One side of the membrane is exposed to water in contact with the alkali ovaline rock. ... Nick Lane proposes that LUCA was a membrane capped pore in an olavine rock.

Correction: Nick Lane never says the vent itself (in which the proto-cell membranes arose) was made of olivine. The olivine is far underground. Sinking seawater reacts with it (serpentinization) and bubbles back up. It precipitates out into the vents (mineralized sponge "chimneys") which itself is not olivine.

Here's what Wikipedia says about Lost City, which Lane gives as an example of a modern alkaline hydrothermal vent:

Once pore waters have permeated the surface and return to the surface, aragonite, brucite, and calcite chimneys are formed as calcium carbonates precipitate out of solution. Younger chimneys are primarily brucite and aragonite, being white and flaky in appearance.

Agree that the treatment of nihilism is shallow, but it didn't matter to me because it wasn't the heart of the movie at all. The heart is, hmm, being a failure? Letting your relationships decay because you're neglecting them, because you don't have a "show up for my people" attitude about them (maybe because on some level you expect both yourself and them to be better, but you aren't, and this is discouraging)... letting (career, family, time management) problems build up that you dismiss as chronic irritations rather than the defining, central challenges that you have to tackle... and then managing, somehow, to change, to choose love, to choose commitment to your own life.

(stares at that paragraph) Okay, yes. That's it for me. This movie is good because it shows a wreck of a person choosing to commit to their own life. I don't commit enough to my own life, my friends don't commit to their own lives, and it's very potent to watch someone turn around on this! It turns me a bit in the same direction.

I cannot ask for more from art.

Found the movie hilarious and it never crossed my mind that the protagonist being a middle aged immigrant was part of what made it funny, btw.

Have you guys already done a voting survey (with whatever system seems good – STAR voting?) sent out to (1) the population of talent you want to take with you for AI research, (2) rationalists who aren't mission critical but are still valuable as interstitial social elements?

If not – at some point that's going to happen, right? This discussion seems most useful if it exists to inform a large number of people who might move what the options are, so that their preferences can be assessed numerically.

I moved to Seattle from the Bay Area, and while I love the weather and relatively sane rent and general environment around here, I think 14% of the US population having a mild form of SAD should be one of the dominating factors in decisionmaking. I have mild SAD, which I find acceptable because I'm not standing in any civilizational bottlenecks, but I would move if I worked at an EA organization and considered my work very important.

If you guys consider SAD to be a solved problem via more dakka, then I retract this and mostly recommend the area.

That's what I do.

Hmm, I looked you up on Facebook and apparently you sent me a friend request god-knows-when (which I presumably ignored because I didn't know you), which I have just accepted.