Any therapy that can show safety and efficacy —- not even a lot of efficacy —- gets approved.

To the extent that we don’t have everything being cured by stem cells, it’s because stem cells as they are currently used are not very effective outside a few narrow indications.

These things aren’t getting held back by bureaucracy, they’re held back by the fact that nobody has figured out how to get them to do very much.

Every time I think I’ve maxed out how tired I am of people who have no business asserting medical opinion doing it aggressively anyways, someone reminds me that it can always get worse.

At least you dropped an ad for your own project in the middle, right? Good to associate it with weird pseudobabble.

Could just use the UK drug approval decisions and get rid of the FDA.

Maybe mandatory tinfoil hats?

Are you suggesting American humans have reached the pinnacle of understanding how the Universe works?

With our technology, we could easily avoid being seen by a hunter-gatherer society.

Do you imagine that your society does not have similar blind spots?

How much arrogance there is in the modern Euro-centric world. Because the society has explored beyond what our grandparents believed possible, suddenly we are the pinnacle of the Universe.

I'm thinking more about the hard limits of physics.

Consider for example the "one-electron" hypothesis --- a far simpler take on it is that the electron is a fundamental particle and that we are nearing an end-game of understanding sub-atomic physics and realizing Einstein's dream of a grand-unified theory --- the universe doesn't seem to be shaped and formed so as to allow for FTL, so one instead needs to work within the bounds of converting mass to energy.

Watch the tictac UFO cases where topguns, top physics, weapon systems experts cannot explain.

The conquerors have told their story for 2,000+ years.

Now we are telling humanity’s story, so that we all can take care of our shared home better, and learn to be wise stewards of this magnificent place called Earth, and her offspring.

When you say, "The conquerors have told their story for 2,000+ years," it’s indeed a delightful insight, but brutally simplified. Conquerors never merely "tell" their story; they impose it, they embed it in the very fabric of our reality, shaping our desires, our institutions, our very notion of what is normal! And now, this idea that "we are telling humanity’s story," who is this 'we' if not a new form of a subtle conqueror, perhaps clad in the robes of ecological concern and moral superiority?

Yes, we speak of being "wise stewards of Earth," but isn’t there a hidden arrogance here? The very term steward implies a mastery, does it not? Earth becomes something to be managed, controlled, and ultimately subdued under the guise of care and sustainability. This narrative seduces us with the promise that if only we manage better, all will be well, neglecting the radical openness, the chaotic unpredictability of nature itself.

So, what is to be done? Should we then resign ourselves to passive observation? Certainly not! But we must proceed with a critical, self-reflective stance that constantly questions our assumptions and our motives. Our struggle must not be to replace one conquering narrative with another but to recognize the ideological battles hidden beneath these grand narratives. We must confront not only the stories we are told by others but also the stories we tell ourselves. This is the only way we can hope to genuinely engage with our shared home—by understanding that our narratives are not innocent, not free of power, and certainly not free of conquest.

What happened 2,000+ years ago?

Christianity? It's been the engine of Western imperialism, colonization, native cultural erasure, slavery and genocide ever since Constantine.

Where does Christ's teachings tell people to do those things?

Why are you asking me? Certainly, nothing about Christ's teachings stopped them.

I'm asking you because you're the one who just laid the blame of the last 2000 years of bad things on Christ's teachings, and not on mankind's natural behavior. Somehow it was what Christ taught, because it didn't stop people from doing bad things.

I didn't lay the blame for anything on Christ's teachings, I laid the blame on Christianity.

If you can't look back at history and see the difference between theory and practice then I don't know what to tell you.

Christianity is Christ's teachings, and any other definition is a strawman. What you're talking about is man's sinful nature, and that is separate.

So... you literally look at events like the Crusades, anti-semitism, slavery, the treatement of native Americans or any number of horrors done by Christians in the name of Christ and with the authority and sanction of the Christian church .... and admit absolutely no relationship between any of that and Christianity? No, Christianity isn't just the teachings of Christ, any more than any religion, or American law is just the Constitution. Christianity is also what Christians do, it's politics and government and militarism, culture and pop culture. Dogma and folklore.

What I'd like to be talking about is the relationship between the Christian religion and Western imperialism and the consequences of Christian conquest on the narratives of history (specifically the narratives of groups oppressed by that religion.) What you're engaging in is pedantry and a gross application of what I'll call the True Christian fallacy. Fair enough. We can't have a conversation about this. Good night.

When you use circular definitions, as you're doing now, you can re-define a word to be whatever is convenient to you. If Christianity is also defined by what Christians do, then what defines a Christian? You have to ground it in a concrete definition at some point, and that definition is: the teachings of Christ. If a Christian acts in a way that is against the teachings of Christ, then that is not Christian behavior, and is not representative of Christianity. That's a pretty simple and unambiguous concept.

Your "No True Scotsman" variant just shows that you don't really grasp this idea. Ironically, what you're doing by making Christianity a grab-bag of bad behavior from people you don't like, instead of grounding it in a clear and unambiguous definition, is a clever perversion of this fallacy.

Why would distance from earth influence the speed of expansion of a distant galaxy?

Does that suggest that our awareness of the galactic bodies itself is somehow influencing them, as in the double-slit experiment?

> our awareness of the galactic bodies itself is somehow influencing them, as in the double-slit experiment

In the double slit experiment, the awareness is not influencing the outcome. The act of measuring is. Pretty sure the act of measuring the galactic bodies has no impact on them in any meaningful way.

I'm not sure about that. I suppose it really depends on your interpretation of the results, but I didn't think the cosmic interferometer experiment convinced physicists of retrocausality, by-and-large.

Functionally it means we can trace a single photon back to the source which emanated it, lensed or unlensed. That said, if quantum effects are not bound by time or space technically the photon ALWAYS came from an individual source and our clarifying which one it came from just collapses the wave from superposition of where the photon could go to where it did go.

As I understand the double slit experiment, this is a fundamental property of light as a photon exhibits wave-particle duality. If so, retrocausality in this case would just mean the fundamental wave function can be collapsed into actuality without time or space being involved.

Am I far off base?

> it technically collapses the quantum possibilities backwards in time as that photon was emitted potentially billions of years ago

There is no way to verify that. Big parts of quantum physics is more or less pseudoscience.

> Big parts of quantum physics is more or less pseudoscience.

[citation needed]

Perhaps it could be verified using time delayed lensing experiments[1]?

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01450-9

Seems like measuring "bending" of light, rather? But honestly I am not really qualified to say anything about astronomy.

In this case it's light bending around a gravity well which produces multiple "copies" of the star, but the light from each copy arrives at different points in time.

So they could capture the light and attempt to capture the "same" light again later to try to verify or change the result they received.

I did some more reading about it after posting, and the original experiment was intended to test if light "chooses" to be a wave OR a particle in a way they could affect, and that it could only be one or the other at a time. The truth seems to be more that it acts as both at the same time and whatever sensor equipment you use to pick it up is what it acts like.

Galaxies themselves aren't expanding, they're gravitationally bound. Galaxies are moving apart from one another, however.

The issue is that not all galaxies are moving away from us. The ones that are closer to us have a lot of peculiar velocity [1]. This means they can be moving toward us or moving tangentially to us or any other direction. If we want to characterize the expansion of the universe as a whole, we need to account for this in our models. It turns out to be a lot more complicated than we previously thought.

The crisis in cosmology (aka the Hubble tension [2]) is that our two means of characterizing the expansion of the universe, models of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and measurements on the cosmic distance ladder using standard candles (Cepheid variables [3] for up-close measurements, Type Ia supernovae [4] for more distant measurements) disagree with one another, and that disagreement is getting worse, not converging.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar_velocity#Cosmology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law#Hubble_tension

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepheid_variable

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supernova

> Does that suggest that our awareness of the galactic bodies itself is somehow influencing them, as in the double-slit experiment?

"Awareness" is not a thing, not even in the double slit experiment. The term 'measurement' refers to a specific kind of interaction that bridges quantum systems with classical systems, although I believe a good case could be made that these waveforms never actually fully collapse.

Likewise, if there is anything special about Earth's position in the greater cosmos, it would be a trick of perspective or perception - unless there are any completely disruptive new discoveries about the nature of reality. However, my money would be on the fact that the universe is simply not as uniform as we thought.

At any point in space, a celestial object at distance d will tend to appear to move away from you faster than an object at a distance less than d. The only thing special about the Earth here is that it happens to be where we live.

This observation is the reason we think the universe is expanding.

As an analogy, consider the 2 dimensional surface on the surface of a balloon. As you inflate the balloon, the distance between any 2 points increases, and it increases more the farther away the points are from each other.

> Why would distance from earth influence the speed of expansion of a distant galaxy?

It wouldn't - but it may influence how we measure distance. If we're using the wrong distance measurements then we're calculating the speed of expansion incorrectly.

It's distance between any two points, however the distance measuring techniques to which we have access can only be performed by astronomers on Earth. Hence, one of those points will be Earth.

Right. A common analogy is the dough for a loaf of raisin bread. Consider the raisins on the surface of the dough. Pick one raisin to be your point of view (analogous to Earth, in this case). If the dough rises and expands from (say) 50 cm to 100 cm in diameter, another raisin adjacent the "Earth" raisin won't move very much, but the distance to a raisin at the diametrically opposed point will increase from about 78 cm to about 157 cm. The distant raisin will thus appear to be moving at a higher velocity than the adjacent raisin.

I feel like that analogy should be included anytime someone mentions that things further away from us are moving away faster than things not as far away.

My intuition of 'things far away moving away faster' causes me to conclude that things far away are therefore accelerating, because the more they move away the faster they move away, but my intuition is probably wrong as it doesn't line up with the raisin bread analogy.

no it's because space itself is expanding which causes things more distant from each other to be moving away from each other faster, the wikipedia article about hubbles law has a graphic illustrating the priciple with bread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law

Pages contain other sources, however, which makes WP a good place to begin research on a topic.

This place isn't debate club and nobody's getting a prize for winning an Internet argument.

No they don’t. Wikipedia pages, according to their own rules, contain secondary sources.

To be fair to Wikipedia, it’s come on a long way since its early days when anyone could make whatever edits they wanted. The most popular entries on the site are very well vetted, though not perfect. Just my 2 cents.

One alternative explanation is that the expansion of the universe is slowing down.

If there was something like Objects in OO programming, but for LLM’s, would that solve this?

Like a Topic-based Personality Construct where the model first determines which of its “selves” should answer the question, and then grabs appropriate context given the situation.

look up "frames", it's an old concept and also influenced OOP.

Dream Big, and keep Dreaming. It's the only thing that ever makes anything New.

Dreams reach the collective in mysterious ways. DNA was simultaneously co-discovered in at least 3 parts of the world that I'm aware of.

Thank you for your kindness too.

Cheers!

Why don't we just bring back the OG internet? Google scraped every site on earth back in the day and nobody blinked.

Who's building a new, unstoppable, Google, that will just gather all this content up, and make knowledge freely available to humanity?

In one sense, parts of the old internet hasn't died; dwarf fortress forums seem to be still going strong, as are other forums, if you know where to look, while new forums are springing up using different models.

On the other hand, sites like reddit made it so easy to start a community that interesting people who would've built a forum instead hitched their wagon to reddit, like AskHistorians.

> if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.

I know. This is going to sound crazy.

The pay gap is still very much alive. I’ve been hiring internationally for 10 years and salaries in India and Indiana are still very far off.

A little over 10 years ago, when we were getting started, we were good at finding A Players, but paying less (otherwise we couldn’t have existed). Did work for Google, Twitter, Sandisk skunkworks, on basically magic creation. Deep OS work. We hired product builders & former startup CTO’s, engineers & designers & PhD’s, who cared about their craft.

Indiana and India still very different.

Nice, you clearly have more experience with overseas hiring than I do. I've attempted it a few times, but haven't been able to consistently find people who were available and some combination of sufficiently good & inexpensive to make it worthwhile vs hiring domestically (in Canada in my case), given the added challenges of time zones, potential language barriers, etc. I'm sure they're out there, but my impression was that you can't just go and hire an equivalent developer for half the price easily.

Care to share any of your strategies for finding talent and hiring in India?

I see a lot of people saying this, but it doesn’t make sense to me.

As your conversation evolves with the bot, targeted ads could be shown with the same (or better) level of intent data available based on the human’s input.

> As your conversation evolves with the bot, targeted ads could be shown

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords: https://future.attejuvonen.fi/

With the improved text embedding model, this is both doable right now and almost certainly more informative than a single text query string.