agrajag

GDP is a measure of the amount of commerce per year, while global wealth is a net accumulation of all the work that has happened in human history.

Billionaires obviously get a disproportionate amount of income per year, but it’s far from 20% of all the world’s GDP. To make your math work that would assume they got all the wealth in a single year.

I’m sure it would be fine if it was quoted, but it seems obvious the policy is to not represent AI generated content as human

They autogenously pressurize the tanks - they heat up the cryogenic propellants with the engines and use some of the gas to pressurize the tanks. In Starship’s case it’s methane and oxygen.

Reputational damage from this is going to be catastrophic. Even if that’s the limit of their liability it’s hard not to see customers leaving en masse.

The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%.

It’s a little hard to tease out how much of this is due to the demographics of Republicans and Democrats changing. There’s been a significant shift in education level between the two parties recently, and this may have offset some of what would otherwise be broad based decreases.

The broader decrease in faith in higher education is still quite clear signal though.

This is some serious cherry-picking. It's going private at a price below the initial IPO price of $48 from 3 years ago, and has generally significantly underperformed other tech stocks.

They might not be about to die, but they're not exactly healthy either.

Congestion pricing hits the lowest earning individual the highest.

This is true for anything that you buy. I’m not sure why being able to drive a car into the Manhattan CBD deserves special treatment. It also already has an excellent subway system that millions take daily.

You can’t means test virtually everything

You can attach pdfs of brokerage transactions to your e-filed return (and FreeTaxUSA prompts you to do so in the filing section)

This is absolutely a problem that interacts with scale. With 1M servers you’re almost certainly dealing with hundreds of service owners, and some of those are going to need additional features you don’t have to worry about with 100 servers. Some examples are databases with graceful failover, long running AI model training jobs, or distributed databases like etc where you have to be mindful about how many can be down at a time.

It’s not 10,000x harder to patch that 10,000x more machines, but it’s not 1x either. Easily 10-20x harder, if not more.

Apollo missions were done at incredible expense, and didn’t provide any longevity.

We’ve had humans in orbit on the ISS continuously for decades, sent probes to the edge of the solar system, landed multiple robots on Mars, and revolutionized our understanding of space and physics with space telescopes.

The biggest obstacle to space exploration was a contracting that didn’t bring down costs, and the thing that makes space so exciting now is high cadence low cost launches

If a state or local government wants to forbid tipping it doesn’t have to be this complicated. Pass a law that says it’s forbidden, that credit card merchants and POS merchants must disable tipping functionality, and for cash tips up a hotline & fees for merchants that solicit them.

Tipping is only a thing because we’ve normalized it. If you pass a law against it, it’s no longer normal, and customers will mostly stop giving them, even without highly intrusive enforcement mechanisms.

The real challenge is getting a government to want to forbid it, because people who receive tips care about them a lot while those that don’t, don’t. Until you solve that nothing else matters. Maybe tipping will go so far that the balance shifts.

It would be a gross failure of an HSM to allow private key material to leak in any way.

If you’re paranoid the worst thing to bring is a personal phone. The best thing would be a burner with nothing on it.

I’d be okay using someone else’s chromebook though, at least you know what data you’re giving it.

Google actually describes an entirely plausible mechanism of action here at [1]. old content slows down site crawling, which can cause new content to not be refreshed as often.

Sure, one page doesn’t matter, but thousands will.

[1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1689068723657904129...

According to this article[1] from 2022 at higher concentrations it has a reduced sweetness response and leaves a lingering sweet taste. Supplementing it with real sugar means they don’t need to go to higher concentrations.

[1] https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2022/12/02/Amai-Pr...

According to the flight plan published by SpaceX, the booster is going to attempt a hover in the gulf to simulate a landing, while the Ship isn’t going to slow down at all after reentry and will impact the ocean at a high velocity.

I mean, SVB did exactly this, and management got fired an equity zeroed out. Other banks aren’t looking at SVB and wishing that was them.

The author is right that treating housing as an investment is a mistake, but doesn't take their analysis far enough. In the case where no new houses are built and their house appreciates significantly, after they sell their house _they still need a place to live._ Their next house will cost just as much, regardless of if they rent or buy, effectively eliminating all the gains they made selling the first house. The only real ways out of this are to move somewhere else with lower housing costs, or die. And really, it's worse than this, because their children will need housing too unless they're ok with them living at home forever.

The mentality that housing is an investment good has created a lot of perverse incentives (buy as much house as you can, you'll make more money!), that we really need to curb so that we can lower the cost of housing for everyone. Housing needs to be a consumptive good, where much like cars there's incentives to drive prices down and keep overall spending on the sector low.

Agreed. _Someone_ has to deal with the drift between astronomical time and earth time, better the class of software that deals with space than every time critical system in the world.

The rate of drift is so slow that people will never care.

Even over thousands of years when an hour of drift is accumulated there won’t be a manual adjustment - people will have just gotten used to different times of day having sunlight, with generations having been born and died with mean solar time happening at 11am.

Eventually the rotation of the earth may change enough that drift accumulates too quickly and leap time needs to be added, but that’s only going to be true thousands to tens of thousands of years in the future.

You can’t realistically argue that twitter will have as easy a time hiring as SpaceX and Tesla. They might have the same shitty working conditions, but without the risk of the company going under in a year or two. Plus everyone already there knew what they were signing up for when they joined, but at twitter you should expect a 50-75%+ employee churn over the next year. You don’t join twitter today unless you treat it like a short term contracting job.

You’d be surprised at how much you can fuck up a ship as a CO without life-changing consequences. Unless there’s gross negligence a CO is almost certainly not even going to get discharged even if their actions lead to death of a sailor.

They’ll stop being CO and will never be promoted, but will finish out their Navy career in a job where they can’t hurt anyone, and will have almost no impact once they retire and go into civilian life.

They’re not going to do time in the brig unless there’s willful misconduct.

A major problem is that life in the Navy sucks too much compared to the civilian world, so that most of the competent Naval Officers leave, and you end up with a pretty small pool of competent leaders. It’s a super weird dynamic where junior officers are on average more competent than mid-career officers.

As for why life sucks so much, leadership has let there be too much to do with too few people, and inflexible systems.

You're assuming that the people of Jackson have a voice in their government. The city is majority black, and in Mississippi that's more enough than enough reason for the rest of the state elected representitives to reject any aid to the city.

The NASA contract model has already changed substantially. Even Bill Nelson, the current administrator and former senator thinks that cost-plus contracting is no longer the way foreward.

A lot of this is directly attributable to the success of the Commercial Crew program.

With TikTok I do worry about the short form nature of it and impact on attention spans.

TV is also very passive, but most content still requires thinking about a narrative for an extended period.

Astronomers whose software uses UTC and isn’t able to change to UT1, and who don’t need precision less than 1 second, but more than 3-5 seconds or so will be worse off. This seems like much less net inconvenience than what the tech industry has to deal with when it comes to leap seconds.

I hear the argument that we have to deal with this eventually to keep time in track with mean solar time, but the adjustments are so small that I don’t see any real impact on regular people.

... the solution is simply to use International Atomic Time (TAI) internally, and convert it to UTC when you want to display information to a user.

From a software development perspective this seems monstrously more complex than just muddling along with the current situation even with leap seconds.

First, consider the question of "what do unix timestamps mean?" The answer is UTC, except just be broken during the second where there's an extra leap second added or removed, and don't try to represent it. They neither represent TAI nor UTC perfectly, and have no way to encode a leap second, but they are very space efficient to store needing only 8 bytes.

Now, we want to start converting our systems over to TAI, great! To do that we need a format to efficiently store a unix time in a binary representation. For this exercise let's use Jan 1, 1970, and so when we call it we get a value today that's equal to unix time plus 37 (the current offset between TAI & UTC). Awesome, now we need a new function to call it in every single language we use, and then migrate all callsites over to it. Try not to miss any places where someone's passing unix time as an int64 instead of, say, a time_t. If you call into libraries that return timestamps make sure you shim them so that you can convert those timestamps from UTC to TAI.

Now, we have the problem of how to store those int64s. We can't store them in place of our current timestamps, they'll be 37 seconds off. So let's add a field to all databases where timestamps are stored to store the TAI version. Additionally, every RPC is going to need to send along both TAI & UTC during the migration process, so change those too. We can't just ignore cases where we need an integer representation of time, either - those have historically been the places where systems break during leap second changes.

I hope this gets to a little bit of why it would be extremely non-trivial to use TAI in place of UTC right now. If you're storing your time as, say, a string representation with a time zone built in you're right, it's actually generally not that bad, and time zone information is frequently encoded in the string. It's _extremely_ difficult to deal with once you move to a representation of time where the timezone isn't directly encoded in a timestamp.

For the wavelengths that the telescopes are designed to observe (primarily ultraviolet & visible for Hubble, though it can do a little bit of infrared, while JWST looks at Infra-red and mid-infrared) resolution is fairly comparable, though JWST has a much wider field of view and doesn't half to sit idle when it orbits the sun side of the earth like Hubble does.

A major issue with Hubble & JWST comparisons is just that they're designed to look at different wavelengths of light. A lot of what JWST will see is completely invisible to Hubble, and no amount of observing time can compensate for that.

That's the distance of an object away that has a parallax of 7.3 arcminutes and a baseline of 1AU. The 7.3 arcminutes referenced here is the width of the image on the celestial sphere.