perihelion_zero

Finland proving the supremacy of "Subs not Dubs". Noted for future reference.

Almost anyone who has a semi-useful technical or trade skill and can manage communications, marketing, sales etc is liable to become extremely rich.

Almost anyone with no skills except they can talk to people and arrange/organize deals is liable to make someone else rich, and might be well-off if they can figure out how to get a slice of the pie.

Pilgrimages were still a big thing among early Christians.

For example, in Acts 20:16 it notes how Paul was trying to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost. Now this was around 55 AD.

Re: Smart TVs. An old laptop running a browser with an ad blocker and some fancy controller setup (perhaps a wireless multi-button mouse or a specialized remote control) can get you way more privacy (and the sanity of a mostly zero-ad experience, just the occasional in-video affiliate ad) and makes whatever you watch a lot smarter, since you are the one doing the searching/surfing rather than the advertiser-funded smart TV channels that are specifically smart at advertising to you for profit. You can hook up an HDMI cable to a bigger screen/projector if you're playing stuff for lots of people.

Nice. Looks like a way to have achievable live text transcripts via tiny devices without using APIs.

Regenerative farmers posting on hacker news gives me hope for humanity. Thanks.

Apparently anyone in US/Canada can just ask for a farm and practically get one at this point. Either via USDA / private loans or indie farmers giving you great lease-to-own terms because you don't look like a corporate billionaire. Urban rent is so darn expensive now that some of y'all can probably get rich just by farm squatting and having a good time.

(Seriously thinking about solo farming in real life now. Not that it would really be solo because of all the animals.)

Gulag Archipelago and various China / Vietnam / North Korea prison memoirs are really good to study also. This is stuff tens of millions of people went through.

Less "social" media, more social research paper / life hack resharing makes the world a better place.

PS: Always hide the best meme in endnote 14 so your fellow meme scientists know exactly where to find the real discovery.

Plato: Writing will make people forgetful.

Been mucking around with huge doses of B Vitamins (especially B3/Niacin) and 5-HTP (a serotonin precursor). Both of those are rather, uh, effectful. 500mg+ Niacin will turn you red unless you're actually deficient. And you do not want to mess with the 5-HTP and alcohol at the same time, plus 5-HTP can cause some nasty side effects in some people.

Seems like a nice way to have some weird dreams while probably improving my health (high dose B vitamins seem to do great things for mental disorder and the only apparent downside is colorful piss and possibly turning into a cherry).

For people who don't do vita-drugs, there's always tea, coffee, chocolate, and matcha.

Automoball

Open up the GIMP and start making joke meme comics. Laughter is the best medicine.

I feel like I'm in a similar boat. Like 6 different mental disorders including constantly pulling my hair out.

I've contemplating sales calls. You can theoretically make like on the order of over $1000/hour while sitting on a bench or walking on a trail. It can be done in short bursts once you get the hang of it.

Then once you have some financial freedom in a few hours of successful work (not the first few hours), you can sell other people designs for clubhouses and build them all over the world and pay people to show up to club meetings (because sadly that is the only way).

Modern workplaces are a lot like clubhouses because everyone is friends there, but they suck because you have to be there all day. If you could just show up to any workplace for a few hours here and there whenever you wanted, the world would be a better place. Some days you could be a dishwasher, other days you could be a bulldozer operator or dig in the mines. I like to try new jobs.

That's my business idea, thanks.

Endless mountain of todo lists on desk: Index cards. Put them in a box when there are too many and let the unreasonable goals expire. (Optional: Trade them with your friends after a year.)

Personal notes: A waterproof mini-notepad.

Personal notes I don't care about: Sticky notes.

Movie scripts, math problems, and complex functional diagrams: A full-size sheet of paper taken from the nearest printer.

This comment sent from my Sticky Pad 5.

PS: The domain www.particleacceleratorferrets.com is currently available as of my posting this.

I'm not necessarily saying we shouldn't domesticate raccoons, but we have to be really careful about what animals are allowed to pilot submarines. It's a serious issue!

I recall looking at a stable diffusion metric https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/stable-diffu...

And between this and some Whisper benchmarks on data center GPUs I worked out this formula approximation using the two most significant features:

stable_diffusions_per_minute ~= memory_clock_mhz x CUDA_cores / 424000

Of course it works out to RTX 4090, RTX 4080, RTX 3090 TI / 3090 beating everything else on speed by a pretty large margin. But not as much as the actual tests indicate. The main use of this test is that it indicates that most of the recent but older GPUs would have to sell for a pretty good bargain to justify buying them over the new stuff.

Yeah, you have to force the results into strict JSON, enforce it, and handle a lot of error cases, and be prepared to give up or reroll on failure. It basically takes a 2nd LLM pass to standardize the JSON keys of the initial result. But it's worth it to be able to turn messy stuff into structured data.

Make the information easily accessible to customers. But actually sell the categorized review data to the restaurants themselves. They will appreciate the feedback/info and can afford to pay something for it on a recurring basis.

This is why I love jobs where you get paid based on a sales commission rather than in mystical dollar-hours. Get 10x the results, get 10x the pay.

I've wanted to see something like this, but as a browser add-on with a crazy amount of connectivity between sites allowing search/discovery. If you do anything "social", it either has to be useful to the 1st user or you have to bribe people onto the network. Building a search/recommendation engine is a good cheat to not have to bribe people to show up.

This is why I have one giant, enormous text file of all the technical notes I have ever taken.

Powder

A Beautiful Mind

tldr version: The numerator must be even and the denominator must be odd. The square of this taken modulo 4 must therefore have numerator = 0 mod 4, denominator = 1 mod 4 (1x1 and -1x-1 both become 1 mod 4). 2 times 1 mod 4 cannot be 0 mod 4. Therefore sqrt(2) cannot be rational.

In one essay, Christopher Alexander calls suburb design schizophrenic, in reference to how suburb dwellers are forced more and more inward.

It's certainly an appropriate description. I've lived in the suburbs for thirty something years and have never made a single friend there. Travel requires a car, and there's no place interesting you can get to without a car. The optimal strategy for life is therefore to pass the threshold of depression and insanity and become a computer-addicted robot who derives pleasure only from typing on the comments section of the internet.

I've been thinking of ways to fix the problem but there's no bandage for removing the cars and redesigning the whole thing. I've thought of structures a clever person might be able to build to attract socialization, and I'm sure almost all of them are against zoning laws.

Dr. John Conolly described insanity in 1850 as "A disease of perception combined with an inability to tell whether these changes were real or not."

Anton's Syndrome: Excerpt from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538155/ : Though the patient is blind, he will behave and talk as if he has normal vision. Attention is aroused; however, when the patient is found to collide with pieces of furniture, to fall over objects, and to experience difficulty in finding his way around. They may try to walk through a wall or a closed door on their way from one room to another. Suspicion is still further alerted when they begin to describe people and objects around them who do not exist. Mental confusion may also be seen. Patients with ABS may give excuses for their blindness. They may explain that their inability to see is because of the lack of proper lighting, and they may try their best to prove that they are not blind, thereby putting themselves in danger.

One of the earliest descriptions of this syndrome is found in Seneca's "Moral Letters to Lucilius".

1. I wonder how much of this can be solved by well-designed 3rd party search engines?

2. Would be nice to see some well-organized search engines / web indexes that stay up to date and don't suck. Searching for a lot of stuff on google is like asking, "Please show me generic business site articles."

I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of super-charged tag-based browsing of various existing sites that are annoying to browse. YouTube is one of them.