercare and newer projects.
That's where correlations of random events and placebo end and where discovery begins.
There are 'gods' that are 'better' than others. Even if the principle of what you/people believe goes against what you find scientifically relevent, or factual, or sensible. There still is something to be said about a group of people following a strange set of rules that could be demonstrably better than other sets of rules and beliefs. May it be enviromental, genetic, placebo or a tiny edge over what gives life meaning. We ended up with the gods we have today, not by coincidence, but because all the other ones failed their followers.
I don’t think that’s valid. Gods usually come with a set of values or a specific worldview, and these are inherently subjective. You can’t really rank them as "better" or "worse" in any meaningful way.
Let’s take an example: imagine I believe in a paperclip-god. The core value here is producing as many paperclips as possible, and I’d argue that anything that doesn’t serve this goal is inferior. Under this belief system, it might be okay to enslave or even kill humans if it leads to more paperclips. I could use logic and even scientific reasoning to defend this idea as a "better" system for maximizing paperclip production.
Now, you might object and say that humans are more valuable than paperclips, but we'll never agree. The value of the goal itself, whether it’s maximizing paperclips or valuing human life, is subjective. There’s no objective reason why one goal is inherently superior to the other.
> Under this belief system, it might be okay to enslave or even kill humans
This is actually what most christians believe (see Abraham's sacrifice). God is the ultimate source of morality, so if God wants you to kill your son - it's the morally good thing to do.
Which shows nicely that morality does not, in fact, come from God or Bible (if it did - we wouldn't care about Isaac - we'd consider it good that he'll get killed by his father). Instead we can't help but feel it's wrong to kill your son.
It's the conflict of the actual "natural law" vs the artificial religious "natural law" nicely wrapped up in one short story.
Religions compete by "virality", like viruses they evolve towards encouraging reproduction.
Even if you measure "better" as "more viral" - it's not "gods" who are better - it's cultural memes (for example there's 1000 versions of christianity believing in the same gods with vastly different cultures and virality outcomes).
I'd guess there is a significant language barrier, for lack of better words, on the meaning of 'god' and 'virtue'(which might have been more descriptive, but I'm not willing to edit my comment for the clarity that it lacks out of respect for the other posters/readers)
Its true that many things co-evolved with us, like viruses and blood types(yes, we're somewhat on topic again) and even though we share many similar characteristics, like blood type, mayor, minor. Its also true that discovery of new things doesn't always invalidate the old way of thinking. Usuallyit just adds to what has already been existing. Like how multicellular life is a true breeding ground for single celled organism.
Similarly, the ABO+- blood type system was good enough to not kill patients, which is quite the improvement. Though only a fool would treat that system as gospel and align personalities with it. Now we're classifying the minor types and we're getting closer to rediscovering the uniqueness of everyones blood just as everyones beliefs,god or no god, is unique if you are willing to look.
I know that HN is not very appreciative of religion or god. I'd just like to change someones perspective on that as we've all evolved from very humble beginnings, both in our personal lives and as the silly monkeys we all still sometimes are. I definitely wouldn't want our economy to become a paperclip maximiser but any perceived missteps should be dissected with a good blogpost on how we got here in the first place.
> I know that HN is not very appreciative of religion or god.
> I'd just like to change someones perspective on that as we've all evolved from very humble beginnings, both in our personal lives and as the silly monkeys we all still sometimes are
I am not sure what the relation is between these sentences.
What's really vexing to me is how spacex refuses to build a triple stage rocket. Their 'reusability' adds a significant amount of mass in terms of heatshield and in terms of fuel margins for landing. Using additional stages benefits them more than saturn V. They likely thought they could get away with two stages and have them both return to the launch site, one the short way, the other the long way around. But the exclusion of a multi stage reusable architecture means that their empty mass fraction becomes a linchpin in bringing anything into orbit.
No wonder there's a v2 and v3 with much, much larger fuel tanks and less payload.
They need something that can land on Mars and return with a crew. Or something that can put a very large payload on Mars.
A three stage rocket is something you’d use for one-way missions with smaller payloads, or for putting something in GEO. Starship just isn’t optimised for those missions.
>They need something that can land on Mars and return with a crew
>A three stage rocket is something you’d use for one-way missions with smaller payloads
The only succesfull human spacecraft that landed on another body and taken off again used a three stage rocket to deliver a three stage lander,
The Command and Service Module(CSM) which brought the two stages into low lunar orbit
The Lunar Lander (LM) contained a descent stage and an ascent stage, the descent stage was used as a platform for the ascent stage.
To say that three stage rockets are just for one way missions is silly, especially considering that more stages enable larger payloads. We've yet to see whether SpaceX's two stage solution will actually be any good. I also do not expect a single stage to the surface of the moon and back to Low Lunar Orbit to be very usefull. Any mars mission will likely follow the exact apollo staging plan.
Depending on your mission profile, there are more ways how to get to the Moon and possibly back - the Surveyor space probes did direct ascent without entering lunar orbit & massive burn with an embedded solid rocket engine just before landing.
The soviet plan (if they actually managed to get the N1 to work) was to take the upper stage of that rocket all they way to the Moon (fueled by kerolox BTW) and use it for the final braking burn of the LK lander[1], before eecting the stage to crash on the surface while the lander used its engine for soft landing.
And then the lander would launch directly to lunar orbit using the same (or backup) engine, not dropping any stages, just the landing legs. This was forced by the much lower carrying capacity of the N1. There was just one cosmonaut landing as a result, with another one in the "lunar Souyuz" staying in lunar orbit. So just 2 people versus 3 in Apollo. And there was not even a hatch between the two modules & the cosmonaut was supposed to spacewalk (!) between the two before landing and after meeting back with the Soyuz spacecraft.
So if you can realistically do a single stage to landing & orbit on a body, I'm sure it will be the preferred option going forward, it has a significant benefits.
The more fuel economic way long term is break the mission into parts and reuse vehicles; single ship from surface to Lunar orbit, dock and transfer to a staged lander at a station and take the up and down. Taking Starship all the way to the surface wastes a tremendous amount of fuel hauling around the mass to get back home and through to landing safely.
Long term definitely like this! BTW, this exact sequence can be seen at the start of the Space Odyssey movie, with the main character traveling from Earth to Moon.
A third stage with the current Starship design would have to be under 100 tonnes and the payload would be small. It would have to do all the work of injecting into a transfer orbit, landing on Mars, and returning. It’s hard to imagine such a small craft getting all the way to Mars, with a crew, and returning them.
Starship is just not a good design for pushing a third stage into a transfer orbit by itself. It’s totally dependent on the idea of in-orbit refuelling and refuelling on Mars. Once you refuel it, the game changes completely.
It’s also not a workable solution for landing on the Moon without refuelling for the same reasons. In some ways the Moon is more problematic because you can’t manufacture methalox on the Moon.
If you have a good specific https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse , and you can get decent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_ratio s in your lower stages, then 2 stages are definitely the way to go to LEO. Every stage over 2 adds a load of weight (more engines, structure, etc.), lots of ground system/support complexity, and a whole 'nother stage separation worth of failure modes.
The full and rapid reuseability is the ultimate goal.
Make rocket launches as frequent and routine as commercial plane flights. Whether they use it for Mars or Moon on Earth-to-Earth or anything in between is irrelevant, this will revolutionize entire industries.
Just look at the share of Falcon 9 comparing to all other launch providers, and that one is only half-reuseable. If they manage to get the StarShip right this will be a game changer.
A triple stage rocket when you're trying to do reuse is actually a negative. The second stage needs significant heat shielding as a result which drastically eats into the size of the upper stage and your ultimate payload.
I guess one issue with that is that the second stage will land far from the launch site. In theory if it has sea level engines for landing, it could fly back though (after refueling).
SI units are attempting to fix standard measurements with perceived constants in nature. A meter(Distance) is the distance light travels in a vacuum, back and forth, within a certain amount of ossilations of a cesium atom(Time). This doesn't mean we tweak the meter to conform to observational results as we'd all be happier if light really was 300 000KM/s instead of ~299 792km/s.
Then there's the problem of not mixing different measurement units. SI was designed to conform all measurements to the same base 10 exponents (cm, m, km versus feet inches and yards) But the authors attempt to resolve this matter doesn't even conform to standardised SI units as we would expect them to.
What is a byte? Well, 8 bits, sometimes. What is a kilobit? 1000 Bits What is a kilobyte? 1000 Bytes, or 1024 Bytes.
Now we've already mixed units based on what a bit or a byte even is and the addition of the 8 multiplier in addition to the exponent of 1000 or 1024.
And if you think, hey, at least the bit is the least divisible unit of information, That's not even correct. If there Should* be a reformalisation of information units, you would agree that the amount of "0"'s is the least divisible unit of information. A kilo of zero's, would be 1000. A 'byte' would be defined as containing up to 256 zero's. A Megazero would contain up to a million zero's.
It wouldn't make any intuitive sense for anyone to count 0's, which would automatically convert your information back to base 10, but it does prove that the most sensible unit of information is already what we've had before, that is, you're not mixing bytes (powers of 2) with SI-defined units of 1000