HN user

sarbaz

94 karma
Posts0
Comments51
View on HN
No posts found.

And, in particular, I also think that nuclear winter is another one of these over-hyped scenarios. If you do the napkin-math it doesn't really work out.

Nuclear war will probably result in every major metropolitan area in the participating countries being obliterated. But I'm willing to bet that non participating countries will survive with their civilization intact. Especially countries with high food security that can deal with total collapse of international trade.

The article has some great examples of risks that were hyped out of proportion to their true severity. Should these things be considered? Yes. But only a little. If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere.

Modern examples, IMO, are:

- Kessler Syndrome

- Trying to prevent an asteroid hitting the earth

- Nuclear war making the entire earth uninhabitable

This is interesting because I work with professional mathematicians and they are the exact opposite. They always start off with a semi-formalized idea and play with it a lot before trying to hone in on something formal. And conversely they have absolutely no problem listening to / thinking about non-rigorous ideas. They also do excellent work, so I would say this is a positive trait wrt productivity.

One way to shorten the time is to constantly increase hospital capacity, so that in each month lets you infect more people. Especially if plasma donations turn out to work to reduce severe cases.

Another way is to separate young people from old people more effectively. Then you might be able to permit 1m young people to be infected each month with the same hospital budget we have today

It's a relatively natural consequence of the fact that doing work creates value. One of the things you can work towards is creating more workers (by creating more humans, or better efficiency, or robots). Because these processes are basically exponential, you expect to see constant neverending growth.

The only real physical limit to productivity is our energy input. When we create things, we use energy and time to turn raw materials into useful stuff. Today most of our energy comes from the plants we eat (ie the sun) and from the ground. But we are not close to using even a small fraction of the energy that the sun gives us, so there is still lots of room to grow.

Nuclear waste can basically be safely solved by dumping sealed containers into the sea. We're talking about extremely small amounts of waste. A swimming pool can contain a year's supply of waste, and 20 ft of water is extremely effective radiation shielding. The ocean is so large that this would be totally negligible even if the worst happened.

This sounds pretty silly. There's bound to be a way to make online (or semi-online) learning agile too. Distance learning is basically a solved problem and has been done for hundreds of years.

How about recorded lectures and in-person small group recitations? Or longer office hours? Obviously you have to change the methodology of learning a bit, but I'm sure it can be figured out.

In any case undergrad level science lectures are basically a one-sided info dump where the lecturer is lucky to get so much as an ACK that someone is listening.

GP's point wasn't about inflation but about growth. So for a rough estimate you should be looking at the rate of GDP growth rather than the rate of inflation. Since GDP per capita grew 30x since 1950, you should be comparing the 70k wage to a family income of approx 100k.

If you look at inflation only, that is equivalent to saying that workers should have gained absolutely nothing from technology and efficiency gains made in the past 70 years. But obviously we know that workers are far more productive today than they were in the 50s, and the extra productivity per worker is reflected in GDP.

Regulation of commerce is one of the powers we explicitly set out as belonging to the government. In the American system free trade is a reflection of some of our values but not some inherent unalienable right.

I think the idea is that even if all the current top emitters do take initiative, China and India's emissions are expected to grow quickly. The losses will win over the gains.

In the US, mandatory deposit technically applies to any copyrighted work of any kind. We should fund LoC to enforce mandatory deposit on digitally published works as well.

In a sense this is also a good demarcation point. If something is serious enough to be worthy of copyright protection, it's probably worth archiving.

I am looking for a service that will allow me to directly pay creators at the same price as an ad impression, paying per page view. So far ways to pay creators are almost always based on dollar increments, but I would have much more use for a service that lets you pay in increments of $0.001. Today this is basically impossible because payment fees make direct payments of this scale impractical, but it could theoretically be solved the way the ad industry does - by paying a lump some once a month.

Not necessarily, because it can be debated whether posting something on the internet really counts as publishing, and whether most internet content is original enough to be eligible for protection. A good example of people who are probably violating this law would be webcomic artists.

But I do think the world would be a better place if we added new legislation to require platforms to submit archives of their public content. Perhaps LoC should also be funded to scrape the web to capture smaller sites.

https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/index.html

All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the copyright law

You own copyright over works whether you register them or not. To the best of my understanding that means that you are always required to deposit works when you publish them, whether or not you register your copyright. But IANAL, so I could be way off.

EDIT: Here's a real citation[0]

What is the difference between mandatory deposit and copyright registration?

... Optional registration fulfills mandatory deposit requirements.

So you definitely are required to deposit a copy with LoC whenever you publish/distribute in the US

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html

We should require websites to freeze and archive public content instead of deleting it. We already require media published in nearly every other format to be submitted to Library of Congress, and we should extend those protections to our internet heritage.

The counterargument given by one of the proponents of MOND (a non-dark-matter counterargument) is that the bullet cluster can be explained by a combination of slight modification of GR, and additionally by the presence of a significant (but not crazy) amount of cold regular matter. Cold regular matter can't be easily detected because it isn't emitting any light, but it is just regular matter.

I'm not actually familiar with the specifics so I don't know whether this is actually a good explanation, but it's at least worth discussing.

The true reason is that intel didn't support coexistence of Virtual 8086 mode with 64-bit mode. So adding 16 bit app support would require loads of work to get it working as part of a 64 bit OS.

Regular protected mode code has built in support that allows easily running 16 bit apps, so maintaining compatibility was a no-brainer. The moment the trade-off changed, Microsoft decided to drop support for 16 bit apps.

Personally, I don't mind that very much, because dosbox is a great product that bridges the gap perfectly.

But not all instances of global warming caused mass extinction events. I think that there is a correlation here rather than a causation. In fact, looking at historical charts the earth's temperature undergoes a relatively significant change every few 100k years at least. So extinction events are only a tiny minority of those events, around 5/5000

I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.

I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK.

And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.