DickingAround

I run thousands of robots in production. We can get a very high success rate but only for the task they're designed for. Production robots can't pick up stuff they drop yet. And this '80%' level is not actually acceptable or even state of art for just pick-and-place, but it's compelling for a robot that also knows how to do other things with equal quality (if JEPA does that).

I think actually you could do that if you wanted to; look up what notes mean, write some little program to make a sound if you had to. You could do it in a week if it was your only job.

We should not under-estimate the need for speed in supply chains. Predicting future demand is hard. To be more specific, we're talking about predicting ~100M unique products (the order of magnitude that moves on the pacific) and some of them have very lumpy demand (e.g. invent a new product, but it depends on 100 other obscure products).

I think the core of the 'improved productivity' question will be ultimately impossible to answer. We would want to know if productivity was improved over the lifetime of a society; perhaps hundreds of years. We will have no clear A/B test from which to draw causal relationships.

This is a good point; a man or woman sitting behind a desk doing correlation analysis are going to look very similar in their function to a business. But they probably physically look pretty distinct to an x-ray picture.

Just because a whole industry is bullshit doesn't mean I should force it to not exist. I don't like musicals. I don't understand or care anything about their culture. But it has a right to exist. Some people are into musicals. Their existence or non-existence isn't my problem and it isn't my business. We cannot and should not try to engineer the world around what we personally find valuable and ignore what others find valuable, even if they got their opinions form an ad, or their parents did and they inherited it.

TINA = There is no alternative... to stocks. Lot of people lost money on long term bonds. Short term bonds are at least better than cash. Stocks are supposed to be about investing in an asset. I guess there is kind of an alternative out there.

Humans can do a lot of useful things with electrical energy. It's good to see our most powerful entities (companies) directly getting involved in getting the energy they need and still trying to do that in a climate-friendly way.

Sadly, that's still very non-causal. A lot of things in China were happening at the same time. We just need to be honest that we don't have causal data and we have to make decisions on correlation data (and not try to over-claim causal testing).

At a practical level, this is NetBSD story is a story of a machine that just does it's job and doesn't change. For example, there is no active experimentation, no machine learning added on, etc. It's like a wood-mill; good that it make 2x4s but also not a highly dynamic business. Probably not a business that's seen a lot of competition or having to adapt to changing markets and products.

There was no pre-mining in Bitcoin. There were early adopters, but I think we're all early adopters still at this stage. Really, it might not be CPU mine-able and $1/coin but it's still nowhere near final value if it managed to actually survive and win dominance over fiat. Clearly no one centrally controls it. Satoshi is gone and his money never seems to move.

In what way? There's a limited number of bitcoin (I get there's unlimited altcoins, but they're easy to distinguish). I've never heard of anyone being able to censor a transaction on the network (hard to imagine how you can unless you can cut off internet access). I'm making an honest try to understand how it could fail either of those, but I don't see it and need to be shown a bit more directly what you're claiming here.

Block rewards get replaced with fees. Part of the 'blocksize wars' was the decision to not just increase block sizes or (or course) increase issuance of bitcoin but to be honest and recognize that there will be constraints on what's in the core chain and it's going to cost money to get stuff in the core chain. There are fees now and eventually fees will replace inflation. But it's going to be hard to 51% attack it because there will be still people mining chasing those fees.

The constant combining of altcoins and bitcoin is not helpful. There's a use case that is 'money' in which the value of the object used as money is always deeply disconnected from the underlying asset value (i.e. we never trade factories and cars as money. We still don't even trade stocks as money). Bitcoin is attacking that use case head on. It has features like scarcity, no ability to stop a transaction, etc. as features over other forms of money.

Then there's a huge list of altcoins promising things that are different, are not actually different or helpful, and are really just still targeting being a money like bitcoin or the dollar except the founder of the new currency wants to be the one that centrally controls it. Thus 'crypto' is not a helpful space, but bitcoin could be.

It does seem to be almost some kind of stigma or classism with buses rather than an actual functional difference in technology. We have electric overhead-line buses and they're just the same as streetcars except you don't need dedicated lanes or putting in rails in the road (which are expensive, limit expansion, and present a real hazard to biking).

I can't wait for Tether to fail. These 'stable coins' are just waiting for disaster; how many times have we tried to tie asset prices together, or tried to make a paper version of something else where there wasn't clear 1:1 relationship... it always ends in disaster. Better have that done away with sooner than later.

There is no way that will break Bitcoin; the network will keep running. And if bitcoin's fiat-price was too high because Tether existed, better to resolve that now as well.

Money is kind of like that; it's a delusion. The problem is something is always breaking that delusion by printing more of it. But not everything can be printed. If you can't print, the delusion can be pretty hard to break. If the delusion is never broken, it's actually a good thing to use as money.

We did that in Q4 2021/Q1 2022 amongst my friend group. Literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in spending among us in land, tools, etc. Stock market looked high, don't want to stay in the dollar.

It's not a complex economic environment out there. You can look at a very small set of numbers and get the picture; buffet-index (total market value to GDP) and GDP growth in dollar terms says the market is high. CPI, M1 money supply, and debt-to-GPD says the dollar will reduce in value. So where else you going to park your money? If there's machines you can use, that was a good time. Most people don't need machines so it's all about houses and land and anything not showing as much peak. Not academic; critical to maintaining the value a person has put into savings from all that labor.

I wanted to come in here and bad-mouth MBAs, but you all already did an admiral and accurate job of it.

Instead, I would claim having the view 'business owner' and 'economist' is really helpful alongside expertise in the field this business is supposed to be good in. And not just a little, but MBA-level depth there; making sales predictions for the product, running net-present-value calculation for a high-capex asset, making decisions using quantified uncertainty, etc.

The problem seems to be "only an MBA". But having an MBA or equivalent knowledge while you are deep in your business' implementation is critical.

You're probably right that the country "USA" doesn't get "sanctioned" much since they're the super power. Instead they use their power to punish other 'bad' performers. That said, Russia's government is totally worth 'cancelling' right now. Maybe the USA should have gotten some more push back for their failed wars, but Russia sure deserves it for this war; it's even more egregious than Iraq/Afghanistan.

If they really are low on power, for whatever reason, it's time to raise prices. I know people like fixing the price below what the actual market rate would be but it causes a lot of problems. And Europe in particular isn't doing itself any favors by shutting down clean nuke plants and relying on fossil fuel Russia, of all countries. They need to re-think how they're managing their energy before it's too late. And "we allowed someone to use their computer a lot so let's ban that" is not a root cause here.

It is if you think it's as simple as 'processing a transaction'. Anyone can design a system that records a transaction. It's very hard to make one that can't be deleted and can't be reversed. Doing this unlocks some amazing things, in particular hard, inflation resistant money.

And if you don't think inflation resistance is important, consider how many poor people have been robbed by those who just print more money and give it to their friends. It's been happening for centuries. It has destroyed whole countries just just once or twice but many times. Coin clipping to fund wars is as old as coins. So is stealing people's money at the point of a sword.

On the outside it might not appear 'efficient' when you don't have to implement all the same features bitcoin has. But if you actually try to build a system with these features, there is no better way so far.

If you worry about the power waste, have a CO2 tax. You don't think some people's use of power is right, but perhaps they don't think your use of power is right. Is that really something you don't want to be a fundamental right, this concept of being able to use electricity as you see fit?

The idea of banning something because of a chip shortage is an even more extreme attack on the rights of others. One person makes specialized bitcoin mining chips (they can't be used for anything else), another person buys them. And you want to bring people with guns into it because maybe the person making the chips could be making them for whatever you want? Please, think deeply before asking for force and violence to be involved in a bunch of people peacefully going about their own ways and interests.

There's just one more step; the market's value is an expectation of the future while the GDP is a 'now' metric. So while inflation is auto-adjusted (roughly) in the past, a strong expectation of inflation now can send the market cap up (and either GDP will catch up, be it natural or on inflated dollar terms) or the market will crash, or some combination of the two to bring the indicator back to earth.

"In olden times, the average person didn't expect to be happy" - I don't think that statement is supported by any evidence or logic. People are happy sometimes even when they're food-scarce. Only the dead are truly never happy.

Similarly, the concept of 'pursuit of happiness' then referenced was a sort of adaptation of the 'right to property'.

Perhaps this article would be stronger with a deeper research into history of people a few hundred years ago, or philosophy of work/life at that time.

The 'intolerant minority' is a very interesting and surprisingly useful concept.

Yea, I'm not saying I want a kinetic or offensive solution either. More like, it might be possible. Like if someone kills a bunch of people in France and flees to Germany, then Germany is going to hand them back over to France. Clearly not everywhere has extraditions, but you can imagine a world where hacking isn't so much tolerated and defended against as punished and thus uncommon (like breaking into a house; you can but you're not supposed to and there's consequences).

I think if you had good attribution it's more like armies. We have been focused on locking our doors, on building better walls, etc. But there is a non-defensive side.

In meatspace we expect the government to use kinetic force to stop people from attacking us. Like if I leave my door unlocked and some person comes in to start stealing my stuff, the cops really will respond and come stop that person (I have had a home breakin they responded quickly to). They didn't blame me for having bad locks. I pay a lot of taxes so my walls and locks don't have to be perfect.

In cyber land, it's an anarchy. The government offers no defense. But there's no reason someone can't offer a deterrent. Like if you knew who broke into your servers, and there was a goon squad that went and broke down their door either kinetically or electronically I think a deterrent strategy could eventually work. Like it literally does for meat-space security.

(Not totally sure I want that, but I'm just saying it would probably work and we haven't really tried it yet.)

Examples? (Presumably there's some browse history that you're referring to which we may not be experiencing the same way. So citing sources is critical.)

I get that humans are wiping out a lot of less capable species. This will turn out to be wrong if humans are themselves wiped out. But from an evolutionary sense, this is a pretty clear cut case; humans are wiping out everything else because we're so powerful. We out compete everything.

And before you assume that's bad, don't forget that evolution makes organisms that do that. It's a core part of the cycle of evolution. I gather the first single celled plants wiped out a lot of other stuff with their oxygen production. Now, the trees grow tall so they can wipe out other plants who can't cut it. In the process the trees are littering their tree bits all over the place. You can barely see 100m in most parts of the world through all the tree crap everywhere. I've been to forests where you cant even touch the ground; it's just like 4 ft of old logs that aren't decaying fast enough (dry forests do this). To trees all that tree crap is trash and it even kills baby trees. To us humans, it's beautiful. And when we pour a bunch of concrete and steel all over, maybe it's trash, or maybe it's beautiful in a different way. I'm just saying 'nature' includes us and the stuff we make. We took over this planet. For better or worse it's a people planet now. We'll see what happens after people (e.g. gen-eng driven specation), but it might be that this is already nice in a way we just don't find 'natural' or 'normal' yet and the next one will also be nice in it's own way that's different from the past.