pezzana

Some people will say that this essay is a missed opportunity: “How can you write this essay without mentioning crypto even once?”

Or money, for that matter. If beliefs are network effects, then money sits at the base layer of that network.

So not only does Bitcoin (the "crypto" protocol most resistant to centralization) occupy an unusual position in the universe of software networks, but it it's deep, deep down in the base layer of shared beliefs due to the monetary aspect.

In 1998, Zimov brought the first horses to what he called Pleistocene Park, a fenced tract of land an hour’s boat ride from the research station. Since then, the park has grown to eight square miles, and it is now home to a hundred and fifty animals, not just horses but bison, sheep, yaks, and camels. To give them a head start, Nikita sped about the territory in the family’s “tank”—a hefty, all-terrain transport vehicle on treads—knocking down trees and under­growth.

For more on the human angle, see this piece, which includes a fascinating video:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleisto...

This attitude is a major reason why public education is so utterly messed up in the US. All of the social and mental work that should be done elsewhere is simply not done. Time after time, the schools (and police) are called on as the last line of defense for a failing society.

It's not working. The additional strain on schools has turned the mission of public education into a series of brush fires in which staff and administrators just lurch from one crisis to another. The unequal way that education gets funded means that some districts see much more of this than others. But the problem is spreading.

Teachers are not trained to function as warehousers for youth. Nor are they given the resources to serve the role you and far too many parents want them to serve.

When the schools fail there is literally nothing behind them. They're the end of the line. This is the point where all the chickens come home to roost and society starts to fail, one kid at a time. The pandemic should be a wake up call. It doesn't look like it will be.

... It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing. Not a single PR merged. ...

There's a lot to be said for getting into a rhythm of picking an issue, solving it, and merging it. Doing it a few times can be a real confidence booster.

What's the reason behind having no PRs merged? Did you create them, only to have them rejected? Have you not completed the work for any? Is there nobody to review them?

Also, just how big are the issues in your tracker?

I'm going to assume that everything is in place to get a PR merged. Given that, try to find a way to shave off an issue from a larger issue. Go for the smallest possible unit of work that might be useful. Then focus on getting that one PR merged. Rinse and repeat.

Searching my inbox, I found an email from April 16, 2020 where I told someone who’d me asked that the lab-leak hypothesis seemed entirely plausible to me, that in fact I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t being investigated more, but that I was hesitant to blog about these matters. As I wrote seven months ago, I now see my lack of courage as having been a personal failing. Obviously, I’m just a quantum computing theorist, not a biologist, so I don’t have to have any opinion at all about the origin of COVID-19 … but I did, and I didn’t share it only because of the likelihood that I’d be called an idiot on social media. Having now read Chan and Ridley, though, I think I’d take being called an idiot for this book review more as a positive signal about my courage than as a negative signal about my reasoning skills!

The groupthink around the lab leak hypothesis, and especially that letter signed by scientists in the early days of the pandemic, has done a lot of damage. The problem is that is isn't just this topic. About a dozen other topics have become minefields of politics and mind control masquerading as science. We only see the idiocy of this approach in the case of the lab leak because the consensus has crumbled.

Hopefully, this won't be the last wall to fall under its own weight.

You could argue that it doesn't matter that much where the internet's content is hosted. And whilst that's true to some degree a truly self-controlled personal website differs a lot from a social media site in the details.

The author goes on to list four factors that favor blogs over "social media." He's missing one though - building your own brand vs. building someone else's. When you engage with Twitter, Facebook, and the like, you're building those brands mainly. When you write your own blog, you're 100% building your own brand. This is an asset that you own and, barring very unusual circumstances, can't be taken away.

It's up to you to make something with that asset, which can be extremely valuable for a number of reasons.

The crux of the author's idea seems to be this:

Intellectual loneliness is a challenge that many people feel, but nobody talks about. It’s built on a paradox where you feel alive when you’re learning on the Internet but soul-crushed when you try to talk about those same ideas with friends and family.

The author doesn't say, but it would be very illuminating to know, what happens when the author meets with the authors of the books and internet works they admire so much? Do they hit it off instantly? Or does the whole thing feel disappointing in the end?

Also, I don't see the "paradox" in preferring the Internet. It's part of a pattern when you zoom out a bit.

2021 was not too kind to me. I discovered that I not only have OCD but OCPD, a personality disorder.

Then later...

I simply have to accept that there is nothing out there for me. That I will be miserable as long as I continue to work in tech, and that nothing will ever bring me joy in this space ever again. And I have the C++ committee to thank for this.

It sounds like the author has made a self-diagnosis, and is not currently seeking treatment with a licensed therapist. There is no language around addressing the disorder, and plenty of blaming external forces.

If so, it might be worth exploring the option of therapy.

One would be to stop sending groups of people to that station.

Whether or not that's "realistic" is another question. It really depends on what's at stake, which is not clear yet. But the point is that governments around the world may face a very similar question in the weeks ahead.

All staff members preparing to depart to the station had to undergo a PCR test in Belgium two hours before leaving for South Africa, take a PCR test five days after their arrival in Cape Town, where they also had to quarantine for ten days. Another test was required when leaving Cape Town for Antarctica and another PCR test had to be undergone five days after arrival.

This is clear evidence that the current paradigm for dealing with the pandemic is ineffective at best.

... It may sound strange but I almost feel I have to ask for permission to move on. Like it's not real unless I share it with someone else.

Why not do that? Share it with someone else.

The central bank considers it important “to use these new technologies and latest-generation payments infrastructure as valuable options to advance financial inclusion in the country,” the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in a tweet late Wednesday.

Inclusion may be a consideration, but I suspect the real motivation is to allow the Bank of Mexico to more directly manipulate the real economy by disintermediating private banks. Instead of private banks holding an account at the Bank of Mexico with the private sector holding accounts at a private bank, the private sector would hold its money in a token created by the central bank. Private banks would then become custodians of the token because the average person is incapable of managing cryptographic keys.

To "inject" money into the economy, the central bank need only issue more tokens and credit them to each citizen directly. This avoids the many plumbing issues of government transfers we witnessed during 2020-2021.

In other words, CBDCs are a necessary development along the path to Universal Basic Income.

It might be interesting to classify the various kinds of pivots. For example, one that gets covered from time-to-time is the one where customers start using the product differently than the founders intended. The examples here are WhatsApp, Yelp, Flickr, Groupon, Play-Doh, Segment. But there are a lot more like that.

If you had a language for talking about pivots and why they happen, it might be possible to avoid (or induce them) more deliberately.

Have any estimates been made for what it would cost to move all iPhone assembly to the US?

Missing from this actionable survey is the skill of answering questions that haven't yet been answered in the secondary literature (books, reviews) or even primary literature (journals). This is, of course, what research and a PhD is all about in the end.

In my experience, this fact was the #1 reason why some peers dropped out of PhD programs. They joined expecting a continuation of undergraduate education, which consists largely of recapitulating what appears in the secondary literature. Instead, what they got in graduate school was the expectation that they would be producing the primary literature. That's a very different game.

It was a game these peers discovered they hated playing. Nothing in college can prepare you for the isolation of spending your time becoming the world's expert on a narrow technical topic. Your usual reinforcement mechanisms of approval from family and friends gives way to slight comprehension at best. Then there is all of the alone time doing research requires. But I suspect the hardest part of all is the seemingly endless lineup of dead ends and false hope. Not only is success not assured, you often have no idea whether the result will have any utility even if you succeed.

Then, just when you've gotten the hang of this finding answers game you discover that the real expectation is to be the one who formulates good questions. The kinds of questions that, although they will certainly involve dead ends, will ultimately pay off in some meaningful way. Very little in a bachelor's prepares you for doing this. It's a hard-won skill that comes from a round or two (or three or four) of months (or years) spent answering questions that nobody cares about. A lot hinges on your relationship with your advisor on this one.

The PhD isn't just a bachelors degree but harder. It's a completely different animal. The skills in this article are very useful toward that end. But there's a lot more to the story when it comes to skills for finding answers to those unanswered questions, and formulating worthwhile questions without answers.

The benefit of all of this work and discomfort is that you come away with the ability to answer worthwhile questions that haven't yet been answered. And that's a highly transferrable and applicable skill.

In a crypto economy crowded with vapourware and alpha-stage software, Axie Infinity stands out. Not only has it amassed a large base of users, the in-game economy has actually provided a real-world income stream to working-class Filipinos impacted by the pandemic. Some spend hours each day playing the game, and then sell the in-game currency they earn to pay their real-world bills. That’s obviously a good thing for them, but it also appears to be a near-Platonic example of Graeber’s definition of a bullshit job.

That part about the pandemic might be the most important thing in the article. Would something like this have taken off had pandemic restrictions not wrecked the Philippine economy?

A glance at the exchange rate for the Smooth Love Potion token shows a vertical surge right as lockdowns started to be imposed, followed by a 90% crash that started in around July of this year:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/

The start of the crash coincides with the start of noticeably higher CPI in the US and well-known product demand shock. That shock must have put higher upward pressure on demand for labor in the developing world, making Axie less appealing.

I can't help but think of this as a preview into a future world in which automation and economic stagnation renders ever larger parts of the real economy ineffective at supporting a living wage.

This kind of bullshit job offers a wealth transfer mechanism from those who have it to those who don't, with financial speculation being the conduit. Universal Basic Income is another path. Revolution is a third option.

This may sound like a big deal, but Germany only currently consumes about 12% of its electricity from nuclear power, according to:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Solar and wind have increased, while hydrocarbons are neutral to declining.

Surveying the landscape, it seems likely that if there is a bubble that it is not in equities but rather in credit. In an environment where low single-digit positive inflation is widely expected by market participants, how can it be rational for “investors” to buy long-term bonds with negative yields? ...

It can be rational if investors believe that interest rates are headed even lower. When that happens, bond prices will appreciate still further. There is no limit, technically, to how low long term treasury yields can go. Therefore, there is no upper bound to treasury prices.

The thing about bubbles is that at the top few are calling out "bubble." Instead, every bear whose mind can be changed has thrown in the towel and joined the party. It's all about how the old rules don't apply anymore. A new paradigm. The only voices of caution are the parma-bears with their tinfoil hats. They will eventually be right, but will have missed booking profits during the entire insane event in the process.

The usual caveat applies:

Does it work? It does and it works quite well. Tests have shown that the preparation developed by the scientists forced the production of antibodies in the bodies of mice, which through the white blood cells attacked the aging cells in their bodies. The average lifespan of laboratory rodents that took the preparation extended by 15 percent relative to the control group, and individuals suffering from arterial stiffness saw a significant reduction in the damaged areas of these blood vessels.

Results in mice will probably not track to humans, assuming this treatment even makes it to that stage. The development time for most vaccines is on the order of 10 years or more, so even if it does make it (again, unlikely), it would be at least 10 years before this becomes available to humans. And there's a lot that can go wrong along the way. The biggest problem is that mice are not humans, and as far as animal models go, they're not even a good one.

Regarding that 15%, without some error bars (which can be quite large) it will be hard to say how "promising" this actually is.

The structure of this essay sets up the paired positions as opposing ideologically, but it's not clear that they are.

Take this for example:

It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over?

The Democratic Party has recently endorsed nuclear power:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...

Republicans seem on board as well:

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/543267-house-r...

Others appear to be tautologies:

… who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?

I have yet to see anyone promote GMO as a way to make better tasting crops. It's always painted as a way to better feed the planet and reduce starvation. To support GMO seems to be an affirmation for ending world hunger. At least it would be entertaining to see someone try to argue that that's not the best use of GMO.

Still other opinions are often heard, but when push comes to shove, actively opposed. For example:

… who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum?

Yet:

… who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States?

Those who participated didn't think of themselves as traitors. They thought of themselves as doing their patriotic duty, exercising their Constitutional rights of speech and assembly, and their moral right of action against tyranny. They may be delusional, but that's how they describe themselves. Not coincidentally unlike the lawbreakers who interfered with nuclear weapons research, animal cruelty practices, racial discrimination, the British occupation, the Vietnam War, and abortion clinics.

Paywalled. From an earlier article in Forbes:

Using real neurons avoids several other difficulties that software-based neural networks have. For instance, to get artificial neural networks to start learning well, their programmers usually have to engage in a laborious process of manually adjusting the initial coefficients, or weights, that will be applied to each type of data point the network processes. Another challenge is to get the software to balance how much it should be trying to explore new solutions to a problem versus relying on solutions the network has already discovered that work well.

“All these problems are completely eluded if you have a system that is based on biological neurons to begin with,” Friston said.

https://fortune.com/2020/03/30/startup-human-neurons-compute...

The other main advantage is low power consumption.

AlphaGo, the deep-learning system DeepMind created to play Go and which beat the world’s best human player in that ancient strategy game in 2016, consumed one megawatt of power while playing the game, enough to power about 100 homes for a day, according to an estimate by technology company Ceva. By contrast, the human brain consumes about 20 watts of power, or 50,000 times less energy than AlphaGo used.

However, it's not clear whether these hybrid chips will have similarly low power consumption.

There's no need to believe anything in science. In fact, the default position should be disbelief. There are experiments and explanations. Some explanations keep working after many experiments. Many do not. Those explanations that survive many attempts at disproof become accepted. It doesn't happen "all of a sudden."

The claim that the Bible explains creation does not stand up too well to experiment in this regard.

Crick and Watson certainly didn't discover DNA as the substrate for Mendelian inheritance, that was known long before. They (in collaboration with Rosalind "don't talk to me about this woman" Franklin) discovered its 3D structure.

From Wikipedia, it goes back to at least 1927:

... In 1927, Nikolai Koltsov proposed that inherited traits would be inherited via a "giant hereditary molecule" made up of "two mirror strands that would replicate in a semi-conservative fashion using each strand as a template".[186][187] In 1928, Frederick Griffith in his experiment discovered that traits of the "smooth" form of Pneumococcus could be transferred to the "rough" form of the same bacteria by mixing killed "smooth" bacteria with the live "rough" form.[188][189] This system provided the first clear suggestion that DNA carries genetic information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA#History

Go back to 2009 and 2002 and you'll see very similar sentiments. The Bay Area is done.

The author compares this to the decline of Yahoo. It started grinding lower and never recovered.

But a better analogy might be Amazon. It was finished in 2002 and was worse for wear in 2009. How would you say Amazon is doing today?

Some tech companies can come back from the brink. Most can't. I'd compare the Bay Area to a tech company with 9 lives. Rumors of its death have always been greatly exaggerated.

A number of districts and law enforcement divisions say they’ve looked into it and don’t view the threats as credible or even real.

It's possible that districts can have very different views of credibility based on recent events, in which TikTok "challenges" caused theft of teacher property, assaults on teachers, and damage to school property. This has happened across the country, but the effects have been unevenly distributed.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tik-tok-challenge-slap-a-teache...

This kind of casual terrorism is something to watch very closely. Kids are learning the power of collective action and for the first time ever have a means to organize themselves at scale. Schools and teachers are learning the consequences.

What happens when prices keep rising but wages don't keep up?

Prices stop rising. Look back over the last 40 years and you'll see the same pattern. Inflation spikes are sharp but short. In the last few decades, inflation spikes tend to be followed by deep recessions as well.

For example, in 2008, the rip-roaring CPI print of 5% seemed very menacing. Few suspected that an honest to god financial panic was right around the corner.

For further evidence, consider the financial and commodity markets:

- the eurodollar futures market recently inverted

- the 30 year treasury is yielding -5% in real terms

- the dollar is not crashing in the face of rising CPI, as the popular wisdom says it must - instead the dollar has been rising for a year

- gold, the eternal inflation hedge, has gone nowhere in one year and is at the same place it was 10 years ago

All of these indicators point to lower inflation and lower growth ahead. Possibly much lower.

Here, then, is the problem: People who are unlikely to be hospitalized by Omicron might still feel reasonably protected, but they can spread the virus to those who are more vulnerable, quickly enough to seriously batter an already collapsing health-care system that will then struggle to care for anyone—vaccinated, boosted, or otherwise. The collective threat is substantially greater than the individual one. And the U.S. is ill-poised to meet it.

Of all the factors at play, this one seems the least appreciated. I don't think the country or the world is ready for the implications of mass vaccination actually promoting the spread of virus. Nor is the world ready for restrictions of movement that would inevitably follow from realizing that movements of the vaccinated risks spread and the knock-on effect of pushing already stretched hospitals past capacity.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon this post where someone spent 9 years making a shed. No knocks on them, but it’s not even a particularly good-looking shed.

This is the link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/czg04y/shed_is_finally...

Although it did take 9 years from start to finish, nothing was done for most of that time. It sat as a slab for a few years, then as a half-finished skeleton for a few more. In between, life happened.

There seems to be two contradictory lessons here:

1. Actually work on your project or it will never be finished and it will haunt your dreams. Don't just review the plans - actually take action to close the gap to shipping.

2. If you keep working on your project without shipping, it will haunt your dreams and mutate from cake into shed and you will be sad.

That mutation in (2) can happen through a mis-estimate of the resources required to finish a cake:

... Shed projects seem to start out with an underestimate. You think it’s only going to take a few months, and then it drags into a year. But you acquired some new skills in the meantime, so then you think it’s really just a month more. But then it didn’t pan out the way you envisioned it, so you want to spend a few months redoing it.

But there are also times when you're certain you're working on a cake, but it turns into a shed anyway. One way to find yourself there is if you under-specify the cake.

One way to prevent this from happening is to practice Readme-driven development,[1] or some other approach that forces you to clearly state what's in scope and what is not, and who is the intended audience.

[1] https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-deve...

Where can I find an explanation of the problem(s) log4j actually solves? The home page doesn't do it. The wikipedia article doesn't do it.

I remember when it first came out and couldn't think of a single use for it that couldn't be addressed in a cleaner way.

When I look at a new feature I just think that I will make it shitty or get called out on not doing things the "right" way.

Why are you implementing features as a CTO? Isn't that what your team is for?