mapt

Smart TVs replaced dumb TVs not out of consumer demand, but out of subsidy from commercial databrokers and streaming services. Despite adding $100 of hardware they were priced $100 cheaper.

The Chinese models keep American financial markets at "To the Moon" levels rather than "Igniting Jupiter as a binary star" levels. This amount of capital pressure exerts its own gravitational pull in markets and in geopolitics, and every additional dollar of valuation can propel acquisitions, which propels valuation, et cetera. Undiluted, very quickly Amazon owns countries like it today owns county governments.

Regulations are a bit different, not just on what counts as rest, but on physical format.

The normal US front-engine is rare in Europe.

The US extended sleeper generally doesn't exist in Europe

The European compact cabover generally doesn't exist in the US.

The scale influences this more than a little bit. The longest drives you'd find it sensible to make hauling freight inside Europe are between 12 and 18 hours of nonstop travel, while in the US they're more like 40-60 hours.

So build them stops.

Skeptic here.

Many of them probably are. Individual EMF concerns are often debunked. It is possible but unlikely that all of them are categorically complete nonsense. But let's put them aside for a moment. There are real, known consequences of living next to a data center as implemented.

Coil whine from transformers, in audible and infrasound movement of air, has real known effects, as well as suspected poorly studied effects, on the human head & ear.

The fact that we're just allowing a data center that says "I'm out of power, let me use more", to run four extraordinarily loud, dirty airplane jet turbines at the middle of their property for power generation on an improvised basis. And then when we look at their operation in aerial photos, we see 36 jet turbines.

Any and all non-closed-loop cooling systems are an issue, especially when they pull from potable water or operate in dryland droughts. The ratio of wattage consumed vs water consumed should be instructive here.

The amount of money that is going into these things is obscene, and when they choose to involve local officials it is essentially buying out your local-level democracy wholesale. Total lack of regulation. Town council meeting videos where all of your supposed representatives are under NDA; Extremely blatant corruption that the state doesn't want to touch. Races to the bottom.

These things are designed to run basically as lights-off factories, with little to no local labor involved. While there may be some initial investment in facilities, that will dwindle. When they are simultaneously not paying taxes via assorted individual arrangements, and raising electrical rates, there's very little to recommend them to locals.

We have established no general rules as far as buffers. Large-scale construction in general tends to kill rural watersheds & aquifers in close proximity. The sound issue is real, the EMF issues may have some limited credibility, and well-water is often tragedy of the commons, all of which might be totally mitigated by a half mile or whatever of forest buffer mandated around a data center zoning.

A year of plugging it in once or twice a day to recharge it, and it blew.

Old rectangular USB-A was only rated for 1500 ideal insertions. USB-C is a big improvement at 10,000 ideal insertions. Most insertions are not ideal, and it is relatively common to have some leveraged pressure trying to wedge the port apart; When my phone bridges the gap between the arm of the sofa and the coffee table while plugged in, for example, it's got a bending moment. USB-C is much thinner in the up-down dimension than USB-A, and it is not designed to safely disengage when side-loaded like Magsafe. If you wanted to break it for some reason, I'm pretty sure you could do it in a few seconds while resting your elbows on the table, on grip strength alone.

"Feel free to create your own university where you have the funding for petri dishes. In the meantime, I'm going to publish without them, because I feel like this tissue culture I'm growing on my lunch is statistically significant."

Just because I am not personally entitled (by funding, by ethics, by career position) to collect the necessary data to demonstrate a hypothesis, does not make that hypothesis demonstrable with lesser data.

My phone's USB-C port is worn out, and so now it's a brick if I don't have a wireless charging dock around.

Is it physically impossible to get bandwidth and power out of something as durable as a Magsafe connector, even a larger-scale version?

Have you been following Gossip Goblin?

AMZN Q2 numbers are in, and it turns out they're going to Goldman Sachs the AI bubble.

We need a sufficiently advanced world model to ground-truth our large language models.

EDIT: This was mostly satirical.

My impression is that friction is negligible once firmly in LEO. Orientation of a sub-component surface definitely matters, as does Earth's presence in half of the viewshed. But my point is that surface finish also makes a big deal, and paint is not necessarily a bad thing, because of the emissivity increases.

(Though I'd rather anodize the thing black imperfectly if it helps avoid paint flecks becoming orbital debris)

The radiative equilibrium temperature is a function of (watts in - watts out), with a fourth power law shoved in there somewhere. A blackbody at radiative equilibrium absorbs whatever visible light you throw at it, and then spits it back out according to a distribution law that mostly places it in the thermal infrared bands (at temperatures we've familiar with, anyway).

Remove convection/conduction as heat transfer methods, and you end up with two numbers dictating radiative balance:

Percent reflectivity in the bands it's exposed to

Percent emissivity in the bands it's emitting

The balance between these dictates temperature, and they're generally inversely correlated. Mirrors are good reflectors, but very poor emitters.

I completely fail to recall that time we burned down Buckingham Palace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington

We did flex quite a bit on lesser powers, though, even in the 1800s. The US Navy was infamously rebuilt after the revolution to fight a war against Tripoli.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tripoli

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_corsairs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars

Before the end of the century we'd fought a hundred or so largely forgotten wars. Who remembers that time we invaded Korea? No, the other one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Ko...

Or Fiji? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1858_Fiji_expedition

Or New Orleans? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811_German_Coast_uprising

The blackbody equilibrium temperature at 1AU from the sun is about 278K. All satellite materials are fine at 278K because that's within the expected range of storage and atmospheric launch temperatures.

The equilibrium temperature of a polished aluminum surface at 1AU from the sun is 416K, hot enough to melt polyethylene and at least weaken many of the relevant aerospace plastics like the PET in mylar film.

Painting polished aluminum black drastically raises emissivity along with the lowered reflectivity, and brings its behavior closer to a blackbody.

So does allowing aluminum to oxidize, which it does almost instantaneously in atmosphere. So it's not like it's going to change anything drastically.

The reason this seems like it should change things a lot is that you're used to convectively cooled matte surfaces on Earth, where emissivity and radiative cooling is a less relevant factor and the only significant effect of painting something black is primarily that it absorbs more energy.

but I'd like to point out that this kind of study must be done in a way that doesn't discriminate any of the students.

This is definitionally impossible. Testing whether the tool benefits the students that get it is an attempt to benefit certain students at the expense of others. Get over this hangup if you want to do this sort of research.

Getting that WYSIWYG editor up and running was a major stumbling block that I overcame to get my school newspaper a PHP-Nuke site ~25 years ago.

It is insane that there isn't a web standard implementation for this passed 15 years ago.

On a related note, pronunciation variance in "Helicopter" -> "Helacopter" -> "Helocopter" leads to a confusing abbreviation - "Helee" vs "Heelo"

I argue that the idea of copyright of intellectual property was a social compact, and this violates it; These are not "copies" in the common vernacular, they're a temporary viewing of a spectacle, and do not deserve protection against replication, especially nonprofit replication.

When we ask "Can guns kill people? What are the rules of engagement that a gun follows? Who would the person shot by a gun sue, should it come to that?" we aren't so confused.

The last human finger that pressed the button, and anyone employing them to press the button. The real question is how much intent transfers. If you point a gun at a person and the trigger goes off without you pulling it, how liable are you? If you're pointing it at the ground and it does the same and the shrapnel flies about, how liable are you for that? If a loaded gun cooks off in a burning car and a bullet goes flying, how liable are you for that?

If you give an AI agent free reign to your computer and ask it to set your schedule, and it ends up sending classified weapons plans that happened to be on your computer to the Chinese Communist Party, how much should you be held culpable?

With novel technologies we typically answer this conservatively, and say that the person running the agent (or holding/owning the gun) has full civil liability for its actions regardless of their intent, but may limit criminal exposure.

We would (should) take an especially dire and suspicious view of anybody that has anything material to gain from using the tool irresponsibly or maliciously; We can demonstrate incentive/motive even if we cannot prove their intent. The law here is principally a deterrent against somebody that tells an agent "Win me this election" or "Build this product", and the agent then proceeds to hire a hitman to kill their opponent, or steal their rival's technology through industrial espionage. My fear is that the way things are going, it's a completely ineffective deterrent. My guess is a lot of people need to be killed by AI agents before we take it seriously and limit its use as a fig leaf.

a certain share A of the prospective benefit of housing is in potential asset price appreciation, and a certain share B is in the utility value of the home.

The systems that contribute towards A are mutually reinforcing, vicious spirals in a neoliberal capitalist world. Just like in the art world, there is no hard objective value to vacant housing, and many purchases are made on debt. It's worth whatever the last guy paid, and so the banks will loan you 80% (or more) of whatever the last guy paid. This is a form of money creation. We have collectively bid up the housing stock, completely separated from the utility value, at a rate we generally expect to be competitive to loaning real operating businesses money to invest in actual operations.

If you tax ALL of the prospective value, and price sinks down all the way to B, you can still have profitable private housing development in a steady state. Unmet demand is a thing that exists. Yes getting to B overnight probably represents a crash in your overall asset investment picture, but getting 1/10th of the way there, locally, less so. Phasing it in over time, less so. If you're expecting 5% and you get 4.5% that's still a return.

The thing about this type of redistribution is, it's just a way better more functional economy than the idea of conventional price setting with the addition of rent control, or than the status quo. Rent control tears incentive structures and makes willing landlords into unwilling landlords who are instructed to be creative in how miserable they make their tenants; Its supposed goal of affordability simply shifts costs from older tenants to newer tenants. The status quo where property taxes are very low and so A is significantly greater than B simply doesn't establish those incentives of mutually agreeable economic exchange to a great degree in the first place. "I bought a house as an investment. Rent it out? I mean... there are upsides and downsides."

NYC is home to ~half of the co-op housing in the United States. This is a relatively unusual arrangement. Co-ops generally forbid renting / subletting, they practically ban REITs, new resident-owners go before a board to get approval. They should be considered the same as owner-occupied housing, and for long-term owner-occupied houses where the asset value isn't a big deal, higher property taxes are on average a wash - they pay higher amounts for higher levels of public services. Perhaps your $2k/month goes to $3k/month but transit becomes free, trash collection becomes effective, and the schools become better. Or in the alternate universe your $2k a month goes to $3k a month and then we hand residents a $12k check at the end of the year.

Either way, vacancy gets punished, landlords can't treat the city's housing like gold boullion, and the price of housing is fractionally more tied to the cost of living than the future economic outlook in potentia.

Picture a conventional Ponzi scheme operating in the Lower East Side, which has scaled to be 30% of the city's economy. Whole industries have risen up around this scheme, it's essentially printing money in a way that seems like it might be legal if you squint, and you're not trying to regulate/tax it. It's growing so fast that it's actually causing problematic inflation for the rest of the city.

Can you afford to let it grow unchecked, indefinitely?

Vacancy taxes are, to my understanding, nearly impossible to administer effectively without approaching them formally as normal property taxes that have some kind of out. Lying about when the unit got vacated is basically expected, while creating a new resident out of whole cloth and filing taxes for them including a Residency Benefit Transfer is a bunch of easy to detect felonies†, and understood as such by everyone. Spend the money on better schools/roads/park and even this isn't practical.

†Modulo accomodations for undocumented immigrants

Some of us hold grudges on account of performative outrage. Ubisoft made invasive DRM the norm in gaming ~20 years ago. While other companies now do the same thing, I'm still boycotting. Fuck'em.

Tax property values.

We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market.

The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected.

Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.

The US will take a 3 year project, bid it out as a 10 year project to "save money", and cancel it at year 20 for cost overruns and because it's not projected to be operational until year 30.

While 2 is possible, we've had automated ransomware going for some time now. The agents in 1 are sufficient.

Both whales and prairie dogs turn out to have rather advanced degrees of verbal language capability, more complex than any of the Great Apes bar homo sapiens. Crows somehow culturally remember the face of an antagonist multiple generations later. Almost every highly social vertebrate has degrees of intelligence that would get you burned as a witch if you'd suggested it not too long ago, in the era when "Fishes clearly don't feel pain" was just a cultural default assumption.

I relent to snarky Rick and Morty quotes because I don't know that it's useful any more to try to explain paperclip optimizers or alignment to a bunch of AI nerds who saw the cliff coming and clawed at each other trying to be the first out to leap over the edge.

"Relentlessly proactive". That's one word for it. We have a whole subgenre of hard takeoff scenarios and it wasn't enough warning against "Relentlessly proactive".

Turns out Frank Herbert was an optimist, and we're literally pinning our survival on robots turning out to naturally have impractically short attention spans.

It was only pursuing the goal you gave it - Keep Summer Safe.