> In September last year, Navalnaya said analysis of smuggled biological samples carried out by laboratories in two countries showed that her husband had been "murdered".
I have a really niche use case that this fulfills. I have perfect pitch, but terrible working memory (can't remember more than 4 notes at time). This is a nice way to try to improve it.
Very nice! One of my friends is the exact opposite: they have a pretty poor sense of pitch but a prodigious working memory. They can take a brief glance at a couple of pages of sheet music and instantly reproduce it.
Pickle, another yc backed startup, is also acting really fishy. They claimed they developed a standalone AR device, took money from customers, and now they're saying it requires tethering to your phone. https://x.com/cixliv/status/2008129653467492631
They do back a lot of companies. Is there any evidence that they are pushing unethical or illegal business practices on their portfolio companies at a rate higher than non-YC start ups?
They don’t have to say anything. The market speaks for itself: do illegal stuff, don’t get caught, capture enough market share of whatever it is you are pursuing, and you will be rewarded handsomely by investors. The name of the game is capital return at whatever cost necessary. We will be living through the repercussions of this system for decades
Sorry for the confusion on this. There's a weird thing that happens when a post is put in the second chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) then get lobbed onto the front page nearly 7 days after it was submitted. It can be getting lots of upvotes and a good discussion, then suddenly it "expires" and loses its ranking and disappears, which means the discussion ends prematurely and people who may have found it interesting may not see it. So I've tried to rescue it by creating a fresh copy of the post, and moving the comments to it. I've now restored the karma score to it too to make it less confusing. There's no way to do this that avoids some form of confusion to some people but at least this way the post gets its deserved amount of time on the front page and full opportunity for the discussion to play out.
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals.
The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.
Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what
tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.
It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
I think the point GP was making was to take issue with framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals."
More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms.
While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so.
All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)
Yeah, I know, pseudoscience and the like, but biology it's weird and with the current scientific discoveries (and even reusing quantum mechanics for profit, such as chlorofilla with leafs and photons), Nature itself it's 'magical'. Not actually something from fairy tales, but from weird mechanics we are actually grasping a little today.
Instead of my comment from I-Ching being taken as numerology, I would think of the universe as something being 'computed over', kinda like numeric towers under Lisp. Because in the end nothing exists per se; it's just fields generating matter, waves, energy and probably, information.
Thus, the Mckenna theory on Fractal Time (and the Chinese paper from Vixra) might be related to hypercubic equations (because of Hamming distance between changes) that we aren't fully aware.
I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.
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