mcguire

Out of curiosity, what if the "can be useful" part is Gell-Mann Amnesia?

"They actually have a great contempt for expertise. They don't see it as necessary because they think that they're the smartest people who've ever lived, because they're the wealthiest people who've ever lived. If they were wrong about anything, then why would they have been so financially successful? This is also where you get the obsession with things like prediction markets. They believe that there are super predictors, that expertise is not necessary to understand or predict what's going to happen in the world, and that they themselves must be experts because they have enormous amounts of money.

"There's a Homer Simpson quote that I like for thinking about this. It's just something that Homer blurts out when someone's talking about someone who lived 150 years ago. He says, "If he's so smart, how come he's dead?" When faced with expertise, they'd be like, "Well, if he's so smart, how come he's poor?" They believe that everything can be quantified, like the utilitarian dream, the eugenicist's dream, a person's IQ, and that money is a good measure of how much someone is worth. So they must be the best and smartest and greatest people who have ever lived."

"Adam Becker: I've got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they've misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they've got to grapple with it because it's the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase."

Don't forget that people don't really want factory jobs, which suck; they want union jobs that pay well and don't kill them.

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Mercantilism.html

Don't confuse the Goldman Sachs branch of the Democratic party with Musk/Bezos/et al bankrolling the Republican party.

Well, now, that depends on when and who exactly is involved in large scale protests against the Trump administration.

If they call out the active duty military against middle-aged, white, protestors, they'll have a problem. If it's against students and minorities,...

This is the biggest lesson of the first quarter of the 21st century.

https://apnews.com/live/donald-trump-news-updates-4-29-2025#...

That is what Amazon said in their comments disavowing the additional information.

Amazon reportedly threatened that this morning.

They backed down immediately after Trump (or someone at the Whitehouse) called Bezos.

The usual HN response to wealth inequality is "why do you care how much they have?" The answer is, of course, that money is power and the power that many of the wealthy are exercising is not to the benefit of most people.

Fundamentally, mathematics is about understanding why something is true or false.

Modern AI is about "well, it looks like it works, so we're golden".

Many years ago I heard a mathematician speaking about some open problem and he said, "Sure, it's possible that there is a simple solution to the problem using basic techniques that everyone has just missed so far. And if you find that solution, mathematics will pat you on the head and tell you to run off and play.

"Mathematics advances by solving problems using new techniques because those techniques open up new areas of mathematics."

The only confirmed example I know of is Harley-Davidson, roughly during the boom of cruiser motorcycles (1995-2010?): They only ran one shift, but the PR of waiting lists and extremely high instant resale prices made the choice appealing in the face of the capital costs.

The important part is at the end of the article: "For those interested in building a stronger foundation in logic, the Open Logic Project provides excellent free educational resources on propositional and predicate logic, formal proof systems, and other topics such as modal logic and set theory - all targetted towards a non-mathematical audience."

https://openlogicproject.org/

See maternal mortality in Texas.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/06/texas-maternal-morta...

So, like Hacker News?

A fun thing to do with google's search engine: look for "Scheme tutorial".

For me, the links are:

1. Arun Muthu's Programming in Scheme (https://medium.com/atomic-variables/programming-in-scheme-th...) Part 1 of a 4-year-old series of blog posts (on Medium) that has no other parts.

2. Yet Another Scheme Tutorial (http://www.shido.info/lisp/idx_scm_e.html) A decent looking Scheme tutorial, undated.

3. A Scheme Primer (https://spritely.institute/static/papers/scheme-primer.html) Another decent looking tutorial, 2022.

4. Scheme Tutorial (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) A copy of a 1997 tutorial for a 2000 class at RPI; has broken links pointing to http://cs.wwc.edu/~cs_dept/KU/PR/.

5. Kent Dybvig's The Scheme Programming Language 4th ed. (https://www.scheme.com/tspl4/)

6. Reddit "Best beginner friendly "write a scheme" tutorial?" (https://www.reddit.com/r/scheme/comments/klt0af/best_beginne...)

7. A link to the introduction of a copy of Paul Wilson's un-attributed An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (https://www.cs.rpi.edu/academics/courses/fall00/ai/scheme/re...) from RPI in 2000.

Google is an advertising company with a big IT department, not a technology company.

I was going to say...

"I began to see TIs like Luca as a group of individuals who are caught between two competing narratives.... The second narrative – the TI narrative – is that if you’re having these sorts of experiences, nothing is wrong with your mind. Your perceptual and reasoning abilities are functioning exactly the way they’re designed to. Unfortunately, you are the victim of gang-stalking or electronic harassment. Despite your suffering, however, there is hope: you can band together with other TIs in a global movement to expose your attackers and dismantle their techniques."

This isn't a value-neutral belief. It has consequences and some of those aren't pretty.

Japan had more structural problems than that. For one thing, at the time it was reported that wealthy, powerful people could not be allowed to lose money in the stock market; the broker would make them whole, until the day that they couldn't anymore.

Allowing the country to die of senescence is also not reviving that country.

Because I am the bluebird of happiness, there are a couple of things you may want to be aware of here.

"I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary."

First, keep in mind that many of your co-workers will still feel this way, even if you provide evidence to the contrary.

Second, after you have been around the dharma wheel too many times, it becomes difficult to hop onto the hype-train as quickly as you used to, which is one reason many of your co-workers will feel that way.

The tech industry has never had a career path for technical people other than directly into management or into a pseudo-management "architecture" roles that are neither technical nor management---you don't get many of the advantages of either and what you can do is mostly based on your personal relationships with managers or technical people. As a result, if you remain technical, you may find that your salary and influence stagnate.

Oh, and 40 is still pretty young. I'm 56 and it wasn't until the last 8-10 years that serious burnout set in. (Salary isn't really an important factor in job satisfaction; influence very much is.)

Personally, I've never had to write a letter like yours because I shot the suggestion of a more management-oriented position down in flames, twice. Lucky me! :-)

"Eh, it'll crash before it runs out of memory."

Don't forget that you're not reading the text as it was originally written; the surviving texts are copies of copies. Reconstructing, partially, the original text is possible if you have many downstream copies from different sources but never perfect.

How do you control for sun exposure versus outdoor physical activity and any of the other factors?

Discussion of the actual paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41302103

Higher ultraviolet light exposure from:

"The UK Biobank has data from which behavioural and geographic UV exposures can be estimated. Firstly, participants were asked ‘how many times a year would you use a solarium or sunlamp?’ We recoded the responses to create a solarium use variable (solarium user or solarium non-user, defined as one or more times per year versus never or less than one time per year)."

and

"Secondly, we estimated an annual average residential shortwave radiation (SWR; kJ/m2) over the follow-up period variable for each participant. Downward SWR is the total incoming solar energy over the Earth's surface in the shortwave spectrum and comprises both UVA and UVB radiation, (Yu et al., 2021) the components solar radiation that have effects on human health. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) calculates half-monthly average of daily downward SWR (250 nm–2500nm) measurements using daily data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites, considering cloud and aerosol thickness (Murakami, 2010). These measurements are available at a 0.05°x.0.05° spatial resolution."

So, "Did you use a sunroom at least once?" and "How much solar radiation does where you live according to our model?"

Are you assuming airline employees aren't scrambling when a flight is delayed? Or that road crews don't get called in the middle of the night? A minor power outage gets a crew called no matter what time it is; a major outage will bring in crews from different states, much less power companies.

Didn't Tesla recently move to Texas?

What do they do with the data they collect?