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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • If ChatGPT was applying for the job:

    Thought about body made of lip skin for 7 seconds

    Lip skin is extremely thin, lacks most sweat glands and hair follicles, and has capillaries near the surface. If your entire body were covered with lip skin, you’d lose much of your normal protective barrier. You’d be extremely vulnerable to dehydration, temperature changes, and infections, and your skin would likely dry and crack constantly without constant moisturizing. You’d also appear reddish or pinkish all over, and physical contact could be painfully sensitive. Overall, such a condition would be debilitating and practically unlivable.










  • Fun fact: according to our models the photon doesn’t exactly travel in a straight line and hit the eye of the cow. It’s a probability wave that spreads out spherically across an astronomical range. It might as well “hit” Mars instead of the Earth. What actually happens is that the huge wave randomly interacts with the eye of the cow. At that time the probability collapses into a certainty (the photon), making it impossible for the wave to interact with anything elsewhere in the universe.

    Edit: or if you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation, the wave interacts with both Mars and the Earth. When the wave reaches the eye of the cow, a new series of waves ripple out. They contain the effects of a photon interaction, but the original (standing) wave before the interaction also remains. We can make a slice of the multiverse in which the cow’s brain perceives the photon, and another slice in which there was no interaction and the cow didn’t see it. Because of how consciousness is tied to a single chain of events, the cow as a matter of experience doesn’t both see and not see the photon. Rather it’s as if there are two separate experiences that exist independent of each other.




  • I like how you think but I’m not sure if that alone will hold water. A variable can vary wildly even though it’s not very relevant to the property you’re interested in, and PCA would consider such a variable to be very significant. Perhaps a neural network could find a latent space. But ideally we want the components to have some intuitive meaning for humans.


  • I’ve been thinking about this now and again. IMO gender, if one insists on tracking it at all (which I mostly find counterproductive), would need to be a vector / tuple of floating-point values. The components would be something like:

    1. Sexual Development Index: Encodes chromosomal sex, genitalia, and other primary sexual characteristics (X/Y chromosome ratio).
    2. Hormonal Balance & Secondary Sexual Characteristics: Combines hormonal levels and the resulting secondary traits (body hair, muscle mass, etc.).
    3. Brain Structure: A dimension indicating how a person’s brain structure aligns with typical male or female patterns.
    4. Gender Identity: A measure of self-identified gender, representing the psychological and social dimension.
    5. Fertility/Intersex Traits: A combined measure of fertility potential and the presence of intersex traits (e.g., ambiguous genitalia, mixed gonadal structures, etc.).

    Ideally it would track the specific genes that code for all of the above factors, but unfortunately science hasn’t got those down yet.