DataDive

Great monologue, shaky biology.

Viruses do not multiply endlessly. Most viruses exist in stable ecological cycles.

Most viruses are beneficial to life. We complain about the few (and tiny minority of viruses) that infect humans and we do so from a selfish perspective, but forget about all the other that make life and evolution possible.

As a matter of fact evolution favors reduced lethality in many cases because wiping out hosts is bad for viral survival.

Agent Smith is way off on this one ...

None of these products would be made in the US, though ... and none would affect trade imbalance ... so the net effect might only be to increase inefficiency in your own country

I had the opposite reaction ... they still have 16 million users ...

Reply: things don't work well for the same reason this very post is so hard to read wall of text.

I find it deeply ironic that the author can't even produce readable text, while complaining about other, much more complex tasks not working.

The author refuses to take minimal, common-sense measures to make the text more readable.

Hopefully this is the inflection point for Chrome.

Here is one empirical data point.

I switched over to Firefox this morning and will advocate for it.

I've considered it for a while, but I never felt motivated to make the switch. It took me a good half hour to set it up the way I like it.

Without even visiting the page I can predict what this writing will be about with uncanny accuracy.

1. Big words at the start - pretending to hack at a problem so big that just swinging the axe is a major undertaking

2. The prose slowly drifts to make less and less sense; words have no practical meaning anymore.

3. Simplistic images galore. Various plots via cellular automata and "pretty" images show things that have nothing to do with the topic and are only distant metaphors at best. Yet these images are the proof that it all "works."

4. A nothingburger by the end. Leaves you wondering, why did I read all this?

Every essay by Wolfram is the same.

There is a parable that applies here,

---

The donkey, feeling unappreciated, approaches God with a heavy heart.

"Dear God," says the donkey, "why is it that all the other animals mock me, belittle me, and hold me in contempt?"

God listens patiently and replies, "My dear donkey, I understand your pain, but there's nothing I can do."

Surprised, the donkey responds, "But you are God! The all-powerful, creator of all things. Surely you can help?"

God smiles gently and says, "I may have created the world, but even I cannot change public opinion."

---

Matt Mullenweg might feel like God and might be among the most influential and richest people on the planet. But they won't be able to change public opinion, which is without a doubt against them.

I would advise stopping the madness before it is too late.

That's what going "nuclear" looks like ... I guess Mullenweg found out.

Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.

Another writeup:

The Shameful Defenestration of Tim

https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...

Excellent point made here; credit card balance can be a money maker, actually! The actual opposite of debt.

I am not calling others wrong, I am calling the definition incorrect.

A credit card balance during the grace period is not a debt - it is no different than paying by check - it is not more than a delay between a purchase being reflected on an account. That's all.

Only the balance after the grace period should be counted as a debt if we are using that term to talk about a population being more or less indebted than say X number of years ago etc.

A credit card balance is simply a form of bank account for large number of people.

Statements like the above are what should give everyone pause.

I think that statement can't be true.

Detailed measurements exists for less than a hundred years - yet the WWA is cock sure this is the highest rainfall ever. It goes to the credibility.

But if you look at the number-crunching process that gave you those percentages, it turns out to be woefully fragile and sensitive to a whole range of other factors

Countless prior models were completely off, but this one is suddenly correct and needs to be treated as a reliable predictor.

The problem is that if you dare to question the accuracy, you are immediately labeled a "denier." The only acceptable answer is that no matter what the prediction is, if it is alarmist, it is correct.

Check those numbers. I looked at the original data, and it seems that in the report you linked, debt is defined as a credit card balance.

I don't know about others, but I always float thousands on my balance and pay it off by the end of the month; the payment is all automatic. Often, for large sums, I pay it off online right away when I get home.

In my opinion, this is not debt—as long as you have the money, don't overspend, and pay it off within the grace period of 30 days, as long you are using the credit card as an intermediary for convenience and as a service that gives you various protections. There is benefit to the customer.

Python, in general, would be much faster for prototyping than Java.

That is the main attraction of Pyhon.

why compete in the consumer domain when Uncle Sam pays you not to

I think you are conflating two different things here: where you come up with ideas and where you produce the goods.

To stay on the topic of drones, Skydio is an example of a US startup that produced drones in the US, and for some applications, it produced better drones than an established and sophisticated competitor. Is every component in Skydio manufactured in the US, very unlikely ...

I am no DJI hater, I have owned multiple of their drones and I think their products are awesome of extremely high quality. That being said, a SkyDio was light-years ahead of them when it came to high-speed object avoidance.

Another datapoint to whether one can compete or not

SkyDio, a US startup, entered the market producing drones with object avoidance so advanced that it was far beyond what DJI offered.

Their consumer pricing was quite competitive ~ 1000, the drone was by far the best in the market. Nothing was even remotely as good as a Skydio at high-speed object avoidance!

It seems like the US government became interested and probably funded them in some capacity, and with that, they exited the consumer domain. They only sell drones to governmental agencies now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skydio

In March 2021, the company became a unicorn, becoming the first US company that both manufactures and sells its own drones to exceed $1 billion in value

Saying that that no one can compete with DJI is simply not true. You can't compete with these companies because each are probably heavily subsidized.

Drone technology, like chip technology is a national security issue.

The author forgets to mention yet another dimension of the problem - a direct political one.

Loan forgiveness ... in essence, a form of vote-buying ... vote for me, and we'll forgive your loan (aka someone else will pay the loan).

If there is a chance that, at some point, we forgive loans - why would the cost of education ever decrease?

right, but my point was that you should need to do detective work to figure out the date of a post, especially when the title refers to a transition in time from one era to another

Articles like this need to have a date right around the title

Otherwise, you will be left scratching your head about the era the opinion is from.

Notably, the author has another post with a "recipe" to success (a recipe that they now believe to be outdated), again with no timestamp.

You can only figure out the date of that writing (2007) by looking at the comments

I will add that I am grateful that I also got to experience a world where AI did not spew tons of code like a sausage-making machine.

It was so satisfying to code up a solution where you knew you would get through it little by little.

I recall a post by Simon Willison

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/23/datasette-gunicorn/#be...

I read you post, I am not sure I agree with:

transforming a tool of empowerment into an amplifier of existing disparities.

Which disparity are we talking about? That of non-coders vs coders?

It used to be that someone who did not know how to code had zero chance of writing any program that runs.

Enabling these people to write code is a massive empowerment unlike any we have seen before. Hundreds of millions of people who had no chance of writing working code before will be able to do so if they wish. That's a lot of people reaching for lots of ideas. I doubt that genius and insanely productive programmer, would be able to outcompete all these competitors that previously did not exist.

I don't think we fully comprehend what this will mean in the future - but I doubt it amplifies disparity.

And if you dare to use Twitter in Brazil, you will be fined a year's salary.

... how authoritarianism shapes public discourse

Having no bacteria in the gut leads to worse development ... I mean ... duh ... what is the discovery here?

It is well known that bacteria are necessary to digest food.

I never thought "open access" means that an author would need to pay $10K to be published in Nature ... that is a lot more parasitic than having a library pay for subscription fees.

In my opinion the declining trust is science is due to science being far less apolitical and far less objective and less validated than in the past.

Fundamentally, the problem is today science is framed as nothing else but a competition, an olymic event, that produces winners that we celebrate and losers, rather than cooperation.

If you got the grant, you won; if you did not, you lost. Losing means you cannot hire graduate students you cannot perform your job at all!

Now consider that around 15% of grants get funded, and it takes about six months to determine whether you got that grant or not.

The desperate competition for money overshadows everything in science.

Science is often thought of and presented as huge leaps, when in reality, it is an iterative process that builds on small advances.

I find it depressing that every time Stephen Wolfram wants to explain something, he slowly gravitates towards these simplistic cellular automata and tries to explain everything through them.

It feels like a religious talk.

The presentation consists of chunks of hard-to-digest, profound-sounding text followed by a supposedly informative picture with lots of blobs, then the whole pattern is repeated over and over.

But it never gets to the point. There is never an outcome, never a summary. It is always some sort of patterns and blobs that are supposedly explaining everything ... except nothing useful is ever communicated. You are supposed to "see" how the blobs are "everything..." a new kind of Science.

He cannot predict anything; he can not forecast anything; all he does is use Mathematica to generate multiplots of symmetric little blobs and then suggests that those blobs somehow explain something that currently exists

I find these Wolfram blogs a massive waste of time.

They are boring to the extreme.