fatbird

How much fact checking do you do on the research AI does?

Availability and wait times vary widely by location. I'm on Vancouver Island in a city of 100,000 and can see my PCP and dentist within a week if I want (though for a while, getting a cleaning required making an appointment months out). I've been to the general hospital for three separate procedures in the last six months, each time getting scheduled within two weeks (and each time getting a marvel of efficiency, arriving in the morning and out by lunchtime).

When my brother was in Columbus, OH, (pop. 1.5 million) he got a referral to a neurologist for a pinched nerve in his neck and was scheduled 9 months out. The situations are far too varied for easy generalizations.

That's where I got an immediate migraine.

No, Carmack is actually an incredibly smart and talented engineer.

Iran will clearly end up much richer and thus stronger than before, with fewer international trade impediments. So Iran having a nuke is objectively much closer and more likely than before.

The bad actors were killed, and the children of the bad actors took over. Same regime, now more firmly in control.

While before, Iran's assets worldwide were frozen, they're now receiving back $25 billion of it. Also, the sanctions preventing them from selling their oil are lifted, so they now have oil revenue to expect.

Additionally, the US will pay $300 billion to "reconstruct" Iran.

Lastly, Iran has proved that it has de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz and the mightiest military in the world cannot prevent or stop it. Going forward, Iran will receives fees to allow transit of the strait.

How can you possibly think this isn't worse for the US and the world than the previous status quo?

This is very charitable assumption.

For a second I was excited that someone had built a space station in Earth's orbit secretly. Perhaps a military station by a world power, perhaps a minor power's attempt to achieve a continuous presence in space, perhaps a private effort.

How it was built secretly, and hidden from discovery until now, and why would make for a legitimately engrossing topic in the news.

Not a bad story, but not as gratifying as my mistaken first assumption either.

Will Ferguson wrote a book named _Bastards and Boneheads_ [0] that told the history of Canada's prime ministers as one or the other. The bastards made history, the boneheads are remembered for their folly.

Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau were bastards, and supremely consequential in Canadian history. Joe Clark and Paul Martin were boneheads.

Which ones Harper and Justin Trudeau are may be too soon to tell, but Carney is clearly a bastard.

[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Bastards-Boneheads-Canadas-Glorious-Le...

The longer term of continuing to buy businesses, load them with debt, strip them of value, and move on to the next, promises much better ROI than focussing on a single business.

I don't follow this example. Isn't stripping screw heads a skills issue? How does a tool help/hurt with that?

Perfect. The dirty little secret of this strategy is that most people's uses just aren't that demanding, so the cheap stuff is more than sufficient. Additionally, breaking a cheap tool is a great indicator of where your real needs for quality lie, which is rarely where you think it will be.

Honestly, Ryobi is fine for just about anything a non-professional will need. Buy it, use it until it breaks (if it does), and then consider whether a more expensive one will be necessary.

I started with Ryobi and burned out a drill using it to hog out a 3" mortise with a 2.5" forstner bit (far beyond any reasonable use case for a drill), and upgraded to DeWalt. All of my other Ryobi pieces (circular saw, reciprocating, jigsaw, lights, non-orbital sander) work great, and I've never said to my tool "You'd be able to do this if you were a DeWalt, ya piece of shit!"

The more important thing to do once you start on one brand, and have a bunch of their batteries, is simply wait until the big sales come. All the brands have ridiculous, stock-dumping deals to move volume at least once or twice a year, and that's when it almost becomes buy-one-get-one-free.

Where I avoid the Ryobi brand is in consumables: bits, blades, and such. That's where the cheapness is most obvious. Bits wear more quickly, blades go dull faster. Milwaukee and DeWalt stuff lasts longer, but this is where you go for specialty names like Diablo that are even better. My Ryobi circular saw with Diablo blade is a tank.

True, the Metaverse was a practical product failure, rather than an impossible-in-principle failure. Regardless, a lot of smart people worked a long time trying to make it work, and it was pretty obvious it wouldn't once Zuck demo'ed it and everyone saw a creepy cartoon world, which was all the bandwidth and compute at the time could support.

Grandparent is trying to argue that a lot of smart people working quietly on something confers plausibility upon the premise of their work (i.e., "they must know something you don't"). I've rebutted with two examples showing that large numbers of smart people working on something don't make plausible a premise that is obviously flawed for other reasons [*].

[*] (ETA) and is known at the time by the smart people.

How many smart people worked quietly on Zuck's metaverse for years? How many knew it was never going to work at some point on the line to $70 billion wasted, but thought "hey, maybe I'm wrong, and it's an interesting job that pays well"?

How many smart people worked quietly at Theranos, knowing that a drop sample from a thumb was incapable of carrying sufficient blood volume for a legitimate sample, but thought "hey, maybe someone will figure something miraculous out that violates a basic tenet of my professional experience"?

They're hucksters who know that adding "in space!" to a sales pitch is a free booster for tech enthusiasts.

It's the same way that Sam Altman talks about the risks of AI deciding to kill humanity: because that's dramatic and attention grabbing, and also the most unlikely outcome. Talking about it keeps us from talking about the real, ground level problems like the massive, unplanned-for disruption in jobs and education.

They just need to keep the money tap flowing, and tomorrow can worry about itself. Who's going to hold them accountable for data-centres-in-space five years from now, when they don't exist? Has Musk suffered any blowback from his hyping the Hyperloop that never materialized?

Sy Hersh hasn't been credible for a long time. We know Israel has a variety of nuclear weapons, but don't trust anything Hersh asserts without credible independent support.

Agree with the rest of your point.

I know, this makes me crazy. The response should have been "... and?! You mean the intelligence community has a worldwide network for raking local information that also accrues goodwill to the US, and you want to end that?"

Are you this patronizing and condescending in the rest of your life?

Your link is 5 years old. This one is 3 days old: "IMF sees Canada's fiscal position as strongest in G7" [0]

[0] https://financialpost.com/news/economy/imf-sees-canadas-fina...

I would love to read a more detailed article on this device. I came back from reading the article with this exact question.

The price is set by how much providers can extract, not by their costs to provide. It's not at all obvious that a vast reduction in their cost of labour would translate to price reductions.

It's worth keeping in mind that in the U.S. the health marketplace is extremely complicated and cannot be analyzed with simple demand/supply graphs.

$2m is the current toll that Iran has already successfully charged any ships it allows. It amounts to an extra $1/barrel, so it's a trivial tax in comparison to what the supply shock is causing in fluctuations. China has already paid, and will happily pay going forward if it stabilizes the supply chain.

Expect it to go higher as negotiations cement Iran's highway robbery. Which, yes, it is highway robbery, but it's robbery no one is able to stop without invading and occupying Iran to execute proper regime change... which no one, least of all the US, is stepping up to do.

The U.S. has lost all negotiating leverage. It's been demonstrated that they're unable to militarily impose their will on Iran, and they're far more sensitive to economic disruption than Iranians are--who are, as I type this, forming human shield rings around vital bridges and facilities, ready to die if the U.S. bombs them. Negotiations are, at this point, about the U.S. coming away with some face-saving outcomes.

If Iran's 10 points become the basis of the peace, it ratifies Iran's sovereignty over the strait, at which point they can raise the price. It will be years before alternative routes devalue control of the strait, during which time Iran can siphon a lot of money out of passages taxes.

$2MM per tanker for safe passage is an extra $100 billion a year in revenue, which is peanuts next to the world's de facto acknowledgement that Iran now has sovereign control of the Strait of Hormuz and can charge whatever it wants. The ceasefire also includes lifting all sanctions on Iran, and notably says nothing about its nuclear program, which becomes de facto acceptance of its right to continue it to its logical endpoint of Iran becoming a nuclear power.

Before this started, it was impossible to imagine that Iran could achieve all this. It's hard to how this isn't a massive win for Iran.

I met someone a couple years ago who was a U2 pilot (which are still in active service). He'd flown F-16s until he reached the point in the promotion ladder where flying stopped, then switched to U2s to keep being a pilot. After hitting 20 years, he was taking his retirement and training to fly Grumman S-2Ts with CAL FIRE.

Very down-to-earth guy who knew what he wanted and made his choices. Didn't at all seem like the sort to find edge-of-the-atmosphere flying a mystical experience.

There's a basic loop that goes on regardless:

1. define a requirement 2. implement the requirement 3. verify that the requirement was implemented

TDD was built around the idea that 1 and 3 could be unified in automated testing, and that's certainly true for a large part of it. But QA as a discrete role needs to exist because, beyond verifying that 2 was done correctly, they expose higher level bugs in 1, the requirements themselves.

It's virtually impossible to define requirements completely and without second order interactions that cause problems. QA is as effective at exposing assumptions and handwaving by the people who created the wireframes or the visual design as by the developers failing to test their own work.

And ideally, this leads to the cycle being virtuous: higher quality starts at the requirements phase, not the implentation phase. It's not just that QA should work closely with the engineers--the engineers need to work closely with UX and VD to ensure they fully understand the requirements. The incentives are aligned among all parties.

Imagine the poor post-doc in the back of the truck, no seatbelt, watching and noting anything going on, while the driver is doing donuts in a parking lot to really stress-test the magnetic containment.

Public employee unions are contrary to the interests of taxpayers

This is not obvious on its face, but also, paying taxes is not my only concern wrt the civil society in which I live.

In WW2, was there an existing organisation for a coordinated response? In the Korean War? Was NATO the organization that coordinated allies in the Persian Gulf War?