reddog

“What have the Romans ever done for us?”

I’m going to buy a WinRar license with all the money I save.

“Apple might be implementing…”.

Could you get back with me when you actually know?

But even MORE impressive is the current raptor engines cost between $1m to $2m each with a target cost of $500k when in full production. The F-1 cost an inflation adjusted $85m-$100m each.

And the raptors are reusable.

These weren’t true Marxism. When me and my communist buddies take over next time you will see a real people’s utopia. Not like the last 47 times. I promise. Word of honor. Everyone will get a pony.

This is an easy fix for Boeing: budget for more lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Exceptions: yelling fire in a crowded theater and TikTok.

Two giants of the buggy whip industry join forces to counter the railroads.

von Neumann also advocated for an immediate, surprise U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?”. According to game theory you see, it was only rational.

The genius's genius.

You might enjoy the Tom Wolfe book, From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tries to explain the observations you make. Very lively, funny writing and you know he is on the right track because he was universally panned by modern architects.

"and said that service should be available in a couple of months"

Thats telcom speak for "the check is in the mail".

Meanwhile, SpaceX valuation has increased about $35 billion over the same time period.

At his current net worth, Musk will be able to underwrite Twitter for the next 3 centuries before he starts running out of money.

No. Since there is a lot of disagreement about this in the surrounding comments, I just watched 20m of an old Russell Brand YT video. As of a few minutes ago there were no YT ads in the video. That includes the very beginning and the end. However there were Brand narrated promotions in the video.

The video was actually much easier to watch without the blasted YT ads that normally pop up every 5 minutes. And I suppose Brand still gets paid 100% for the embedded promos he narrated and negotiated with the advertisers.

Siri rarely disappointed me because my expectations were always low and I trained myself on how to talk to it.

But now after some remarkable experiences using GPT-4 I find I’ve lost a lot of patience with all the different voice assistants. They are just so stupid in comparison. How much longer before LLMs and projects like Whisper run the backend?

including current faves Austin and Miami

Austin has 2.57 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100K. Same year, SF has 6.35 per 100K. So SF is twice as bad as Austin. Your right about Miami though.

But 6.35 isn't bad. The murder rate in St Louis (for comparision to the US city with the worst) is 66.07 per 100K. And Colima Mexico (worst in the world maybe) is 182 murders per 100K.

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

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

When automation, computers and offshoring were hollowing out the jobs of factory workers, miners and the low-to-medium skilled all we heard was "Learn to code!" from the laptop class of knowledge workers.

My advice to all the upper-middle-class professionals (teachers, lawyers, engineers, managers, accountants, doctors) out there who will soon be disintermediated by an LLM is "Learn to weld!"

Sorry about this, but I couldn't resist:

GTP4, rewrite the above message to be less brusque

I hope you don't mind me sharing a different perspective for the sake of discussion. I might be mistaken, and I'm not entirely sure how much I believe in the argument I'm presenting.

It's true that ChatGPT doesn't only provide answers based on what it has been taught, but it also uses the structure of those answers to create statistically similar responses. However, when it comes to demonstrating novelty, I think we might be underestimating the vast amount of information and variety that humans have written about and shared online. While anything we ask ChatGPT to do might be new to us personally, it's highly likely that it has already been thought of and documented online, and ChatGPT is simply providing a similar response based on its prior knowledge.

This phenomenon, where ChatGPT has significantly more training data and experience than any single human, leading to the illusion of originality, is quite intriguing. For instance, when it comes to image generation, we might experience a period of "artistic inbreeding" because we, as individuals, are not aware of everything others have done. We may perceive something like Midjourney's output as moving and original, when in reality, it could just be a slight variation of someone else's work that we haven't seen before.

Please don't take this as me being confrontational; I genuinely respect your opinion and experiences, and I'm enjoying our conversation.

I agree and have always wondered how people with these extreme views think modern society would function without roads. You can't build (or maintain) a house, a hospital, a factory, a school or an office building without roads to accommodate the trucks pouring the foundation, deliverying the lumber and shingles. How do I get food, funiture and appliances to my apartment with only bike paths? What if I need an ambulance or police, do they roll up on electric bikes?

Nothing is going to get build and everyday life is not possible without real roads that accomadate vehicles doing real work. And if you have that already why not use then for real personal vehicles that can be used by everyone and not just young, healthy hacker news subscribers.

From the Wikipedia link at the top of the thread:

“The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story "The Sentinel" and other short stories by Clarke. Clarke also published a novelisation of the film, in part written concurrently with the screenplay, after the film's release.”

The film — written by Kubrick and Clarke — came first. The book is a novelization of the movie. So watch the movie. It’s unlikely you will be disappointed.

Would it surprise to learn that among the worlds nations the US ranks 76th in the number of military personel per capita? North Korea is #1 with 306 military personel per 1000 citizens. The US is 6.3/1000. The US is sandwiched between Namibia (#75) and Belize (#77).

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

Its also #22 in military spending as a percentage of GDP. However the US is #3 in per capita military spending.

Not true — it takes 5 minutes of effort and about 40 cents to make very good bread out of salt, flour, yeast and water.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=13Ah9ES2yTU

I had a lot of trouble cooking on a halogen electic -- pulse on, pulse off -- stove and all those problems went away when I got an induction. For years I thought I was a terrible cook but it was always that terrible electric cooktop. The only thing that cooktop did well was boil water.

The most frustating thing I tried to cook was good, crispy hashbrowns. Believe me, I tried everything and the results were always soggy, greasy horror. When I switched to induction (and replaced all my non-ferrous pans) the results were perfect everytime.

Except that the space shuttle solid rocket boosters were recovered and reused.

From Wikipediea: "Out of 270 SRBs launched over the Shuttle program, all but four were recovered – those from STS-4 (due to a parachute malfunction) and STS-51-L (destroyed by range safety during the Challenger disaster).[6] Over 5,000 parts were refurbished for reuse after each flight. The final set of SRBs that launched STS-135 included parts that had flown on 59 previous missions, including STS-1.[7] Recovery also allowed post-flight examination of the boosters,[8] identification of anomalies, and incremental design improvements"

Also the rockets on the shuttle itself were landed and reused.

Will Prowse did something similar (much smaller scale) on his YouTube channel last year. He set up a 6000 watt ground mount array in about 40 minutes and discusses the trade offs here:

https://youtu.be/71vME5k-oiw

Most of this thread belongs in the Louis CK's "Everything is amazing & nobody is happy" bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U

it’s an excellent product.

Indeed it is. What Alexa can do today was science fiction 20 years ago. I can say "Alexa, order Earl Grey tea" and a package of Earl Grey tea will show up on my front door step tommorow. Yeah, its slower than a Star Trek replicator but essentially the same thing.

No, the Enron scandal was much, much bigger. In 2000 Enron had a market cap of over $60 billion and was "reporting" $100 billion in revenue. It ended up losing it's sharholders $74 billion and all 20,000 employees their jobs. At the time it's bankrupcy was the largest in history.

The scandal also drove Enron's accounting firm, Aurthur Anderson, out of business costing all 85,000 their employess their jobs.

If only. If you had 3, 100w solar panels on top of your ev van it would take about two months of charging to go 200 miles. That’s assuming clear skies and parking in full sun. This is based on current Teslas reportedly getting 100m of range on 34kWh and your solar setup being 70% efficient.

That’s true. But you’re also $400,000 wealthier. So you got that going for you. Which is nice.