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Cake day: November 25th, 2023

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  • Something I have been pondering is why when going after Bitcoin from crimes (ransom or stolen) they donā€™t just declare the individual ā€œcoinsā€ stemming from illegal proceedings and that when they show up the ā€œcoinsā€ will be confiscated and the holders investigated for money laundering. They have a serial number of sorts, right?

    It should decrease the trade value of the ā€œcoinsā€, might even have the added benefit of scaring people of from the scam currencies. Ay, there might be the rub, for in this modern world of ours suppressing financial ā€œinnovationsā€ is treated as worse than scams.







  • I was going to write that it was good that you didnā€™t say ā€œumā€ all the time. (Being silent in pauses is in my experience a learned skill for most people and one that comes once one has heard oneself say ā€œumā€ too many times.)

    The sound was fine. I think your (Jabra?) headset did its job unless that was also the result of editing.

    The imagery got a bit distracting because you look to the side of the camera. No problem for podcasts, but for video itā€™s better to look straight at the camera to look at the audience so to speak. (Also a learnt skill.) So maybe a webcam you can place in front of the screen you are presumably reading of?

    No idea about marketing a YouTube, but you got in the ā€œlike and subscribeā€, so that is probably good.






  • 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 doesnā€™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 ā€œHello World!ā€.

    Gene modification consists of grabbing a slice of genetic code and splicing it into another. Impressive! Means we can edit the code. Doesnā€™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 donā€™t understand) so it wonā€™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.


  • Some years ago I read the memoirs of a railroad union boss. Interesting book in many aspects, but what I thought of here was a time before he became a union boss. He was working at the railroad, was trusted in the union and got the mission to make store keeping of supplies and spare parts more efficient.

    This wasnā€™t the first time the railroad company had tried to make it more efficient. Due to earlier mergers there was lots of local supplies and a confusing system for which part of the company was supplied from where. In short, it was inefficient and everyone knew that. Enter our protagonist who travels around and talks to people. Finally he arrives back to HQ and reports that it canā€™t be done. Unless HQ wants to enact a program where everyone who is made redundant gets a better job, with the company footing the bill for any extra training or education needed. Then it could be done, because then it would be in the interest of the people whose knowledge and skills they needed.

    This being in the post war era with full employment policies, labour was a scare resource so the company did as they were told and the system got more efficient.

    Itā€™s all about who benefits from the automation. The original Luddites targeted employers who automated, fired skilled workers and decreased wages. They were not opposed to automation, they were opposed to automation at their expense.