jaqalopes

Editing my fantasy novel. Made a mindset change recently that helped me get past a months-long block.

Sounds like the perfect setting for a souls-like game.

A friend and I were at the WW2 museum in New Orleans a couple years ago and he said something that really stuck with me. Amazed at an exhibit on wartime manufacturing, he turned to me and said, "This is so unbelievable to me. To think what we accomplished when everyone in the country was pulling in the same direction. There's no way that could happen anymore." I hardly want to glorify warfare, but he has a point. As a young person in our chaotic and ambiguous present day looking back into the haze of the past, there really is something incredibly romantic about the era of war mobilization. Ordinary people had a purpose simply assigned to them, and if nothing else I think it's still the case that people in all eras crave purpose.

This is pretty amazing. I clicked on a Luganda-language channel in Uganda and it was a concerned-looking woman being interviewed for a news segment about a "for men" testosterone supplement. Kind of heartening to see that people everywhere are the same, for better and for worse.

Tangential question: Is housing activist your occupation? And if so how did you get into that line of work?

This is miraculous. I randomly flipped to Air Bud and it's just... playing the whole movie! How on Earth was it possible for one person to make this???

All of the people who lived in the country of the Tigris and Euphrates were white. We don’t know how nor when nor where colored people first lived, though it is interesting to guess.

I guess you can read this as a funny, outdated text but I personally would not give it to my kid.

93/100 here, wonder if there’s a difference between mobile and desktop? I played on mobile and being able to bring my phone right up close to my eyes seemed to make it easier to judge the spacing than if I’d done it at my desk.

I’m a fellow ADHD sufferer and you’re 100% right that it is disabling in many contexts where “normal” function is optimal. But I want to encourage you not to despair entirely—-there are legitimate ways in which the ADHD mind has an edge. Mainly in recognizing lateral connections that neurotypical people might not see—-in essence, creativity, innovation. Not that neurotypical people can’t be creative, they obviously can be. But the ADHD mind has been shown to have this unusual quality. It’s why people with ADHD are often especially good conversationalists and jokers, even if they are terrible at getting their taxes done on time.

I could hardly believe this finish, yet the program certainly earned its victory. … Only one thing marred the scene. Villa, who only a day earlier had reached the summit of his backgammon career in winning the world title, was disconsolate.

This seems to be the pattern for the human champions who are the first to lose to computers. What a truly singular moment in existence to experience. Both a personal loss and a loss for the whole human species, and you have to bear it alone.

The author conflates individual YouTube channels with "publishers" which is nonsense. The publisher is YouTube. You don't read 10 different "publishers" when you read stories in a newspaper by 10 different journalists. Are we also going to say that watching, say, 20 TikToks from different creators is consuming content from 20 publishers? I sure don't think so. The whole idea of the article seems like nonsense to me. "Spotify for news" is your web browser or the home screen on your phone that has five different news/social media apps. We don't need another layer in between.

I'm surprised how many negative responses this essay has received. If you read it as prescriptive, "Do these steps and you will achieve greatness," then yeah obviously he is skimping on the "why" of it all. But as he says at the very top, this essay is actually descriptive. This is an analysis of how great work comes about, based on looking at many cases of "it." Your own mileage may vary.

For my part, I found it perfectly thought provoking; not a strict roadmap to follow, but a set of observations against which to measure my own experiences and ideas, and see if I can't improve on what works for me. I appreciate anyone who is trying to dig deeper into how human beings can better themselves and create meaning in our indifferent universe.

https://www.chriszombik.com/blog/

Most of my writing energy the last couple months is going into finishing a book projects but when that's done I will have more to write on other topics!

On the topic of the nude statues, I have no evidence for this idea, except: modern toy dolls are often "nude," with the idea children will put clothes on them. Is it possible that the Greeks put different clothes and decorations on their nude base statues, clothes which are now gone, evanescent as the paint that once adorned the marble statues as well?

This first struck me as obvious, but really it's only obvious if you're already deep into generative AI. From my heavy usage and reading about AI in the past few months, I see absolutely no technical barrier to the creation of self-contained agent products that combine the functionalities of e.g. Alexa, GPT-4, Zapier, Wolfram-Alpha, Google, etc. all into one steerable package. It's just a matter of time.

Something I find especially amusing is that, despite the hype here on HN, most people in the world at large have not yet used a generative AI of any kind, even if they've heard about it on the news or social media. Because these things are developing so quickly, I think the first of these "agents" are going to hit the market before most people have even tried something like a ChatGPT. And so the experience of a "normal" person who's not in the loop will be of ~1 year of AI news hype followed by the sudden existence of sci-fi style actual artificial intelligences being everywhere. This will be extremely jarring but ultimately probably very cool for everyone.

Not an hour ago I was remarking to my roommate that airplanes are "better" at flying than bumblebees, but the bumblebee does things no machine can, and that I see AI versus human intelligence similarly. Yours is pithier though!

"Generate a testimonials section."

What a perfect use case for AI hallucinations!

I wonder if this is why my heart rate goes up and I feel inexplicably enraged when I can slightly, just barely hear my roommate two rooms away watching TV when I'm in bed trying to fall asleep. I ask for things to be turned down and I use a white noise machine (have tried ear plugs, they work but they make my ears hurt), which helps, but sometimes the only effective thing is to pull a pillow over my head. It's even worse with people who snore. I can't imagine how my mother has slept next to my sleep apnea father in the same bed for 40 years and not gone insane.

Anecdotally, my buddy (31M) in London says he's having the time of his life. Making a lot of money at BP, parties every weekend, just moved into a nice flat with a partner. I suspect, just like in America, that if you're inside the "formal economy" (corporate job with real benefits and potential for career growth) your life is pretty great. If you're outside that (service worker, gig economy, small business owner, NEET) then things are pretty grim.

I hope you will try other entries in the series! Player of Games and Excession are big favorites of mine, but they're quick reads and if you have the time I would really encourage all of them in order of release!

The Fed as we have seen definitely "has the power" to raise rates. The question behind your question is, to what extent does raising rates lower inflation? I'm not an economist, just some guy on HN, but I'm pretty persuaded on the idea that inflation is, as others have said, a "monetary phenomenon." If you strip away money for a second, the "actual economy" is just supply (people making stuff), and demand (people buying stuff). Now imagine we're back in 2019 and the economy exists with some baseline amount of money in circulation. Then in 2020 and onwards, more money is printed to allow for emergency government spending in the face of the pandemic (a policy, by the way, that I think was completely correct in context). With interests rates low/zero, the money that was added to the economy basically stayed in the economy, bouncing around according to supply and demand. However, once people got the new money, and people consequently decided to buy more stuff with that money, the economy did not magically start making way more stuff right away to match. Classically, this is where the inflation supposedly happened.

As we discovered with some recent bank failures, it is somewhat more complicated than this. People did not just use the new money to buy stuff. They also used it to invest, and a lot of those investments would not have made sense if interest rates were higher. Somewhere I saw the example of an "AI dog-washing startup"; this fake business illustrates the type of real but not necessarily sound business that was suddenly getting investment because there was a lot of money flying around inside the economy. Now, when the Fed "raised interest rates," what actually happened was it created new investment vehicles (e.g. treasury bonds) that offered returns on investment that were much more attractive to investors than the previous generation that offered low/zero interest. Banks and others shifted towards these new, better investments and tried to sell their old, worse ones. Hence, some of the money that was flying around began to exit the economy and return to the government coffers. This was bad for banks like SVB that had a lot of "interest rate risk." It was also bad for downstream investments like the AI dog-washing startup, which were now competing with "better" businesses in an environment with less money flying around—this is where you see e.g. the current tech hiring downturn and layoffs.

So that's about what the Fed has been able to do. One assumption you've highlighted here is, to what extent is the Fed doing all this based on research and deliberation? I think the short answer is, we don't know. Interest rates are indeed a blunt instrument, but they are also the instrument the Fed can control, and so that's what the Fed is using. This leaves a lot of room for conspiracy theories and speculation. I happen to think the Fed is doing its best within the constraints of its powers, but the Fed cannot singlehandedly "fix the economy." They can print money and adjust interest rates. And doing these things affects the economy in theoretically well-understood ways.

Ultimately, raising rates is like putting an ice pack on an injury. It reduces the swelling, which is helpful, but it doesn't fix the injury per se—the fixing happens in an entirely different, more complex system, really a system of systems. Just so with "the economy." The economy ultimately exists as a sort of distributed phenomenon in the thoughts and actions of all its participants. These thoughts and actions are not aligned, and so we get the infinite omni-directional tug-of-war known as the "invisible hand of the market." The Fed certainly has a lot of ways to influence the economy, but it cannot force people to think or act in precise, coordinated ways.

I was cackling at this part. How could anyone in Texas say that with a straight face after the big ice storm two years ago? The climate is changing everywhere. The idea that you can move away from the climate is simply deluded.

I've also seen it suggested that modern tech is causing people today to be less in touch with their physical bodies and the bodies of those around them. I personally think I'm much happier and more "productive" when I have access to physical intimacy (which, as with perhaps many people today, is less often than I would prefer). Perhaps it's all related?

Today's Money Stuff opens with a story in which JP Morgan owned $1.3 million worth of nickel metal in a warehouse somewhere (for reasons having to do with metal futures trading). Somehow it was recently discovered that the bags of nickel, which have been there since early 2022, were actually full of worthless rocks.

It's not for society, it's for the author's specific needs. On Twitter, you can filter certain keywords you don't want to see. Why not build a tool to do that sort of thing for the entire web?

Part of the solution is certainly better mental habits by information consumers, but it's not fair to expect normal people who are just trying to go about their business to bear all the costs of trying to stoically ignore this mental pollution—and it is pollution. It sucks that the business models of many websites apparently depend on bombarding people with 90% crap that you need to fight through to get to the 10% you want, and we ought to demand a better solution than "just suck it up."

Consider Phlebas was such an odd entry point into the Culture series. In a way it makes more sense as a prequel, to be read after you understand the world and the general conceit of the series. In fact, I think Consider Phlebas is better upon rereading than it was going in cold. In this light, I'm kind of surprised I went on to read the other books after starting with this one. But, I'm incredibly glad I did, and I recommend them to anyone with an interest in far-future sociological sci-fi.

It's a big world, not everyone needs to be a farmer/doctor/psychologist so some people who have other skills do other things. Sometimes those other things help. A lot of time they don't. For better or worse we live in a society.

That struck me too, I'm doing it around once a week!

Tweet showing what the actual monotile looks like: https://twitter.com/cs_kaplan/status/1637996332475359232?s=2...