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Yup, I too am surprised this hasn't (at least by my awareness) entered the zeitgeist.

At work I'm putting together an MCP server that more easily exposes our legume data for model consumption, and part of the insane value-add has been the curatorial work that our collaborators at USDA put into the data over years. For example, genome data (i.e. nucleic acid fastas) include relevant metadata such as their DOIs, so models can fetch and read the original papers (if they're open access, of course).

This goes a long way to boosting the intelligence/usefulness of these systems for research.


Yeah, you have to do the lateral thinking yourself. But the LLMs can do the work of going into a single-focus rabbit hole quite quickly.

Thanks for the links, I had missed those. Also:

> Our democratic systems, laws, etc. are not built to do that, they are built on the idea of intrinsic stability of our world where incremental improvements do not need cutting through what was decided before.

Without totally derailing the thread, this is also obviously why climate and biosphere collapse is not (and likely will continue not) to be addressed, e.g. Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects


Ironically, the origin of "cognitive dissonance" as a concept is attributable to Leon Festinger who (with others) studied a UFO cult called The Seekers in the 1950s who believed in imminent apocalypse. As other commenters have noted, pushing the date back was inevitable. Time is a flat circle and we repeat the mistakes of our ancestors just with different coats of paint...


ArrayCast is a great podcast and I've enjoyed it quite a lot since it started. Listening to people talk about APL/K/J/BQN/etc is a great way to learn about the array languages. Maybe it's just me but hearing people use the glyphs in conversation went a long way to building intuition with how to think in arrays, so to speak.

Wherever you are in cyberspace: hi Marshall!!


> Their behaviour has been more akin to a non-profit. Great for us, not so great for them in the long run.

This is particularly amusing when considering they helped start the Open Container Initiative with others back in 2015.

What if Docker "the company" was just a long con to use VC bux to fund open source? I say mostly in jest.


Only because with Google open sourcing Kubernetes, it was a decision on still be able to play the game, or be left completely out, helping with OCI was a survival decision.

As proven later when Kubernetes became container runtime agnostic.


You don't have to do that? I touched upon it in the first section of the post. All you need is a valid phone number, which you can use throwaway trial SIM cards for.


> Our first hurdle is the account creation setup

Account creation requires biometric face-scan.


No it doesn't? Have you used Hinge? I created a fake account using a trial SIM card and stock photos lol.


Tons of posts on Reddit disagree with you:

https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/SwipeHelper/search?q=hinge+sel...

Maybe you're getting lucky and not tickling their risk-based nonsense, but now that this article has been posted they'll certainly crank that knob up to 11.


Ah, I see, you're referring to this: https://help.hinge.co/hc/en-us/articles/10303221435539-What-...

You probably don't use Hinge. The verification is not necessary at all. It's merely used to "verify" your identity to other users. It has no bearing on what I cover in the post.


> Note: In certain regions, Hinge requires users to complete a biometric Face Check™


Interesting! Well, I'm definitely not in whatever those regions are. Presumably if a threat actor was motivated enough this would be fairly easily circumvented :]

Edit: e.g. via residential proxy IPs and a bunch of cheap Android phones


Regarding your first point, extraction of the headers could be trivially automated. Also, using Hinge's CDN (which I think is CloudFlare and/or AWS) is more viable imo, as you don't need to provide headers to GET the files. If that also applies to user-uploaded videos then I do think there's some meat on this bone. But as the other user who replied to you pointed out, this was mostly for nerdy delight.

Also thanks for bringing up the blockchain C2 use, that's cool and news to me.


I want to thank you and the other user (hobofan) for pointing out the use of crypto currencies as C2s. I do bioinformatics for a living, not infosec, so that's another fun little rabbit hole for me to go on...


Hey I actually created something like this when I was once curious. Its called nanotimestamps

I found it when I realized that nano had 0 fees and I realized that by using a nano vanity address generator, I can embed data into a series of transactions and then basically embed data into the chain (for free) since there is 0 gas fees

Now I created it as a way of getting timestamps of any data onto the chain but you can embed any information and create c2c's on top of that

There is also a way that I vibe coded once to embed data directly into the vanity address and so you can lose 10^-32 nano or basically negligble which is more efficient as well

If you have any questions, I'd love to answer (also even if I like the tech, I think that crypto's fundamentally really really volatile and I prefer things like index funds being honest)


Cool! I wasn't aware of nano; your point about the gas fees is really compelling, as there's a lot of stuff I've wanted to try building on Ethereum et al that I just haven't done because I can't get over the hurdle of paying transaction costs lol.

Is this you? https://github.com/Koeng101/nanotimestamps

> also even if I like the tech, I think that crypto's fundamentally really really volatile and I prefer things like index funds being honest

At the risk of derailing the thread, I agree. However, I think "tokenization" is probably crypto's killer app if the messy problem of legal finality rectifying assets on the blockchain with their real-world counterparts can be solved. I touched upon this in a separate post on my blog.


Oh yeah another point, see my other comment as well but if you need to start with nano, all you need is a faucet which you can get for literally free and that's all you need for you to experiment with my project.

You really don't need to spend any money at all and that's actually how I built it. I recommend you to contact me if you wish to run it locally for experiments purposes as it requires bao and nano-vanity-generator, you can take the look at the code

Also I would like to disclose that the code is AI generated. I have no expertise in this field but I found this idea fascinating and saw nobody doing it so did it. But still, I am just proud of my idea and I get good reception whenever I mention this idea (which is quite a lot, tbh I am proud of it a little) so yeah, I love talking about this project's idea fascinating as well and I have expanded upon this work privately to even build ways of creating ones own tokens on top of nano etc. but creating wallet etc. and more abstractions felt wrong and I just wanted to prove it was possible

To be honest, you creating a c2 server on hinge was similar to this feeling of "proving" as well.

To me, its just that if I can prove something, then I can figure out the practical uses of it later (like discussing it right now) etc.

I guess we both are similar in the "proving" way reading your article which is nice to hear, Let me know if you have any questions as I would love to answer!


> Is this you? https://github.com/Koeng101/nanotimestamps

No its not, I have the domain nanotimestamps.org but its not really doing much (its called laziness from my side)

https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/nanotimestamp/blob/main...

Here you go! (the video starts as a gif but there is also a .mp4)

Ended up finding that the best way to upload videos is probably github wiki pages

https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/nanotimestamp/wiki

So let me know how you like this project, Y'know making this project had to make me build some abstractions which you might be interested to look at as well and could be used for multiple purposes.

Create an issue in my github repo if you want to talk to me if you have any questions as well and I would love to answer there and here as well if you wish! Glad my project could be of interest to ya! If you have any use cases for my project, then let me know as well

have a nice day! Looking forward to talk to ya


If you want the Ethereum VM but with lower tx costs, try one of the L2s.


Any L2 you'd recommend? The last time I dipped my toe in that world I only bothered with L1s like Ethereum, Solana, etc.


Have a look at L2BEAT - any L2 EVM in the top 10 is fine (disclosure: I work for an L2). Check their native token price to understand gas price and onboarding complexity. Some L2s use ETH bridged from Ethereum rather than a native token.


If you are interested in cheap L1's which aren't restricted like nano, I can recommend stellar, (sei?) etc. although these are L1's

If you are interested in L2's, polygon's cheap as well fwiw


+1 for Polygon. Very cheap.


Annual lupin (L. angustifolius and L. albus) have been bred for better yields and low alkaloids. There are some existing commercial varieties. Australia is a large producer.

From an economic perspective, the yields on perennial lupin are just too low. Something that plant breeding could hopefully address long term.

Apparently the Land Institute already investigated it (https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/legumes/) and decided on sainfoin instead of lupin. I reached out some time back to ask why, because I was curious if their research found yield or alkaloid content too difficult to control for. Never got a reply.


In terms of commercial farming, it's probably desirable to have the better varieties. Maybe get some of those seeds from Australia then for Iceland. Have variety.

Mostly just a suggestion for the issue of "lots of a plants, that we don't especially want." At least it's edible. According to a quick search, it cost apparently $30 to $40 dollars per acre to harvest an existing field (Purdue custom rates survey for combines, obviously no input costs considered, Iceland's maybe different).[1] Maybe add a bit further for cutting, raking, windrowing, and threshing parts.

Either way, with an existing field you just want to get rid of, hiring a combine and running it over the field is not that expensive (based on the available prices). Throw it all in a pond, pool, or barrel and let it soak until they're safe to eat. Not horribly expensive.

On the sainfoin thing, probably just easier and less work for their objectives. WP says sainfoin's already "highly nutritious plants" used for a long time for forage and nectar production.

Frankly, they seem like a trade-off personally, since Lupin varieties grow rapidly in horrible climates and terrain. Sainfoin is apparently finicky. "difficult to establish as pasture, not persistent in grassland, do not recover well from overgrazing." Lupin is probably a better choice for anything in the artic, sub-arctic, tundra, and taiga biomes (which is most of Iceland).

[1] https://www.farmprogress.com/harvest/custom-harvesting-could...


That's true, the existing power infra (substation, etc) is big and would cost a pretty penny to build greenfield.

But the water is also right there and more than plentiful. In this case it pays to step back and look at the wider strategic value.

If anything, I want to inspire in people's minds a more thoughtful approach to locating techno-industrial infrastructure. To take a page from permaculture, we can work with the landscape instead of against it.

All that being said, I wish this was something other than a data center. Nuclear power, a second Micron plant, please anything but this!


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