taraharris

The national debt stands at $39.5 trillion. Interest payments on that debt exceed war department spending. Major recessions trigger massive stimulus payments, which would balloon that debt further, which puts the entire nation into a doom loop with the bond market. So instead the economy will simply not be allowed to fall into recession. Rates will not be raised; the debt will simply be monetized.

Part of that strategy requires continual talk of rate hikes to maintain the appearance of a market.

We are clearly living through a period of national autophagy. What's happening all around us is causing a great deal of confusion, so I thought it might help to look at this from an economic perspective.

The federal bureaucracy was largely created by the New Deal, which depended on an expanding American empire. In 1935, US debt/GDP was around 39% and the world traded in physical gold, the Pound Sterling and the USD. By winning WWII, American institutional power was set in stone, both at home and abroad. For generations, Americans largely lived and died believing in Pax Americana.

Today the American empire has begun to visibly shrink. US debt/GDP is at 123%, the USD is slowly losing its reserve currency status and the prospects for American expansion are low. Decades after Reagan and Thatcher, the bond market is in total control of public spending. America is locked in an intense security and technology race with a peer competitor. Is it any wonder that institutions are being remodeled? The economics of an empire determine its laws and the shape of its institutions.

None of the above is an endorsement of empire. Creating, maintaining and unwinding them always leaves a stack of bodies too horrifying for most people to consider. Don't forget that if this stuff makes you rich.

I didn't click the link. (My first guess is this was inspired by a Benny Hill joke.)

I think it's a good thing to not bake IEEE 754 too deeply into RISC-V.

I really want to see hardware built around posits. This is not because they're necessarily superior to floats (they aren't in all use cases), but just because we need some diversity. Too much standardization is bad for innovation, and not everything that's settled should remain that way.

https://www.sigarch.org/posit-a-potential-replacement-for-ie...

I have a home in Seattle, so I get to see intersections and signs that are so confusing that I can't understand what I'm supposed to do when I encounter them. On residential streets around my house, people put up all these "20 is plenty" signs, close off streets, etc., have speedbumps put in, place their cars in driveways that block off the sidewalk, put in traffic cameras in school zones, etc.

My wife's car has FSD (it's a Model X Plaid with HW4) and it does a great job at navigating all of this madness. The magical milestone for autonomy is here already, and it's a part of my daily life. I drive my girlfriend to her job and back four round trips a week, from Ballard to Green Lake.

Three thoughts come to mind:

1) At some point a federal limitation will be legally imposed on the kinds of special cases residents can force on the roads and/or we'll just shrug and let the tunnel-boring machines go under our homes.

2) I think the Boring Company tunnels would be a lot better if they had a grid topology and a story that's more than just lip service about public use.

3) It would be really cool if people got together to take over some of the surface streets and made old-timey functioning streetcars from 120+ years ago. The city and state governments could support this by simply ceding control to worker-owned cooperatives that build and maintain their own streetcars. Ballard was going to get a train that connected it to the rest of the city by 2039, and now that plan is dead because it can't be sustained for financial reasons (public planning is rife with linear assumptions and other forms of myopia).

The claim is that compilers were f(x) -> y, and LLMs are f(x) -> P(y | z1 | z2 | ... z3).

But how were various combinations of popular programming languages, operating systems and hardware platforms not effectively f(x) -> P(y | z1 | z2 | ... z3)? Suppose you were quick on the take and were writing in Unix and C in the early 80s and found yourself porting your program from a PDP-something to an 8088 PC, or to a 68k Mac, dealing with DOS extenders, printer drivers, different versions of C (remember K&R style?) or C++? Remember MFC? The evolution of the STL?

LLMs are similar to that maelstrom, just on a faster timescale.

No. Just grow up, please.

It's telling that there isn't a single mention of surgery in the study or the interview.

Facial feminization surgery (FFS) exists but is extremely rare in Finland. After puberty, hormones alone can't change bone and cartilage structure, nor can they make vocalization congruent. Only surgery can do that.

Comparing what life was like before I had FFS+VFS, and I remember the way people treated me. After puberty locked in my bones, expecting life to be easy with hormone therapy alone simply wasn't realistic socially. Most people were incredibly judgemental. Life is a lot easier when people can't instantly spot you as something they see as abnormal.

When you're an adult and you can't afford surgery with skilled surgeons, you get shunned by the less accepting parts of society, which leads directly to increased morbidity.

When you suppress treatment before adulthood -> higher surgical costs.

When you don't treat it at all -> quiet suicide, causes get buried in the statistics.

I lived through all of these things. It was an impossible childhood. I lived with this in total secrecy and agony until my early 40s. I'm 45 now, and I've had all my surgeries. I know what hundreds of thousands of dollars buying the best care can bring. None of that is available in Finland, where this study was done.

(I had the luxury of making my peace with my father before he passed.)

The point is to protect Apple's control over its APIs and business model. I'd be shocked if they're not busy figuring out how to use LLMs to shore up app review right now.

The war on general-purpose computing isn't good for human well-being. All of this stuff concentrates power in ways that are genuinely terrifying. Maybe the point is that we notice it, and understand the suffering it causes?

Elon would sell a lot more cars

if he'd make peace with Vivian

his fear keeps him holding in tears

I guess I'll just buy a Rivian

As long as it's not coupled with calls to tax and regulate those who do get in early and reap benefits from doing so, this is good and healthy.

(I'm not the earliest adopter of crypto and AI by any means. I only rode up crypto a couple of times for 2X and 3X kinda gains on my investment, and I only started using Claude last year.)

This is so draconian it's worth leaving the United States to avoid this. The video is entirely correct: the true target is to help corporations maintain their monopolies on production. I'm disgusted with the Democrats that are pushing this trash, even as Republicans are wiping out our rights on a federal level. Our rights really are under attack from all sides.

This is so incredibly bad that we citizens need to organize to oppose these laws. I really don't like sticking my neck out given the horrific political environment, but this is so scary that I don't know what else to do. realtaraharris.bsky.social

A few weeks ago I got into our car. Without touching any controls other than the screen, it backed out of our garage and driveway, drove me to the grocery store, found a parking spot and parked. On the way back, it did the same thing without issue.

Last night my spouse was "driving," and she got frustrated by the slowing traffic ahead, so she grabbed the wheel away from the car, and in a microsecond we were nearly sideswiped. We were both so terrified! But it only reinforces the takeaway: this car drives better than we do. No human can see as far and as well as the car's cameras can.

I'm not trying to undermine his wider point, which is fair. It's just hard to reconcile the words in the title ("driverless car hype") with my daily driverless reality.

My first encounter with MBTI was at work, eight years ago. I resisted categorization because I dismissed it as being too geometric (like the four elements, or the four humors), and I tried to skew my results so that I'd be the type (ENTJ) that I thought would be promoted. (I've always scored ENTP on tests, no matter how I tried to skew my answers.)

Over the years, I learned more about Jung, what cognitive functions are and how to identify them, the research of Dr. Dario Nardi, etc. When I think about MBTI types these days, I have a lot of experiences to draw on that make them more real to me.

It took me a long time to understand that the MBTI tests out there are of limited value. I only treat them as a starting point when establishing someone else's type in my mind. To really figure someone out, you have to be able to take into account a ton of other things, including childhood traumas, neurodivergence, etc.

Talk to the people that helped you! Don't assume they don't need help from you now, because a lot of people put up a brave front

I didn't know it was gonna be the pandemic that did it. I was getting ready to get in because I saw the tiny yield curve inversion in like August or September of 2019 and was preparing to make up for lost decades of not investing at all. I learned all I needed to know in three weeks on youtube and I dunno, it worked for me.

I'm no expert myself in anything, but I pick my experts carefully

You can be incredibly fucking lazy for most of your life except for a few key hinges

I got out of your situation by getting interested in investing in 2020. I made smart bets in march that year and had 5X the money when I dumped all my tsla stock teo years ago

I suggest getting a job that you like and is low stress. I spend all my free time studying everything there is to know about human interaction. there are all kinds of subtleties in dating an I'm learning the purpose of each structure. it's like a clutch

if you reveal your hand too fast, you dump the clutch and stall the entine and maybe jerk forward. if you do the the opposite, that's called riding the clutch and in this analogy you wait too long to act toward your nascent goal and the other party loses whatever interest they may have had

you have to constantly re-evaluate this after every single interaction

you have to take an interest in their lives and anticipate their needs

I refused to buy the first one because it didn't have a round face. and since then I've decided that I don't want anything at all from Apple in my life, even if they one day do manage to make it pretty and round. everything they make is exploitative

NATO and the UN are both American institutions, and they ultimately serve American interests above all else.

No matter what the future holds for these particular organizations, we should all hope for better and more neutral ones that actually maintain fairness and peace. We need something that's truly independent of all three superpowers

I'm saddened to see this is the thing that's being resisted, rather than the Trump administration's desire to throw me in prison for being a trans woman

I spent a very long time giving SolveSpace a native Haiku UI. I'm going to keep doing this kind of thing because there's nothing I personally dislike more than apps that don't use the platform's native UI.

I don't care that my approach is harder for the developer, because the thing I care about is consistency and convenience for the user.

I know the thing you built is neat (I've spent quite a few years working on almost the same thing), but I guess this is why I gave up on pushing my own solution

I'd go for ARM anyway. I don't need to run binaries from the 90s

Why not quit school?

I doubt this very much. Sky-high interest rates make large purchases such as cars incredibly expensive.

I remember reading about this case a few years ago (so I don't have a link). The article said the CSAM was the result of many of the employees in the CIA pranking each other. I am inclined to see this as a selective prosecution that benefits the CIA at the expense of the public interest.

The secrecy they operate under inherently shields them from accountability. We have allowed our constitutional system to be usurped, to have a watcher free from the oversight of an effective watcher (i.e., the public or even its representatives).

There's no need to "destroy" the entire foreign policy establishment. We just need to force them to operate without the secrecy and privileges they presently enjoy and exploit so they can be subject to the democratic process.

Surely this is better than to suffer more wars like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

EDIT (apparently my responses are being throttled): In response to wolverine876's question below, "How would secrecy be managed?"

We don't need any secrecy or statecraft. We're so large and established that we can do everything out in the open. Russia and China know where our missiles, bases, ships and submarines are, and we know where their are. The only people in the dark about everything are the citizens in both countries.

A similar argument was made against Linux when open-source was new. It turns out you don't need any closed source code at all to run a successful project.

What we need is to minimize or eliminate the adversarial relationships between nations globally. The only winners of the present status quo are the elites in every nation.

Missile defense is a misnomer. The distinction between a defensive and offensive capability is meaningless in the context of arms races and mutually assured destruction. As we pour billions into shooting down ICBMs, China will pour billions into new delivery systems to evade that defense, and vice versa.

The net result is that money on all sides is taxed away from things that people actually need and want (food, shelter, medicine, schools, parks, the arts) and directed into things that either rust in silos and bases or kill us all.

The only way to stop an arms race is to increase transparency and to negotiate treaties with our peers.

We should repeal the National Security Act of 1947.

Nuclear weapons have proliferated to nine nations around the world since the passage of that act. The production of nuclear armaments is clearly limited by political will and industrial power, not knowledge.

The act protects a foreign policy establishment that has abused its power to conduct dirty tricks against other nations for decades in order to keep American elites rich and in power.

No one is going to invade the American homeland, given the vast oceans separating us from the rest of the world. Repealing that act and removing the foreign policy establishment from power would unwind our vast empire abroad and greatly improve our relations with other nations.

I would prefer that we do this cleanly, but unfortunately I think our empire will suffer a far messier fall from power over the coming decades. Empires at this stage flail wildly in their military adventures.