cameldrv

Not a great move for SpaceX IMO. Things that get installed on airplanes are very expensive and people expect them to last 10+ years. If the equipment can only be used with a single service provider, and they have a track record of just doubling the price because they think they can get away with it, people are going to look for alternatives.

Starlink is clearly the best right now but there are competitors. In particular, these competitors may not have the capacity to service millions of households at $100/mo, but they definitely do for private planes at $10k/mo, especially when the service is only being used for maybe 40hr/mo.

Most people just go to sleep at a time such that they get enough sleep and they get up some time after sunrise. Our bodies naturally wake up with the sun. The modern clock defined world messes with our biology, and daylight savings helps correct this mismatch. Before people had clocks or times they had to show up to work, they would just get up with the sun.

Most people also prefer to wake up a bit after the sun rises. Daylight Savings approximates having the sun come up at the same time each day. People do not want to wake up in the dark.

There is a lot of black art stuff in jet engine manufacturing, but if this article is supposed to be reassuring to Americans, it's not to me. They're saying that China was 21 years behind on the previous generation of engines, and they're going to be 7 years behind on the next one. That sounds like they're catching up pretty fast.

I don't know where they're at in terms of civil engines, but each new generation of engines eeks out less and less additional performance. If China comes out with something like the CFM LEAP at a good price, I'd imagine they could sell that for many years to come.

They were really slow though. It took minutes to boot up a game from the 1541. I never had one but my friends did, and one of them had a "Fast Load Cartridge", which I believe just replaced the software on the drive and on the computer with better software that was something like 5x as fast.

Arbitrage baby. Rent the movie from the studios, and then sell it to your customers! Before they know what happened, the sheriff is coming to evict them from the house they thought they bought, but you can just pocket the difference!

Yes, but you’re paying with your data unless you’re hosting with a provider you trust or self-hosting.

If you didn't take the time to write it, why should I take the time to read it?

This is the fundamental problem. You have to look at the equilibrium. When you submit a PR, you're asking for some of my time. I have to figure out if it's likely to be worth it for me. If you have a track record of producing useful software that I have merged before, you're putting your reputation at risk when you submit a new PR, so it's probably good. If you start sending AI slop, I'm going to downgrade your reputation.

If you have no track record though, I'll probably at least take a glance since even if I'm not sure, at least you had to spend some time to write the code and put together the PR. Now that's not true.

My guess is we're going to have to create some new systems for reputation, maybe bond posting, maybe "sponsored" PRs, where someone trusted vouches for it, etc.

Incidentally, this doesn't just apply to PRs. It's emails, all kinds of other messages, reports, etc.

Great article. I agree money and time are significant issues here.

I’d just add something else I’ve noticed with social organizations, that people used to run them more often, and one form of compensation they got was status in the community for doing something good for everyone, and that status feels like it has diminished since I was a kid. As America has changed demographically, some cultural traditions like volunteerism haven’t diffused as well. There is a tendency when two status systems live side by side, that the lingua franca is always money, and so people focus on that because having money is recognized by everyone.

It would be awesome if we emphasized this more in schools. One place to start would be talking more about my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, who started the first public library and the first fire department in the U.S.

The general environment in the 60s and 70s was extremely dirty. Every once in a while when I’m out with my kids, a classic car will roll by and I’ll admire it, but then my kids will hold their noses at the awful exhaust smell. That used to be every car.

It used to be that almost every river was unsafe to swim in.

It’s possible to fix environmental problems. It just requires the will.

It really never was that big of a problem. People make a big deal that it lasts 30,000 years, but there are many other types of waste, such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, etc, that will literally never go away, but we don't make people put those types of wastes in repositories that will last forever. Basically you just want to put it in a very remote place with a lot of earth over it. The good thing about nuclear waste is that it's so energy dense that there really isn't even that much of it.

The environmental movements of the past 60 years have been extremely successful, certainly in the U.S. The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire has been essentially solved, massive smog has been essentially solved.

The question I’ve seen here is responsibility. If you submit a PR that means that it was your best effort, and you’re willing to stand behind it to some degree. With AI, some people, when the scathing review comes back, just say “haha look at that stupid AI.” The reviewer might just as well run his own AI to do the review, but it may make huge errors as well. In that scenario, who is held accountable when there is a big bug or it degrades the quality of the code base?

Ultimately what it means to be a professional is that you are responsible for your work. That’s why you get a salary instead of being paid by the token.

I think the issue is that the tarriffs just don’t really matter anymore because the panels are so cheap that they’re dwarfed by the “balance of system” costs — installation, racking, inverters, cabling, etc.

It's really not a public company at all in the sense people are accustomed to. The super voting shares plus the 3% rule for a lawsuit plus the arbitration clause make Musk almost totally unaccountable. It certainly should not be included in stock indices that are used for passive investing, because it is a different category of asset.

These incentives are IMO a significant part of the political problems we are having around the world and even the general decline in mental health.

Just on a personal level I’ve found it hard for example to get YouTube and Facebook to stop showing me short videos, which I don’t want to see. You can click the “not interested” or “show less” button, and it doesn’t do much.

What works though if you apply it consistently is, when you see something on a feed that you don’t want anymore, is to immediately close the app and don’t come back for a while at least. That’s the strongest signal you can send to their recommender.

Notwithstanding the merits of this case, I'm against the concept of unlimited time deed restrictions on property. Dead people should not be able to decide what living people can do with land or any other property indefinitely. That's why we have things like the rule against perpetuities, and requirements that charitable foundations spend a certain percentage of their assets every year.

Some of these ideas strongly carry over to the idea of AIs acting as autonomous agents as well.

Do people think those numbers are correct? 920 million a month for 110,000 GPUs is $11.61 per GPU hour. That seems very high to me.

Something like a bridge is easily possible with the gravity of our planet. If gravity were twice as strong, we would still have bridges. Orbital rockets are only barely possible (with practical, known chemical propellants). If gravity were twice as strong, we either wouldn’t have them or we would have to use very different methods of propulsion.

Given that it’s just barely possible, you can’t just make things twice as strong as you think you’d need to, just in case something unexpected happens. Anyhow when something moderately unexpected happens, that means you may get a giant fireball like we saw today.

You often see them “monetizing the brand.” That’s a nice way of saying “betraying customer trust.” They buy a company that’s known for high quality and then cut the quality. They can keep charging the high prices for a while until people realize that it’s not what it once was. After a while, higher end customers realize what’s happened and stop buying. Then the brand typically becomes a mid market brand and they start selling on Amazon to a less affluent clientele who still associate the brand with quality but wasn’t in their price range before. They usually cut quality again at this stage.

Effectively it’s burning all of the trust built up with consumers as firewood by tricking them into buying mediocre products at high prices.

It’s very probably not deceit, it’s just biomedical research jargon from the original paper that was written for a scientist audience that didn’t get translated to a lay audience language for a sciencedaily/press release format.

It correlates reasonably well with 4 of the big 5.

I think the definition of vigorous is roughly 75% of max heart rate. HIIT would generally be more strenuous than that. Roughly speaking for a lot of people, running faster than about a 10:00/mi pace is probably vigorous.

In the WHO recommendations, they say to get 75 minutes of vigorous or 150 of moderate per week. I believe in this study they use the same double counting of vigorous minutes.

I’ve seen other studies that say you get most all of the cardio benefit you can with about 150m vigorous/300m moderate. You could roughly get that by running about 2.5 miles per day.

The environments of various bets have varying degrees of "control" from insider trading. I wouldn't say that sports is more controlled than most other environments. Point shaving scandals are certainly as old as college sports.

The real question is what the purpose of prediction markets are. For sports, there isn't really much of a purpose to the markets except entertainment for the bettors, and harvesting cash for the bookies. There are also various advantage bettors (who may be involved in corruption or not), who attempt to harvest cash from some combination of the bookies and the bettors. Generally IMO these are bad due to simple human frailty though. We figured out a long time ago that for the most part, making gambling available to the general public was a net negative to society, because it mostly transfers money from addicts to big corporations, destroying lives.

For major world events, one purpose of prediction markets is just to generate a price. It's potentially useful for people to know that, in an adversarial market, what the aggregate probability of an event is. It can also be useful theoretically to hedge risks. Whether it's practical to do that depends on the depth of the market though, and with the current markets, it's not. Even more traditional "prediction" markets like commodity futures aren't deep enough to usefully hedge most risks. For example, you might think that major oil companies might hedge future pricing risks, e.g. they want to drill an oil field with a high production cost, but they're worried that the price might go down before they finish production on the wells. Generally though, the markets aren't deep enough for them to be able to do this, so they just won't drill fields that have a production cost more than roughly the lowest price in the past 20-30 years, depending on the age of the executives in charge of the decision.

There's this other purpose of prediction markets though, which is money/information laundering. People may have secret information where their employer has a strong interest in it remaining private, however the person with the information isn't that well compensated, so they monetize the information on prediction markets. On the darker side, you can have wildly illegal markets like "assassination futures" where people bet on when someone will die, and you can bet on a particular outcome, and then make it come true. There are lots of markets somewhere in the middle where someone can take an action in the context of them being a trusted agent of an organization, but instead of following their duty as an agent, they do what is profitable based on their bets in the prediction market.

Overall, IMO there are some good uses for prediction markets that allow people to hedge risk on both sides and enable useful economic activity, but most of the uses I've seen in practice are a net negative.

He's an extraordinarily bright guy. He can get a lot more done in two years than most people, and he can get up to speed with a new organization and a new task and be productive much faster than most people.

My impression with no inside knowledge, but understanding what Elon companies are like, is that he was assigned essentially an impossible task at Tesla and tried his very best, but it could not be done, and he semi-burned out. It makes sense for him to be getting back on the horse now.

The Elon approach to management as I see it is to assign what normally would be totally unreasonable goals to a small group of extremely bright people, and they work their asses off and somehow find a way. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. If it works and the impossible was in fact, just barely possible, you dominate the market, everyone gets rich, and the people see it as the most exciting, intense, and rewarding part of their career. If it doesn't, they get depressed, divorced, and looking for other work. The Elon magic is threading the needle closely enough that a lot of the seemingly impossible things are in fact possible with enough hard work and brainpower, but although Elon is extremely good at this, the nature of the thing is that you can't predict which side you'll wind up on fully accurately.

Not at all. Saying that science does not yet explain some observed phenomenon is precisely how one starts to make scientific progress. Saying that qualia don’t exist because they are “magical” is like someone telling you lightning doesn’t exist before the understanding of electromagnetism.

Chalmers’ claim is that the fact that it really exists and the fact that we can talk about it are unrelated and basically a coincidence, which I think is completely absurd… If you really believe in qualia IMO you have to bite the bullet and say that there must be physics that we don’t yet understand.

It's wonderful that the American elite has broadened as much as it has in the past 70 years or so. With it though there was some load bearing social infrastructure that got demolished.

When it was a little club, you had to think of your family's reputation in the club, and like you say there was a particular framework of their morality.

When the elite franchise was expanded, one problem was that everyone in the elite then had different ideas of morality. When they got into business, the only thing that really united everyone was that they all liked money.

One thing that used to help that we've lost is a moral code in the universities that elites have to attend to get into the club now.

Another thing, after it became illegal to teach the bible in public schools, was "secular bible stories." You had secular saints, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ben Franklin. They each had a characteristic story, like George Washington and the cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln walking 10 miles to return 2 cents, and Ben Franklin flying a kite and discovering that lightning was electricity. Later on, MLK was added to the canon for a whole bunch of stories of courage in defense of justice. All of the stories had a moral lesson about what it meant to be a Good American.

Lately we've cancelled most of our secular saints, and my guess is that the few that are left are on borrowed time. That's not to say that these guys never did anything wrong by any means, but the point of teaching the story wasn't even necessarily even that the story actually happened exactly as it was told, the point was the moral lesson. We've basically just given up on moral education, and all we have left are things like Social Emotional Learning, but it is thin gruel.

Having integrity in elite colleges helps society. If people graduate from these places by cheating, and they see others graduating by cheating, cheating becomes a norm in elite society. If students are observed to be honest, and those that aren't are usually caught and punished, the graduates leave with a norm of honesty.

I’m not saying the math checks out, but the argument is that you get full sun with no atmospheric losses 24/7, so you produce way more energy per panel, and you don’t need batteries, because the power production is consistent and predictable.