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I love those who yearn for the impossible.
Recently, a newsletter: map.simonsarris.com
a stromata of anecdotes, fables, tales, advice if you ask for it, photography, questions, sentiment, and ways to get lost in the forest. Some of it will be private. Some will be legible. Not too legible I hope.
And trying to DIY a rose garden: https://garden.simonsarris.com
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I make GoJS, a powerful JavaScript/TypeScript diagramming library:
https://gojs.net/
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I live in Amherst, New Hampshire
simonsarris.at.hn
very minor nit but no CO2 is released during concrete curing. And over time (decades) the calcium hydroxide in concrete reacts with CO2 to pull it out of the air, producing calcium carbonate.
Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O
That sounds a bit like one of Saturn's (1985-2010) original ideas from the 80s. The plastic paneling was easy to take off so that people could DIY change the colors or add their own panels (and Saturn engineers could quickly revise styles). I am not sure very many people ever did, however. Or even if the cars were all that customizable in the end.
It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy.
I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more) years of pricing pain. Meanwhile expensive RAM has so far left stock for people that really need it. Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
On November 16 2022 Michael Burry tweeted "You have no idea how short I am"
On January 31st 2023 Michael Burry just tweeted out "Sell"
that period was the market bottom, which has rocketed since then. (QQQ more than doubled)
reminiscent of when people were trying to mine bitcoin in the background of web pages, or with more trad malware
I've had surface devices for a long time, originally for work to test HTML Canvas with the touchscreen. Unlike a lot of the other comments, I've had a nice time with them. The screens are a great quality, the keyboard especially in later versions is quite good. Drawing on them is nice. Battery life is middling, though.
true but be sure to see `All Employees, Government/Population`
Many people hold one or more of the following positions:
1. Illegal immigration is bad, and we should do more to reduce it.
2. Immigration (any kind) is too numerous. Eg someone could say "Nashua, New Hampshire is now 17.2% foreign born and I think that is too high." Within 2. there are multiple separate reasons to have the position. One could think that its bad for assimilation, or one could be upset that the Nashua school system's budget increases are almost completely due to having to hire more ELL staff to accommodate the rapid rise in non-English speakers in a school system that used to be almost entirely English speakers. I'm sure there are more complicated examples but I hope that one is easy to understand.
3. Immigration (any kind) is used to lower wages of the working and middle class via labor and program abuses. At the low end, this used to be a leftist talking point (the kind Bernie Sanders once talked about). At the high end, it is grousing about H1B abuses. Despite many agreeing that th program has large abuses, H1Bs are legal immigrants.
Your idea of an "easy solution" doesn't remotely correspond to a solution for people who think #2 or #3. Even for #1, someone who dislikes illegal immigration does not necessarily want more legal immigration, though that used to be a very common view (eg, Bill Clinton in the 1990s, I think George Bush too). If a person believes #3, increasing the number of legal immigrants may simply increase the corresponding abuses.
n.b. the text above is descriptive, not normative.
Because how you spend your time is different when you need to work for a living and when you do not. If that's not transparent, this can't really be discussed. Spending 4 years and $300,000 is "fine" if you have a trust fund and "extremely stupid without a return-on-investment" if you don't.
There's not really enough info to know if this is just a coin toss or something more. "Company tries to roll its own system and [saves / loses] money" is just a common story, one way or the other.
For context, the Homes for Ukraine refugee scheme cost 2-3 billion as of 2023. I can't seem to find an updated cost. This cost (from the article) was Palantir working for free for the first 6 months (could they have beat that, time wise?), then awarded 4.5m and 5.5m for two more 12 month terms, and now they're transitioning to something home-grown instead.
The MHCLG [ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] said it initially needed a system which could be ready within days but, in seeking a "steadier service", later created an updated platform to meet the programme's longer-term needs and bring down costs.
I basically agree with the MHCLG's reasoning here. It's always worth at least experimenting to see if you can roll your own.
we spent one zillion dollars over 200 years to make flat surfaces everywhere, often perfectly flat (like inside of stores), so that ball bearing wheels can work well. We've found that tracks work even offroad. Arms, sure, but why legs?
Around a dockyard or a warehouse, a small tank with 6 arms might make more sense!
So that was 2016. Why doesn't it link to "Chinese property sector crisis (2020–present)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis...
Never mind, I added a link to it, and the prior Chinese bubble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_bubble_(2005%...
but [gestures vaguely at the state of it]
Everyone wants to gesture vaguely at the state of it but it's still by far the best place. Just use the site the way you want to use it, post the way you wish others posted, and mute stuff you don't like aggressively.
Younger Dryas, definitely. It very likely abruptly stopped progress in human agriculture, before allowing it to abruptly restart again. Makes the Medieval warm period and little ice age look like a joke. Two massive shifts that punctuate the timeline of early human prehistory.
The Younger Dryas (YD, Greenland Stadial GS-1) was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP). It is primarily known for the sudden or "abrupt" cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, when the North Atlantic Ocean cooled and annual air temperatures decreased by ~3 °C (5 °F) over North America, 2–6 °C (4–11 °F) in Europe and up to 10 °C (18 °F) in Greenland, in a few decades
As a fan of Calvino I will say that If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is somewhat more enjoyable after you've read a bunch of other Calvino, since it has a somewhat cheeky, self-referential feel and the more you sympathize with the author the more you may like it.
Numbers in the Dark is very good as a place to start.
Flora Carta, design and keep track of your gardens. Originally a project for myself to keep track of every rose variety (I have over a hundred) in my garden, and apple/pear/plum variety in my orchard.
Presumably, those have influenced elections, though I guess it depends what you count as an attack.
Plenty of bots try to modify public opinion. Someone hacked the DNC in 2015/16, the result of which also alleged attempted manipulation in 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_National_Committee_...
Since we (as old Rummy said) do not know what we do not know, we cannot be certain about the extent of cyber attacks and what they might have influenced, and may not know these things until discoveries decades later, if ever.
Yeah. From the Italian defense minister:
Someone is trying to get the message across that Italy has decided to suspend the use of bases for U.S. assets.
Something that's simply false, because the bases are active, in use, and nothing has changed.
The Government continues to do what all Italian Governments have always done in full adherence to the commitments made in Parliament and to the line reiterated in the Supreme Defense Council as well, in continuity with all previous Councils over the decades.
International agreements clearly regulate and distinguish what requires specific Government authorization (for which it has been decided to always involve Parliament), without which it is not possible to grant anything, and what is instead considered technically authorized because it is included in the agreements.
A minister only has to ensure they are respected.
There is no third option.
Finally, I want to reiterate that there is no cooling or tension with the U.S., because they know the rules that have governed their presence in Italy since 1954 just as well as we do.
Is this really true in 2026? Even 10 year old cars are simply big now, and not that expensive. I could believe it in 1990 maybe.
I have 3 babies (ages 0, 2, 4 when we started) in a 2016 Subaru Outback for 1.5 years now and it's been mostly fine. I have 2 "slim" seats from Clek, one is a booster, and it's really not a big deal. I cannot imagine deciding to give up a child because of a minor inconvenience like this.
Buying slim car seats is just not that expensive compared to buying a new car, so we did that. It's hard to believe that people who really want 3 children cannot make it work.
He's made a lot of predictions: Apple will acquire Disney (recent), Microsoft will acquire Yahoo (mid 2000s), we'd have a "hard landing" in 2023/2024. None of these have turned out true. It's especially hard to meaningfully evaluate claims of crashes.
On the other hand, the best way to improve your capabilities is to use them frequently.
The Russian army assumed a state of readiness for the Ukraine invasion that turned out to be, well, less. Their special forces floundered, their logistics were (are still!?) unpalletized - using bespoke metal containers and wooden crates! Whereas the US military learned an awful lot from its (mis)adventures over the last decades.
This is essentially what Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) was predicting a few months ago. Incumbents in most software spaces will probably see a lot of short and medium term benefits from the new tooling as being trustworthy and truly understanding the problem space.
Where was this kind of movement when Russia invaded Europe in 2022?
I think Europe's inaction in 2022 will go down as the greatest moral failing of the century. You can't say "they didn't act because Russia is a nuclear power" - the same is true here.
It's commendable relative to other countries not deploying much, but nonetheless, CO2 cares only about totals. See consumption by source:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
though they've gone mostly electric
Who on earth told you this?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
I mean, did you know most dental floss has PFAS? You have to go out of your way to get PFAS free
Do you know what "countertop sealer" is made of? It's PFAS! Lots and lots of people rub PFAS on their food surfaces on purpose!
The stuff is everywhere even if you think you are avoiding it.
That top graph has been shared a lot but its a somewhat disingenuous display of data. It's true that lots of growth has been healthcare in the last 2 years, but that doesn't mean zero growth elsewhere, you can see eg construction growth on the chart, which is reflected in the fact that construction is seeing all-time-high employment right now:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES2023700001
And if you look at something that's "flat" like transportation, its still essentially at all time highs right now, its just now declining slightly, but its on the heels of major growth: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES4300000001
Now if you look at one that's negative on the graph, like retail trade, and zoom out:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USTRADE
It's still essentially at all time highs!
Serious contractions in these things would be much more worrisome, but this data is basically fine. Some losses may just be temporal corrections from all time highs, like what happened to software jobs at the end of ZIRP (though Software now has separate problems to solve wrt job market).
I have always like C. P. Cavafy's famous poem about this, Waiting for the Barbarians, because of what it emphasizes about why people want these things to be true. Doom is an abdication of responsibility.
But that doesn't work for desktop (they already killed the messenger desktop app)