Nifty3929

The problem is that everything is negative, all the time. Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged. Everything someone or some company does must not be acknowledged to have any redeeming value- it’s all just negative

Which is sad, because so much amazing stuff is happening on the world right now, and seems to be only accelerating. For everybody.

"Aluminum (Al) is a widespread environmental contaminant " - they lost me right there in the very first sentence.

Already using charged, non-neutral language ("contaminant"), giving away their pre-existing bias and forcing me to disregard the rest of their opinion on the matter. Aluminum is no more "environmental contaminant" than any other extremely common basic element in the Earth's crust, like silicon or iron. Are they also against chlorine?

Clearly they decided to conduct a study to show just how scary aluminum is, and I have no doubt the succeeded.

That's one of the important reasons - I thought - that we have the FDA in the first place. But these days I'm really not so sure. So many promising treatments rejected (or just stalled forever) while pointless placebos and worse get or remain approved.

So - why again does the FDA exist?

Yes. It is not true that anything that makes our lives better or work easier is bad. In fact that's the story of all progress - making peoples lives better and work easier.

You are correct, but I think having a good policy - and trying earnestly to enforce it - is a good start, even if that enforcement is very imperfect.

I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.

I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.

Speaking of keeping separate things separate: remember that Unions (a business in it's own right) is different from the Union Workers that it represents.

Because this? "I believe with little certainty"

Actually, I think it's powerful to acknowledge when my beliefs are weak. I still believe it - I think it's true, and I don't have any conflicting beliefs. But still it would not take a lot of evidence to change my mind, and since this is a prediction about the future, I will not be very surprised to find out I was wrong.

It is more than plausible that spending money on AI is spending money on healthcare. I believe with little certainty that AI will help us find new ways to fight disease, improve our health and live longer lives.

Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration.

I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.

You and I are the same person apparently. Let me tell you about malaria! Or the bends! Or tetanus! Please! Wait, where's everybody going?

It reminds me of how the Panama canal was built, and actually the first major attempt failed and they gave up. What they learned for the second attempt was that digging was not the hard(est) part to solve - it was how to move the dirt! So much dirt!

Great book on this BTW: Path Between the Seas. I couldn't put it down.

Would you be willing to pay a small sum per piece of content? Maybe 10c per video or article? Maybe 1c for a short or something? Assume that it’s anonymous and frictionless (big assumptions, but this is just a thought experiment).

These glasses address farsightedness, which doesn't apply while driving. Worst case you just take them off.

Basically - building video games is (or seems from the outside) fun and cool, and so there are lots of people who want to do it. In effect, people are willing to be paid in fun, rather than in money. Also, games just generate a lot less revenue overall than boring, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen SaaS apps. By a wide mile. When you look at these SaaS companies they're generating maybe $1M/yr in revenue per employee (not just developer). Some blockbuster games can achieve that, but not many.

So basically, high supply of labor and relatively lower demand for it in games than in boring business/SaaS software.

Yes, and yes!

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.

China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

The original Antigravity editor is/was just a light reskin on VSCode. My normal workflow - even before the 2.0 update - was to run VScode and AG at the same time, on the same local codebase. AG would do the work, which I would then review in VSCode.

Why not just download and run the IDE you want, alongside the agentic dev tool you want?

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea.

Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the concept well. I recall one corporate training I was sitting through and they used the term "Border Gateway Protocol" and it took me a half beat to think through "oh, you mean BGP?"

Thanks!

Yes, that's what I meant, but I'm an idiot and just used the word that came to mind: GBP symbol -> "pound" -> "lb". And I don't have a quid (GBP) button on my keyboard.

Thanks for the correction.

It will if it's a required 35lb item, which is not readily available from multiple sources.

Honestly - the first thing that came to my mind is that the papers got stapled back together wrong, and her original correct answer was swapped with someone else's incorrect one. And instead of simply explaining that, she decided to just erase what was there and re-submit. But who knows?

Fine! So let's get started then! I don't care about data centers. I don't care about AI. Maybe it's here to stay, maybe it's a passing trend. I care about humans, and human prosperity.

Human prosperity - ours and our grandchildren's - is to a large degree determined by how much power we produce. So let's get started producing more.

The best time to have built a power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

Prosperity is closely correlated with energy availability. Can we please build some power plants?

Oddly from your comment I can't quite tell which end of the political spectrum you're on. I think I agree with you, but I'm not sure until I know which team you're on.

I love this book, and I often recommend it to new folks on my team. I used to carry a few extra paperback copies to give away, just in case.

It is not at all clear to me why people get upset about using borrowed money on the balance sheet of the acquired company.

Say company B wants to buy company A. Company A is worth $20B, but the buyer doesn't have that much, and the original owners/shareholders want to get paid. So Company A takes out a $20B loan, paying out the original owners, making that company worth $zero. Now Company B gets it - it's still worth zero because of the fat loan, but now Company B is the owner. I don't feel like anybody got taken advantage of in this financing model.

In fact, this is pretty close to what happens in the US real estate market. When I buy a house I take out a loan against that house. It's non-recourse, so it's very much like the house borrowed the money, not me. In any case, I got the house with a lot less money than the purchase price. Sometimes nearly zero from me in fact.

I do understand why people get angry about what often happens next - layoffs and such - but I think that's very independent of the financing used to purchase the company. The acquirer could pay all cash using money from it's own bank account, and then still lay a bunch of people off - and in fact that often happens.

Me too! Where is the wild-west? The independent sites and dark corners with weird stuff? Those were fun times. It felt like I was an explorer in a new place helping to also build and contribute to that place. Now it's basically like interactive TV or something.

Are BBS's still a thing?

They don't need perfect enforcement, or even good enforcement. The purpose is to make VPN use criminal. Then you have a large group of people getting away with criminal activity which you can go after on an individual case-by-case basis, depending on your level of compliance or troublemaking in other areas.

I'm not convinced. I use a VPN basically always, and frequently get blocked by VPN detectors. It's not perfect - sometimes switching VPN servers/providers gets me past it, but websites can employ VPN-detection technology. Then they just block you, which is what this is all about. Force companies to start blocking VPN traffic. It'll be at the individual site level for a while, then at the ISP level in a few years.