If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?
All Highlights
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â The Last Answer - Isaac Asimov - Reading Session 202301282203
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â Data Science and Prediction - Dhar - 2013 - Reading Session 202301271312
In situations where we are able to design randomized trials, big data makes it feasible to uncover the causal models generating the data.
The author doesnât make this point very big but it is actually quite important. There are many cases in which it is unethical to undertake a conventional scientific study of certain phenomena… Even though we know that those phenomena are happening anyway. If the data is collected ânaturally,â however, we may be able to trace and track patterns in these data without putting ourselves in precarious ethical situations
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â Mexico bans solar geoengineering experiments after startupâs field tests - Reading Session 202301191446
The company, called Make Sunsets, conducted the field tests without prior notice or consent from the Mexican government.
This is one of the scary consequences of democratizing technology: volatility. It is getting easier for small teams to take big actions without oversight.
And this is a well-intended initiative. The opposite of this would be ecological or environmental terrorism against businesses or governments perceived to be direct contributors to climate change, which surely will happen as climate change advances and people get desperate.
At least this test was small:
Iseman says he launched two balloons in Baja California last year, each carrying less than 10 grams of sulfur dioxide. Thatâs a tiny amount of the compound thatâs typically released into the air by fossil fuel power plants and volcanoes in much larger quantities â so the release isnât likely to have had much impact.
The business model is interesting:
Founded in October 2022, Make Sunsets started with the grandiose vision of releasing enough sulfur dioxide to offset global warming from all the worldâs CO2 emissions annually. Itâs already selling âcooling creditsâ for the service at $10 per gram of sulfur dioxide â even though it has yet to achieve any measurable impact and canât guarantee that releasing sulfur dioxide at a bigger scale wouldnât trigger any unintended problems.
This has obvious parallels with Climeworks, who was recently paid by a few big tech companies to pull carbon from the atmosphere. It is hard to imagine this business model working at scale, though… surely there is a kind of prisoner’s dilemma at play that will keep every company from chipping in. Perhaps we need regulators to require businesses to purchase credits like these to properly recognize the environmental costs of business.
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â Design Science Dysfunctions - Listening Notes 20220525
# Notes from listening to “Design Science Dysfunctions,” an episode of This IS Research
- Recker, Berente, and Gregor identify three problems with design principles:
- Design principles rarely build on existing work (They should be developed over extensive amounts of research (eg review articles), not one-off papers)
- Design principles are rarely very surprising or useful (“the UI has to be easy to use”)
- They often depend too much on context â indeterminacy
- Interesting: even though (to her chagrin) she is the “[Design] Theory” person, Gregor doesn’t always include or look for a design theory in design science research. She said “A theory is just a body of work” in defense of why she doesn’t sometimes include a full Design Theory.
- Recker, Berente, and Gregor identify three problems with design principles:
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Note titles as API calls
i saw someone say that note titles should be like API names ( from @davestridsr on the Obsidian Discord)
An app adds an API when its developers want other developers to be able to extend and work with the app’s functions, e.g., to develop other features or to let services interact with one another.
Some “good” features of an API in software development might be that the API is: (1) deep (you can get at as many functions of the underlying app as are useful), (2) expressive (you can fine-tune interactions between your extension and the app), and (3) intuitive (by looking at an API function’s title and parameters, it’s pretty easy to guess what it allows you to do).
Andy’s saying that a good note title fits those parameters too. The metaphor goes: you “extend” an atomic evergreen note by invoking its title in a new note. By doing so (and if done right), you can grasp the details of that note easily while, at the same time, you can reinterpret it in its new context.
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- > It would be faster if they showed me multiple thumbnails on the screen, for me to just scan through a bunch and #ip through them; theyâre intentionally slowing me down, and showing me one thing at a time. But in doing so they get much cleaner feedback about my sentiment â and that means that the training of the algorithm happens more quickly.