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I remember seeing discourse recently saying telomere shortening is a side effect more than a cause of aging as a function and happens as a function of DNA damage. Important to consider
Re:TikTok goes dark in the US on Sunday January 19, 2025 @01:03PM (#42759579)
Re:TikTok goes dark in the US on Sunday January 19, 2025 @01:00PM (#42759542)
I see so many people arguing against the effectiveness of propaganda as if they think an opinion is arrived at deterministically with the same access to facts. Utterly insane.
Re:TikTok goes dark in the US on Sunday January 19, 2025 @12:57PM (#42759501)
Your understanding of the situation is incredibly naive. TikTok can selectively suppress or emphasize viewpoints that are geopolitically advantageous to China that are not as overt as "China GOOD!" or whatever you imagine propaganda to be.

This is studied and proven to be happening already: https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing...

Re:TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @02:55PM (#42716080)
Huh. What are your interests? I'm curious why you think they would come in conflict with those of the US.

I'm confused why you think China's interests are irrelevant to you, unless you truly believe geopolitics is a zero-sum game. We compete in markets, militarily in the indo-pacific, and technologically in ways that are not mutually beneficial.

Re:TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @02:04PM (#42715500)
Surely you can't think propaganda is just spreading lies... Contextual presentation can change how true information is perceived. Seeing a perspective more will align your own with it.
Re:TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday on Wednesday January 15, 2025 @01:56PM (#42715358)
Is this a serious question? China has its best interests in mind, the US government has its best interests in mind. Which one of those two adversaries are more likely to align with your interests?
> who lack critical thinking skills to such an extent that we basically shouldn’t even have the option to make up our own opinions in response to feed recommendations

I think it's easy to be insulted by this perspective if you spend too much of your time surrounded by people who fall more than one standard deviation to the right on the intelligence bell curve. 84% of people are to the left of that, and can vote.

> Ultimately, who is the one most overtly putting their thumb on the scale here

The expression "putting their thumb on the scale" means influencing subtly and deceitfully, so China. I chose this expression intentionally.

> Do you really actually have the opinion that China is the most censorious here

Nowhere did I mention censorship. Its not merely about suppressing perspectives, it's about influencing them. Hong Kong is too obvious-- what about amplifying anti-AI sentiment to increase regulation and hobble AI progress in the US, giving a decisive advantage to China in the AI arms race? Amplifying anti-nuclear energy sentiment, to erode US energy security and create economic advantages for the Chinese solar industry?

I do agree w.r.t. the messiness of precedent, though.

The issue isn't surveillance, it's the ability for China to 'put their thumb on the scale' of the black box algorithm responsible for populating every user's feed to emphasize or de-emphasize topics/ideas that are strategically beneficial to China, and bad for us. This is not hypothetical, this is happening, and has been happening.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/briefing/tiktok-ban-bill-...

Re:Amazon Aurora DSQL on Tuesday December 03, 2024 @06:20PM (#42312800)
Why would this product having a subset of postgresql features make it less portable? If anything, that makes it more portable
...What? There is a spectrum of importance to national security, food and energy are very much on the side of more important, so not sure why you chose those as an example. It's extremely reductive to say any country that imposes limits on trade for its own strategic benefit is an autocracy.
Re:Google SIMA on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @12:38PM (#39693747)
He was a professional gamer, and switched to biodynamic agriculture after seeing how little hope humanity had playing games against machines
Re:OpenAI – transformer debugger release on Tuesday March 12, 2024 @10:52AM (#39680228)
>Truck drivers earn between min wage and 150% of min wage

Where are you getting this information? It's absolutely wrong. Long haul truckers (the one's you're saying don't have social lives because they drive 8 hours per day) make $71,196 on average in the US[1].

[1] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/LONG-HAUL-Truck-Driver...

The dose that recreational users are being told they're getting is FAR off what they are actually getting. When someone says they're taking 3 tabs of 100 microgram dosages, it's likely they're taking 50-75% of that.
Re:Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% on Monday January 15, 2024 @11:26AM (#39002615)
>someone who will not treat their datacenter like a home lab

What does this mean? They steal company resources for themselves, or just configure things incompetently?

Re:AWS cancels serverless Postgres service that scales to zero on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @09:28AM (#38939318)
Because you need SQL. Dynamo can be quite powerful for querying if you use all of its features but it won't be as flexible as just using SQL
Re:LED Industrial Piercing on Friday December 22, 2023 @09:29PM (#38741110)
Such a big fan of this guy. Found him through his UV protection amulet project: https://mitxela.com/projects/amulet
Interesting - how is it not outcompeted by regular staph? Wouldn't it be over a long enough time period without introducing it to methicillin?
His book The Vital Question does actually address this. He says the RNA world hypothesis doesn't perfectly explain early catalysis, as RNA is a sophisticated polymer. It was most likely more simple things like metal sulphides or other inorganic complexes were primarily responsible. Amino acids and nucleotides also have catalytic activity.
Re:To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use on Tuesday December 12, 2023 @09:19AM (#38612373)
Except as a rhetorical device which the above person is clearly using his request as...
Re:The pro-Israel information war on Friday December 08, 2023 @05:45PM (#38575705)
Think of it the other way around - the only real weapon Hamas has against the much stronger Israel is shifting public opinion, so it's in their incentive to bring as much negative attention as possible to Israel in the conflict
Re:The People Who Ruined the Internet on Wednesday November 01, 2023 @06:25PM (#38106217)
Isn't this what happened with rap genius around a decade ago[0]? Maybe this was long before their policy of zero human intervention.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/25/5243716/rap-genius-plumm...

Re:All of ChatGPT's System Prompts on Saturday October 14, 2023 @06:37PM (#37884894)
What would you like to do with these models that you can't currently do if they are 'crippled'?
Interesting - I saw this article and thought it'd be talking about red #40, which has been linked to ADHD-like symptoms in children [1]. I've been pleased to see more food items replacing artificial colorings with things like beet juice lately.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3441937/

Re:Google Cloud Spanner is now half the cost of Amazon DynamoDB on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @02:35PM (#37848464)
With CDK, I can get an ECS service up and running in the same amount of time it'd take to create a lambda function behind API gateway or triggered by SQS/cron. Deploys are easier, cost savings are real, permissions/configuration are the same level of complexity unless you're cutting corners. I'd only use ECS for stuff I know would be high sustained throughput, long duration(>15m) tasks, or things that absolutely need more persistence between executions.
I think you're forgetting about the main participant, Google.
I remember reading discussions about mRNA vaccines being created to sensitize against immune system molecules, like in the way that Dupixent is just a monoclonal antibody that works against certain interleukins. So many interesting things out there for people with autoimmune diseases!
Re:Evennia a MUD/Mu* Creation System on Thursday August 31, 2023 @03:47PM (#37342748)
> good mud/moo/mush/mucks never seem to truly die

The original hellmoo is finally dead! Which fork were you referring to?

> whatever you do, people only want 1-1.5 kids?

This is definitely not true. Look at the fertility rates of any of the aforementioned cultures. Humans will never go extinct because they're making the conscious choice to do so...

Re:Building Muscle in the Lab on Friday August 18, 2023 @12:36PM (#37178172)
The movie Antiviral made it look great.

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