If this can be scaled up, I wonder how useful it would be for use in space for radiative cooling - clearly, you can see I’m thinking of diamond skinned space-craft hulls - how cool is that!
I think cooling in a chip vs cooling in space are two orthogonal problems. In a chip, the problem is getting the heat to the heatsink where it can be efficiently dissipated into the much larger heatsink of the surrounding environment. In space, the problem is that the only way to dissipate heat is thermal radiation because you're in a vacuum.
You could perhaps consider looking at some of the class D amps coming out of CN. Remarkable stuff considering the price and power output.
SMSL has some good, well reviewed products; as do WiiM and quite a few other brands.
The Audio Science Review forum (1) has objective measurement based reviews of many of the newer amps, standalone and integrated.
I’m using the SMSL AO300 to drive Boston Acoustics VR3 floor standing speakers in a study, and they’re sound as good as they did when they were on an older Yamaha amp, or a Denon integrated amp.
Edited to add: most (none?) of the class D integrated amps can’t do Dolby -(licensing, I suspect, is the main issue here), so you’ll need to get a receiver in the middle for HTS though.
Edited post edit (sorry!): turns out Wiim streamers can now do 5.1, so some options are slowly emerging. (2)
“Early human studies of ketogenic compounds have improved cognitive scores in patients with mild to moderate AD.”
While it requires behaviour changes (for the diet), this is something that's relatively easy to test & validate, and with a good sample size.
Edit: To elaborate -- getting on a keto diet results in production of ketone bodies; the keto diet is (IMO) hard to adhere to, but not impossible.
And if it is ketone bodies in the brain that are important, iirc, you can supplement the body with exogenous ketones (which the article alludes to, and the authors appear to be planning to test) which could potentially help.
If there's a measurable, significant effect with just consumption of exogenous ketones without even having to enter ketosis via diet- wow!
I'm all keto / very low carb for 4 plus years. I have been on dozens of different diets, not an exaggeration. Other than the eat whatever I want diet this has been by far the easiest for me to maintain long term. For me eating just a little bread is an insurmountable goal, but eating none I can do. I wouldn't have always traded carbs for a few extra years of cognitive function, but post addiction it feels like a good deal, if I can still get it.
I echo this. If you liked murderbot, you might also like the Battleship Chronicles series by L. Claire (1), and ofcourse, the Imperial Radh series by Ann Leickie (2), and bobiverse, mentioned below, by Dennis Taylor (3), among others..
I read the first three books of the Imperial Radh (Ancillary Justice) series and for all of the love they get online I found them rather dull. There's this fairly dramatic collapse of a galaxy spanning empire happening in the background while the protagonist frets over the level of offense she might cause at the tea party if she chooses to wear the more scandalous gloves. The last book gets a bit more into the fractured psyche of the ruler, but even that gets shoved in the background far more than you would expect so the protagonist can worry about how she might hurt the feelings of the local planetary governor if she doesn't show up for his garden party.
The protagonist is basically a disconnected Borg drone, although in their universe the drones are left with a bit more autonomy than the Star Trek equivalents, but because the protagonist is disconnected it doesn't matter nearly as much as you would expect.
If you're interested in a big space opera about an empire falling apart I found the Collapsing Empire series by John Scalzi to be much more engaging.
But having recently read about all etiquette concerns of the Japanese admirals doing their life or death struggles during WWII, it hardly seems unrealistic.
For a lot of people, seeing people navigate multiple military/social/political spheres is part of the appeal of imperial fiction.
Book recommendation about Japanese etiquette are very welcome. I was reading chip war recently and the wife of the Sony ceo throwing American dinner parties was insanely interesting to me.
I quite liked the focus on minutiae while the bigger events were happening in the background. The third book even discussed it - we live or die today after this battle, but if we live then we still need to do the staff rota. It gave a little sense of realism that made the larger events more relatable.
> while the protagonist frets over the level of offense she might cause at the tea party if she chooses to wear the more scandalous gloves
I have to admit this made me boggle.
I really enjoyed them _because_ the culture was strange and unfamiliar and it was just assumed you'd know what was going on -- which is exactly what mainstream fiction does, of course. (Aside: that's one of the things I enjoyed most about the Three Body Problem.)
Compare with most SF which is "20th century California, but it's in space". (Note: I have never been to California.) Or most fantasy, which is "noble square-jawed heroes in a Hollywood movie parody of the middle ages". It's dull. Leckie gave us something different without infodumps.
As for the empire collapse thing: well, in real life, if you're in the middle of world-changing events, the thing is you still need to wash your socks and get to work. This is realism. It's more involving than some mighty imperial Mary Sue deciding the fate of worlds, as per Asimov's Foundation or something.
The first bit of Ancillary Justice story is a slog like the first 80 pages of anathem and as purposefully confusing, but 3x longer.
I get why the author did it but and it was a good payoff on realizing and stressing inherent societal biases, like any good scifi should break your brain a bit and point out where you are being intellectually lazy. It just didn't need to be so long. And also the story just wasn't all that interesting if I recall. Kinda someone wandering in the wilderness iirc.
I actually liked the latter parts of the series once I got past that. Got more into a detective novel and some political intrigue. The gender bending/fluditity came into it's own at the end as you had many characters against current gender norms that you hear described through actions and then "meet" much later in the book, realizing all the assumptions you were implicitly making being wrong. along with all of the drones who wouldn't really have a gender anyway or might switch gender constantly, so why are we forcing our mental model of gender on them (fair enough).
If you like challenging your brain a bit power through the first book, but it's definitely not the traditional science only sci-fi. I see why a lot of people like the book and I see why a lot of people hate it because it's not a deathstalker novel. It's kinda like when my dad was really pissed when we watched the live version of Cats because "it wasn't what I expected". I was 8, and was like "what did you expect?" "I don't know, but not this" to which my 6 year old brother said "It's definitely about cats".
I love Ancillary Justice even though I don’t think I should - must be the long payoff. Of course, you can get some of the same themes in an easier (and no spaceships, sentient or otherwise) read with Leckie’s other book The Raven Tower.
This is pretty amusing but true. I enjoyed the series for its quirks (unable to detect many character genders) but it’s very young adulty with focus on social things and stuff. I think the concept of non-human-minds is better explored by Linda Nagata’s series. You can kind of start in the middle with Edges and go with that.
And I liked the initial Imperial Radch and I liked the idea of the fracturing empire and the gender bits but my feelings now about it are influenced by some of the characters’ overthinking. Then again, perhaps placing a troop transport sentient ship’s mind into a person gives them terrible social anxiety.
Still, I was recommending it soon after I read it. These are opinions that I have now a long while after.
I have a nagging feeling that Collapsing Empire isn’t “good” literature (the swearing and sex?) but really enjoyed it, along with the other Scalzi books I’ve read. As others have pointed out, the reason for collapse are unique compared to other collapsing empire stories.
Shakespeare is full of swearing and sex. Neither is a clear sign of good or bad literature, unless you have a very specific definition of "good literature" in mind.
Sex? Scalzi barely touches the subject; contrast that with Arthur C. Clark and his, ah, more detailed scenes, or Heinlein. And I've read quite a few of Scalzi's works (including the Empire series).
Can you offer a comparison? I don't have a good understanding of your baseline.
Yes -- agree with you on Ancillary Justice (could not finish it) and Scalzi's Collapsing Empire is fantastic. Eric Thomson's Ashes of Empire series is sort of in a similar vein, although IMO not as good.
Definitely don't read the most recent one, Translation Space. It's some very bad "I like you but I don't know how to say it!" YA-vein tropes and the climactic scene is, essentially, people walking around a circular hallway a couple times.
It was so bad it caused me to re-read the original three, and I realized that only the first was one was any good.
> the climactic scene is, essentially, people walking around a circular hallway a couple times
I feel like once you decide you don't like something, it's very easy to get reductionist about it in a way that makes it sound stupid or trite even if the reductionist statement is true. This summary to me is a quintessential example.
I liked the book alright, but certainly not enough to get into a debate about it. If you liked Leckie's other work, you'll probably find something to like here too, no matter your feelings on hallways. But maybe not!
Its probably my least favorite of all of her books but I liked the approach to describing an additional dimension. And the idea of the alien translators grown in human bodies and the development of a species/culture
> the drones are left with a bit more autonomy than the Star Trek equivalents
I'm not sure I would describe it as more autonomy. The central ship computer was absolutly dominant within the hive mind, and had control over the ancillaries at all time.
It's more like personalities of the ancillaries feed back into the hive mind at a somewhat subconscious level, and had quite a bit of impact on the overall personality.
> If you're interested in a big space opera about an empire falling apart I found the Collapsing Empire series by John Scalzi to be much more engaging.
Yeah, the Imperial Radch series is not about the empire falling apart. That's just something happening in the background, which sometimes drives the plot forwards. Its primary goal is to explore the question of "what does it mean to be human"
I really enjoyed John Scalzi's Collapsing Empire series, which is directly about the fall of a civilisation, and how to save the people.
The interesting thing is that Collapsing Empire bucks the usual trend of empires falling apart because they grew too big, internal political instability or external rivals. It was stable and only falls apart because the form of FTL they were using to connect their star systems fell apart, and none of the star systems were self sufficient.
Also in the genre of "space operas with collapsing empires", I do recommend Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire.
Much of a fan as I am of his works, some of them certainly fall flat. Lock In is a great example; I loved his world building, but both of his first two books felt like it channeled Matlock or CSI with their endings, with exposition and some kind of reveal that felt out of character. I also admit lost interest in Old Man's War after The Last Colony.
Redshirts however is a master class in satire of Trek, and Starter Villain made me laugh.
I also admit Wil Wheaton's narration of his books always feels spot on to me.
if You go into Bobiverse, "please" do yourself a favor and give the audiobooks a try. Ray Porter is a wonderful narrator and Bobiverse (and to an extent probably also Project Hail Mary) is one of the best showcases of how the audio version adds to the original text
The books (Battlefield Chronicles as a series) were originally published serially on royal road, where it has quite the following.
There are a lot of excellent authors who self publish, first on Reddit / royal road, and then some of them publish the same work as a book. The promotion channels, including review copies, etc - that a good publisher can facilitate - aren’t often accessible for this cohort. So that’s one big reason why - discovery becomes a challenge.
IIRC, Lisa Su and her team took nearly decade to orchestrate the turn-around at AMD, and they are still a distant second player in GPUs. Expecting Pat Gelsinger to turn around Intel (or any company in an industry with such long development and tech lead times), and replacing him in 3 years - given that he is an engineer with extensive domain and leadership experience - seems - reactive, as opposed to thoughtful and directed.
Wonder if they will approach Lisa Su to take the job now :D
Can you please share some evidence (peer-reviewed scientific research publications / clinical data) supporting this? Curious about the potential mechanisms.
Inflammation is typically experienced when the body is responding to an infection or injury. It is a normal, and as per current understanding, a necessary part of the body's immune response.
The Cleveland clinic has a nice, informative page if you want more information [0]
[edited to add]
The response of the innate immune system to the infectious agent / injury is what causes inflammation - i.e., for instance, fever, swelling, etc. It is a very very complex multi-cascade process, but one of the first responses to an injury, for instance, is the release of signalling molecules that results in localised swelling, slightly elevated temperature (which makes the tissue a little more inhospitable to bacteria / viruses), etc. all of which serve as the front line defense. <This is a severe over-simplification> Wikipedia has a good explanation that goes into the roles and triggers of the inflammatory response. [1]
Acute inflammation in response to infections and injuries is a good thing, and from everything we know, it is a necessary part of the immune response. The challenge is when the same inflammation response is mis-directed to target the body - for instance, in rheumatoid arthritis, and other inflammation related auto-immune disorders.
The latest Kurzgesagd video on exercise seemed to imply that (excepting sudden changes in activity level) caloric burn rate is constant regardless of lifestyle, but if you are sedentary, the "excess" calories are burned "unproductively" (e.g. increased inflammation).
So this seems to imply excess calories are a cause of chronic inflammation.
Also, the ketogenic diet has been shown to significantly reduce inflammation, though I'm not sure if that's from reducing carbs, or reducing something else associated with high carb intake.
> caloric burn rate is constant regardless of lifestyle
This is obviously false as stated, extreme athletes consume vastly more calories than sedentary people of their same weight. Phelps was rather famous for a 10,000+ calorie per day diet but even just manual labors need significantly more calories.
I’m assuming there’s some unspecified criteria such as while sleeping?
It's just plain not true. Claims like this coming out in the past few years are based on Herman Pontzer's research in which he measured activity levels and energy expenditure among the Hadza, a forager group in Africa, testing the hypothesis that they'd be using a lot more energy because of how active they are. He found their energy expenditure on average wasn't actually much different than the average for sedentary Americans and developed something called the constrained energy expenditure model. This just postulates that the human body has various ways of compensating in the long term for high activity levels. If less energy is available for basic life processes that are not critical to immediate survival, those process will be modulated downward. Importantly, one of these is inflammation, which is likely why exercise reduces inflammation. At the very extreme end of this, you see things like Marshall Ulrich when he was attempting to break the record for time running across the continental United States seeing things like his hair and nails stopped growing. Female endurance athletes commonly stop having periods. Male endurance athletes often have reduced testosterone production.
But this compensation is nowhere near 100% and it also isn't clear to what extent this is mediated by food availability and possibly the intensity of the activity. The Hadza don't have a lot of food and they're spending all day walking around. Similar studies have been conducted on the Amish, who are doing far harder manual farm labor and have enormous amounts of food, and these studies found much high energy expenditure among the Amish compared to post-industrial sedentary Americans, as well as an average 9% bodyfat for males for whatever that is worth. Similarly, the experiences of endurance athletes with bad health symptoms like amenorrhea and low bone mineral density are limited to people who feel pressure to be as small as possible and don't eat anywhere near enough food. Those who simply eat more don't have the same experiences.
As you stated, we also have quite a bit of clear cut existence proofs that energy expenditure is not simply constant among all people regardless of activity. Pontzer himself has studied some of these extremes to figure out how much energy a human actually can expend. From what I recall, it seemed to be around 3.5 times whatever your base metabolic rate is, at least in the long run. Over short bursts, energy expenditure can be up to 10 times base. The greatest longer duration energy demands he has seen in the field is the Tour de France for men and pregnancy for women, both of which are about equal and seem to represent the limits of what humans can do. Obviously, the people doing these things are eating far more than they would be if they weren't doing those things. Nutrition advice for athletes is nearly the opposite of what it is for the obese and sedentary. Eat sugar like there's no tomorrow. Get as many liquid calories as possible. Avoid high fiber because it'll sit in your gut forever slowing down all other digestion and making you uncomfortable. There's a reason for this.
Two of my favorite podcasts, Stronger by Science and Iron Culture, was in the former case and is in the latter hosted by one of the researchers who works in Herman Pontzer's lab, and he is constantly expressing frustration over how the findings and model get misrepresented by the time they telephone down to pop science communicators and diet influencers. The model simply says that expending X calories per day in exercise will not result in a net difference of X calories expended in total. It'll be some percentage less than 100. But it won't be 0%. Exercise and activity don't make no difference at all.
I'd never heard of this Kurzgesagt thing, but it appears to be a group of animators that make cartoon explainer videos of basically everything? That might be entertaining but is probably not the best way to learn about the frontiers of contemporary nutrition and exercise science.
Glucose and fructose will react non-specifically with proteins in the body, particularly when present in excess. These non-specific reactions are recognized as foreign and/or defective, which triggers inflammation. The apply named RAGE protein is one mediator of this response (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAGE_(receptor)).
HbA1C results from the non-enzymatic reaction between glucose and hemoglobin. It serves as a measure of your long-term glucose level and is elevated in diabetics.
Low carb diets dramatically reduce this source of inflammation.
That's missing the point. If this technique can result in longer lives for people with both good diets and not, it is a genuinely novel innovation in human life span that can't be replaced with better diet alone.
It could well be that this protein is good for you when you’re young but not that good for you when you are older.
For example, young people might encounter more new infection sources, and thus need a faster/stronger responding immune system. This protein might be evolved for giving you that, with a side effect of having too strong an immune system at older age.
Evolution may not yet have found a solution that turns down its production at later age, or it might have evolved it at some time, but found its benefits do not outweigh the cost of maintaining the necessary control mechanism.
It’s far from a given that having more humans live to old age has evolutionary benefits.
What happens when you eliminate the "good inflammation" in those with bad diets? Then what? There's likely going to be unintended consequences, naturally. My point, eliminating one symptom usually means eventually creating another.
It's not missing the point. The point is that a lot of people live with chronic inflammation caused by poor lifestyle choices and that results in many diseases later in life, including Alzheimer's.
The point is that chronic inflammation is bad. The comment I'm replying to isn't recognizing that it's just saying "oh inflammation is fine because it's a response to injury" which is very much missing the point.
How much of the consequences of a poor life style can be mitigated by simply reducing the chronic inflammation response by the body?
I'd love it if cheap shitty food wasn't bad for me. At the end of the day a calorie is a calorie and many animals handle the stuff that shortens our life with no problem.
Look at it another way, if dogs can't eat chocolate but humans can, is the problem with chocolate or with dogs?
A calorie is certainly not just a calorie. Different foods are metabolized differently and affect the body in different ways, regardless of otherwise equal caloric values. Take fructose, glucose, and ethanol as an example.
The problem there is with dogs, and has nothing to do with calories. Dogs (and many other animals) are simply not able to tolerate chocolate like humans can. Conversely, humans can't tolerate eating rancid meat and cat poop, but dogs can eat those things easily and not get sick. Lots of substances are poisonous to certain species, and non-poisonous to other species.
Also, the reason chocolate is unhealthy isn't because of the cacao plant, it's because of all the added sugar used to make it taste good, since raw cacao (or cocoa, which you get after cooking it) is horribly bitter.
Chronic inflammation is bad. Is chronic inflammation always caused by auto-immune?
Or is it also caused by things like pollutants, poor diet, or other "first world" problems?
I ask because I used to be very concerned with particulate matter (I still am, but I used to too), and it seemed a big problem with that was it triggering inflammation.
It's been a while since I looked into this, but diet is a major factor with inflammation. Sugars, seed oils and grain-fed dairy. (Also if you eat the grains yourself!) Keto lowers it, caloric restriction lowers it (conversely excess calories coupled with sedentary lifestyle increase it), intermittent fasting lowers it.
I forget about exercise, I think it's a case of temporarily increasing it (hours) and then lowering it long-term.
Speaking from personal experience diet plays as much a role as medication in decreasing inflammation. Sugars, gluten, and some* nuts and seeds are indeed pro-inflammatory (many seeds and nuts are anti-inflammatory)
I don't think there's a pattern suggesting that. Many autoimmune diseases are more prevalent in less polluted parts of the world. The strongest links appear to be genetic, in that some diseases (e.g., Sjogren's syndrome) are clearly more common in people of certain geographic descents.
There is no distinction regardless of cause, imo. Stress can epigenetically cause an autoimmune disease, and so can pollution (including smoking), excessive alcohol, processed food diet, sedentariness, etc. Often it is a number of factors that can lead to a chronically overactive immune response.
I am the founder of an industrial edtech company, with some prior experience in the K12 space.
Your analysis of the market structure and the challenges is consistent with my experience - I'd like to add 2 points though:
1. Building on what you've said about VC-level returns, while edtech (and industrial edtech) may not necessarily be fields where VC funded unicorns can actually form and then survive to profitability, I believe there is sufficient need and space for companies that are investable and can grow into profits / valuations in the 10s /100s of millions - they can follow the startup format, etc.; just not VC investable, as you've noted.
2. In the space of skill development (i.e., adults / professional learning), I would like to add that for many skills, as industries get more sophisticated (I am taking of manufacturing, automotive, energy, oil & gas, infrastructure, petrochemicals, infrastructure), there is value for the company in upskilling their staff - simply because that does directly convert to profitability if done well; and at least puts a floor on issues that poor or absent training may cause - like safety, quality, etc. So even if it is a cost, it is a cost that can directly affect their topline / bottomline, and I believe there is an opportunity here.
I think bootstrapped with a small team of under 10 people, Karpathy can get to revenue of $20M just from the developer market. That's a pretty great outcome if VCs aren't involved.
The submission was flagged, and I am not sure I understand why since the only (negatively) critical discussion I see is on the ambiguity over the title in the HN submission; flagging a submission appears to take it off the HN homepage, and I feel a title ambiguity in the face of the significance of the submission itself isn’t a strong reason for removing the submission from HN? :)
There are (at the time of posting this comment) no comments raising any substantive issue with the arxiv submission itself (which ofc has to go through the peer review process of publication, and hopefully the original authors will respond / rebut this new article) - so curious why its been flagged? It’s not dead, so cannot vouch for it.
If folks in the HN community who have flagged it have done so because there are serious issues with what the paper is asserting, please comment / critique instead of just flagging it. If it’s because of the ambiguity in the title, I hope @dang and the moderators editorialize - there are some valuable comments in this thread that helped me understand what the issue is and what the bug is!
and there are some anatomical differences between mice and humans..
So its open at this point whether it is relevant directly to humans.
IIRC, mice do not get Alzheimer’s, for instance. There are mouse models (genetically engineered)that exhibit some of the physiological symptoms of Alzheimer’s; but mice make particularly poor models for human neurology [1]- so this reach for using these essentially biomechanical structures to identify parallels and try to target a cure for neuro-degerative disorders in humans: seems more like a grant application attempt. I do wish press releases were a little more circumspect about such claims.
They do say they plan to verify findings in primates as well so perhaps the accomplishment here is more concerning the methodology. So there me be some greater merit to this work going forward.
I think it would be more interesting for this kind of study to verify these measures that can only be obtained in animals with neuroimaging. There have been some interesting attempts to move monitor aspects of CSF flow through MRI but we need to make sure we are measuring what we think we are before using in the clinic
