epivosism

there are some but only ones which have kept going from before zoning came in in the 40s-60s. that's why they always look old; since then the overhead of zoning means that generally only commercial / managed places have the capital to fight the regulations to just build a little corner where you and some local friends can spend money

note that hanging out and drinking w/out money IS legal, but as soon as you sell a hot dog or a beer, boom now the state has some lawyers for you to talk to and you're 100% blocked until we are satisfied you have done everything we want.

Ebay has used copies for ~12$. I got a few to give away to nephews & nieces who might be interested in this kind of thing

Robin Hanson reviews Planiverse here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-planiversehtml which might give you an idea of what some of his work was like!

The book seems crazy wrong on how its mystical quest ends, and on its assumed connection to a computer simulation in our universe. But I presume that the author would admit to those errors as the cost of telling his story. However, the book does very well on physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and low level engineering. That is, on noticing how such things change as one moves from our 3D world to this 2D world, including via many fascinating diagrams. In fact this book does far better than most “hard” science fiction. Which isn’t so surprising as it is the result of a long collaboration between dozens of scientists.

+1 I LOVED it. Huge, huge, influential book in my thinking when I read it at 11 or 12. It led to interest in world simulations, sociology and how it relates to physical structures and limits, physics simulations, and so much more.

Yeah, the framing you need to have to understand the comment is dark. How is one to "know" that one ought not to do this, unless the facts about cultural behavior are communicated? Yet those facts themselves, about regions and risks, are extremely contentious. It doesn't seem fair to have it both ways - either every group should be free to move to, try to make a life, do business an lots of US regions without worrying much, or we should spread stereotypes and warnings about how groups are likely to behave, which would look a lot like racism.

The points about not knowing anybody are fair, but still, the obvious implication is that the comment, while coming from the left, is also suggesting that the MC should have privately been told the racial realities of that area. But the right to speak about that, too, is under attack. Is it or is it not okay to mention that majority black, southern, low income towns are likely to be extremely dangerous, and that poverty is a proxy for it, but that other methods of stereotyping are likely even more effective?

True. Although most science fiction which would take place over such a long timespan might involve methods of locking things down more firmly, and putting at least part of the world into a kind of stasis. This is almost necessary to explain how humanity could still be at a similar tech level to us now yet still be around for such a time period.

I often think about a scifi story where after X million years, somehow familiar humanity survives, and two plates containing land with VERY different natural flora and fauna approach each other - for example, california, home of many native plant defenders, and australia. As they get closer than 50 miles, news would start to mention making sure not to cross-transplant animals and plants. Under 20 miles, the wind and storms would do some work already, but people on both sides may still be resisting. But the moment they actually touch for the first time, some great treaty may shimmer into enforceable existence, changing the future of that whole world.

Or else, they'd just build fences, forbid anyone from living on the coast, and maintain this artificial continental boundary forever...?

related: a market summarizing what I know about China's intentional map offset laws, specifically on whether Google will continue following this (only 4 bettors, not very meaningful yet) https://manifold.markets/Ernie/will-google-maps-stop-followi...

To the opposite point: the reply says "women are failing cause the event design is biased" and also "women could do perfectly well if not for society making them not play"

Which one is it. If society didn't hold back women, would they win or not? Arg 1 says no, arg 2 says yes.

If the event were fairly constructed, arg 1 says they'd win, arg 2 says they still wouldn't.

So you've identified two possible problems; if the first is true (events are inherently biased) that completely proves that social discrimination is irrelevant (because the event design is so sexist women can never win)

If the second is true (women only lose because society holds them back) then the claim that the events are inherently biased (enough to totally prevent female wins) has to be false because either they can or can't win ex social bias. Qed either claim being true forces the other to be false, the args are contradictory.

EDIT: yes, I may be falsely thinking point-wise rather than distributionally. Both of the factors you mention do push women out further in the distribution of placements

Why have you locked off the easy complimentary answers: "women generally are smart enough to know running 100 miles at once isn't that useful" or "women on average have more important things to do". Nobody crows how men also have the largest Warhammer figurine collections and the largest trains sets due to sexism. Women just have different and generally more reasonable interests.

Why would someone trap themselves in an ideology which depends on believing that women are physically equal to men when men are obviously bigger, stronger, more insanely competitive and dedicated to meaningless status games. That's not necessarily a plus.

Also you still haven't really explained why "run X miles from A to B" is a tilted contest. Yet "swim Y miles from France to England" (an event I believe women are somewhat better at than men?) isn't.

yeah, the author seems to like the guy but still falls into typical prejudicial choices in explaining the actual story. It's so schoolmarmish. Step back man, people can do what they want, they make mistakes, they have grand plans that sometimes fail.

“The Overconfident Optimist and His Ill-Advised DIY Project.”

This is what I mean. The article just started and he's defining his conclusion for all readers.

Then, he compares Fenley to a "Child-destroying slackline" (which apparently never actually hurt anyone?). Fenley bought some property and tried to artistic type stuff. It is really slimy to compare him to such a horrible thing as hurting a child. That linked tweet is another "we know better" type of guy who's telling someone else how wrong they are. Yeah, doing risky stuff is risky, and I definitely don't think kids should (or would) be allowed to ride that thing, but I think they'd figure it out real quick (possibly after the creator died testing it).

This is really a cultural thing - puritan types freaking HATE how unplanned, disorganized, and free/careless other cultural groups are in the US (i.e. appalachian/borderer people). So reading this as straight up cultural mockery/status management/ridicule makes it clear. Its basically equivalent to a 19th century "lets go to other countries and laugh at people's behavior" type of travelogue by northeast USA "know better than you" types criticizing other cultural groups for the behavior they don't like (monster trucks, bbq, hotdog eating competitions, basically anything that's just not done in the uptight north-east USA)

Also: author, did you personally ever make 900k from a patent? So yeah, people are weird, have bad/dumb ideas. And I can feel you kind of like the guy despite everything. So like, get over the contempt you feel, figure out what he's got that gave him the skill to invent something, and rise above your need to mock him. The rest of the article is fine in tone, just fix the initial disrespectful comparisons. Something like "I looked into this guy and found a complicated, naive, but also gifted guy... <details>" rather than just hitting the regular playbook.

Final comment: the note about race / murder is super weird. You mention a company moved, then immediately explain the race distributions without any reason to do that, as if there is a connection. Is there? what is it? Did the company ever mention race? This is typical journo hinting/dogwhistling. Is there any evidence of any racial problems in the subject of the article? Some towns are poor, some rich, some white, some black, whats the point? Then you mention the murder rates... inadvertently confirming a hate fact, that certain groups are linked to super high murder rates (victims and perps). I just don't get it. Like, what's the point of bringing that up?

The thing is traditionnally sports have been invented by men with charactetistics/rules that suited men first.

Take a look at the history of the concept of marathon; I think your claim is a stretch. Running fast from point A to point B isn't some kind of patriarchal conspiracy.

Also you make two contradictory claims, which one is it?

1) that the sport inherently is sexist in design, so of course women aren't winning

2) that women would be winning if the sport had more women competing

Those are opposite arguments.

You might like this conversation Laz had with Tyler Cowen a few months back: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/lazarus-lake/

Yes, and MJ has no public API either. Same for Ideogram, I imagine they have at least 10m in the bank, and aren't even bothering making an API despite being SoTA for lots of areas.

+1 on the recs for his main work. I also wanted to mention that I loved his book Tatja Grimm's world, too. It's great, alternate world fantasy, but with Vingean depth of thought about what it all might mean... Looking it up now, I see this is a rework of what must have been a very early novel for him, based on a work that came out in 1969!

Thinking about this too, I'm sure he did a great job as a professor, supporting his family and teaching. But in addition, he had this greater creative gift to reach millions, too! I think this pattern probably applies to a lot of us. Working and doing useful things during the day out of necessity... and like him, I hope everyone on HN puts in the effort and time to do something creative, too, and finds their audience. It'd have been a shame of the creative side of Vinge had never gotten out!

Readers may be interested in this link, which is to all the SBF sentence-related markets on manifold.

Caveats: just like twitter follower counts, instagram like counts, hn upvotes, this is "play money", the mana amounts the traders bet here are numbers in a database, not real cash. Also the number of traders is fairly small.

The top markets have settled on these values:

  300 traders, The most likely time served is 20-30y

  270 traders, he'll be sentenced to 20y+, 86% 

  135 traders, he'll be sentenced to 50y+, 27% 

Freedom of choice means you have the right to try to create such a system. As other people can try what they want, VC funding, astrology, etc. It's all legal and competes.

But, if someone is selling a system which doesn't exist yet, but is supposed to be better, but that will only work if we also shut off the one working system first, before knowing... well, I'm skeptical.

I loved Debt for the ideas, but I abandoned this since it seemed to be pushing their politics so hard. I've read Zinn, GGS, later pop science anthropology books, 1491, 1493, as well as kept up with john hawks, razib, etc as far as paleogenetics; I wanted to like this book but a lot of it didn't add up - the theory was so complicated and specific. There also didn't seem to be much room left for the evolution of larger scale social structures... yet to me the way things went in history seems obvious. Most of the actors and roles in early human history have cultures shaped by their survival imperatives - and the variety of belief systems we know about match the needs of that culture. Anyway, I would love to hear a good defense or explanation of the book, to make sure I haven't missed anything! I abandoned it possibly 1/3 in, and then read reviews, which mostly confirmed what I had been thinking, so I never went back.

how long they live before reproduction, reproduction rate, edibility (while you're waiting for them to be tame), in-captivity behavior, what they eat, etc matter a lot since they are the variables going into the equation for how many 100s or thousands of years you're going to have to devote to this.

Also, if they are basically useless now, most groups won't even realize there's a point to starting to tame them.

100% agree w/this recommendation. The title is pretentious and put me off, so I missed out for a few years, but the contents are amazing. He has another related book, The Secrets of our Success, which is good. I'm happy that despite everything, at least a few people are doing cross-domain research and trying to put together and test ideas for how humanity came to be.

Another type 2 site I forgot: stackoverflow

And another type 1: github

Another problem is that due to fear of lawsuits, you really are not allowed to talk to candidates afterwards.

Even innocuous things like "We all really thought you'resmart, and loved your projects, but in the end we thought you needed a bit more experience. Please, please reapply in a few years" - you may mean it to encourage the person and show them that the lack of an offer is just a time mismatch, they or their lawyers might reinterpret it as a type of age discrimination, or worse.

Basically as a company employee you are in a "live fire" environment when talking to candidates and you need to keep your head down and minimize exposure

The obvious answer is to make the average validity of successful suits against companies much higher, so that the feeling changed from "it's Very very easy to be sued and lose money+status+reputation wise, regardless of the merits of the case" to "it's a free country, if you do clear, overt, intentional wrong, you may be in trouble, but in general as long as you are honest you are in the clear"

This is really great. I want to review this for everywhere I've been, because the variation in how gov'ts do statistics is hiding so much of what's actually going on there.

That matches what I would expect. My normal continuation would be to look at the growth from 2014 til now in global internet users, and at the competitors like youtube, insta, etc. I'd expect to find that many of these sites grew 100 or 1000x, and that the global online population whose device power and internet service levels surpass some threshold has also grown by at 10x since then.

Those are all assumptions and memories from working during that time period - possibly wrong, would look up if you disagree. But if you don't, then my conclusion would be that staying flat during a period like that - when you could have grown and supported a deep, new, persuasive trend of literacy, fact-based reasoning and understanding, education and compromise - is a huge failure.

I'd definitely agree that changes like that intensify the issue!

For me as an amateur contributor, though, even the normal experience was tough - suddenly I returned to find my content removed, with a short, aggressive note, left by what wasn't a committee, or a jury, but rather a single, annoyed and tired individual, who in his seniority was somehow justified in unilaterally acting alone to delete my work, without the careful attention to detail in documents, wording, and formality which helps make real-world justice palatable. The carelessness with which he wrote made it clear that at that site, I was to be considered a person of very little value at all.

To speak more clearly, that was the social/psychological effect of it - which left me without much motivation to continue! And I think that's a wide effect - if you compare a typical 1st-time wikipedia editing experience to the more successful UGC sites, it's pretty clear they all make some effort to shield users from that (if they can) and let them feel successful, even if they aren't yet. (I know from the inside of one of these places that users get mad at for removing their creations for copyright or other reasons, all of us on the inside hated potentially frustrating a creator, and admired them for trying over and over to create something.)

Moreover, from what I've heard, there used to be more freedom on wikipedia, so the argument that "it's always been that way" might not even work.

Yes, I didn't break them out but I do consider some types of basic filtering to be legitimate because they're both common across cultures, and their limits can be described fairly precisely. These are things such as prohibitions on political, ethnic or religious conflict, criminal activities, nudity, and of course, copyright.

Actually, treating censorship of those things as the default global level of censorship makes the difference between restrictive sites like Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet even more stark.

It's almost unimaginable that YouTube would remove a creators content simply because they thought the topic was irrelevant, or the quality too low. So I agree we can't have a true free for all online. But the distinction between the large group of UGC sites that really try to cultivate and protect their creators from those that don't is reflected in the popularity and growth rates of them all.

I have heard the editor count at Wikipedia has been shrinking for years. Might have been wrong though

I recently have been thinking about UGC site in general, and it seems like they generally go two ways:

1. Allow most legal content to be uploaded and control distribution with algos

YouTube, Roblox, Twitter, Tinder, Flickr, Insta, FB, TikTok.

This lets users practice and test things without risk to their work or account.

2. Sites that try to "keep the db clean" by nuking stuff they think is "bad" by some criteria.

Sites like this: Wikipedia, most big subreddits

Type 2 sites can be unsustainable because they tend to make new users feel judged, and don't give them the chance to iterate and improve their work until it's more ready to be shared and useful to a broader audience. You just find your content nuked, or removed from the subreddit, or downvoted a ton, often with a dismissive or aggressive comment. This is NOT the way to grow and survive as a company over a long period of time

Obviously, there is no necessity to keep the db full of only high quality items. As the scope and number of niches a site covers, it's not possible to maintain that. On the other hand, using algos lets you do interactive tests with content, directly testing against various audiences to see if they like it, without having to do editorial work yourself.

Of course, there has to be some limit - articles for every pokemon, or every version of every pokemon, etc at some point it does get too far. The thing for me is coming in and seeing your content completely deleted.

Yeah, expanding and making prompts specific via LLMs is a good idea. I would like to be able to see and fight better against the outer prompt in some situations, though. Dalle-3 can be really persistent in certain cases.

The whole alleged theoretical reason for this doesn't work. There is no proposed way to even implement a globally fair representation plan. So it just feels hacky that very USA-21st century-specific grievance groups show up in all global images from the USA to India to Rome to the Mongolian steppe.

Dall-E 3 at least exposes the adjusted prompt. Here's an example of it; you can get it if you hit the API directly and look at revised_prompt.

https://twitter.com/eb_french/status/1760763534127010074

At least they show it to us; and you can prepare or attempt to convince the GPT which interprets your prompt into not doing it quite as much (although the example above is where I failed; it seems like it's on to me, because the violation of what I'm asking for is so egregious.)