all season jacket with smarts to let you sleep comfy anywhere. source https://warpcast.com/keccers.eth/0x5a31710c

— @sdv

It's a less wrong about genetic engineering and the idea of creating superbabies to increase IQ, health, and lifespan.

It also criticized scientists for being hesitant about germline editing because of vague ethical worries.

I dont so much care about superbabies because it's less a potential future and more an inevitable one — for me it's the second part that's interesting because I think many ethical concerns today no longer authentic reasoned debates, but rather simulacrums — acting more like a comfortable justification for stagnation or avoiding risk rather than genuine moral reflection.

I think genuine ethical responsibility includes not just caution, but also courage to explore controversial ideas. If people continue questioning vague moral concerns it will show that innovation and ethical reflection aren't mutually exclusive. The main obstacles of many (not all) scientific breakthroughs are not technological or intellectual, but rather ethical.

— @ArtemG

new sync engine that really speaks to me. a lot of the web can feel so much snappier with tech like this

— dandankis

it's, well, less wrong, although this one is a short read. the synopsis is that in a given field there probably are big central bottlenecking problems that need to be solved, and those problems will be solved in super creative ways that you can't even conceive of.

because the ways are so crazy, fixing the bottleneck will probably upend the whole field. which the author uses to argue that making marginal progress on smaller subproblems is very hard, since the only way your marginal contributions are useful is if you figure out a contribution which robustly generalises to the new paradigm of your field once the big central problem is solved.

which is interesting i guess. i think id argue that those smaller subproblems you are generalisably solving are actually much more interesting. like you could argue the iphone robustly generalises to the future of computing, kinda interesting

— @thebison505

Social media's illusion of change. The article argues that social media creates an illusion of collective action, leading users to mistake online engagement for meaningful political change.

— misha

a hanuman devotee mentioned this to me yesterday

schrödingers view of the world he references the vedas

— tobeistobreathe

the digger's free print shop and newspaper (kaliflower); og communal hippie stuff.

— catherine

A link from a family friend who is an anglican priest who would love for me to become a Christian (it might happen tbh, I find the whole thing fascinating).

"Those who prefer their personal spirituality over religion are quick to identify the multiplicity of religions, and their sins, as signs that they are better off on their own. But critically, the individual is destined to reproduce these same problems on the micro level and will only, therefore, succeed in worshipping himself."

I found this argument compelling.

— @pieratt

"For amusement, programmers sometimes attempt to develop the shortest possible quine in any given programming language."

"produces a copy of its own source code as its only output"

both elegant and slightly depressing?

note that I got this from https://x.com/sdvim who built https://sdv.wtf/ which is 'a self-printing CSS page' and who corrected me about the proper term when I suggested it was recursive.

— @pieratt