saalweachter

I mean, I object to cars with unreasonable acceleration on the roads.

I'm looking at you, Tesla Plaid; a ten second car was a plot point in The Fast and the Furious, so this feels like yet another "we have created the Torment Nexus".

They were a thing in the previous 20's and the exchanges banned them in like the 40's (you could still have a dual-class corporate structure, you just wouldn't be listed on eg the NYSE), because investors thought that was some bullshit to have someone control a company while owning only a tiny slice of it.

That rule was dropped sometime in the 80s.

So in terms of flexibility, Cambridge. Tons of companies will preferentially snatch up candidates with prestigious advanced degrees, and many of them will even pay you more. Heck, no one will care if you drop out of your advanced education halfway through. It's easier to go academia -> corporate than the reverse, unless you make a ton of money.

So in terms of long-term money, the question is the oldest one in economics: when is the next market crash? There's two conflicting narratives right now. One is that new AI technologies are going to take a handful of companies to the moon. The other is that these companies are engaged in an incestuous network of investments and the whole thing is about to come crashing down.

If the former is true, or even just a normal economy, the fastest way to make money long-term is to make a lot short-term while living like a monk and investing.

If the latter is true, all the stock you purchase/are granted in the next couple years will lose a big chunk of its value, and you will spend years just getting back to even, so you might as well wait a couple of years and jump in after the next crash.

I really appreciate the attempt by Chris & Jack to make Julysixth Park a thing.

I enjoyed Star Wars, but I kind of feel like a lot of my feelings towards it are just reflected nostalgia from the writers and comedians who grew up a generation before me.

Jurassic Park may not have been the first movie I saw in theaters, but it was still one of the movies of my childhood. The magic of it, and the experience of where we saw it -- the Mesker Park amphitheatre, in an outdoor showing, and then walking back to the car in the dark, past the Mesker Park Zoo, looking into the dark foliage and imagining dinosaurs.

N.b. that Cerf was mentioned in the Epstein Files in a list of scientists Epstein wanted to invite to an event. There is no evidence Cerf actually accepted any such invitation.

Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.

Eh, not a lawyer, but my experience with internet PR problems is that the Internet is pretty lazy with a short attention span.

Take something down and most of the Internet is too lazy to dig up an archive and they wander off to find something else to score internet points off of.

And what could you get quality-wise if you poured an equivalent amount of money into improving ground based factories?

When the hubbub about phenylephrine first started, I decided I still felt less miserable taking DayQuil/NyQuil, and switched to the "High Blood Pressure" formulation, which drops the phenylephrine, alcohol and sugar.

It takes it down to just the Tylenol, the DXM (, plus the antihistamine in the NyQuil), and the great slightly tearable taste for the ritual of "time to pretend I'm not sick for a little while".

I would also like to take a moment to evangelize against the notion that all politicians are crooks.

Some politicians are crooks. They should be voted out, investigated, prosecuted and publicly scorned.

"Everyone cheats" is something cheaters say to (a) feel better about themselves and (b) try to get other people to ignore their cheating when they get caught. Don't believe their lies. Most people don't cheat.

In studies of cooperative behavior, most people choose to cooperate, and the key predictor of whether someone will cooperate is whether they believe other people will choose to cooperate. Cynicism is permission to defect.

Defectors must be punished.

Also, even if you can't resist looking, not replying to every single person arguing against your position is a powerful tool on the internet.

If you're right, or at least, not making a complete ass of yourself, chances are someone else is going to come along and argue back for you. And besides the benefit that someone else will likely explain your position in a slightly different way, and the multiple POVs might combine more effectively, having a half dozen people explain to someone why they're wrong is a lot more convincing to random bystanders than two morons replying "nuh-uh" to each other a few dozen times.

And if no one jumps in to defend you, it's a pretty good signal to step back and re-read everything and have a good think before you have another go at it, at least to make sure you have something to add beyond what you have already said, even if you think you're still right.

What I find mildly interesting is how the older money (eg, the Koch brothers) spent decades creating the current environment (between deregulation on business, cutting taxes on the wealthy, and political ventures like the Federalist Society and Heritage, Inc), but it's come together to create a newer group of rich jerks who are really exploiting it to the hilt.

If NYC lifts all its density restrictions, why do you need people commuting inward over a hundred mile radius?

You can sell scams -- LLMs may be dubious at many tasks, but they're probably good enough to use to write personalized email or texts convincing random people to send you money.

Is your suggestion "we should do the status quo, except the bridge and tunnel commuters should be confined to tiny high-rise enclaves clustered around train stations strung out over a hundred miles"?

I'm actually inclined to believe it was a typo for 10 mile radius.

Or, if you're scared of UBI: government work programs, like the good old Works Progress Administration.

Tax, and hire millions of people for a good living wage to do things that either need to be done and aren't (infrastructure repairs and improvements, inspections of all flavors, etc), or that don't really need to be done but make some fraction of the population happy (unnecessarily beautiful post offices).

Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall.

100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle.

If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.

Manhattan itself has a median height of 4-5 stories; the outer boroughs bring that down to 2-3, because commuting from Far Rockaway to midtown is already a schlep.

A professor I worked for in college was a big fan of how the US funding was fragmented, with some coming from the NSF, some from NIH, Energy Ag, each branch of the military... if one department had a loon in charge, the others would keep things running smoothly.

Eh, I think LLMs will stay a part of what comes next, it will just be used for language I/O instead of everything.

I don't even know that I would call it slowing down so much as constraining/focusing innovation.

There's three basic paths for a company hit by this ruling to comply:

  1. Stop showing users generated content.
  2. Figure out how to generate the content with more quotes and attribution to source websites, to regain the protection offered to search engines.
  3. Figure out the hallucination problem, so that every statement in machine generated content is true, or at least defensible.

It's easy to look at a newly made garden, its flowers all freshly planted and its paths all neatly laid out, and think it finished, but once you see one that's been carefully maintained for decades and how its plants have matured and grown together and how the steps have been worn by human feet, it's clear the project is merely off to a good start.

There's like three groups of developers you need:

The prototypers, who move fast and break things, who throw together shiny first versions that look great and work some of the time;

The architects, who take the prototypes and take the time to build it correctly;

And the gardeners, who maintain the built system for the next 10-30 years, fixing bugs, making incremental improvements to speed or resource usage, and updating dependencies so that it continues to function on modern machines.

The crazy thing is that there are a ton of developers with different tastes who would love to fill each of the roles, but not many companies that are able to manage all three types without pushing everyone into one bucket.

My preferred fix is "corporations can't buy stock, their own or others".

Research does get lost over time. The whole point of the patent system is keeping that from happening; if the drug company goes bankrupt, even if they lose all their internal documentation in the process, hopefully the patents and other public paperwork provides enough information for an unrelated company -- either having acquired the patent rights, or after the patent period ends -- to reconstruct the processes with less investment then the original research.

If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.

Fun fact!

Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.

Fun fact!

During the DotCom crash, about $5 trillion in market cap disappeared.

NVidia's market cap is currently around $5 trillion.

Eh, you're off by an order of magnitude or so on both ends.

The iPhone 17 has like 8 gb, the Pixel 10 12.

The original iPhone was 128mb, and the iPhone 6 from 2016-2018 was around 1gb; that puts the iPhone at around 8x RAM per decade, and puts us at 128gb in our pockets at around 2036 or so.

(Incidentally, the big news in phone RAM is that a lot of new phones are dropping back to 4gb because of RAM shortages.)

So the question for all forums is "what is the user funnel?"

For some there's an obvious thing that brings people in, like if you're a forum tied to a webcomic or game, and the forum will live as long as that property does.

For others -- which I think HN falls into -- it's just word of mouth about a cool place to hang out, so it will die when there's a cooler place to hang out.

I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt, the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the I believe on-going lawsuits.

AFAIK there were no similar ignition switch failures or associated deaths with the Cruze (or other >2011 model year vehicles), although I think it might have been part of the recall.

I think a lot of people are also missing the value-add of asking a person to Google something for you.

Some large fraction of the time when someone asks me a question, I also end up googling it... and then I use my domain knowledge and experience to weed out bad information and outdated information and identify the right references.

And some fraction of the time when I ask someone else an "easily Google-able question", I've googled the question, found a number of sources, maybe even one I think might be right, but want some confirmation that I'm not going down a rabbit hole.