showerst

With any luck, by the time we're serious about sending big spacecraft out and about we'll have figured out a workable fusion drive. You'd still need to launch them from space since they're a little spicy from a "don't stand downwind" perspective, but unimaginably better than using nukes against pusher.

Amazon, Walmart, Etsy... my kingdom for a marketplace that doesn't become just a dumping ground for shady fly-by-night dropshippers.

Yes, but the AI that is metaphor is comparing to does not create more food. More to the point, it may not create more jobs.

After a few decades of turmoil the industrial and agricultural revolutions netted out far more jobs. The verdict is still out on AI, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Here's a fun collection of Soviet maps of DC - https://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

Someone on reddit got the actual maps but the link has bitrotted, wayback saved some - https://web.archive.org/web/20241207144716/http://architecto...

I didn't feel like this article necessarily idolized it; the author seemed pretty even-handed about strengths and weaknesses.

The interesting question in all of these kinds of things is "are there ideas we can take to gain the strengths of other systems or patch the weaknesses in ours?". Looking at Japan specifically, I think I speak for most westerners in saying that if we could get a little more stability and less financial-quarter-driven behavior without taking the whole kit of lifetime employment and zombie companies, that would be a good thing. The author points out just how bundled that is, so it's a tough nut to crack.

One model that does give us that is the 'Untouchable visionary CEO' of Jobs and Musk, but I think the popularity of that approach is also limited, partially because of all the not so visionary CEOs trying to be Jobs, and partially because working for those guys is terrible. They inevitably seem to become tyrants.

Most Americans I know are familiar with the unending work culture of Japanese white collar workers (if only a parody version of it), and want no part of it.

There's a wikipedia page with a few more details / rebuttals from various sources - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned,_Multiple-transient_Ev...

I mostly agree with your points, but I think the involuntary incarceration is a major rock and a hard place situation.

There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.

GBY is Gesher Bnot Ya'akov, an archeological site in Israel, it’s in the first paragraph of the abstract.

Pretty cool, although the heatmaps have a little of the "this is just a population density map" effect. https://xkcd.com/1138/

It would be cool to modify them to be per-capita, although I imagine adjusting arbitrary hexes for population density would be a real challenge.

How about Taraxacum officinale, the common dandelion?

It’s not quite all across the globe but pretty close, and is so adapted that it is not considered invasive any more in most places.

Feature request:

Let me filter and alert based on a distance, not just sort. e.g. "Lathe" within 100 miles of Baltimore. GovDeals lets you do this, but their distance filter is very inaccurate.

Giving your customers the idea that you really need the money is terrible advice.

They will think you’re insolvent and start looking for alternatives.

It’s better to just be persistent about “reminders” and for saas set up a clear, well communicated cutoff time for unpaid accounts.

I've been working on legislative data for 15 years now, on open source scrapers with OpenStates and running a commercial product targeted at professionals (competitor to those in the article).

We tried for years with OpenStates to run a free legislative tracking product before eventually having it partner with a commercial provider who was willing to contribute the resources to keep it alive and help out with the open source pieces (shout out to Plural, nice folks).

Believe me when I say that this space is a classic nerd tar pit. It looks like a relatively easy problem, a few hundred scrapers, search, and some basic CRM functionality and you're off to the races.

The problem is that behind the scenes the data is very complicated, and the sources constantly change and break in goofy ways. You need to be running hundreds of scrapers constantly (many of them against akamai or cloudflare), and working around new source website bugs or procedural edge cases every week. It doesn't scale like something like product or web search where you can just ignore broken pages, the penalty for missing things is too high. Tuning your workflow so people find what they need without getting buried is tough, because there are tens of thousands of bills a session about things people think they care about like "AI" or "taxes". On top of that, the low or zero budget clientele is often that mix of high-expectation and low domain knowledge that makes them a big support burden.

Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this and just went under this week, granted with a series of spectacular own-goals.

I wish this author the best of luck, and if you want to team up on scrapers please give us a shout. But please be aware that you're promising the moon, and try to build a model that will be financially and effort-sustainable. Keeping this stuff going is a _slog_. I'm really hoping that someone can bring the professional level tools to normal people.

Unfortunately that just isn't true in large parts of the US. Many cities have no public transit, and no accessible grocery stores.

Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.

The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.

Wow even as a bit of a rocket nerd i'd never thought about it that way, that's pretty cool!

"Space" is 100km. The moon at its closest is about 350,000km.

So the jump from the former to the latter is... significant.

I think I phrased this poorly. Obviously nobody is genetically "better" than anyone else, but that's what many Pronatalists think.

Pronatalist also usually implies a racist/nationalist angle, some of the reason you want more births is because your people are genetically better than immigrants in some way. This isn't universal, but it's often true.

I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs.

If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.

For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.

A thou on any decent mill is no problem.

Given the teeny tiny endmill the author was using, I suspect they were using a small mill with a very fast spindle. Maybe something like a Taig or a Sherline.

Edit -- I see on another post the author has a Sherline 5400 mini mill.

I just want to second this; a ton of parents I know had kids ready to do it earlier but waited until a major holiday/break when everyone would be home anyway to knock it out.

A friend wanted to try this, but no daycares would do it.

Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.

The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.

How does this not fall afoul of states with two party consent laws around recording conversations? Particularly since California is one of the strictest states.

The people behind changes aren't actually as attributable as it sounds though because amendment text gets collaborated on, so showerst might propose an amendment with the key parts of LPisGood's wishlist in it, and then the bill itself will die and then various parts will get cherry picked into an omnibus bill in 6 months anyway.

I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that special in the first place.

If you have a product that:

1. Solves a real problem people would pay for

2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors

3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential customers

Then you need the marketing budget.

That is not most people's problem.

This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.

The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

I'd argue that QoL in middle America is not great compared to similarly priced places in the EU.

Americans have worse health outcomes (including lifespan), travel far less and have less time off, and retire later. That said, you do get much more space, nicer housing stock, (arguably) better access to education, and generally more 'stuff', so it's a tradeoff.

Yeah, haha fair. Even my friends with two look noticeably shell shocked most of the time. Good luck =)

Minus the commute you had to do most of that anyway though, right? We get my four year old ready and walk her to school (city free pre-k a few blocks away, plus paid aftercare).

It takes about an hour to get breakfasted, dressed, and ready which we would be doing anyway. Counting the walk both ways it's about 30 minutes of extra time for 8 hours of childcare.

Unless your commute is just huge I can't see that math being true.