I love how this story follows the magic pattern of so much of innovation and discovery - an accident. It's refreshingly human and not a mode of discovery that machine learning is going to completely take away from us.

-- commonly attributed to Isaac Asimov

You're probably days down exploring that explanation before the eventual "holy shit" (that I never really had the benefit of experiencing).

They have to put themselves in the situation to get lucky first. This person got a graduate education, and was competent enough to be selected to be doing research in what is likely a multimillion dollar lab owned by an institution, then she had the knowledge and ability to notice and be able to identify what had "accidentally" happened with a micro-organism that we barely understand.

Luck was the smallest part of this discovery. I would say that the grant money is well spent funding someone so "lucky".

Source: spent years looking hard for hibernation promotion factor in P. aeruginosa ribosomes via cryo-EM. Got a PhD and worked a whole lot of 16 hour days. Never got lucky.

Not sure what you're insinuating about the story not being true, would you like to see maps?

This is literally the opposite of the situation put forth in the article. Accidental discoveries are accidental discoveries.

> Then they soak up all the grants.

What use does a machine learning model have for a grant? This seems like something that is uniquely useful to humans.

(I vividly remember as a kid leaving a slice of bread in the refrigerator as a for-credit experiment until it grew interesting green mold to study)

And if AGI becomes a thing, it might go "Hey, this is funny" in weird ways after it has ingested enough data.

I love the novel Colossus because almost 60 years ago it portayed realistically how a nascent AGI could behave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(novel)

The search space is huge, we sometimes find needles in haystacks by accident, isn’t it exciting that we have tools now that can systematically check every piece of hay?

Innovations like these are more about ‘shocks’ that surface fitting cannot capture.

Note universal approximation theorem applies only to smooth surfaces.

If ops point was rather that “accident”/“luck” are uniquely human… I don’t agree. Luck is when probability works out in your favour - and that can happen all the time with any sort of probabilistic search, which is rife in ML.

"They chose to spend the worst part of the year trying to sleep through it inside of relatively safe caves, and to do that, they sacrificed nutrition and vitamin D from the sun."

Also it does not really matter for your vitamin D levels, if you are outside in winter in the north or in a cave. The sun is too low for the body to produce Vitamin D anyway (only the Inuit for example do not need sun, to produce Vitamin D btw. )

And that they lacked nutrition in winter can also just mean, that there simply was not much food in the winters, which is kind of expected, before humans developed storage and preservation technologies?

As far as I can tell, they need vitamin D just like any other life form and can only synthesise it from the sun, just like all other lifeforms on Earth.

They might have adapted to reduced amounts of available vitamin D though[0], because they don't have much of it available to them in the first place and because there's really no other source than producing your own from the sun, or eating things that have produced it from the sun. So they have a vitamin D deficiency, but it's less severe than for most people.

[0]https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/etudinuit/2016-v40-n2-etu...

That is, either sunlight or dietary supplementation will provide the essential vitamin/hormone D (its biological function is ... interesting).

Which is to say, deprivation of either sunlight or dietary sources of themselves is not sufficient to induce vitamin D deficiency. There's also the fact that as an oil-based vitamin, can be, and is, stored for prolonged periods in body tissues. That's a sharp contrast to the water-soluable vitamin C of which excess is excreted in urine.

This was responding specifically to the prior claim "they need vitamin D just like any other life form and can only synthesise it from the sun" (emphasis added) by seszett here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40594479> The apparent claim that sunlight is necessary for acquisition of vitamin D is incorrect.

Periodic hypersupplementation of D can be effectively processed and retained by the body. By contrast, hyperdosing of vitamin C is a waste of resources as the excess is not retained and is flushed out. I've read previously that long-term injections of vitamin D have been effectively used, see:

"Lasting Moderate Increases in Serum 25-Hydroxvitamin D Levels and Shorter-Term Changes in Plasma Calcium " <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28492140/>

"Vitamin D Injections: Benefits, Side Effects, and Who Is a Candidate? " <https://healthnews.com/nutrition/vitamins-and-supplements/vi...>

(Neither of these is the specific item I'd had in mind, though both describe similar procedures and efficacy.)

(Overconsumption of various vitamins and minerals can be harmful in other ways as well, I'm not a doctor (not even of philology) and moreover I'm not your doctor.)

I'm quite happy to know that "microbes sleeping deep in the Arctic permafrost" are asleep. I'd rather not have to think what might happen when they wake up.

That said, saving energy is certainly one part of it – and what else could a diurnal species do in the darkness anyway? (And similarly for animals adapted to night or twilight activity).

Face reality: when you've been on ice long enough that your friends and immediate family are dead, nobody wants you anymore. You will never be defrosted, and if you're lucky at some point your remains will be given a burial. It's more likely you'll be unceremoniously cremated like medical waste.

What are you saying - the lives of ordinary people are the holy grail in archaeology and history as they are more difficult to investigate and construct. A king's remains and belongings tell you little about the actual society.

(You're probably familiar with the book Montaillou? For passersby, it's a neat insight into the minds of ordinary people from hundreds of years ago.)

The best thing I can think of is putting your cryopod in a lava tube on the Moon, powered by a small nuclear reactor or maybe a large RTG.

And then hope nothing critically fails for centuries ...

Unless we have perfectionized robots by the time you go into the cryopod, you might as well bet on humans. And if we "perfectionized robots", that do not fail all the time, we already would have a very different world.

We already know how to make redundant computer control systems, like for aircraft. It's not that hard. They don't "fail all the time" either. Sure, your crappy Windows computer does, but no one with a brain uses that for anything safety-critical.

And not that hard? Are you aware of Murphy's law?

Basically, give anything enough time and all the possible things that can go wrong, will go wrong. So your windows powered cyopod breaks after 1 year at most. And your embedded tiny verified OS manages 100 years, hurrey. But dead is dead.

You what now? :) I think you watched too many scifies and started to believe that the plot devices are reality. “Hybernation” is a thing in movies because the writers wanted to write stories involving humans and long space travel. It is not a working technology in reality. It might become one day, but your RTG powered cocoon is not going to invent and perfect it for you while you are asleep.

You're making a big bet that people in the far future will look at your preserved body as a resource to cherish, not one to be exploited.

Imagine you had an opportunity to make an investment. The performance odds of this investment are: 1) a 10% change of making 10 times your money, 2) a 60% chance of doubling your money, and 3) a 30% chance of losing ALL your money (not just the investment amount, but going completely bankrupt) and having your life completely ruined. Would you take that investment?

Of course these numbers are made up, but from what I've seen in life, it's probably not that far off: there's a non-zero, and fairly significant chance, of having a really awful kid that really screws up your life. If you're highly risk-averse, it's understandable I think why you might want to pass. Remember, estimates for sociopathy in the general population are 5-10%.

The population-level extinction event is coming if we don't change course.

I’m not sure what you are talking about, but “comatose” and “brain dead” are two very different states. If you are brain dead you are not comatose.

For some reason knowing that other animals exist just for the sake of existing and even sleep off when life gets harder gives a new perspective. I feel that we humans use too much knowledge and complicate problems even when there's a simple solution. I think that our bodies are highly intelligent and humans intrude a lot in it's natural functioning by inventing too much techniques and methods. Like I want to stay awake, drink coffee. Drink coffee, get insomnia. Insomnia leads to unhappiness. Take insomnia meds, get withdrawals. Generating more problems along the way while forgetting what the solutions were even for in the first place. If we just listened to our bodies signs, it pretty much tells us why you you are lethargic and need coffee in the first place.

Sometimes we should just trust nature to do it's work. This article was a refreshing read.

With the amount of technology today, we should be the happiest, wealthiest generation alive.

My grandmother, born in the 1920s, still experienced hunger as a child, fled from the Russians through the ruins of bombed out cities, and, up until not too long ago, had to make a fire in order to have warm water for the bathtub. But I’ve never heard the word “depression” from her even once. Then you look at today’s younger generations, and you see it everywhere.

When you bought a roll of bread 40 years ago, you would be entering a shop owned by the baker. You would be getting a roll that was made by hand with local ingredients. And the woman at the counter would be friendly and relaxed, and she would be earning enough doing this simple job to have a normal family. Today, when I want to buy a roll, I enter a shop that heats up rolls that they get from an industrial scale bakery. It costs about 5 to 10 times as much. And the woman standing at the counter is of the lowest socioeconomic status, because the salary she gets for her work is barely enough to afford her some tiny apartment.

I would be able to except that many things just don’t change, and every generation has its problems. But if we believe the mantra that progress in technology makes us happier and wealthier than those that came before, I think we’re kidding ourselves. That, to me, seems more and more like a modern form of organized religion. And I’m not sure who the priests are.

The pandemic rate which caused (rightly) lots of angst and introspection was 14.3.

We should investigate what is causing increased levels of depression currently but we shouldn’t assume it was absent in other generations when we do it.

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...

They knew what suffering was, and arguably did more of it. But very few of them thought of it as a primarily medical problem, one requiring intervention by professionals, medicine, and so on. People who think of their problems in this newer way handle them differently, and not always better.

If I had to summarize my own thoughts about it, it’s ownership, community/relationships, and hardships/challenges that can be overcome through hard work.

Modern technology counter intuitively gives us very little agency everything is owned by faceless/soulless corporations, technology “connects us” in unparalleled ways but also isolates us, and while life has and likely will always be hard for the majority there is a feeling of invisible prisons enabled through technology that no amount of hard work can overcome.

Tangent:

I remember my mother, in the 1980s, getting a parking ticket. So she had to go to the local police officer. We were a tiny town, a village almost. But there was a police station. And the officer was in charge of this case. He talked to my mother. She explained. And he ended up saying that in this case, he’d be willing to make an exception.

Fast forward to today. I drive to school in the morning. There’s a van at the side of the road. It’s not even police; some kind of contractor. Out on the road, there’s a fancy radar/speed trap thing. They probably paid €100,000 of taxpayer money for it, plus a servicing contract. Were probably promised that it’s gonna pay for itself within two years. And now the two dudes sit inside the van. The machine is doing the work. Tickets are being sent out automatically by a computer system. And there is literally nobody who owns the process.

It is an abstract machinery, turning citizens into objects.

My mother and the policeman, as a result of the encounter, had reached an understanding. They became partners in the higher principle. There was a true connection between the citizens and the state. The state had a face, and there was a local representative who was in charge.

Today, the state has no face. Even the judges in the legal system just act as tiny wheels in the machinery. It’s hard to find anyone whoever owns anything. Much less owns up to anything.

And so it is when PayPal or coinbase accounts get frozen, or social media accounts get suspended without notice or explanation, Gmail accounts get hacked or deleted in freak occurrences. Good luck getting any help, there’s no one in charge, the best you can hope for is social media shamming which only works when you already have influence.

Firstly, no one spoke about depression, because it as a condition was not recognized. It doesn't mean people didn't feel depressed.

Secondly, this time supporting your argument, perhaps when people go through terrible things in their childhood, they grow resilient towards adversity. If you know things can get a lot worse, you don't really worry about minor things.

That's inherently very different to realizing that the golden era has basically passed and it's only gonna get worse from here, societally speaking.

None of the inherent issues our societies has had were solved. They've just become worse with every decade, inequality in particular has gotten worse with every technological advance, and it'd expect it to get meaningfully worse with LLMs now, too.

A select few will still get meaningfully richer, but - on average - their prospects for their future are a complete dumpster fire.

You (leobg) are likely right that people a few hundred years ago probably wouldn't have become depressed like Gen Z, Alpha and likely soon Beta too... But they'd probably long since taken up their arms, wiping out a good chunk of the population and consequently redistributing wealth to the survivers. Do you honestly think that'd be better for us?

The war leaders certainly didn't literally distribute wealth to the conscripted people. Instead you had plundering, with the winners simply taking things and the dead were ... Well, outta the picture, consequently the survivors had the opportunity to become skilled craftsman and marry after their return, as most didn't survive (even if their side won).

Let's say a farmer family's children were all conscripted. 5 left and 2 returned. Before the war, 4 had few prospects. After the war, both will have prospects, one to succeed the farm and the other one as the husband to another farm that didn't have anyone return.

Replace the word wealth with prosperity and the same applies for your later example. The leader is just someone you can’t see, touch, or hear so is harder to displace.

Only if you think that wealth is what makes people happy, but we just need to take a look at all the unhappy wealthy people all around us to see that that is not the case. Poverty can make people unhappy of course, especially the stress that comes from uncertainty. But prosperity alone is not sufficient for happiness. Generations of social researchers and philosophers have thrown themselves at this problem.

With the current amount of technology we could put a roof over people's head, provide clean water and safe foods and medicines. This has nothing to do with owning a Lamborghini or eating a Michelin star restaurant, which would indeed count as superfluous wealth that doesn't actually improve happiness.

Most people with money are old, because that's how you get money in general: provide value over a long period of time. But they would probably all trade that money for being 22 again, and having a lifetime ahead.

[1]: https://www.science.org/content/article/exploding-ants-sacri...

Just like the winegrowers, who, living in a garden not cultivated by them, had to understand and feel that they were in immeasurable debt to the landlord, people must also understand and feel that from the day of their birth until their death, they are always in immeasurable debt to someone: to those who lived before them, to their contemporaries, and to those yet to come; to that which was, is, and will be the beginning of everything. They must understand that with every hour of their life, as they accept life, they reinforce this obligation that binds them to life and its origin, and that therefore, the person who denies this obligation and lives for themselves, in trying to preserve their personal life, ultimately destroys it.

This is precisely what Christ repeated many times.

The true life is only that which continues the past life and contributes to the salvation of the present and future life.

This also asks for a search for better social technology, as opposed to asserting that we must slow down the search for better physical technology because the social technology isn't keeping up.

With industrial baking, modern fertilizers, farming automation, global container shipping, and all of that, one would reasonably expect it to have gotten significantly cheaper.

This has come into hyper clarity for me ever since transitioning to minimalist shoes/sandals ten years ago and foregoing all caffeinated beverages this past December.

It's actually quite insane to think about how accessible coffee is and how much of our modern economy relies on people consuming it.

Consulting, big law, investment banks and lots of blue collar jobs (for example) rely on workers pulling 12+ hour days to do what mostly amounts to eye-watering amounts of paperwork. Given that sleep naturally becomes an afterthought when working under these conditions and showing any signs of weakness is frowned upon, coffee, sodas and energy drinks are all but required to function.

Similar deal with shoes. Feet are incredibly complex systems that are designed to withstand lots of abuse. Unfortunately, big shoe companies built their fortunes off of selling shoes that are great for sports but terrible for everyday use. Instead of pushing more minimal shoes that counteract weakening feet while being simpler to make, they push orthotics and shoes with more advanced technology and thicker sole stack.

It's depressing to think about, so I try not to!

I highly recommend reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. It was written in the ‘60s about how technology influences the direction of humanity and all the unintended consequences that come from that, and how we turn to more technology to solve those problems. It was a very prescient book.

- Control, also profit

- Control, albeit in a less direct form than housing also data and profit

- The pretense of caring about privacy issues, so politics and control

- Profit/control

If you ask, "why?" for almost anything in today's society it'll come down to money/power, which are functionally mostly the same thing.

Exceptions exist sure, but they are called exceptions for a reason.

My perspective at least, i'm sure others think differently.

Humans actually utilize quite a big chunk of the biomass.

Funnily enough, the livestock population weighs about twice as much as the human population.

There are only a few other terrestrial animals of comparable biomass with humans, e.g. ants and termites.

"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" Matthew 6:26

Here in the valley of Oregon, we don’t get snow often or for very long, but one late winter/early spring we suddenly got 1-2 feet snow cover for at least 3 days. I’ll never forget the few dozen birds I saw dead on the side of the roads because they couldn’t get to food.

After the Notre Dam fire someone on Twitter was claiming a miracle because the golden (statues I think?) had survived. Someone then pointed out that the melting point of gold is several hundred degrees above the temperature of a wood fire.

A while ago I was having a discussion, and someone asserted that synthetic fertilizers are necessary because composting doesn't scale.

And my reaction was, surely composting scales to an entire biosphere - like, empirically we know this, right? There was a massive biosphere long before there was a Fritz Haber. Surely it's that we don't have the required technology and wisdom to create supply chains that can run as closed loops and accept inputs that aren't so rich and concentrated?

I don't want to argue this point, there are definitely good counterarguments that could be made, but I'm just trying to illustrate the shift in perspective I think the commenter may have been going for rather than change the topic.

By definition, yes.

> There was a massive biosphere long before there was a Fritz Haber.

There are about five times more humans today than there were when Fritz Haber invented his process.

The question is not “will there be an ecosystem”. Of course there will be. The question is are you ok with 4 out of 5 person potentially starving to death.

> Surely it's that we don't have the required technology and wisdom…

Synthetic fertilizers is the required technology and accepting that is the wisdom.

Again, I don't want to get into a debate about agriculture, I'm trying to discuss the quote, but these are the types of assumptions I'm suggesting are worth questioning.

The question is, are there ways to exert less control and get better outcomes? I'm not suggesting we let 80% of people starve. I'm suggesting we not be obsequious to the logic of the technology we've already built, when deciding on what to build next. (I elaborate in a cousin comment.)

Consider that in the extreme, if you have a linear supply chain with Haber-Bosch on one end and a landfill on the other - when you scale to enough people, you will also have mass starvation. Haber-Bosch isn't a "wisdom we accept" or "the" definitive technology. It has tremendous application, but it isn't magic. We're not simply done innovating in this area.

I still think it's doable (but not if we also want to feed many times our mass in lifestock), but it's not easy.

What got you here might not get you there. You can go really far with a monolithic web app running on top of a relational database. But if you scale far enough, you'll need to pull some pieces out and hook them up to databases with relaxed constraints.

There are good engineering reasons for us to do things the way we do them, and maybe it was the only feasible way for us to get to this point. But presumably if we continue to grow, we will enter a different phase with a different set of tradeoffs. That phase will probably involve exerting less control, it will probably also involve worse unit economics, but may also scale further with fewer externalities.

Would you say the same about great works of fiction, or old fairy tales that for some reason keep grabbing our attention and we repeat them for generations? That they're just falsehoods because duh, frogs obviously can't talk? Or can they have some deeper meaning? Stating facts is not the only way to describe the world.

Do you thing religious followers, such as Matthew, see god/heaven/etc as being merely a metaphor?

> That they're just falsehoods because duh

per previous poster: "laws and government don’t tell you how the world works"

works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts, as much of the contents of the Bible does - but some things in there are meant to be at least partially literal, such as the existence of a divine being that created the world.

What's the greater message behind "God takes care of lesser creatures" when there's no proof of such a thing? That things will generally turn out alright if you don't plan ahead (demonstratably bad advice)..

No, I'm not suggesting that. The alternatives to just reporting facts are more than "merely a metaphor".

> works of fiction doesn't purport to either. They might have morals, or subtexts

Disagree - I think they distill patterns from the factual and present them in the form of stories, encoded in the structure of the story. If you're a materialist you might say that the story is less true than the factual manifestations of the patterns, I'd say it's more true; and that it's telling something about the world.

> What's the greater message

We're debating if zero even exists, don't ask me about analysis ;)

It’s a medieval gaslightenment and it would be great if people kept it private at least.

PS. purpose is different from meaning, the latter is just a medium for purpose and may be arbitrary.

I think it's a misguided sentiment of its time, we know today that birds also bust ass in their own birdy ways to live. We all bust ass.

However, as Ecclesiastes 1:9 says, "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."

Trends and themes often resurface on Reddit, where discussions can cyclically return to religious topics or quotes.

If you are open minded about/not hostile to religion (in general or a particular religion) you will find a lot of wisdom in religious works. Not just "scriptures" but a lot else, written from ancient times to contemporary.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.

And adhere to that culture before complaining about others

Indeed! One might even say "you hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye."

(I don't follow or read reddit, unless a search for something specific leads me to a particular page, so I'm clueless about this and curious to know more)

Maybe we need this for dogs, so their lifespan isn't substantially squandered when their owners are at work.

Dogs are usually very social. If they are left alone they will often be very unhappy. I think what was being suggested was that if a dog that was going to be left alone for half the day each work day could be "turned off" during that time so it would not experience those hours of loneliness it would make the dog's life happier.