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HF-secreting microorganisms with a tropism for a material extremely common in the human environment? No way that could go wrong.


I'm not asking if it could go "wrong", which is a matter of perspective though.


I guess you can see it can't work because glass is typically the material used by scientists to contain microbes.


Yeah, I just wonder if it is entirely impossible, or there MAY be a way, even if theoretically (so far). Or is it like "it certainly can never happen"?


You imply microorganisms capable of digesting glass, stone, and sand, via a hydrofluoric-acid-concentrating biochemistry that I suspect is not even remotely possible in Earth's atmosphere, which is something of a relief because if it did happen, it would almost certainly end all other life on Earth within a span of years to decades.


I do not imply their existence. My question is, can they exist or is it completely impossible, even theoretically?


Nothing is impossible in theory.


OK, well, is it completely impossible in practice? I just want to get educated! Gosh.


Good to see a couple stories here I first read in Clarkesworld! If you're a fan of the old-school SF magazine as form, there's no better place to go lately, in my view, and Neil's editorial taste is excellent - if you like this anthology, you'll enjoy the magazine, also. Take a look!

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/


Thank you for posting a link to Neil's magazine! I think he's the best short-form editor working in SFF today.


I occasionally encounter a story in Clarkesworld that I don't click with and skip over, but most of them range from like to love (I really hope The Apologists¹ from this month's issue wins some awards).

Even though he makes each issue free to read online, I've been buying it Kobo every month for around a year now to help support the magazine. Too bad the platform doesn't seem to support subscriptions so I don't have to manually buy each issue.

[1] https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/thompson_11_25/


IMO, if you like every single story that a magazine publishes, the editor is playing it too safe and not doing their job properly.

The biggest advantage of short fiction magazines over longer form is that it's a lower stakes way to try out new ideas and ways of telling stories and to expose readers to new authors.

Doing that means taking some risks and publishing some stories that won't always land with readers.


Christian Bale played him in a Michael Lewis movie.


It's the region, or maybe just the GM. The Parkville and Rockville stores aren't like that at all.


What I hear you say is that Brewster's time would be more wisely spent making friends of billionaires.


Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.

The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.

Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.


Eh. If patronage was good enough for da Vinci...


Yes, but from a much older coinage, as documented in (the not entirely uncontroversial) "The New Hacker's Dictionary" compiled by (the likewise) Eric Raymond: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacke...

I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration.



That's good background, but I'm not sure where I'm meant to understand it to disagree with the idea that the "hacker" in "Hacker News" is the same one discussed in TNHD.


How, summing (not averaging) to 58 of 1000 possible points (0-100 in each of ten domains), are we calling this score 58% rather than 5.8%?


It's confusing. The 10 tracks each get 10%. So they add up all the percentages from every track. When you see the first table, 10% on math means "perfect" math basically. Not 10% of math track.


0-10 in each domain. It’s a weird table.


The simple additive scoring here is sus here. It means a model that's perfect on 9/10 axes but scores 0% on Speed (i.e., takes effectively infinite time to produce a result) would be considered "90% AGI".

By this logic, a vast parallel search running on Commodore 64s that produces an answer after BeaverNumber(100) years would be almost AGI, which doesn't pass the sniff test.

A more meaningful metric would be more multiplicative in nature.


Bay Photo, https://bayphoto.com. Good prices, great service; I use them for my own work, at sizes beyond what I can do in my own shop. Next time they disappoint will be the first.


The FileReader web API enables you to make local files available to content running in the browser. This entails a file picker and, depending on the verbiage in your browser UI, that may talk about "upload." That doesn't mean anything is being sent anywhere. See MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileReader

(Or that nothing is; I have not audited this code. But I vouched the parent comment to point out that browsers do offer this capability, and there's nothing facially suspicious in claiming to use it.)


Great explanation!

Maybe I should not use the text ’upload’ to avoid the confusion


Oh, I see it there in your copy. Yes, I would use a different verb there, such as "pick" or "choose" or "select."


“open”


Your memory serves well with respect to the Shuttle. Astronaut Mike Mullane, from his autobiography Riding Rockets:

> Next [after loading the computers with on-orbit software] we opened the payload bay doors. The inside of those doors contained radiators used to dump the heat generated by our electronics into space. If they failed to open, we’d have only a couple hours to get Discovery back on Earth before she fried her brains. But both doors swung open as planned, another milestone passed.


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