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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 15th, 2024

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  • The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

    I’d go back even further (to 2007) before the invention of the iPhone. The smartphone has, arguably, IMO been a bad, or at least premature invention. It created a generation of kids obsessed with their photographies, giving girls eating disorders and creating/spreading unrealistic beauty ideals, etc… Also it has severely disrupted teenagers’ social living, created sleeping disorders, chronic doomscrolling, addiction, and more bad stuff. The iPhone was, IMO, not ready for this world.










  • Yes, it’s pretty cool. Side notes:

    • plants produce a literally electrical voltage across cell membrane when collecting sunlight. The solar panel is very much a technological copy of plant leaves.

    • biology can be incredibly efficient sometimes. storing information in DNA takes just about 40-50 atoms per bit, and DNA is about 2.5 nm in diameter. For comparison, the finest structures in modern computers are 3-5 nm in size.

    • since powering the whole thing is incredibly important, animals have one specialized cell (mitochondria) inside every normal cell, simply for the purpose to convert the energy from sugar into a usable form. Plants have two of these specialized cells, with the other one’s job being simply to collect sunlight and turn it into usable energy. That, in my opinion, makes them more advanced than animals. ;-)