tweedledee

A huge loss to and a massive vote of no confidence in MSR Cambridge.

Is Epic worse than Facebook? I can’t imagine much of an upside to praying on human frailties in order to make games addictive to extract money from kids.

I have hEDS which can cause POTS and had the exact same experience. The Golden Girls covered it over 30 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVyLZTKDy2E and it is still the default response.

I enjoyed the realpolitik of Expanse but hated the trite interpersonal conflicts which seems to be a mainstay of modern drama. I find the main characters to be rather childish.

I wonder how much may be due to LongCovid. If even 10% of infections result in LongCovid then I would expect to see it in job reports.

My primary concern would be the noise. I can deal with small rooms, no windows etc. but I assume students crammed that close together would be crazy noisy. I have ADHD so I’m much more noise sensitive than most, but even for normal people I would expect better sleep and study outcomes from a quiet environment.

My favorite part was the gaslighting done by Cadbury. “It hasn’t gotten smaller, you’ve gotten bigger”

Q seemed to be an 'Operation Trust' / операция Трест campaign. The idea is to undermine resistance by pretending there is already one in place and that the secret resistance with a plan that will be eminently successful. It undermines actual resistance. The parallel being Trump supporters being the resistance that didn't do anything (other than make fools of themselves) with the belief that there was a secret plan to keep Trump in power. In this scenario Q would have been created to undermine Trump and his supporters. A large part of propaganda is to make your enemies look foolish. I'm reminded of a Voltaire quote: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous. ' And God granted it."

It’s still simpler and cheaper. The swashplate is much simpler. Much less power is fed to the main rotor as inertia is built up slowly and only for take off. The lower standard of reliability as worst that happens is you don’t take off. Engines are pushing a more forgiving higher speed prop, so engines and fuel are cheaper.

I don’t know how marginal jumpstarts are, possibly very, which would limit the utility. Especially where there is a runway nearby.

For completeness I should add; Quadrotor configurations rely on varying prop speeds to control pitch, yaw, and roll. The larger the props the more difficult it is to vary the prop speed in a timely manner. Electric motors are more weight efficient at high speeds but larger props need to be slower. You could add a gearbox but either way you are gaining weight and complexity. Plus parts start to get really expensive as you scale up and get out of hobbyists range.

Most wing suit flying is generally far away from obstacles. When they do get close its not many obstacles and it’s carefully planned. Flying FPV through forests is a lot of fun because of how random it is, and how dangerous it feels, but you quickly become aware that the human brain is not set up to do that kind of high speed navigation. There is no traction and flight lines have to be planned a few moves ahead. There is very little margin in the best of times, and sometimes no margin at all. It’s like that ball tracking / hidden monkey experiment. While you are watching one tree another jumps out at you from nowhere. It would be like playing Russian roulette non stop. You’re looking for the intersection of people who are actively suicidal and with a spare $100K.

I am aware crazy people do exist. It's a matter of degree and I would suggest that flying this thought a forest Endor style would be far more dangerous than free solo climbing.

They are explaining how quadcopters don't scale very well. You may be misunderstanding the explanation. The surface area covered by the rotor is much less for quadcopters and it is difficult to make up for that. Plus small rotors are less efficient. One upside for quadcopters is simplicity but that advantage diminishes with scale.

I've flown FPV drones through forests, it's insane. The reaction speeds needed are crazy. It is almost impossible to last a day without crashing. I'm sure there are lots of fun things to do with it, but Endor style races is not one of them. The people willing to do things that crazy don't last very long.

That would involve Endor-style crashes, it would be insanely dangerous. Flying FPV drones gives much of the same feeling without the all the death.

Some gyros can jump-start, as in pre-spin their rotor fast enough for vertical take off. It would add a bit of complexity but it'll still be relatively simple.

The real problem is just how damn expensive it is to build anything inside Microsoft. It makes it hard and harder to justify spending the money. AFAIK it’s only getting worse. I expect in time that more and more dark patterns will creep in.

100% it’s cheap enough that everyone should do it. The TNXB mutation has a ton of weird drug interactions. Anesthesia resistant being just one.

You’re talking about phenotypes. With height people with entirely the same diets will end up different heights based on their genes. I used to think that intelligence was earned due to exercise and that others just needed to try harder. I’ve since seen enough people try really hard and fail that I no longer believe that. As with strength, some mutations give some people a big advantage. I don’t think it’s an assumption, there is a lot of evidence. Even the low studies have IQ at 50% DNA and that’s without the greater understandings we have today, I would put it at 80%. Plus likelihood of IQ supporting genes would be much much higher at the extremes.

This is absolutely world changing. I've known that this was coming and was only a matter of time, it did get here sooner than I expected. I have hypermobile Ehelers Danlos Syndrome (hEDS) from a TNXB mutation. I was incorrectly told by doctors for decades that I was perfectly healthy and my issues were psychosomatic. It wasn't until I did a careful large scale behavioral analysis that I was able to identify similar people and from there the root cause. A $500 (30x) DNA test confirmed it. hEDS is massively under diagnosed, the vast majority never get a diagnosis.

I strongly suspect that most mental problems are physical in nature and most physical problems are DNA related. And even when they're not DNA related, treatment ideas could be gleaned from 'natures large scale experiment'. The number of issues that can be identified from a $100 (1x) test and then subsequently treated is mind boggling. For me, that cost is less than a single doctors visit. This side steps the medical establishment which is slow and in many ways archaic. This will lead to a massive leap forward in medicine.

In other news; I'm also of the opinion that IQ is largely determined by DNA, nature as opposed to nurture, and once that is properly figured out I'm sure designer babies are next. I don't think that is a door that can be kept closed. There is already a black market for it. I'll be watching from the sidelines, I think this is going to get interesting.

Acquisitions. Say a big company lacks in category, an exec from that company can let a VC know that they would like to buy a company in that category and are willing to pay a certain amount. The VC then goes about bringing the company into existence. Do a song and dance about how it's a real company. Buy a bunch of positive press. Cram it full of new grads. Then before it can collapse under its own weight offload it.

Sorry, I misread as Edit #1. We know in certain countries in certain areas nothing gets done without some kind of bribe / kickbacks so we assume some of finders fee we pay for leads goes back to the customers exec. Sometimes we get asked to increase prices to increase their margins. I.e. make a Pro version for 10x the cost for them to buy. Sometimes the customers complain to us how expensive it is and then we tell them how much it should be costing them which is a fifth of the price. Usually the exec is untouchable though so it doesn't change anything. Funnily enough, only time we've been directly asked for graft was from a Swiss customer and we offered a junket which they didn't like, I guess they wanted more.

I don't know of any firm immune to it and I've worked with a couple of the most prestigious and hear about many others. I've long given up wishing people were better. And unfortunately I expect it to get much worse. As the financial crushing of the middle class increases I would expect much more corruption as being middle class / poor becomes more humiliating. I expect this to give way to mobsterism that would make current levels of capitalist fraud look like paytime.

I was Applied Research, feature X was for internal use. The companies were supposed to be tallent and tech acquisition, they claimed to have feature X but were faking it. The 'talent' was fresh out of university people crammed in last minute to bulk up numbers. The VCs funding the startups had a pre-existing relationship with the VP who joined the company in a similar earlier acquisition. One of the VCs approached me about doing a purpose built start-up of my own, the purchasing company and sale amount was already determined, quick easy money. It was clear making working technology was orthogonal to the real objective of extracting huge amounts of money large tech companies. I only cared about the tech so it wasn't of interest to me. Even 10 years later feature X doesn't exist even though it's entirely tractable. It's possible that it may never get built which would be a shame.

It doesn't bother me anymore. It's just people being people. I'm enjoying the series The Expanse lately because of the way it integrates realpolitik into the storyline.

I'm privy to more details than I am giving out. I've been in SV for over 15 years and I have seen a lot in that time. I'm aware of what is normal. There is normal purchasing intermediaries and then there are purpose built bribe vehicles. We're not talking 10% it's more like 100% to 1000%.

I’m sure the tiny particles would damage the rotors as well. Even rain is bad enough.

There is also the role of the VCs who facilitate much of this. They use VPs in big companies to offload crappy purpose built startups for huge profits then get their friends to offer the VP sweetheart deals and or future employment. AFAIK the arms-length / chinese walls keep it legal in appearance. Basically any big tech company with lots of money and terrible management is prone to this.

This is so common it’s hard not to do. Not doing it definitely stunted my startup but it’s a lifestyle company and I don’t mind building slower.

Edit: I should add that while I was working at a FAANG (before doing a startup) the team I was on would constantly be blocked from building X only for a VP to buy a company that said they did X but didn’t. Because we still needed X we would buy a new company each year. We could tell the VP was setting them up to sell to us. We would joke about leaving to do a start up for the VP to not only make more money but so we could finally have a working X in the company.

Edit2: With my current start-up it's not uncommon that we are instructed to sell to a customer via a nominated 3rd party. We don't know for sure, but we strongly suspect, that the 3rd party markup is how the executives are skimming off extra money. At least it keeps us out of it.

In 1984 I’d say he was more inspired by his time working for the UK government in Burma. Particularly the use of propaganda to control the population.

I presumed Orwell was inspired by the UK and not the other way around

AFAIK Sam Harris was always considered the weakest of the four horsemen.