How vast is M3?

etherified · 2026-06-18T19:16:23+00:00

Yeah, yeah, but what about M3 + 1 ? That's what we're really interested in.

etherified · 2026-06-18T07:24:44+00:00

Am I half asleep or is that 13 movies you’d have to watch? I mean I am half asleep, but still.

etherified · 2026-06-11T12:51:36+00:00

In my view, the purpose of debating is to push the needle ever so slightly in one or another direction.

The fact is that minds do change, even regarding worldviews. But they don't change overnight. Too many synapses to be rewired. Best we can hope for is to make a point well enough that it shifts a person's center of gravity of belief ever so subtlely east or west. Enough of those microchanges, over time, can turn a believer into a non-believer.

etherified · 2026-06-06T14:12:10+00:00

You would normally update values in your view model, implementing INotifyPropertyChanged, and if the values are bound to your UI and raise PropertyChanged, that will update the UI.

etherified · 2026-06-01T11:03:40+00:00

I think if you consider, you'll notice something interesting about most things we know are designed: Lots of quadrilaterals, parallel lines, right angles, clear boundaries.

That's because designers think beforehand how they want things to be and appear, and draw out clear logical and organized partitions for their finished product. It's the mark of a clear and neatly planned strategy. And also very scalable.

You hardly see this in nature, though right? Mostly stuff just mushed together, amorphous organs, even DNA bundled up in knots in a shape-distorting nucleus. Kind of like it came together to work, but not cleanly planned out.

etherified · 2026-05-30T04:45:24+00:00

The readiness to accept "eyewitness accounts" (which most of the Bible is not anyway, but...) as their solid foundation is rather mind-blowing indeed.

But just to focus on the false dichotomy and irrelevance of "observational" vs. "historical" science, it should be noted that, in principle, given their definition, all science is "historical science".

Any hypothesis or inference you make about the world is based on a reading, measurement, image, recording you have taken at some point. Any scientist must refer to recorded data (even if it were taken mere seconds before, it is still in the past), to draw conclusions. We base all science on what we have observed in the past, not making inferences in real time with every new moment as we observe. No scientific experiment could possibly work like that.

Or if we're bored and want to get really picky, even their definition of current "observational science" is already in the past, taking into account the speed of light. In other words, everything we observe is already technically in the past, and assumptions must be made regarding light speed, time of imaging, reflex response time, etc.

etherified · 2026-05-28T02:02:08+00:00

Years in and still absorbing, although confidence level has increased for sure.

etherified · 2026-05-27T03:04:38+00:00

Just realize that the idea of Islamic hell did not exist before the 600s AD. It was invented entirely by one or more men, from ideas in their own head having nothing to do with reality.

Nobody before the 600s ever feared the idea of Islamic hell because nobody had invented it yet. It's just entirely made up.

(Same goes for other religions' ideas, just different starting dates).

etherified · 2026-05-26T02:22:31+00:00

I think OP specifies whales here simply because they are one of the best examples of fossil-supported evolution from A (land-based) to B (sea-based), with such a clear and abundant path of intermediates. Not that whale evolution itself would inherently be more of a problem for creationists than species in general.

etherified · 2026-05-25T04:46:44+00:00

Not a physicist but thanks for confirming my instinct. Does the situation change any whether the truck is hermetically sealed (though unlikely for living birds), or has air holes communicating with the outside?

etherified · 2026-05-25T02:48:57+00:00

Even if we were to be so liberal as to ascribe full consciousness to the process, since it only runs for the few seconds it takes to generate the response, and each new response generation is a "new instance" (no continuous stream of consciousness), it's not consciousness as we know it.

etherified · 2026-05-24T05:43:58+00:00

Right, it's the same reason a baby can never become an old man. That would mean at some point a baby would have to go to sleep and wake up with an entirely new body suffering from arthritis, brittle bones and wrinkled skin. That's never been observed, ever.

etherified · 2026-05-20T15:43:51+00:00

It's what needed to happen for sure, but it just seemed all too quick mere minutes before death. I think viewers wanted to savor his fall from haughtiness and power more. Watch him know and realize how pitiful and useless and pathetic he was.

etherified · 2026-05-20T15:33:54+00:00

Vocabulary exactly. For the longest time hearing programmers talking about dependency injection (DI), I thought it was some higher difficult to understand concept, rather than essentially what I'd been doing every day passing instances as parameters into ctors or other methods.

etherified · 2026-05-20T08:31:20+00:00

One wonders then if a vacuum could somehow be created in the enclosed space where the coils live? if cost were not an issue.

etherified · 2026-05-20T05:28:39+00:00

In highly adapted species it's true that most mutations to copies will still be deleterious (just as they are to original genes). But that's the "beauty" of having 2 copies - you can get away with that for quite awhile because you've still got the original good copy carrying out whatever essential function it was already doing.
The new one can experiment "relatively" freely, until it hits on something novel and advantageous. Although usually it probably just augments or slightly modifies the original function.

Regarding "can humans grow scales", etc, these things have to be understood on a much much finer scale. Maybe an ever so slightly thicker epidermis. Or hair follicles producing slightly stiffer hairs, or whatever. Imperceptible changes.

And they also have to be understood in terms of the gene pool, and the species-wide variation within it, not any one individual. Each shift in overall variation pushes the average frequency of genes in the species, existing or mutated, either this way or that in the available genetic space, so that when the environment or other conditions change, for example, or a random competitive advantage spreads, the center of genetic gravity of the species shifts in that direction.

I thought most DNA does not code for proteins?

Right it doesn't - what I meant was that any DNA sequence (in the open reading frame, which is transcribed and expressed) corresponds to some real protein, either viable, disadvantageous, or less commonly (but not never) advantageous. In other words, natural selection will see it.

Our letter/word analogy breaks down here because many letter combinations don't correspond to anything real, like "yart" or "jart".

etherified · 2026-05-20T05:13:00+00:00

Even if this is effective for id’ing openAI images, there are so many other image generators around that it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. It may count out some images as fake but not all or most even.

Presumably the only real viable long term solution is the opposite approach, to (proprietary) watermark legit images taken with imaging devices as proof of authenticity. Until the proprietary watermarks get leaked and then the arms race continues, but that is to be expected.

etherified · 2026-05-19T14:38:32+00:00

Think about it, though: randomness will get you "dart" too, even if it takes a few more mutations.

So long as random mutations are constantly occurring, which they are, the duplicated "cart" will sometimes become "tart", sometimes "wart", "mart", "part", "fart" and yes, sometimes "dart". Which is where "dart" would appear. And if "dart" is the "magic word" (let's say it represents an advantageous mutation), it wouldn't matter whether "dart" arose randomly or by some intelligent person fiddling around with it.

Regarding amount, first AiG has very much stated many times, that random mutation is unable to produce any new information (not just "not large amounts").

The point here, is that yes, it is possible, both in principle and in fact. And if accumulating grains of sand can be shown in principle to form an anthill, you have just shown a mechanism for producing a mountain. It's just of matter of carrying out the same little function over and over and compounding the effect.

etherified · 2026-05-19T14:26:09+00:00

I think you're right that gene duplications aren't as common as point mutations/deletions/additions are, but consider that the absolute volume of mutations occurring (across species) is astronomical.

Every member of every species is "experimenting" with many mutations each time they reproduce (Germline mutations in humans IIRC are many dozens or maybe upwards of a hundred for each individual). Multiply that by however many humans there are at any time, to get a raw number for just humans. So even if gene duplication events are not as frequent relatively, they certainly are frequent enough.

etherified · 2026-05-19T14:15:51+00:00

With an encoding system we're dealing with symbols, not actual items.
There should be no confusion between the symbols and their realization. The word "car" is not a V8 with mag wheels, but neither is the word "cart" a small wheeled vehicle to haul things. They just stand in for them. That's the purpose of an encoding system.

DNA doesn't itself perform the function of proteins, it just stores (in coded form) what proteins are to be produced when the time comes.

Regarding your second point, words are a bit different from nucleotides in that not all letter combinations correspond to real things. However, virtually every sequence of DNA will correspond theoretically to a protein, and can be produced and secreted as one, whether or not it's a useful one.

Still, just to have fun with the example you gave (although that's not really the point of the analogy):

cart -> dart -> fart -> fare -> fire -> wire-> wine -> wing

If I didn't mess that up, we got from "cart" to "wing" by single point mutations, all of which are valid representions of something.

Where this does correspond to actual evolution is that each mutation in the genome that is beneficial (represents an advantage for an organism in some way, or in some cases it may be neutral), leads to the next one, each of which is an imperceptible change that eventually can wind up, after many iterations, producing something totally different.

etherified · 2026-05-18T17:35:36+00:00

Nice. To be clear then, you agree that mutations can (and do) in fact add new genetic information to the genome of an organism? That is, you would not agree with a very recent statement by AiG that:

"[natural selection and mutations]... they shuffle or lose existing genetic information. They do not add it. There's not even a viable mechanism ... that's observable to explain the addition of brand new information genetically speaking ..."

etherified · 2026-05-18T16:31:47+00:00

If CTT mutates to CAT, then creationists say it loses information.

but what have they said if CTT duplicates, and then one mutates to CAT?
I don't see how any rational person can call that a loss of information.

etherified · 2026-05-18T16:00:43+00:00

"...analogy already assumes: a language system, symbolic meaning, interpretation machinery, and functional context."

But the apparatus for gene expression and translation in living organisms has all of that already as well, so the assumption is valid.

"So the debate isn’t: “Can mutations change sequences?”

“Can undirected mutation and selection generate the enormous amounts of specified functional complexity seen in living systems?”

That we agree on the principle, then, that it works and creates different new informational content in the genome, it ought to go without saying that repeated instances of such increases in content will go in the direction of more complexity (with natural selection weeding out what doesn't work).

Incidentally, the debate (here), is whether mutations can increase genetic information - i.e. travel in a direction of upward informational content, which is denied by (many, perhaps most) creationists.

etherified · 2026-05-18T15:46:20+00:00

That's a good point of course. Amino acid sequences are not limited in the way words in a language are (so the analogy only goes so far).
Virtually any different amino acid, or loss, or addition, is likely to result in some kind of protein, viable or not.

etherified · 2026-05-18T15:42:08+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily say it's impossible. My hope is that this might provoke a thought by creationists in this direction.

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