Yup it seems crazy to me how deep insights one needs to have to be able to, say, connect the dots between compression and machine learning. And now it looks to me like he has done a lot of the foundational work in these fields. Super cool stuff

Too lazy to check, but is this the Rivest from the RSA algorithm?

Like you said, there’s a metric ton of steps involved in the overall process, and our understanding of each of these ‘levels’ of organization varies quite a bit. Closest to my personal expertise is the sub-cellular and cellular level, for which I would refer you books or papers in developmental biology, developmental genetics, and epigenetics. I can give you a couple bloopers to get you excited though:

When it comes to deciding where different organs will form (again, from a sub-cellular level), it essentially starts from a concentration gradient of certain proteins/chemicals inside the zygotic cell. This gradient then determines the level of activation of other proteins, each level then leading to different biochemical cascades which, once more cells have formed from the zygote, determine which organ systems will come from them. Messing around with this concentration gradient can, thus, dramatically affect an organism’s development, leading to, for example, a body with just ‘left’ organs on both halves, just ‘top’ organs on both halves, missing an entire organ system (like circulatory system and heart) and so on.

A more or less similar process occurs to determine the shape of organs. As a simple example, when some animals with regenerative capabilities (like axolotls) lose a limb, they are able to regrow the limb to the exact same length as before. Turns out, each cell on the periphery of their limb has a certain concentration of receptor proteins on its surface, which acts as a molecular ‘signature’ of that cell’s position in the limb. These signatures provide information on how far to grow the limb for regeneration, and some chemicals, lile retinol, can even override these signatures and fool the organism’s body into regrowing the limb from scratch on top of the place of regeneration.

I hope these examples give you an introduction to the mechanisms involved. There’s obviously a lot more involved, so I would again highly recommend textbooks and research papers if you’re interested.

For Meet, I’d also suggest Jitsi. For Drive, I’d recommend giving cryptpad.fr a shot; that seems to be the closest to Drive’s file editing capabilities.

Just to add, some also theorize that new elements may turn out to be stable, sort of the reverse of how f-block elements are a bunch of unstable elements in the middle of more stable [d-block] ones. If that is indeed the case, we may find a lot more candidates to work with in, say, materials science.

Akshually, calling it GNU/Cancer would mean that GNU is a critically important component of cancer, which is incorrect. A more appropriate term for it would be Nestle/Cancer. Also, prayers for RMS

It’ll get more complex than that. I’m no expert, but I’m guessing you have to consider the depth of the crust at your location, type of soil and the distance from (and time since) the last closest volcanic eruption, possibly distance from the nearest tectonic boundary, maybe even tidal forces (assuming they have a considerable impact on magma being pushed out, but this may be a bit too far)

A flair-like implementation would be nice for certain communities. From past experience on reddit, I can see how it could be beneficial to filter a community’s posts through tags, say, to check latest announcements or new support questions. I’d personally prefer community-specific tags as opposed to global post tags (which is what I inferred from this post’s content, I haven’t read the RFC yet though) edit: the RFC talks about both instance-based tags and community-based tags, which is even better

Not exactly what you wanted, but njalla is a privacy-focussed domain registrar that basically buys domains on your behalf under their own name and gives you all the access to it that you need

I’m not sure what exactly you’re looking for as an answer here. I’ll say that instead of looking for alternatives of science itself, we can list through the central tenets of science and then explore perspectives that counter one or more of those tenets. I’m not sure of the generally accepted list of tenets, so I’ll try coming up with what I think those are:

• observation: to understand the world around you, you need to be able to see/hear/feel it. Without this, you’re basically making up whatever you feel like (one could argue that the scientific method begins with a hypothesis followed by observations to test it, but the hypothesis itself has to be based in reality, which again requires prior observation of reality)
• logical reasoning: once you make observations, you try to make sense of them. You do this by applying logic on your observations. Alternative worldviews would say that this logical reasoning has no inherent advantage over, say, not having it, but those worldviews would be useless themselves because a) as far as we can tell, the world does follow logic; “the world around us doesn’t have to make sense, yet it does”, and b) if we were to still accept alternative worldviews that throw away logic, it would get us nowhere. Theories that disregard logic have no consistency and thus no utility whatsoever. You can say this about most (if not all) religions: one of the arguments I’ve heard a lot against atheism is that science is useless because it’s ‘incomplete’, hence God. But that essentially stops science in its tracks: saying we should throw away science and blindly accept any faith solely because science hasn’t solved everything already actively harms science from making progress, and the religions being presented as the alternatives don’t answer the same questions satisfactorily (or consistently) either.
• skepticism: this may partially overlap with the previous one. A huge part of the scientific method is to not blindly accept whatever is presented as model, or even observation, of the world around us. If an observation is objectively good, it should be possible to make basically the same observation by different people. If a model of reality is objectively good, it should match with the reality regardless of who tries to apply it. An alternative of this, like before, would be blind faith and superstition. Things like ‘miracles’ are not scientific because they cannot be (or at least have not been) repeatedly observed under controlled conditions. God as a model of reality is not scientific because it does not have much predictive power (as far as we can tell based on ‘prophecies’).

There may be more ways an alternative theory could try to counter science, but I think these points should give you an idea.

That’s fair too. I was just trying to get some use out of my old device, but I think it’ll be better if I simply use to run some CLI tools via SSH that I don’t want running on my main device :P

Going for a RasPi might be a bigger hassle for me due to the market, but I suppose I can try the rest on my laptop as easily. Thanks!

Ah now it makes a lot more sense. I’ll have to stick with things like overlay network simply because my ISP is super unreliable (for example, I’m out of wifi right now because of mildly incovenient weather lmao)

Haha I think it’s best if I stop running towards just getting my own server up and actually learn this stuff instead, regardless of how long it takes. I’ll try to follow through on this, thanks again for all the help :D

That’s super cool, I’ll check it out. Thanks a lot!

Oh I’ve never heard about openwrt, but it sounds interesting. I’ll check it out, thanks!

Understood. Guess I’ll figure out setting up all the services before I get to figuring out putting them beyond my local network. Thanks!

I’ve been putting off learning docker for a while now, guess it’s finally time to dive right into it. Thanks for the info about freshrss, I’d been looking for ways to get more into cybersecurity and this might be it

Welp, port-forwarding seems to be the major issue then, since I’m soon going to shift to an institutional wifi where I may (not) have access to the router. But you’re right, I should try getting familiar with what I have first lol. Thanks!

I did try launching a website on my local network, but widening it to the public network is what I was confused about, like you said. But the idea of overlay network sounds interesting, I’ll give it a shot. Thanks!