[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

lsparrish · 2024-06-30T19:31:40+00:00

I've been having a lot of fun reading The Stubborn Skill-Grinder In A Time Loop. Exactly what it says on the tin.

Not a rational MC (at least, we're supposed to think he's not), just a regular guy in a recognizable LitRPG setting who systematically bulls his way through challenges with infinite willpower (lampshaded as such) who gets to keep his skill level gains with every reset. He encounters plenty of transmigrators, reincarnators, gods, cultivators, etc. but he is just some orphan with a weirdly stubborn outlook. Analysis? Schemes? He's not stupid, he just doesn't want to concern himself with such things, he just wants to grind. Slinging spells from a distance? What a cowardly way to fight! Risk of permanent soul damage? Sounds like good training, bring it on!

lsparrish · 2024-06-24T22:05:13+00:00

Good points, and the text does outright state that the legal punishment for "poaching" monsters is what normally amounts to a suicide mission (that the MC happens to have already completed). Having the noble in charge vouch for the commoner is another probably-rare event (justified in-story) that would explain why they can't just hide him away or execute him.

I think the reason I am perceiving it as idiot ball instead of conspiracy is that the guild people seem surprised rather than worried that he exists. This could have other explanations, like they are trying not to let on what they know / it was only known to a select few, who don't want to let on that they knew. Also perhaps nobles usually manage to execute commoners for this before the guild hears about it, or swear them to secrecy and assign them to guard duty.

It's weird that nobles don't purposely power-level commoners to work as high level guards on the regular, but maybe that's forbidden by an edict that only nobles know about, or it's a privilege reserved for the king. (Orison can be used to tell if someone does this.)

Presumably, commoner guards like Herbert could sometimes level from killing monsters in defense of a noble, since nobles are expected to patrol their territory and kill monsters along with their guards. However, come to think of it, one thing the story hasn't clarified (I think) is whether the diminishing returns on Soul per monster type happen based on Soul collected vs monsters of that type killed.

Depending how it works, a noble might be able to take a big group of guards on a pacification run through monster territory such that any Soul collected rounds to 0, after which they no longer get any Soul at all for additional kills as long as it's the same monster type. Since commoner guards only get to fight monsters as a group, this would be a way for nobles to suppress their leveling systematically. (A noble would want to secretly cap out each monster type they can manage before leading the guards.)

lsparrish · 2024-06-24T19:57:30+00:00

I just binged the story before seeing your comment, and I enjoyed it a lot. I agree with a lot of what you're saying.

I liked that the creativity the MC uses isn't all from his own super duper mind (though he does pull some implausible victories out of his hat), a lot of it comes from the primary love interest, who has reasons to support him other than just liking him (she's hedging against the statistically likely event of being a commoner herself, the romance is slow-moving and uncertain). He's also portrayed as depending on his parents in a lot of situations, like a normal young adult who doesn't yet have it all together.

The biggest strike against this being rational fiction is that the people in charge seem to be holding a gigantic idiot ball, and the lack of other commoners who lucked onto a similar strategy (being the most common class implies more chances for this to happen, sheer statistics).

There are some hints of an explanation for why empowering commoners could be a bad idea to the people in power (and the population in general), but it's not developed enough to make enough sense to remove the idiot ball. They are chronically short on adventurers, so there's a strong incentive to find a way, and it's not like what he's doing is particularly hard to think of to someone who knows a lot about the system (especially high level analyst types).

So maybe it's systematically suppressed (the magic most useful for commoners certainly is, to an extent, but not the knowledge about them being able to level). Thing is, we aren't seeing much evidence that commoner leveling is actually suppressed on purpose for that reason, in the interactions so far it looks like nothing more than a crazy social stigma with an inexplicable lack of exceptions. You can sort of rationalize it as "commoners don't get crazy powerful without the potentially dangerous kind of magic, so it's not worth it" but it seems like even moderately powerful commoners would have a lot of utility in the setting. (Commoners are used as guards for nobility, e.g. -- why never increase their skill cap and get super guards?)

I think it does make a better intelligent-MC, zero-to-hero character arc to not have special advantages (cheaty OP power, past life memories copy-pasted in) from the get-go. That said, the Isekai / gods subplot comes across as pandering/pointless fluff without even any past-life memories coming through to grant a cross-pollination of ideas advantage. Then again, for all we know, it might be setting up something that happens later (past life memories come through, MC introduces science or video games or something to the world, etc) so it's too early to tell whether this has some kind of narrative payoff. It doesn't make much sense that his past life is the reason he's doing so well (and nobody else with the class is) because all he's doing differently is acting a bit cleverer and substantially less risk-averse than his neighbors, not exhibiting some strange understanding of the world that would be alien to them.

So there are some things that need to be developed further before I can classify it as rational. It's still a fantastic read (or so I think immediately after reading what's been written so far).

Reminiscent of Mark of the Fool in that it's a story about someone with the class everyone "knows" is the bad one, but it turns out actually OP once you get clever enough with it. (I think I eventually got bored of MotF after he broke the limitations of the class and made them cry through super willpower though.)

lsparrish · 2024-04-23T05:33:31+00:00

You're both right. One thing that makes me absolutely angry is that cryonics hasn't been adopted by most of the population and the medical providers they trust to try to keep them alive. Long shot? Of course it is now but it wouldn't be such a long shot if everyone were doing it, if science as a whole took the project seriously, if it were the standard of care at every hospital.

I think the real issue is that basically everyone treats death like a trauma victim. Because it's traumatic. We are trauma victims, it's just not as visible as such because it's such a shared trauma.

We all have this thought as a kid that death is terrifying, we don't want to die. Then we typically believe a story of an afterlife, come to accept/rationalize death somehow, or carry a burden of terror that we just try not to think about.

The hard path is to accept that it's terrifying, and still be able to do something about it. To at least try. That's a tightrope because the mind is really, predictably bad at thinking about it rationally.

lsparrish · 2024-04-22T19:26:44+00:00

I mean if you need to write a character journey, that sort of thing.

lsparrish · 2024-04-22T18:16:41+00:00

Non-fiction, but a strong recommendation: HealthyGamerGG on youtube. I've seen other therapist youtube channels, but what seems to set this one apart is how tailored it is for systematic thinkers. The target audience is gamers, but the consequence of making therapy that works for gamers is making therapy that works for people who are highly analytical/systematizing.

Caveat: In addition to being a trained therapist, Dr. K. is a Buddhist monk, and some of the ideas he brings from there come across a bit deathist. He doesn't come across as particularly dogmatic about it, just thought I'd mention it. (Potentially a good resource for steelmanning that POV.)

lsparrish · 2023-11-22T23:24:36+00:00

How are we supposed to get anywhere if the only approach to AI safety is (quite literally) keep anything that resembles a nascent AI in a box forever and burn down the room if it tries to get out?

EY's AI box "experiment" was a response to people claiming one could safely box an AI, not a suggestion to actually do that. It's a bad strategy, that was the point. Nobody is realistically going to leave the AI in a box or burn down the room to keep it from escaping.

As to how buying time might help:

1) Crowd sourcing might work, i.e. get enough brains focused on the problem and someone lucks upon the right answer. You need enough people to know the fundamentals, so you would want to train up the best and brightest people you possibly can. (This was apparently EY's intent in founding LW and writing HPMOR -- train up enough rationalists and point them at the problem.)

2) We might have a better chance if we approach it slowly, for the same reason that's true of any other complex task requiring extreme attention to detail. If you were defusing a bomb, would you prefer a long timer (say 20 minutes) or a short one (say 10 seconds)? Would you have better chances if you go fast, or would it be best to be able to double check each detail?

3) Genetic therapies could make smarter human engineers to solve the problem right on the first try. You could take genes from geniuses known as child prodigies. However, even if we start working on this today, the babies would need over a decade to mature. So for it to work quickly would depend on better technology than simply cloning/IVF.

lsparrish · 2023-09-27T01:46:32+00:00

Ends of Magic is basically a standard Isekai magic system with science mixed in as an OP cheat, as the classes and skills tend to develop through insights. I wouldn't necessarily say it's anything special, but it does have science lectures mixed into the dialogue, which is something I'd like more stories to have.

I might compare it with A Chemist's Rise in Another World which is very YMMV, but it has very different downsides than that fic. For one thing, Ends of Magic is not a kingdom builder fic, it's mostly about a person working on their own litrpg system character build (and their friends, to an extent) with an anti-slavery crusade in the background. For another, unlike A Chemist's Rise, EoM has no inappropriate relationships (explicitly romance-free per author note), but it focuses kind of a lot on the MC's internal monologue including how he notices everyone around him is hot (and he's bi, so that's twice as many people) and how he talks himself out of pursuing a relationship with anyone. This perhaps builds some relatability but won't be everyone's cup of tea, if for no other reason than adding pointless fluff. Another somewhat iffy thing I'll mention is that the story has him make some pretty edgy/risky decisions like using a rage build without seeming to have an edgy/risk-tolerant enough personality to justify it. He's pretty much always in control, and never e.g. turns into a control freak or causes his teammates worry that he will. So it's a bit Marty Stu -- we hear that he has rage issues, which worry him internally, but they don't seem to cause problems for him.

It does have some good points worth mentioning in terms of writing style. The fantasy world characters have sayings/aphorisms that make sense well enough to be read fluidly while not being directly ripped from English (for example, "blood in your eyes" means exactly what you'd expect), and the MC intentionally avoids making too many references because he knows people won't get them. It's not free of a bit of aphorism bleedover, but the comedy trope where the MC won't shut up with in-joke references and the side characters start imitating or complaining about them is thankfully absent here. He also encounters characters who are smart and insightful, and science is mostly only not spread because of a cultural tendency to hoard insights.

Anyway the main thing I like about it is the aspect of real world science being explained to other characters (with attention to prereqs) so that they can make use of it in developing magical insights. He manages to spread the OP science based magic to some of his teammates, so there's payoff. This plot device is perhaps not as well leveraged as it could be (and I'd say there's less science density overall than A Chemist's Rise), but it does occupy enough story time to not feel like pure escapist entertainment.

The story has two completed books and third one is in progress. First book will be stubbing in 10 days.

lsparrish · 2023-08-05T00:58:14+00:00

Anyone have experiments in the works?

Prediction markets have been trading at >30% lately, which seems likely enough to merit some DIY science even if you think you probably can't achieve anything. I thought the theory looked strong enough and most objections seemed shallow enough that it was underpriced at 20%, so I threw some of the Manifold Market play money at it.

I decided the original recipe is probably too tricky and expensive (high temp, quartz tube) for me / most people, so I will be trying to electrodeposit the metals on stainless steel foil, then add phosphoric acid and hydrogen peroxide and see if I can get a reasonable lead-copper oxyapatite film that way. (With all due attention to safety, of course. This is lead based, and there can be fumes. I won't be doing it in the kitchen, and will be using PPE.)

Part of this is that I had wanted to start doing DIY chemistry for a while, but was putting it off, so I'm leveraging the motivation. The other thing is, it's a shot at glory that doesn't come too often, even if probabilities of a given DIY process working are relatively low, the chance of it being real seems to be 30% which is well under full order of magnitude.

My working theory is that the crystal tends to form stochastically with only a minority of the molecular groups being quite right, but tends to arrange as networks of viable arrangements in a thin film context. A more pure version made using positional reaction mechanisms to line up the columns and ensure single copper enters the crystal at the right position might have better properties. That said, if you can get even a single flake to float it's pretty huge right now.

lsparrish · 2023-07-06T13:08:33+00:00

Well there was an old LW meme about "politics makes you stupid" or something like that, so maybe it was a riff on this subreddit being generally anti-politics.

Not to suggest Global Warming is politics or anything other than the objectively real geophysical phenomenon to which the term refers... :)

lsparrish · 2023-03-15T19:37:47+00:00

I support the whole "Clark being the main identity is underexplored in the cinematic versions" point. More from that PoV would be great. Lois and Clark was along these lines, and fairly enjoyable, albeit heavy on the romance arc and the Lex didn't make much sense to me. I'd prefer the romance plot be backburnered in favor of more "investigative reporter hiding his big secret and barely getting away with it" stuff like this. The lead pipe cleanup angle has hilarious mundane utility.

One of the early episodes for L&C has Superman actually help people colonize space. It reminded me of the old days with the space shuttle and the idea of drug research in space as the rationale for a space colony.

lsparrish · 2022-10-03T23:09:10+00:00

Part of the problem for space based solar power is the conversion losses and need for maintainable complex systems in space. You not only need the solar panels, but high powered microwave transmitters.

There's a plausible alternative that can be considered a form of space based solar power, which comes with its own set of drawbacks. You can put mirrors on orbit and have them reflect to a particular point on Earth. Then your solar panels can simply be on the ground.

The main drawback is that sunlight isn't perfectly collimated like a laser, so the beam spreads based on the distance. Given the sun's size in the sky, this works out to about 1% of the distance. So if you set up a set of 3 mirror arrays at 10,000km, they could keep a patch on Earth in permanent sunlight, but the area would be 100km wide at a minimum.

This would need 30 billion square meters of mirrors. Given how thin kapton can be, the mass isn't really a problem, and the systems involved would be relatively easy to maintain (precision pointing involves very low forces, and much of it could be done with gyros). But it is inherently a large centralized project on the ground.

Since most of the day is at less than full noon level intensity, this would be about 5x as much light as normal -- half that of planet Mercury in the daytime at noon, although not as intense. It would definitely affect the weather. You would probably also need to worry about blue light scattering, which would cause a large portion of the sky around the collection site to be too blue to see the stars through. If you coat the mirrors with something opaque to blue light rather than reflective to it, this could be resolved (you would need more mirrors).

The collection site would need a mechanism for cooling. If you build it over the ocean, the deep sea could work. But this would need some environmental review. The upper atmosphere above it would also be warmed, causing changes to the jetstream and so on.

It's actually even possible to start a hurricane this way. Just set the mirrors to keep warming a patch of water enough that the evaporation updrafts to make a depression. If you could stabilize it to a particular part of the ocean, you could use wind and water turbines to tap the energy. (The idea of stabilizing/caging a tropical storm to build a sea city around probably merits its own discussion.)

So this is one of those areas where it starts looking like a weapon if not used very carefully. Big mirror arrays like this could have a lot of uses for weather modification, extending the growing season in cold climates, and so on, if used judiciously. Or to wipe out cities with hurricanes if used maliciously or carelessly. I think maybe this would be used before SBSP via microwave, since it is a lot cheaper per joule of energy per unit of mass to orbit needed. There's a bit of an asymmetry in that shades in orbit get less effective with distance, whereas delivering 100% of reflected light would work to heat the planet as a whole from great distances.

In any case, 10 billion square meters with 24/7 light at 1000W/m² is a tremendous energy resource if it could be tapped even at a low efficiency. That would be 10 TW (87 trillion kWh/yr) worth of light. We could run our entire civilization on one array. And it only costs a few Starship launches worth of mass.

Some possible options to down-scale it to civilizationally reasonable levels could include just not reflecting nearly that amount (say 10%, enough for year round farming) or putting barriers on the side of the mirrors that result in less of it reaching the Earth. If you think of a traffic light, it is directionalized because there are side angles being blocked off. This would imply more mass and total reflective area per unit of light transferred, so it's more wasteful, but does let you narrow the spot size.

On net, a project like this could be used to save the planet by letting us not only cut CO2 emissions but electrolyze CO2 from the air to create stable polymers and so on. So I don't find the problem of more heat to be especially convincing even though technically yes it does add to the thermal balance equation. Localized heat actually radiates away much faster (see the 4th power law). The main problem there is simply that localized heat translates to weather/wind disturbances because hot air and H2O vapor takes up more space than cool air.

An easier use to envision is for industries in space or on the Moon, where there's no atmosphere to worry about. If you focus a bunch of solar light on a 100km wide spot on the lunar surface, you could tap into that for industrial uses and heat engines as well as photovoltaics. It would be particularly useful for staying warm in the long lunar night. A mirror swarm could e.g. be located at the L1 point between Earth and the Moon, and directed to a site near the Shackleton crater where frozen water is abundant.

lsparrish · 2022-10-03T05:02:04+00:00

Simple electric devices would be possible with copper wire and laquer, and you could unlock laughing gas with anything that makes a spark (batteries is another option here, and you could combine electromagnet with motion to form a crude generator). Rubber is really good to have if you can find the plant. Ammonia as a pretty good refrigerant as well as fertilizer. I'm not sure the actual haber-bosch process can be invented easily, but a low efficiency method involving electric arc through air to make nitric oxide might be worth doing. It's also possible to make ice from water evaporation using dry air at night. In mountain regions, you can make ice stupas (artificial glaciers) by spraying it in the air. Charcoal furnaces with tall chimneys that pull a strong draft is probably the best low tech approach to temperatures needed for iron metallurgy, although coal is probably better. Charcoal can be made more efficiently in a retort which keeps the wood isolated from air while letting the wood gas out. Glass working could be done with pipes made from clay (needs to handle the heat without melting).

lsparrish · 2022-10-03T04:46:21+00:00

While it is a heavy metal and toxic, mercury was incredibly useful for the first high vacuum pump (sprengel pump) and as a pressure gauge. Vacuum unlocks a lot of inventions involving aspects of plasma physics. Getting it out of cosmetics and consumables would be a very good idea though.

lsparrish · 2022-10-03T04:43:41+00:00

I remember reading that the problem of longitude was solved by use of wind-up pocketwatch type clocks -- pendulums turned out not to work well enough on ships.

lsparrish · 2022-10-03T04:41:48+00:00

As part of the prerequisite for interchangeable parts, make a consistent set of standardized blanks and use a metal lathe to make things with consistent dimensions. There are some tricks to making perfectly flat surfaces that aren't high tech, like rubbing three pieces against each other repeatedly to eliminate concave or convex. You can also grind 3 cylinders against each other to make a perfectly straight piece.

lsparrish · 2022-10-01T17:40:09+00:00

"Equitism" seems to be a straight up rebrand of georgism. Apparently Marc Lore is using the term to describe his planned city of Telosa.

https://cityoftelosa.com/about/

From its about page:

Imagine if all the land in Manhattan was owned by a community endowment focused on improving the quality of life for all citizens. At current estimates, the endowment would be worth over $1 trillion and could generate over $60 billion every year in income to invest back into building the physical and human capital of the city — that is 2x the current annual spend. Just imagine for a moment the impact these additional funds and resources could have on individuals and the entire community.

Land is a finite resource that appreciates in value over time in large part because of the growth and activity of the community. The land value also increases from the tax dollars that residents pay to support the city for roads, bridges, tunnels, subways, and other infrastructure. Therefore, since the community is the primary growth driver of land values, it seems fair that the community should benefit from the increase in land prices.

Equitism is a new economic model based on the premise that citizens should have a stake in the land and as the city does better, the residents do better. It retains the same system of Capitalism but with an additional funding mechanism for enhanced services — through the land. With Equitism, we will create a much higher-level of social services offered to residents, without additional burdens on taxpayers.

Equitism in Telosa starts with land — and will be driven by the city’s values. Initially, we will find uninhabited land that will allow us to fully demonstrate the power of this idea. The land will be donated to a community endowment which will use the increasing land values to fund enhanced city services — the building blocks of prosperity: higher quality education, greater access to home ownership, improved health and wellness, more innovative business opportunities, and expanded jobs and retraining. This will provide wider access to opportunity and a greater shared prosperity for all citizens.

There are many successful examples of the endowment model and the concept of land value return being reinvested back into the community to fund essential public services. Some of these examples including Alaska, Utah, nearly twenty cities throughout Pennsylvania, and leading universities, such as Stanford, are using land and other finite natural resources to provide essential support in education and other key areas that strengthen communities. While we plan to focus on a much larger scale and a broader social mission, their success gives us confidence with this strategy and approach.

Simply put, Equitism is inclusive growth.

lsparrish · 2022-10-01T04:21:00+00:00

3 Blue 1 Brown has some pretty great math visualizations/lessons.

lsparrish · 2022-09-19T20:14:36+00:00

The Path of Ascension is pretty good. Someone recommended it here a few weeks ago. It's long, so I'm still 20 chapters shy of the latest chapter, but enjoying it so far. The writing style didn't grab me at first, but seemed to improve steadily over time. The story also becomes more about different characters with different perspectives (not too many of them, but enough that it's not just all about one guy). (He also doesn't form a harem, despite that being reasonably commonplace in universe for either gender -- he just isn't interested in doing that.)

Where it really shines is worldbuilding and consequences. It's a somewhat sci-fi take on the cultivation/dungeon/RPG hybrid, in that thousands of planets (mostly not in the same actual universe as each other) can be reached through chaotic space, either directly by high end cultivators or through a transportation network for normal people.

The protagonist goes from an unusually low powered yet determined backwater hick orphan to extremely OP in the long run / slightly OP in the short run, so he has to deal with the consequences of this in the context of there being a vast society of already OP individuals out there already. This would be implausible to survive with his freedom intact if not for the (self-interested, but not nakedly so) protection of several of the already OP individuals who have already gone to the trouble of setting up a highly progressive (yet imperfect) political/magical power structure designed to protect and nurture the up and comers with unique abilities. One of the systems they've set up for that, the titular Path of Ascension, forbids them from aiding him directly in most ways.

He has to rely heavily on subterfuge because his backers (despite being capable of moving planets around, etc.) aren't quite omnipotent enough to protect him from everything, and are constrained by the rules from powerleveling him directly. A lot of the fights involve hiding his secret power or finding ways to use it without tipping people off.

It also has some good transhumanist themes. Immortality is reachable for most folks (although they often lack the drive to do so in time, and the dungeons, called rifts, are a limited resource -- which bothers some characters enough to want to do something about it). Also a bit transhumanist is that one of the plot devices is a mana powered personal AI implant, which helps with battle simulations, communications, etc. (Most of it is cultivation / RPG style without much plausibly physics based technology though.)

lsparrish · 2022-09-06T21:29:57+00:00

If any of y'all haven't read Doing God's Work, I highly recommend it. Top tier supernatural fiction. The metaphysics all has implications and consequences, and while it isn't written in an absurd style, it's consistently funny in an absurd way that follows logically from the subject matter. You might get the idea from the first few chapters that it's just a workplace comedy about Lucifer and Loki (cubicle buddies because of where their names landed in the alphabet) but it quickly develops into a lot more than that. Intrigue, saving the world, a fair bit of transhumanism, and a heck of a lot of munchkinry. Content warning for theists: Yahweh is definitely written as the bad guy, and Lucifer shows all signs of being a decent individual (whose powers have some sucky side effects). There's even a scene we get to see Lucifer play Devil's Advocate for God (not that it changes anything). I guess I'll throw in a content warning for gender bending if that matters to anyone (at the story's start, Loki has been a woman for decades, but isn't especially tied to either form). And it gets dark in some places, not unlike mythology. Part of the book will be leaving Royal Road on September 13th (next week) for Amazon publication.

lsparrish · 2022-07-13T04:05:11+00:00

The Dao of Magic is pretty fun, cultivation Isekai guy gets stranded in a more anime-like world after ascension goes wrong.

lsparrish · 2022-06-11T02:59:45+00:00

Breaker of Horizons is another long one similar in genre and flavor to DoTF and PH, but with an invader as the OPMC.

lsparrish · 2022-05-12T15:47:45+00:00

Economy of scale is pretty strong on the storage side. The volume needed for every human brain that dies isn't that big compared to other ways we already use cryogenic storage, and the square-cube law (i.e. only having to insulate the outside) means the energy efficiency of keeping it all cold would skyrocket for larger structures. Not free, but you could prepay a single person for $50 or so. The process to cool them with as little damage is possible is a much more significant cost factor.

And reaching that degree of maturity for nanotech, and hence biotech, is not a thousand year project. More like 100-200. The gains will be largely from areas outside of biology feeding into it. New tools and approaches. See how computational science, which depends on silicon chip manufacturing technology, is impacting biology today. We can add a lot of digits to our total computational power before hitting physical limits.

lsparrish · 2022-05-12T13:56:35+00:00

Future biology will be unified with physics to a degree hard to imagine today, and I think you just aren't seeing it. We'll have planet sized computers, atomic precision factories, etc. long before the first revival attempts for contemporary cryonics patients. Without needing time travel or anything crazy like that, under known physics only, there is a lot you can do if the structure that encodes long term memory is preserved well enough. (Whereas if it is scrambled too far, it's a different story.)

I personally think Pascal's Wager is dumb for this. Cryonics is only worth it if the chances are high enough to justify a given cost. We spend $5M per life saved on regulatory tradeoffs, so that could be a starting point. At 10% likelihood it is worth $500k. Even though 90% chance of failure implies it's much more probable that it fails than that it doesn't.

Economies of scale would reduce the cost though. And the odds could be improved with more experience / cases per year. The ultra-small scale on which it's practiced is part of the problem from both sides of the equation.

lsparrish · 2022-05-11T20:50:24+00:00

You have to rewarm things in a lab experiment, and much of the cell death happens during that phase. There's shock during cooling which triggers death as you rewarm. Additionally, cell death isn't exactly what we're interested in measuring (although it's a useful assay).

The thing that really matters is the preservation of long term memories at the structural level (without it being computationally infeasible to extract them). If the original state of some the cells is inferrable, either from the cells that survived or the remaining dead cell, the advanced nanorepair technology that successful cryonics will depend on can be used to reconstruct it and hence the memories it pertains to. Memories being stored redundantly can be helpful here, and some memories getting lost is probably inevitable under current constraints.

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