forlorn_mammoth

breed much more easily.

Humans seem to be forgetting this step. Birthrates are down

sorry you experience it as demotivating. I think this is because your expectation of who has what responsibility is not aligned with workplace expectations.

The thing is, your manager has to fill in some paperwork and other admin processes to get you that raise. The manager is probably willing to do that work for you.

You can make this easier for them by helping them fill in that template. Making your manager's job easier IS part of your job, especially making it easier for them to get you a raise.

So yes, the main part of your job is to do the work explicitly assigned to you. And another part of your job is making sure that the work you've done is easily legible to the company.

family/friends relationships have other 'rules'/courtesies.

wait, so the device has "good" blocks and "worn out" blocks... sounds like a binary format to me, maybe you could encrypt the data in that format...

You can ship my genius award to me at X..x>X..X.

You were physically tethered to them through invisible waves through the sky

We've got a thing, and that's a-called radar love

We've got a wave in the air...

Radar love

Don't forget this [emacs] is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness

How familiar are you with Emacs?

deterioration of international shipping routes

like a closing of a certain straight that was essential for a large percentage of a necessary resource?

I press 1 on my microware. It starts to run for 1 minute.

I press 99 on my microwave. It starts to run for 99 seconds.

1 minute < 99 seconds.

Technology has advanced enough that analog clocks have joined polaroid cameras and vinyl records

assumption digital 'more advanced' than analog.

unclear. How digital more 'advanced'? Is regression, not advance.

Analog watch. See gap between minute hand and start of meeting. See gap get smaller. Instant.

Colleague in different time zone? See hour hand -3 steps, faster than "14 - 3 is 11". If digital even have 24 hr time, many no.

Teach kids. Analog visible, easy to read, child can see. Child can turn hands on wooden clock, manipulate. Now plus 1 hour, now plus 1.5 hours. Move long hand forward 1 rotation, 1.5 rotations.

Digital? Teach kids "now plus 90 minutes" digital? Hard math. now plus 90 is now (hour) plus 1 and now (minute) plus 30. Teach kids "now minus 10". Does hour change? Why hour change? why now hour different from now minute? daddy daddy what about now seconds? All abstract, cannot touch. Daddy why move hour number first?

Digital. 1 on microwave less than 99. Where else in world 1 < 99 makes sense? Digital time math crazy.

I appreciate you being upfront about the depth of your knowledge.

Regenerative farming and/or permaculture offer ways to run industrial-scale agriculture without the monoculture. See i.e. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal...

Another innovation I see is the use of "crop tunnels" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytunnel) to greatly extend the growing season in colder climates (another poster mentioned "Ohio"), and/or better control evaporation.

fortunately, there is a lot of evidence behind plant's feeling and thinking; enough so that if you were to expose yourself to it, and if you were willing to update your beliefs based on strong scientific evidence, I believe you'd change your view.

might depend how different the codes are. could be a really expensive retrofit. Residential and office put different stresses on infrastructure.

Wait, you seriously believe the point of all entertainment is addiction?

As in, the only form of entertainment that society should (or does) offer should be specifically designed to trigger as much addictive behavior as possible?

I can see why a person, looking at our current world, might think that. Hello Dopamine Fracking.

But is that the world we want? It certainly is not the world that existed before modern extractive capitalism started turning to extracting from the people it is supposed to serve.

Fortunately, capitalism is more efficient that state/centralized planning, so capitalism is doing a better job of turning us into their farm animals than lords ever could do for their serfs.

I respect your humility, and agree that you have an insight.

what I am curious about is how you would think about valuing these companies? Let's take it for a given that they are data and capital flywheels, and that this flywheel driven growth will continue for the next 100 years.

And say the valuation based on this measure says the company should be worth X today and X_y = X(growth rate per year)(y years) in y years (yes, I know we should use exponents not multiplication, but that's hard to render in this text editor).

and the price today is P.

What is the ratio of P to X? What is the ratio of P to X_y?

If P today is greater than X_y in 5 years, do you still buy it?

Alas, the teachers are typically pretty hampered by policies they cannot control.

They are not the thing to blame. It's system thinking all the way down.

"Your are a helpful/less assistant"

Give it a try. 4 letter difference. Add a few 100 tokens describing the task, such that the change becomes a tiny fraction of the input.

Discontinuities everywhere.

Game theory seemed kind of useful when the US was negotiating nuclear weapons control with the Soviets. It allowed successful negotiations in an extremely low trust situation.

Also, your own example is an application of game theory; you've basically stated a 'prisoner's dilemma' problem. You state that in a high trust society, most people will choose cooperation, while in a low trust society, most people will defect.

in the long term

being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.

for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.

so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.

effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.

wait, so we have a pill that cures us from (some of) the effects of having turned all of out food into low-nutrition, high addiction items that negatively impact our health while they destroy our ecosystem? (ask where all the water that goes into making soda comes from, all the high frutcose corn syrup, all of the palm oil, ...)

And that's what gets you excited about the future?

I wonder how large the spread of ethnicities is in Native American Indian populations. Just for fun, let's estimate our answer based on data from 1600, just pre the mass European arrival on the continents (plural).

academic writing is designed so a paper is part of a conversation, i.e. 100 other papers strongly relevant to the current paper. And the author needs to compress the ideas from those 100 other papers, plus their own additions to the conversation, into 6 pages.

Keep in mind those 100 other papers also went through this kind of data compression.

So the number of ideas/concepts per paragraph is much higher than 'popular' writing, and some base familiarity with the concepts under discussion needs to be assumed.

Yes, it is hard work to read these. Even when you are active in the field. Generally I need to read at least the abstracts of a some of the key references in order to understand the paper I'm interested in.

eliminate malaria from the continental US. Check.

eliminate smallpox. Check.

eliminate measles. Own goal.

power a modest sound system

please don't inflict your music on everyone around you.

Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?

If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.

'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.

The new generations have lived their whole lives under this maligned structure, and they are sick and tired of it.

Evidence in support:

Compare the number of HN posts showing disfavor towards "billionares" and/or other markers of business success, and how this has changed over time.

See the popularity of this post from the other day as one example, on 'dopamine fracking' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440792

the Friedman doctrine makes the argument that the social responsibility of the firm is to increase its profits. That policy making should be left to governments.

His theory was introduced in 1970 and it seems has since become the standard for the corporate world

questions: WHY has it become the standard? Should it still be the standard-- the world has changed a lot since 1970, is the context that supported Friedman's arguments still true? Does this also mean corporations shouldn't try to shape government/public policy?

Additional questions: "increase profits" over what timescale? PE has a reputation for increasing profits in the short term while killing the company over the medium term.

Re social responsibility. Wasn't it Ford who helped realize that paying workers enough to let them buy your product increased your market size, thus increasing profits? Did Ford perhaps go too far in 'social policy' by requiring his employees to pass invasive inspections by his company's Sociological Department. Where to draw the line?

I appreciate the linked article. I wonder if the the list should be expanded to 'at least three times', and I start to think about intelligence in plants.

See also recent work on honeybees, popularized here https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bumblebees-can-sol...

honeybees are not social insects, but maybe social insects should be added to the list?

Social insects. The original object oriented programming paradigm.

that 14 out of 64 samples had levels above the legally allowed limit (MRL), of which 12 pesticides that are not approved in the EU (page 12 of report).

The guy who carries a pistol and shoots the neighbor's dogs in self defense, I would expect that guy to face some social consequences and he'd be lucky if it was just the police.

Hobbes. we create the Leviathan so we don't have to constantly act in self defense. The alternative was cold, brutish, and short.

apparently you enjoy drinking from permanently poisoned aquifiers.

Hey, I appreciate your insight. Especially your observation that when the underlying assumptions are wrong/broken then the model produces less reliable results.

Like you, I also don't know what would work better, nor do I believe any one individual can know.

But I do have some ideas for what would make a good framework for the evaluation?

If the idea is to allocate resources in a way that provides the most benefit to the most people, where most feel they are getting a 'fair deal' or something...

and we have social institutions that convert 'resources' to value (in quotes because time, attention, etc are 'resources'. The key principle is organizing human behavior over time to produce something humans value)...

Companies Religion Sports Government

then think about what value each creates, how it is delivered, how it is captured, ... recognizing that each offers some unique strengths and unique limitations.