Choosing not to give money to someone you do not know is not quite the same thing as murdering them.

A couple of decades ago I got really confused because I found a lot of papers referring to “comer” cubes, but could not find an actual definition. Eventually I figured out that these were actually “corner” cubes, but somewhere a transcription error occurred that merged the r and n into an m, and this error kept getting propagated because people were just copying and pasting.

I think that you may have mistaken this community for !linuxquestions@lemmy.world.

Not really; being as derisive of the authors as that comment was contributed absolutely nothing positive to the conversation.

That entire comment is specifically being derisive of the article authors, so it is calling them “intellectual supremacists”, rather than agreeing with them.

I am fine with someone arguing that maybe the traits we consider to be a sign of intelligence are defined too narrowly–though in this case it is a really weird take because the article authors would clearly completely agree with this sentiment! I am not so fine with them calling the people they disagree with things like “intellectual supremacists”.

That is a really dumb response to an article whose whole point was to argue that we have been thinking too narrowly about intelligence.

I agree that the article exhibits unmerited grandiosity, but, having said that, “quantum activity” is a real thing insofar as it is a shorthand for quantum coherence extending to a (relatively) macroscopic scale. However, it is really difficult for quantum coherence to exist at such a scale, especially at room temperature, so there is a high burden of evidence that I do not see as having been met to be considered “confirmed”.

Additionally, although there are efficiencies that life may be able to take advantage of if it can exploit quantum effects, I am not convinced at all that these efficiencies need to be used for life or consciousness to be able to exist. This actually goes along with your underlying point, which is that it is not clear that we need fancy mechanisms as a sort of magic touch to explain all of these things.

Argue with the authors of the study. That’s what they found.

Assuming we are specifically talking about the paper on tryptophan, there is absolutely nothing about what they found that could be characterized in that way. To the contrary, they are using pretty standard physical models in their analysis.

Physics can’t explain quite a lot of things in our physical universe.

But there are a lot of things that it explains extremely well, and the things discussed in the linked article are among them.

Given that we are talking about physical processes, saying that something is happening more efficient than anything that could be done “through physics alone” is nonsensical.

In fairness, it is not completely crazy for biological systems to have evolved a kind of molecule that allows there to be quantum coherence at such relatively large scales in order to improve how well the various parts of a biological system coordinate their behavior, I just will remain incredibly skeptical that this has indeed happened until there is more solid evidence then some computational modeling.

Quantum coherence does not generally extend beyond the scale of an atom or a molecule, which is why building a quantum computer is so hard. It is not impossible that biological systems have evolved a mechanism for quantum coherence on the scale claimed at the relatively high temperatures at which living systems operate, but there is a high burden of proof to demonstrating that the barriers to achieving this have indeed been breached.

Just to be clear: the science is fine; I skimmed through the publications and they did not come across as being obviously problematic. It is the reporting that was grandiose.

Ugh, nothing has been confirmed; some interesting modeling and theoretical conjecturing was performed. The rest is grandiosity on the part of the article.

(Also, why was the link to a comment near the bottom of the article, rather than to where it began?)

I only see a couple of the most recent posts, but the number 2K seems to indicate that there are a lot more that it just is not showing me.

By contrast, I felt like looking at pictures of galaxies right now, so I went over to https://astrodon.social/tags/galaxies, and behold–look at all of them! So easy!

In fact, maybe the lesson here is that I should just give up on Pixelfed and use Mastadon for discovering cool things to look at in my downtime.

The thing that I don’t get is that it seems like this should be a solved problem, because I can visit any Mastadon instance and see the content there just fine. Rather, Pixelfed seems to have gone out of its way to construct an artificial wall that prevents people from doing this.

But what if I want to be on a small instance or even self-host? Then I cannot see any potentially appealing hashtags because I do not start with a large library of locally downloaded content.

But if a hashtag has not made its way over to my instance, then it effectively does not exist to me. Even if I do see it show up and decide I want to see more content related to it, if said content has not ever made its way over to my instance then I am still left out. The great thing about being able about able to check out what is on other instances is that I am no longer restricted to whatever the people on my instance are interested in.

This a completely different experience from Lemmy, where I was immediately able to go to a bunch of different instances, look through their communities, and go: “I want to subscribe to this one, this one, and this one!”

People are not generally as self-reflective as you might think; when someone settles upon a core belief, they tend to stick with it for the rest of their lives, with any challenge to it being treated as a threat rather than as a potential opportunity for growth. You might think that when a core belief is completely wrong and leads to disastrous negative consequences that this might at be enough to lead someone to give it up, but strangely the mind does not actually work this way.

(I mean, I am not saying that these people are not also evil and/or oily snakes, but I think that there is value in observing the mental fallacies at work in others so that we can better spot them at work in ourselves, since our own mind is the one thing that we have at least some limited control over.)

I created a script that I dropped into /etc/cron.hourly which does the following:

1. Use rsync to mirror my root partition to a btrfs partition on another hard drive (which only updates modified files).
2. Use btrfs subvolume snapshot to create a snapshot of that mirror (which only uses additional storage for modified files).
3. Moves “old” snapshots into a trash directory so I can delete them later if I want to save space.

It is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import os
import pathlib
import shutil
import subprocess
import sys

import portalocker

DATETIME_FORMAT = '%Y-%m-%d-%H%M'
BACKUP_DIRECTORY = pathlib.Path('/backups/internal')
MIRROR_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'mirror'
SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'snapshots'
TRASH_DIRECTORY = BACKUP_DIRECTORY / 'trash'

EXCLUDED = [
    '/backups',
    '/dev',
    '/media',
    '/lost+found',
    '/mnt',
    '/nix',
    '/proc',
    '/run',
    '/sys',
    '/tmp',
    '/var',

    '/home/*/.cache',
    '/home/*/.local/share/flatpak',
    '/home/*/.local/share/Trash',
    '/home/*/.steam',
    '/home/*/Downloads',
    '/home/*/Trash',
]

OPTIONS = [
    '-avAXH',
    '--delete',
    '--delete-excluded',
    '--numeric-ids',
    '--relative',
    '--progress',
]

def execute(command, *options):
    print('>', command, *options)
    subprocess.run((command,) + options).check_returncode()

execute(
    '/usr/bin/mount',
    '-o', 'rw,remount',
    BACKUP_DIRECTORY,
)

try:
    with portalocker.Lock(os.path.join(BACKUP_DIRECTORY,'lock')):
        execute(
            '/usr/bin/rsync',
            '/',
            MIRROR_DIRECTORY,
            *(
                OPTIONS
                +
                [f'--exclude={excluded_path}' for excluded_path in EXCLUDED]
            )
        )

        execute(
            '/usr/bin/btrfs',
            'subvolume',
            'snapshot',
            '-r',
            MIRROR_DIRECTORY,
            SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY / datetime.now().strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT),
        )

        snapshot_datetimes = sorted(
            (
                datetime.strptime(filename, DATETIME_FORMAT)
                for filename in os.listdir(SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY)
            ),
        )

        # Keep the last 24 hours of snapshot_datetimes
        one_day_ago = datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1] >= one_day_ago:
            snapshot_datetimes.pop()

        # Helper function for selecting all of the snapshot_datetimes for a given day/month
        def prune_all_with(get_metric):
            this = get_metric(snapshot_datetimes[-1])
            snapshot_datetimes.pop()
            while snapshot_datetimes and get_metric(snapshot_datetimes[-1]) == this:
                snapshot = SNAPSHOT_DIRECTORY / snapshot_datetimes[-1].strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)
                snapshot_datetimes.pop()
                execute('/usr/bin/btrfs', 'property', 'set', '-ts', snapshot, 'ro', 'false')
                shutil.move(snapshot, TRASH_DIRECTORY)

        # Keep daily snapshot_datetimes for the last month
        last_daily_to_keep = datetime.now().date() - timedelta(days=30)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1].date() >= last_daily_to_keep:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date())

        # Keep weekly snapshot_datetimes for the last three month
        last_weekly_to_keep = datetime.now().date() - timedelta(days=90)
        while snapshot_datetimes and snapshot_datetimes[-1].date() >= last_weekly_to_keep:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date().isocalendar().week)

        # Keep monthly snapshot_datetimes forever
        while snapshot_datetimes:
            prune_all_with(lambda x: x.date().month)
except portalocker.AlreadyLocked:
    sys.exit('Backup already in progress.')
finally:
    execute(
        '/usr/bin/mount',
        '-o', 'ro,remount',
        BACKUP_DIRECTORY,
    )