friendly & curious introvert with too many interests “start where you are, use what you have, do what you can” also on bsky @ https://nitter.cf/t.co/z6rZGFfzVB
steppelandia
Joined December 2019
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i can believe in the akiya trap as old houses outside of japan are similar money sinks. but on demographics alone there should be real deals out there that aren't terrible. assuming regulations vary locally there should be areas more and less friendly to DIY & cheaper repairs
Japanese sister in law bought an akiya. She bought a 100 year old house on some land on the cheap but then had dump over 5m yen of her own money to fix up the place.
Over 5 years later and she’s still constantly putting in her own money and time in the house. Talked to her recently and she told me she’s getting married and giving up on the house.
I know it sounds romantic to buy an Akiya in the Inaka but most are time and money sinks. Most of the Akiya YouTubers seem to embrace DIY as a hobby and see the work they do on their house as good content for their YouTube channel
Jean 🍌 Leon retweeted
According to this 130 year old book from an Aomori overstock bin, Ronald McDonald, an Oregonian, wanted into Japan so bad he purposefully shipwrecked himself off the coast of Hokkaido and became an English teacher. I believe this makes Ronald McDonald the first weeaboo ALT.
maybe not the largest issue with AGI/RSI around the corner, but the iran war is following the conventional bad end scenario that made everyone sane think would serve as an incentive to avoid it. houthis are doing to saudis what ukraine is doing to russia.
with the transition away from fossile fuels there was always the lingering issue of how to keep refineries and other infrastructure with no future around just long enough and avoid premature shutdowns, let alone building more of it. the wars made this problem much more acute...
wow i had no idea tiny radiotags for butterflies exist. ok maybe not tiny from a butterfly's perspective: "Solar-powered radio tag (0.06 grams, approximately 10% the 0.5-0.6 gram mass of the butterfly)."
knew this could not be a good day with this kind of brainfog, but it turned into one of those days where i am particularly tired of my own shit
babe, would you still love me if i turned into a human-derived cortical organoid living in a mouse brain?
An extraordinary @Nature paper has just landed from the lab of @Sergiu_P_Pasca at @Stanford - led by Konstantin Kaganovsky. They have found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells. This human-derived cortical graft integrates deeply with the host nervous system, supporting organised neural activity and behaviour.
This study is a milestone in synthetic biology and chimera research. It has the potential to generate multiple medical breakthroughs by providing an enhanced biological model of human brain tissue that allows behavioural as well as neural and genetic assays.
The Stanford team have been exceptionally thorough and proactive in addressing ethical concerns that comes from this frontier work. But their pioneering work nonetheless raises many open questions: are the xenocortical mice conscious? Do they have any human-like properties of consciousness or cognition?
@NitaFarahany and I will be addressing some of these questions in a forthcoming commentary - where we'll also offer an ethically-informed roadmap to guide this important research as it progresses. In this context, "pacing the frontier" really does make sense 😉
Read the Stanford @nature paper here, and buckle up. It's wild. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
my position on AI is as follows:
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ALT https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10062
Jean 🍌 Leon retweeted
An underrated positive externality of public transit is that it’s a honeypot for identifying everyone who’d commit a crime for literally $3. Done thoroughly, it’s a massive improvement for public order.
Mamdani’s NYPD btw. This could be handled via a ticket with a fine payable to MTA, or even a summons written on the spot with a court date. Instead, officers are given permission to make custodial arrests, haul ppl into central booking, and charge them w/ A Misdemeanors over $3.
