Envy is worth talking about. It seems to pull a lot of people, like one of the strings in string theory. They want to be envied so they live an exhibitionist life, or they were surpassed by someone they thought was their equal and now they hate the gap. Is it possible people who feel envy then decide to be more exhibitionist, so they can be envied in the future?
I wonder what value envy provided to evolution? Did it motivate primates to do more than they are already doing? Is it a by-product of social status behaviors?
Weddings are also a social commitment exercise to the couple. Imagine if you had break a promise you made in front of everyone both of you know, after spending a whole lot of money. It’s loss aversion and social shame that possibly made a lot of couples stick together. Even so, posing with your best clothes, food, locations, entertainment and donning all of your jewelry (all of your wealth in gold in some country) does likely play the Envy string too.
on an individual, or societal pov, i heavily doubt this is the case... it might be true in some subsets of some societies (royalty? maybe, not sure), or maybe in some periods of times. but this view seems extremely reductive.
Russia’s kleptocracy has impoverished the country so much that it now needs attrition in its male population to keep people from rising up against the current leadership. War is how you keep poor citizens from rebelling against you. When the war is over, historically the returning soldiers (especially in Russia) overturn the leadership. So there is never an incentive to stop a war. Especially a losing one.
The fact that it's a fragile kleptocracy basically reduce to 0 any possibility of a normal future. Puppet state at best, if someone is willing to take them. I expect they already planned what to do with the returning soldiers, not that they will like it or accept gracefully what's in store for them.
Those cover Russia's motivation, which is indeed strong. You can add that Putin wants the glorious Soviet Empire days back, and that without additional buffer zones Russia is very vulnerable to land invasion (in Summer). Russia has plenty of reasons to conquer much of Europe
But I don't see Russia's capability to do so. Their kleptocracy has impoverished the country and has repeatedly lead leadership (including Putin) to overestimate their own capabilities. Male population faces attrition from war and alcoholism. Leadership has a habit of dying in mysterious accidents or falling out of windows, reducing the amount of experienced leaders available and discouraging anyone with a brain from rising up too far. And they are barely able to advance in Ukraine.
There are legitimate concerns that Russia might attack other countries once the Ukraine war concludes. They might even make some initial territorial gains because they are in full war economy while Europe has only scaled up enough to support Ukraine, and has depleted ammunition stockpiles. But I don't see them getting very far
EVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"
I thought the tire wear particulates being a huge source of particulate air emissions was an overestimate due to misunderstanding and misquotation of primary literature by secondary literature used by regulatory agencies.
Well, scanning an article on it for Manhattan, the fraction of "road dust" PM2.5 looks like somewhere around 2-5% depending on time of year, which is a bit below contributions by sea salt.
From my limited reading, what fraction of road dust is from tire tread is unclear. The models trying to estimate it give anywhere numbers from 4 to 48%, but may be incorrect due to the citation problem above. Experiments seem to show 4-9%, but they have trouble excluding resuspended dust.
I'd also point out that if we're worried about air quality in NYC between modes of transport, then one should look at subways since PM2.5 in stations/tubes is many times that of the street and far exceeds EPA limits.
EV shuttles will come in lots of capacities. Vans, buses. But you won't need to worry about schedules or preset routes because it's all dynamic.
Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.
So solution is to make from 3x more expensive to 5x more expensive?
And don't get me wrong, some places in US (with extreme density) should do this. Personally it's not the places where I'd ever want to live ever again lol.
That's so unbelievably difficult it might as well be impossible. It's easier to teach cars to drive themselves than it is to build transit. Ridiculous I know.
No, individualized point to point travel is better. I just got back from Tokyo and Taipei, which have transit systems better than any European country. And it was still faster to Uber everywhere.
And how much did that cost? You can get around Tokyo on the subway system for $5 for an entire day, and it's a profitable system that largely does not rely on taxpayer subsidy.
And how fast would it be if Tokyo and Taipei's trains weren't handling 80% and 40% of trips, respectively?
If you reduce Tokyo's 80% trip usage rate down to 5% like many American cities, that means for every other car on the road in Tokyo you'd now see 5 cars instead. How's that Uber ride looking now?
I’m not aware of any transit-oriented city where average commute times are as low in absolute terms as in sprawling, car-dependent American cities. You just don’t like the aesthetics of that approach. I don’t either. But it’s an aesthetic critique at bottom.
People in Tokyo will accept a longer commute for the sake of a better job or housing or both, because the commute is less miserable (and also because employers pay commute costs).
> I’m not aware of any transit-oriented city where average commute times are as low in absolute terms as in sprawling, car-dependent American cities.
Transit-oriented cities provide access to more jobs within a fixed range like 30 minutes even for car commuters. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2/figures/4 . People in Dallas having shorter commutes isn't a sign that Dallas is built better, it's a sign that people in Dallas are avoiding switching to otherwise better jobs because it would make their commutes worse.
From your article: “The automobile provides better access than transit in all cities we compared, except in Shanghai, China, where automobile reaches about 90% of the jobs reachable by transit at 30 min.”
Yes, that's what a tragedy of the commons looks like. An individual in a given city will have a shorter commute by car. But the more people who are using cars, the worse everyone's commute gets.
Tokyo has a population of some 14 million. Dallas is about 1.3 million. Did you pick cities with populations exactly 10x apart on purpose or something?
It's a tragedy of the commons. For an individual, private car is faster, but the resulting traffic ultimately makes things slower for everyone. Public transit in Tokyo is faster than private cars in car-oriented cities.
That’s not true. Public transit in Tokyo is slower than driving in Dallas or LA. Average one-way commute in LA is just over 30 minutes: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS006037. For Tokyo it’s 45-60 minutes based on sources I’ve seen online.
As I said on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214609 , that statistic doesn't mean what you think it does. The article I linked doesn't have figures for Tokyo but it has Shanghai which is comparable; there are around 4x as many jobs within 30 minutes by transit in Shanghai as by car in LA, while the population is only 1.5x bigger.
this is the west, we can afford to spend more marginally on transportation to:
- have a financial and physical barrier between the riffraff and paying customers
- spend less total money (for real, the cost of second ave subway alone is about 1/3 the market cap of waymo)
- sit down in comfort with door-to-door air conditioning
- go faster
wheverever the density justifies, autonomy will make "dollar van"-style minibuses financially viable too, since unionized drivers have made full-sized buses a money pit
Everywhere? This is a crazy thing to claim. I was also recently in Japan and I never took a car anywhere. I'm sure there are particular routes that are badly served but come on.
I've been few times to Japan. Limiting yourself to rail gets boring very quick.
Also if you travel (aka kinda pressed for time), esp. with larger group (aka family) a lot of time cars are cheaper and faster and more practical option.
Everywhere. I was staying right next to Tokyo Station, too. I went from a meeting in Roppongi Hills to a bookstore in Jimbocho. Apple Maps says 31 minutes by train and 24 minutes by Uber.
And I was traveling alone this time. Last year when I went with my wife and three kids the differential was even more extreme. I’m convinced public transit is a major reason for the birth rate collapse in east asia.
> I’m convinced public transit is a major reason for the birth rate collapse in east asia.
Sure thing. Just so we're on the same page, mind backing that up with the obvious basic research? You know, just a simple breakdown of birth rates vs public transit usage across the world. Rudimentary stuff.
A lot of obviously positive things correlated with lower birth rates, like not having half your kids die before they reach adulthood, being able to treat infections with antibiotics, not needing a crazy amount of labor to keep subsistence farming going.
Birth rate collapse itself is a positive thing, this planet can’t ecologically sustain pre-industrialization birthrates combined with modern medicine and life expectancy. Back in the mid-century there was a lot of academic concern about overpopulation.
EVs are just going to further escalate the race to the bottom with traffic that we’re already seeing with services like DoorDash.
Driving down the marginal cost per hour to operate a vehicle on the road and removing humans who are averse to sitting in endless traffic is not going to result in the utopia people think it will.
This is a bad way to provide functioning public transit and a good way to enshittify car ownership. All the externalities of private vehicles with all the downsides of not owning your own mode of transportation.
The only thing that matters here is how good the transcription is. You absolutely have to save the recording. You also have to enable the user to connect to their own transcription service and preserve the recording for that if yours sucks or is not trusted. People have accents. Third party transcription vendors can sell data. Do not mess this up. Enable users to add their own trusted transcription.
If we want to give this to grandparents to save their stories, we can want to have the stories too. If we want it for ourselves, we have to trust it.
Yes, but they mention there will be a subscription plan for their cloud-based transcription. If you want an open platform of devices - ensure users can use a range of transcription providers for quality and security.
You have the options of using the transcription in the app, subscribing to their cloud service, or building out your own service that access the data via webhooks:
> I love customizing and hacking on my devices. What could I do with Index 01?
> Lots of stuff! Control things with the buttons. Route raw audio or transcribed text directly to your own app via webhook. Use MCPs (also run locally on-device! No cloud server required) to add more actions.
I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem.
Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies.
Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control.
Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.
Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.
> Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body.
Is this not the case with capitalism, right now? Except with political influence being led with money? The people with power, control, and political influence right now are absolutely not functioning in favour of the body.
> Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.
I'm so glad that you're equating me, and people like me, who the system repeatedly failed over and over, and who could be functional if I was able to afford even a minimum of help and support for my situation, to cells being shed in a body. This doesn't feel dehumanising at all.
The fact of the matter is that there is a very Gattaca-like system that exists right now in the world. It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc. People who are branded as "invalid" are an underclass who could be functional, and contribute to society, and perhaps already are contributing to society in ways that are not accounted for in pure economic value (For example, I have talked a great many number of people out of suicide over the last ten years), and yet none of the support given to "valids" is given, and when it is, it is a bureaucratic fight to get it (I personally am thinking about a friend who is currently working as a graphic designer, who had a long period of disability and had to fight for support through the court system. Not because it was an abnormal case, but because the disability support system is set up to automatically deny support, and the system (as any caseworker will tell you) relies on the vast majority either dying or giving up, rather than suing them).
To put it mildly, this feels like a leaky metaphor. I won't say the rest of what came into my mind, to keep things civil.
The metaphor makes you break away from existing labels and think of newer approaches, enabled by the faster methods of communication we have available. In the past, the head of was many days or weeks ride away for most citizens. It made sense for people to relocate for 4 years and represent interests. Now that agency is proving very corruptible, especially because the enforcement of the rules is corrupted. What would be a faster, more reliable, less corruptible approach? You still need people to implement the will of the people, but can we come up with better ways to communicate that will to those in power?
If by capitalism you mean whatever is happening right now, then there is a mix of different things going on.
There is the system of private enterprise governes by capitalist accounting methods which is driven by the action and exchange of people acting to fulill their needs. This is like a functioning organism whose organs act autonomously, and in doing so affirm the life of the organism itself.
There is then the system of hegemony and bureaucracy which is organized by rules, dictates, and orders. It is like an organization, a machine whose parts operate according to a will, and function only so far as the will of the organizer operationalizes them into the pattern that fulfills the organizer's ends.
A natural, organic system can survive only as it functions in the matter of the former. When it functions in the matter of the latter, it dies with the failure of the organizing force which binds the parts. Society is an organism, not an organization. It is as senseless to organize society as it is to tear a plant to bits and make a flower out of the pieces. I should hope that we figure this out sooner rather than later before we smother society and its people with endless bureaucracy and regulation.
The things you recognize are the tragedies of authoritarianism in all forms to me: nobody can possibly understand the system that well, and central planning simply doesn't work whether it's in a State or a company, because it just cannot and never will recognize each individual person for what they are actually worth as a human.
> It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc.
Mostly inherited wealth I would guess, correlated to the other things for sure. Capital is everything in capitalism. Wealth distro follows a power law instead of Normal for this exact reason.
DreamWeaver absolutely destroyed the code with all kinds of tags and unnecessary stuff. Especially if you used the visual editor. It was fun for brainstorming but plain notepad with clean understandable code was far far better (and with the browser compatibility issues the only option if you were going to production).
After 25 or so years doing this, I think there are two kinds of developers: craftsmen and practical “does it get the job done” types. I’m the former. The latter seem to be what makes the world go round.
I am both, I own a small agency when I have to be practical, and have fun crafting code on the hobby side.
I think what craftsmen miss is the different goals. Projects fall on a spectrum from long lived app that constantly evolve with a huge team working on it to not opened again after release. In the latter, like movie or music production (or most video games), only the end result matters, the how is not part of the final product. Working for years with designers and artists really gave me perspective on process vs end result and what matter.
That doesn’t mean the end result is messy or doesn’t have craftsmanship. Like if you call a general contractor or carpenter for a specific stuff, you care that the end result is well made, but if they tell you that they built a whole factory for your little custom made project (the equivalent of a nice codebase), not only it doesn’t matter for you but it’ll be wildly overpriced and delayed. In my agency that means the website is good looking and bug free after being built, no matter how messy is the temporary construction site.
In contrast if you work on a SaaS or a long lived project (e.g. an OS) the factory (the code) is the product.
So to me when people say they are into code craftsmanship I think they mean in reality they are more interested in factory building than end product crafting.
I also do third party software development, and my approach is always: bill (highly, $300+/hr) for the features and requirements, but do the manual refactoring and architecture/performance/detail work on your own time. It benefits you, it benefits the client, it benefits the relationship, and it handles the misunderstanding of your normie clients with regard to what constitutes "working".
Say it takes 2 hours to implement a feature, and another hour making it logically/architecturally correct. You bill $600 and eat $200 for goodwill and your own personal/organizational development. You're still making $200/hr and you never find yourself in meetings with normie clients about why refactoring, cohesiveness, or quality was necessary.
I agree wholeheartedly. As for the why do craftsmen care so much about the factory instead of the product, I believe the answer is pride. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but writing and shipping a hack is sometimes the high road
If you've been doing it for that long (about as long as I have), then surely you remember all the times you had to clean up after the "git 'er done" types.
I'm not saying they don't have their place, but without us they would still be making the world go round. Only backwards.
I work in digital forensics and incident response. The “git ‘er done” software engineers have paid my mortgage and are putting my kids through private schooling.
> all the times you had to clean up after the "git 'er done" types
It’s lovely to have the time to do that. This time comes once the other type of engineer has shipped the product and turned the money flow on. Both types have their place.
I think there's more dimensions that also matter a bunch:
* a bad craftsman will get pedantic about the wrong things (e.g. SOLID/DRY as dogma) and will create architectures that will make development velocity plummet ("clever" code, deep inheritance chains, "magic" code with lots of reflection etc.)
* a bad practician will not care about long term maintainability either, or even correctness enough not to introduce a bunch of bad bugs or slop, even worse when they're subtle enough to ship but mess up your schema or something
So you can have both good and bad outcomes with either, just for slightly different reasons (caring about the wrong stuff vs not caring).
I think the sweet spot is to strive for code that is easy to read and understand, easy to change, and easy to eventually replace or throw out. Obviously performant enough but yadda yadda premature optimization, depends on the domain and so on...
After becoming a founder and having to deal with my own code for a decade, I’ve learned a balance. Prototype fast with AI crap to get the insight than write slow with structure for stuff that goes to production. AI does not touch production code - ask when needed to fix a tiny bit, but keep the beast at arms distance.
The HTML generated by Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG mode might not have been ideal, but it was far superior to the mess produced by MS Front Page. With Dreamweave, it was at least possible to use it as a starting point.
Judicious and careful use of Dreamweaver (its visual editor and properties bar) enabled me to write exactly the code I wanted. I used Dreamweaver foot table layouts and Home Site (later Top Style) for broader code edits. At that time I was famous with the company for being able to make any layout. Good times!
It might have been pretty horrible but I hold Frontpage 97 with fond memories, it started my IT career, although not for HTML reasons.
The _vti_cnf dir left /etc/passwd downloadable, so I grabbed it from my school website. One Jack the Ripper later and the password was found.
I told the teacher resposible for the IT it was insecure and that ended up getting me some work experience. Ended up working the summer (waiting for my GCSE results) for ICL which immeasurably helped me when it was time to properly start working.
Did think about defacing, often wonder that things could have turned out very much differently!
It’s funny this came up, because it was kinda similar to the whole “AI frauds” thing these days.
I don’t particularly remember why, but “hand writing” fancy HTML and CSS used to be a flex in some circles in the 90s. A bunch of junk and stuff like fixed positioning in the source was the telltale sign they “cheated” with FrontPage or Dreamweaver lol
My only gripe was that they tended to generate gobs of “unsemantic” HTML. You resized a table and expect it to be based on viewport width? No! It’s hardcoded “width: X px” to whatever your size the viewport was set to.
Crypto at this point is neither decentralized nor anonymous. It’s a Ponzi scheme wrapped in increasing level of complexity and involving an increasing number of banks, and controlled by a decreasing number of very large players. This crypto octopus is putting tentacles in Fidelity, and major US banks, and pension funds, and 401k accounts, and any other money holder. They are putting debt on banks at leverage levels beyond any reason. So when the music stops playing the octopus can slurp the real money liquidity out of as many US banks and savings institutions as possible, to eventually collapse the savings even of people who have nothing to do with Crypto.
That's really not true. Sure, there are huge amounts of scams and ponzi schemes and that's what gets attention, but crypto is absolutely used every day by many in a decentralized and effectively anonymous way.
Dark markets are still active and people move large amounts across international borders effortlessly.
As an example of being effectively anonymous, I can easily take some cash, meet up at a cafe nearby with someone from a p2p site to swap it to crypto, and then pay a foreign company for hosting services for years with that crypto, sharing zero personal information.
In case you are wandering where the money goes. If you need a gall bladder removed or an appendix removed the bill to you might be $10,000-30,000 but the surgeon, for all of their care and time with you, is compensated less than $100.
I'm confident a surgeon in America is paid more than 100$ for a surgery. They are paid about 400k a year on average. Do the math yourself.
On the other hand you provided no details as to where the money actually goes. It's not a simple proble, and part of the problem is that our doctors are paid a lot more than in peer nations
I did get my gall bladder removed in July, and I know paid my surgeon a lot more than a 100 bucks, which was just the smaller deductible portion of the bill.
CATL's announcements of Sodium Ion batteries promise an order of magnitude cost reduction over lithium. Having enough storage to capture peak energy will be game changing; the only significant hurdle is to modernize the grid but there's a lot of resistance to that /rimshot
We could also choose to just build solar powered datacenters and have a follow-the-sun model for the data processing. That small delay would still meet most of the needs of users. But nope, BigCorp isn't smart enough to be that innovative and instead doubles down on the old method and demands more nuclear power.
Electricity is cheap compared to GPU capital costs and depreciation. Intermittent usage is only cost efficient with capital that cheaply buffers energy either generically like batteries or specifically like heating up your smelters. It is not unsolvable, but not as easy as you imagine to retool.
retaglutide is the next gen (3rd) GLP-1 which is in phase 3 trials now. It is a triple antagonist (current are dual GLP-1/GIP). It adds glucagon, and apparently that comes with not only greatly increased weightloss, but also wicked sugar cravings.
These things do way way more than just appetite and craving suppression.
Interesting! how does that work though? I thought reduced sugar craving was part of how GLP-1s aid in weight loss as the paitent craves sugar less and thus eats less.
I'm not a biochemist, so I can't say with any authority, but presumably its to do with the 3rd antagonist and its impact on glucagon. Most of what I have heard is through Reddit communities for the on-market drugs (1st and 2nd gen peptides). The anecdotes from Retatrutide sound like it has way less impact on appetite and for some people that's actually a downside even though the weight loss effects appears to be significantly more powerful.
I wonder what value envy provided to evolution? Did it motivate primates to do more than they are already doing? Is it a by-product of social status behaviors?
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