Equals Dashboard - Oct 24 launch
https://www.producthunt.com/products/equals/launches
Reforge Artifacts
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/reforge-artifacts
Gorilla is a LLM that can provide appropriate API calls. It is trained on three massive machine learning hub datasets: Torch Hub, TensorFlow Hub and HuggingFace. We are rapidly adding new domains, including Kubernetes, GCP, AWS, OpenAPI, and more. Zero-shot Gorilla outperforms GPT-4, Chat-GPT and Claude. Gorilla is extremely reliable, and significantly reduces hallucination errors.
NocoDB - The Open Source Airtable Alternative
https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb
Turns any MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, SQLite & MariaDB into a smart spreadsheet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynWHhw8o-pY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LArfW-RY2Bc
Equals launches Dashboard on Product Hunt
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dashboards-1
DELETED
https://www.modular.com/
Chris Lattner founded Modular promising an alternative to CUDA: A new programming language that gives Python superpowers
(Chris Lattner developed SWIFT language before)
https://docs.modular.com/mojo/
https://vimeo.com/822336980
Bard on Mojo vs PyTorch
In terms of performance, Mojo can be up to 10x faster than PyTorch for some tasks. For example, in a recent benchmark, Mojo was able to train a ResNet-50 model in 10 minutes, while PyTorch took 100 minutes.
Sample Quote (formatted by me):
Judgment is already too well known. Within a week it is to be
pronounced.
What is the consolation with the exception of the idea that I am going to sacrifice my life for a cause?
- A God-believing Hindu might be expecting to be reborn as a king
- a Muslim or a Christian might dream of the luxuries to be enjoyed
in paradise and the reward he is to get for his suffering and
sacrifices.
- But, what am I to expect? I know the moment the rope
is fitted round my neck and rafters removed from under my feet,
that will be the final moment – that will be the last moment. I,
or to be more precise, my soul as interpreted in the metaphysical
terminology, shall all be finished there. Nothing further. A
short life of struggle with no such magnificent end shall in
itself be the reward, if I have the courage to take it in that
light...
- I know in the present circumstances my faith in God
would have made my life easier, my burden lighter, and my
disbelief in Him has turned all the circumstances too dry, and
the situation may assume too harsh a shape. A little bit of
mysticism can make it poetical.
- But I do not want the help of any intoxication to meet my fate.
I am a realist. I have been trying to overpower the instinct in me by the help of reason.
I have not always been successful in achieving this end.
But man’s duty is to try and endeavour, success depends upon chance and environments.
Lex Fridman & Sam Altman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_Guz73e6fw
Lex Fridman & Eliezer Yudkowsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaTRHFaaPG8
Lex & Andrej Karpathy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdiD-9MMpb0
Lex & Nick Lane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOtdJcco3YM
Arguments for Open Sourcing AI models
Lex & Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Llama
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4fRgnuFgQ
Lex & George Hotz (Comma AI Guy)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v-qvVIje4Y&ab_channel=LexClips
Hotz TLDR:
Anarchy over Tyranny vibe,
"GPT-4 has 220 billion parameters with 8 sets of weights"
George Hotz vs Eliezer Yudkowsky AI Safety Debate - LIVE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yQEA18C-XI&ab_channel=DwarkeshPatel
Geoffrey Hinton at MIT Technology Review, May 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sitHS6UDMJc
Zapier with OpenAI lets you add AI to typical workflows easily. I was able to quickly create this zap to parse my email for time and address of event and add it to my calendar.
https://zapier.com/shared/4f34dcc0d65b4e591608b687eaa078980c48c324
Checked on Google Maps, Uber, Doordash. Everyone supports referring to exact locations using plus codes.
Found this lens to be a good framing to come up with new ideas:
"The lens through which we view trends matters. If you recognize Software 2.0 as a new and emerging programming paradigm instead of simply treating neural networks as a pretty good classifier in the class of machine learning techniques, the extrapolations become more obvious, and it’s clear that there is much more work to do.
In particular, we’ve built up a vast amount of tooling that assists humans in writing 1.0 code, such as powerful IDEs with features like syntax highlighting, debuggers, profilers, go to def, git integration, etc. In the 2.0 stack, the programming is done by accumulating, massaging and cleaning datasets. For example, when the network fails in some hard or rare cases, we do not fix those predictions by writing code, but by including more labeled examples of those cases. Who is going to develop the first Software 2.0 IDEs, which help with all of the workflows in accumulating, visualizing, cleaning, labeling, and sourcing datasets?"
Sidenote, the example chosen reminded me of Scale AI (Now, Scale.com)
-
"Using a weighted average of the 4 studies, a lower limit of 210,000 deaths per year was associated with preventable harm in hospitals"
-
"the true number of premature deaths associated with preventable harm to patients was estimated at more than 400,000 per year."
-
"Fully engaging patients and their advocates during hospital care, systematically seeking the patients' voice in identifying harms, transparent accountability for harm, and intentional correction of root causes of harm will be necessary to accomplish this goal."
"The report was based upon analysis of multiple studies by a variety of organizations and concluded that between 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year as a result of preventable medical errors. For comparison, fewer than 50,000 people died of Alzheimer's disease and 17,000 died of illicit drug use in the same year"
- "the World Health Organization to estimate that one in ten persons receiving health care will suffer preventable harm."
- "Prescribing errors are the largest identified source of preventable errors in hospitals"
- "Computerized provider order entry (CPOE), formerly called computerized physician order entry, can reduce medication errors by 80% overall but more importantly decrease harm to patients by 55%"
Excellent Read on the pathetic-ness taught at school called Math
I have never scraped data from a website with a login this quickly and easily. https://photos.app.goo.gl/To41a3SM7zKVRdYp6
"Students think their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan - never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers" 😄
https://youtu.be/LYCKzpXEW6E?t=826
Musk Interview- AII In Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnxzrX9tNoc
"How to be Impatient" would have been a better essay. This essay doesn't provide any actionable advice. Maybe because there isn't any. The Sam Altman quote seems to indicate it is an intrinsic quality you are born with.
"Some of these characteristics seem to be easier to change than others; for example, I have noticed that people can become much tougher and more ambitious rapidly, but people tend to be either slow movers or fast movers and that seems harder to change. Being a fast mover is a big thing; a somewhat trivial example is that I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails."
When paired with https://dbss.azureedge.net/ allows using any android tv or tablet as a customizable dashboard!
Dashboard Screensaver only mentions it supports Android TV/OS. Have you tried Dakboard Screensaver on Tablet as well?
Best link I could fine to enable this on tablet is https://blog.dakboard.com/use-dakboard-on-your-tablet/
Dakboard dashboards are just websites. They give you a unique URL for your dashboards. On a tablet it should be trivial to leave chrome open in fullscreen.
The Screensaver app sets android tv screensaver (after 5 min delay) to the webpage you configure.
I wanna integrate this with OK Google on my wall!
"Starting today, users get full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise. This includes images they generated during the research preview."
How to know when to stop
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-know-when-to-stop?s=w
The mystery of the miracle year
https://dwarkeshpatel.com/annus-mirabilis/
https://towardsdatascience.com/the-upper-confidence-bound-ucb-bandit-algorithm-c05c2bf4c13f
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/upper-confidence-bound-algorithm-in-reinforcement-learning/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
"Second, to the extent that the public/private distinction is understood, it highlights the capability of private companies to impose sanctions, and their willingness to do so in pursuit of political goals — even if those political goals are to stop an unjust invasion and save lives."
"Start with the latter: India is widely considered the most important long-term growth market for a whole host of tech companies, thanks to its massive population that is only just now coming online, combined with a growing economy that, to the extent it can follow a similar path to China, promises more opportunity than anywhere else in the world. In the economic era it has made perfect sense for India to be a core market for Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc."
"It was India, though, that raised some of the most strident objections to Twitter and Facebook’s decision to take down President Trump’s accounts after January 6, with several politicians pointing out that tech executives in San Francisco could do the same to them; in the case of the Ukraine invasion India is staying neutral, thanks in part to its significantly longer-term relationship with Russia, particularly from a military perspective. That makes it all-the-more likely that the aforementioned private sanctions are being interpreted in terms of capabilities, not intentions, clouding the long-term prospects of those tech companies counting on India for growth."
"""
Taiwan, China and South Korea “represent a triad of dependency for the entire U.S. digital economy,” said an influential 2019 Pentagon report on national-security considerations regarding the supply chain for microelectronics. “Taiwan, in particular, represents a single point-of-failure for most of the United States’ largest, most important technology companies,”
"""
"""
A most telling (and often quoted) exchange between [India Prime Minister Inder Kumar] Gujral and Pres. Clinton occurred on 22 September 1997 at the occasion of the U.N. General Assembly session in New York. Gujral later recounted telling Clinton that an old Indian saying holds that Indians have a third eye. “I told President Clinton that when my third eye looks at the door of the Security Council chamber it sees a little sign that says ‘only those with economic power or nuclear weapons allowed.’ I said to him, ‘it is very difficult to achieve economic wealth’.”
"""
"""
The implication is that nuclear capability was a more attainable route to great nation status than was economic dominance; what, then, to make of an industry that can, via private sanction, destroy economic wealth above and beyond government action? The capability wielded by the tech industry is incredible; it is easy to cheer when it is being used in the service of intentions that are so clearly good. It’s equally easy to understand how much fear that capability may generate in the long run.
"""
"China, whose AI Innovation Action Plan for Colleges and Universities called for the establishment of 50 new AI institutions in 2020,"
-
Consider three plausible technologies:
- Artificial general intelligence
- High-speed space travel
- Self-reproducing spacecraft.
If these are practical, they suggest that the universe could suddenly find itself completely saturated with advanced intelligence, even if it appears quite rarely.
-
For a wide range of possible final goals, it has been argued that rational agents are likely to deploy such technology and rapidly expand. And even if just a small fraction of intelligent life chooses to do so, the conclusion remains much the same.
-
Accessing a massive reserve of free energy should be a prime instrumental goal for almost any final goal that an ambitious rational agent could possess.
-
Intelligent life may be the universe’s large-scale, general-purpose tool for seeking out and minimizing deeply hidden reserves of free energy.
-
This would result in a tremendous amount of waste heat radiation, as ordinary matter is “burned” everywhere that life is active.
-
Depending on where the practical limits to technology reside, the universe could once again be filled with radiation, and thus pressure, inducing a backreaction on the scale factor.
-
the universe may be entering a kind of phase transition after all, complete with its own nucleation events, spherically expanding domains, and latent heat. But it’s not the result of hidden physics taking us by surprise. We are the transition.
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
[apparently, this later on won the contest]
Related from the author, Lars Doucet | Game Economy
http://gameofrent.com/
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-and-the-digital-housing-crisis
Understanding Economics: 4 - The Laws of Distribution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrClVfO4CpM
EVE Online: Game Economist Ramin Shokrizade explains the whole thing in his 2013 Gamasutra article, "How I Used EVE Online to Predict the Great Recession.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-used-eve-online-to-predict-the-great-recession
Henry George Lecture Series
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB1uqxcCESK7WucTqc4uBZ5hmXL6dz3cW
Interesting (and maybe encouraging) to see basic ideas on political economy come up in mainstream discussions on solving the current fiscal situation in the US. Instances:
https://youtu.be/wwJV_NuN43Y?t=4898
Peter Thiel mentioned about Henry George and current runaway rent problem in other countries as well. This is something that I've been observing as well as part of trying to find 'the place to live'. Interestingly he also mentioned about the need to continue govt spending to keep the 'Blue City States' like SF, NY, Chicago afloat. While I had read about their bleak fiscal situation, I'm not sure what happens when spending stops or reduces. Will these city govt default on their debt? We are living in interesting times!
Had shared these earlier with different people -
Canada - https://youtu.be/ZvSNcnG2eqY?t=64
UK- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ67YUcrIgw
US - https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/high-earner-not-rich-yet-finances-fb8ae842?utm_source=pocket_saves
EU (Not exactly land though, but related)- https://twitter.com/itsolelehmann/status/1856759960648257765
https://youtu.be/4AIgn545PPA?t=2619
Separately, the likely next Secretary of Treasury (Howard Lutnick) talks about using mineral and oil to balance the budget partially. Also I didn't know federal income taxes were first introduced only in 1913 (the year Fed was formed!) Prior to that country was run on tariffs for like 100+ years (1789-1913)! There were some earlier attempts at federal taxes, but they were mainly to fund the Civil War and were temporary.
Related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harberger_Tax
Javier Milei
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLzc9kobDk
Murray Newton Rothbard
https://mises.org/online-book/rothbard-reader/chapter-11-monopoly-and-competition
Henry George & Land Value Tax | FAQs
https://bluerepublik.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/georgism-lvt-faq/
Details on Land Valuation
https://www.henrygeorge.org/ted.htm
The Book Review Guy - Lars Doucet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL-qkv7Pzxo&t=5s
Great, thought-provoking read on the issue with trusting code given the long chain of trust and the bootstrapping problem.
P.S: Not sure how this wasn't already on Panchayat 🙈
Good, Long Read on Sleep, Dreams and the Importance of Art in the Modern Age
"Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart. One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.
These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
"That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world."
2010 😅
"Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests."
"But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We'll increasingly be defined by what we say no to."
"unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us"
"As we can see, there is a very clear pattern: richer countries tend to be happier than poorer countries (observations are lined up around an upward-sloping trend), and richer people within countries tend to be happier than poorer people in the same countries (arrows are consistently pointing northeast).
It’s important to note that the horizontal axis is measured in a logarithmic scale. The cross-country relationship we would observe in a linear scale would be different, since at high national income levels, slightly higher national incomes are associated with a smaller increase in average happiness than at low levels of national incomes. In other words, the cross-country relationship between income and happiness is not linear on income (it is ‘log-linear’). We use the logarithmic scale to highlight two key facts: (i) at no point in the global income distribution is the relationship flat; and (ii) a doubling of the average income is associated with roughly the same increase in the reported life-satisfaction, irrespective of the position in the global distribution."
"Also, consider Australia. It’s in the Southern Hemisphere, so its winter is northern hemisphere summer. But it gets its flu season during its own winter, not ours. It doesn’t follow China’s timeline, and it doesn’t follow the timeline of travelers who might be bringing in flu cases (I assume most of its inbound travelers come from the Northern Hemisphere)."
"So possibly coronavirus is still in its half-seasonal phase, and will transition to a fully seasonal disease once it’s infected everyone it can infect and picked all the low-hanging fruit in possible-variant-space so that it can’t trivially become more infectious."
"I was writing all the Android code, was writing all of the server code, was the only person on call for the service, was facilitating all product development, and was managing everyone. I couldn’t ever leave cell service, had to take my laptop with me everywhere in case of emergencies, and occasionally found myself sitting alone on the sidewalk in the rain late at night trying to diagnose a service degradation."
Did not know moxie actually wrote android code!
"""
“It’s early days still” is the most common refrain I see from people in the web3 space when discussing matters like these. In some ways, cryptocurrency’s failure to scale beyond relatively nascent engineering is what makes it possible to consider the days “early,” since objectively it has already been a decade or more.
"""
Damn, 🔥.
@alb_d What led you here? The article hit on some of the common themes that have come up previously in our discussions.
For eg:
-
Price Capital Well
A respected hedge fund describes part of their investment philosophy like this: “Enterprises work best when they have access to capital priced to reflect the value they can create. Index funds, by the way, do not price capital; they only mimic the actions of those who do.”
-
Live Out Your Personal Vocation
"Discovering and living out a sense of calling — a personal vocation, or something you are uniquely meant to do — is the ultimate way to cut through the mimetic noise of the world and begin to shape both a moral and a vocational compass. When you have a mission, it begins to act like an interpretative key to everything and allows you to know what to pay attention to."
Protocols, Not Platforms for Free Speech
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech
BlueSky: https://mobile.twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106
Twitter's New API
https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2021/build-whats-next-with-the-new-twitter-developer-platform
Having 3rd parties allowed to build on top of content recommendation services could generate different flavors for the web, preloaded with the specific tuning that you desire.
The usage of introducing "non-recommended" content (80-20), so to speak, to break up the echo chamber effect is intriguing. I wonder what effect, if any, that would have on people, and to what extent it's already used. Beyond just providing other points of view, it can help surface content that would otherwise be hidden.
"One of my ideas involved introducing what I call “final ranking providers”: third parties who take pre-digested feature vectors from the underlying content platform, then use these to do the final ranking of items in whatever way they want.
My other ideas involved introducing “constraint providers”: third parties who provide constraints in the form of computational contracts that are inserted into the machine learning loop of the automated content selection system." (Wolfram)
Apart from solving for echo chambers, I felt this could provide new ways of bundling content and could swing the bundling-unbundling pendulum in media back towards bundling.
For example, Digital newspapers can be delivered daily with fixed real estate (in XR maybe?) but with more interactive media, customization, curation, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaBEFqFVSE8
https://youtu.be/InAilI9b6DA?t=49
Livemint ePaper: https://epaper.livemint.com/Home/ArticleView
Of the two solutions suggested by Wolfram, the "Final Ranking Providers" seems like a more practical idea to implement. They can be added at the end of the pipeline and don't need to weave deeper into the original content providers systems, unlike the "Constraint Provider" idea. This will make it easier for third parties to create these final rankings.
Musk Chat History
"Elon to Steve Davis: My Plan B is a blockchain-based version of twitter, where the "tweets" are embedded in the transaction as comments. So you'd have to pay maybe 0.1 Doge per comment or repost of that comment."
https://panchayat.haletic.com/posts/3252
Musk Tweeting Twitter's System Design
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649/photo/1
Is it just me, or does it look like Musk is opening up the platform to make it neutral and avoid having to censor content? If so, we should expect the algorithm too shared publicly in some shape or form in the coming weeks/months. It'd be interesting to see how that would play out!
YouTube Algorithm
https://www.globalreach.com/global-reach-media/blog/2020/08/24/how-to-beat-the-youtube-algorithm
"video content is considered “good” and potentially sharable if it averages over 4 minutes of Watch Time, has a Click Through Rate Higher than 10% (more on this how to improve this in a minute…), and more than 50% Retention."
Twitch Predictions | Dec 2020
https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2020/12/12/channel-points-predictions-let-your-viewers-guess-your-destiny/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpvFqQKLZw
Set up Betting on your Stream | Streamlabs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwlWb613E50
CloudBot | Gamble Module using StreamLabs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwlWb613E50
Pac Man MILE
https://venturebeat.com/2021/12/06/mark-zuckerberg-launches-pac-man-community-audience-played-game-on-facebook-meta/
Google for Games Global Insight Report
https://games.withgoogle.com/reports/insightsreport/
Not Boring | Pareto Funtier
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-pareto-funtier
Twitter Recommendation Engine
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm
"We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." 😄
Zizek on Kung Fu Panda
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCD3hg6OEQw
Le Musk is an upcoming Indian virtual reality film directed by A. R. Rahman.
I didn't even know monkeys could play pong so well using a joystick!
Why is text still the best medium to change someone?
I have found that the most significant changes in my attitude/perspective have been after reading some book/article/essay/tweet. I can't say the same about movies/videos/podcasts/audiobooks. Is this the case with everyone?
If its true isn't it paradoxical that a medium(video) which can engage so many of our senses(vision, sound) is able to influence us less than a medium(text) that isn't even natural to humans. Also the bandwith of information transfer to the brain is a fraction in text compared to video.
One explanation could be that the text being a low fidelity channel is actually a positive. It leaves out many details that the reader then fills using their imagination. And ones own imagination is more powerful in influencing oneself than the imagination of some director.
I don't really buy this explanation. For eg: Does hearing a story in an audiobook have more influence than watching the movie version?
The explanation that I am leaning towards right now is that text is the only current consumption medium that is pull and not push model. By pull I mean the reader is pulling content at a rate of the reader's choosing. By contrast video, podcast, audiobooks etc are all push based.
Since the reader pulls content out of a book/article/essay the reader can pause and internalize the content. They can associate, experiment, simulate and coagulate the new content with past experiences and stored knowledge. In other words while reading you can pause to think.
Assuming this explanation is true, can we consume video content using a pull model. You could today do that by pausing the video to take time to think and internalize. But, it's not as effortless as pausing while reading. And hence it's impractical to pause as frequently. What if the video would automatically pause when you look away and resume when you look back at the screen?
By pull I mean the reader is pulling content at a rate of the reader's choosing
Youtube provides keyboard shortcuts to control speed, jump forward/back etc [1]. I haven't used this till now, but it may improve the viewer's ability to pull content at their desired rate.
[1]: Hit "?" on Youtube to see the shortcuts or see https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7631406 for details
Picture abhi baaki hai, dost! :P
On a more serious note, something seems to be off with the article:
The total Fed's balance sheet even after all the recent QE is ~$8-9 trillion
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm
Why should this be captured in the total Balance sheet of the Fed?
I don't think the article is saying that this is unpaid debt. We just don't know where this $21 Trillion has gone (between 1998 - 2015)
"Poincaré's famous lectures before the Société de Psychologie in Paris (published as Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method) were cited by Jacques Hadamard as the source for the idea that creativity and invention consist of two mental stages, first random combinations of possible solutions to a problem, followed by a critical evaluation."
Now compare this to how computers today generate creative content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network
"The generative network generates candidates while the discriminative network evaluates them."
Steven Pinker on Morality | Colors of Morality in Ethics
https://ronbc.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/steven-pinker-on-morality/
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html
Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
https://www.pagecentertraining.psu.edu/public-relations-ethics/ethical-decision-making/yet-another-test-page/ethical-orientations-reciprocal-favoritism-or-the-golden-rule
https://iep.utm.edu/goldrule/
Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
This strategy works when majority agents play ~tit-for-tat. If majority agents are not willing to cooperate, you're going to get fleeced if you follow that rule.
See Evolutionary Stable Strategies (ESS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy#Prisoner's_dilemma for context
"""
When the article resurfaced on Boing Boing in 2010, Stoll left a self-deprecating comment: "Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."
"""
"A so-called logically reversible computation, in which no information is erased, may in principle be carried out without releasing any heat. This has led to considerable interest in the study of reversible computing. Indeed, without reversible computing, increases in the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated must come to a halt by about 2050, because the limit implied by Landauer's principle will be reached by then, according to Koomey's law."
For other people like me whose brains hurt doing arithmetic, I made this lookup table to calculate how much to tip. The requirements for the lookup table are:
- Minimize the number of things to remember
- Tips must be integral
- Tip should be in the 15%-20% range
Amount..Tip
0-5.......1
5-8.......1
8-10....1.5
10-14.....2
14-20.....3
20-25.....4
25-30.....5
30-40.....6
40-50.....8
50-60....10
A generative model of this table is more useful for folks (like me) whose memory is worse than their arithmetic. By example
50 -> 5 -> 10
40 -> 4 -> 8
30 -> 3 -> 6
25 -> 2.5 -> 5
14 -> 1.4 -> 2.8 -> 3
8 -> 0.8 -> 1.6 -> 1.5
The tip amount is an approximate, I'll usually just round up the total (bill + tip) amount to the next whole number. So calculating the tip at <=0.1 precision isn't required
I used to do this exact calculation before. Was very taxing for my low-power ALUs 😂.
-
Top Fuel dragsters are the quickest accelerating racing cars in the world.
0-100 mph time is ~0.8 secs.
0-60 mph time is ~0.4 secs.
The 300 mph mark comes up in less than 4 seconds.
The Lamborghini Diablo has not even reached 60 mph by the time the Top Fuel car is doing 300 mph.1
-
The fastest competitors reach speeds of 335mph (539 km/h) and finish the 1,000 foot (305 m) runs in 3.62 seconds.1
-
An NHRA Top Fuel dragster leaves the starting line with a force over four times that of gravity, the same force as the space shuttle when it leaves the launching pad at Cape Canaveral2
-
The nitromethane powered engines of NHRA Top Fuel dragsters produce ~7,000 horsepower, about 37 times that of the average street car2
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The cars are slowed by a reverse force more than seven times that of gravity when both parachutes deploy simultaneously2
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The engine of a Top Fuel dragster generates around 150 dB of sound at full throttle, enough to cause physical pain or even permanent damage. A sound that intense is not just heard, but also felt as pounding vibrations all over one's body, leading many[who?] to compare the experience of watching a Top Fuel dragster make a pass to 'feeling as though the entire drag strip is being bombed'1
What is the dragster driver even doing? Don't you just need a line follower?
Trying to not get killed while enjoying the ride, from what I understand 😁
And now that I think about it, that's pretty much what the rest of us are up to as well, isn't it? 😅
Well, if full self driving was widely available, then I doubt anyone would still be driving. Line follower tech is super easy to implement in a drag race. And all these artificial constraints on the car (max speed etc) seem to be in the name of safety after drivers have been killed. Imagine how much more badass they could make the car if they didn't have to have a human driver.
Although at that point it will look more like a cruise missile and less of a car.
I'd meant we're all just enjoying the ride while not getting killed in general life level terms, wasn't talking specifically with respect to driving, just being philosophical 😇
Spine-on-a-chip [Related?]
Spine-on-a-chip is an organ-chip or micro physiological system which relies on tiny embedded tubes in a hand held With Spine-on-a-chip designed for researchers and big pharma companies, we aim to provide accurate and trustworthy predictive data to revolutionize therapeutics for the country’s largest untreated epidemic: back pain. We believe addressing the back pain epidemic through therapeutics enabled by our data and services is crucial for increasing the quality of life for millions"
https://oconnell.berkeley.edu/soft-tissue-mechanics/
Jonathan McKinley (Lean Transfer alum, 3rd yr Phd student in Berkeley BioMechanics Lab)
https://oconnell.berkeley.edu/people/jonathan-mckinley/
Synthetic Bio
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-synthetic-biology-redesigns-life/
https://samharris.org/podcasts/special-episode-engineering-apocalypse/
INSITRO
https://www.insitro.com/approach
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/insitro-raises-400m-for-machine-learning-powered-drug-discovery-efforts
"Beyond CCR5’s presumptive role in HIV entry, “Is there more to it than that?” asks Adashi. As yet, beyond its role as a chemokine receptor, there is an incomplete understanding of the actions of CCR5 variants in humans and how their functions may differ in different genetic backgrounds (Box 1). It is unknown whether the CRISPR edits in the three girls could produce an altered, CCR5 protein that could cause harm."
"Xenotransplantation has seen significant advances in recent years with the advent of CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing, which made it easier to create pig organs that are less likely to be attacked by human immune systems. The latest transplant, performed at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), used organs from pigs with ten genetic modifications."
"Still, the details of the New York patient’s medical journey could help researchers who are developing gene therapies to confer the HIV-resistant mutation to patients, she and other researchers said."
This woman received cord blood from a donor which had CCR5 mutation conferring HIV immunity. CCR5 is the same gene that was edited on Lulu and Nana embyros.
In other words, all the pieces are there. We are a couple of years away from having a pill that can cure HIV! And some more years before we start seeing all sorts of pills to edit the genome in myriad ways.
Found this to be good material to revise genetics, mitosis, meiosis, etc.
Wonder if they have started using these AI agents for fuzz testing of software.
What if the Cytokine storm triggered by a disease is really an example of Phenoptosis? A programmed death to cull unhealthy individuals from contaminating their nearby genetic offsprings and relatives
"Septic shock – Severe infection by pathogens often results in death by sepsis. Sepsis, however, is not a result of toxins activated by the pathogen, rather it is directed by the organism itself. Similar to phenoptosis of E. coli, this has been suggested to be a means to separate dangerously infected individuals from healthy ones"
Interesting perspective!
"Age-induced, soft, or slow phenoptosis is the slow deterioration and death of an organism due to accumulated stresses over long periods of time. In short, it has been proposed that aging, heart disease, cancer, and other age related ailments are means of phenoptosis. "Death caused by aging clears the population of ancestors and frees space for progeny carrying new useful traits.""
"If you catch salmon right after they spawn... you find they have huge adrenal glands, peptic ulcers, and kidney lesions, their immune systems have collapsed... [and they] have stupendously high glucocorticoid concentrations in their bloodstreams. When salmon spawn, regulation of their glucocortocoid secretion breaks down... But is the glucocorticoid excess really responsible for their death? Yup. Take a salmon right after spawning, remove its adrenals, and it will live for a year afterward.
The bizarre thing is that this sequence... not only occurs in five species of salmon, but also among a dozen species of Australian marsupial mice... Pacific salmon and marsupial mice are not close relatives. At least twice in evolutionary history, completely independently, two very different sets of species have come up with the identical trick: if you want to degenerate very fast, secrete a ton of glucocorticoids."
This is by Robert Sapolsky. The Stanford prof with the popular youtube series on behavioral biology.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD7E21BF91F3F9683
Things I didn't know before shooting guns
- Ammos are expensive! approx half a dollar per round
- Kids roaming around at gun ranges. They could easily run into the line of fire if they wanted to. 😲
- I was able to shoot 30-30 Marlin, AR-15, 12 gauge shotgun and a pistol without having to show any ID proof or document to anyone. All I had to do was sign the liability waivers and take a quiz on range rules.
- Guns were way louder than I expected
- Rifles are easier to aim than expected. Pistols are harder to aim than expected. I think I can already shoot a deer 20m away with a rifle. I don't think I can do the same with a pistol 3m away.
- AR-15 is the easiest to shoot among all the rifles and shotguns. It's also got the least recoil.
Dear Airlines, please add an AR mode to see outside the plane
Most planes already have Wifi and an onboard computer for media streaming. You just have to add few cameras on the plane and stitch them together to create a 360 view. This can then be streamed to behind the seat display.
Even interesting would be to allow an AR mode streaming to phones. Passengers can point their phones around similar to google skymap and see what's outside with major landmarks annotated.
For more immersion, oculus headsets can be rented at an additional cost. Airlines are already quite commodified with not much differentiation. Features like this could push people to prefer one airline over another.
IC: I wanted to ask you about going beyond silicon. We've been working on silicon now for 50+ years, and the silicon paradigm has been continually optimized. Do you ever think about what’s going to happen beyond silicon, if we ever reach a theoretical limit within our lifetime? Or will anything get there, because it won’t have 50 years of catch-up optimization?
JK: Oh yeah. Computers started, you know, with Abacuses, right? Then mechanical relays. Then vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits. Now the way we build transistors, it's like a 12th generation transistor. They're amazing, and there's more to do. The optical guys have been actually making some progress, because they can direct light through polysilicon, and do some really interesting switching things. But that's sort of been 10 years away for 20 years. But they actually seem to be making progress.
It’s like the economics of biology. It’s 100 million times cheaper to make a complicated molecule than it is to make a transistor. The economics are amazing. Once you have something that can replicate proteins - I know a company that makes proteins for a living, and we did the math, and it was literally 100 million times less capital per molecule than we spent on transistors. So when you print transistors it’s something interesting because they're organized and connected in very sophisticated ways and in arrays. But our bodies are self-organizing - they get the proteins exactly where they need to be. So there's something amazing about that. There's so much room, as Feynman said, at the bottom, of how chemicals are made and organized, and how they’re convinced to go a certain way.
I was talking to some guys who were looking at doing a quantum computing startup, and they were using lasers to quiet down atoms, and hold them in 3D grids. It was super cool. So I think we've barely scratched the surface on what's possible. Physics is so complicated and apparently arbitrary that who the hell knows what we're going to build out of it. So yeah, I think about it. It could be that we need an AI kind of computation in order to organize the atoms in ways that takes us to that next level. But the possibilities are so unbelievable, it's literally crazy. Yeah I think about that.
IC: If you have more than 100 people, you need to split into two abstraction layers?
JK: Exactly. There are reasons for that, like human beings are really good at tracking. Your inner circle of friends is like 10-20 people, it's like a close family, and then there is this kind of 50 to 100 depending on how it's organized, that you can keep track of. But above that, you read everybody outside your group of 100 people as semi-strangers. So you have to have some different contracts about how you do it. Like when we built Zen, we had 200 people, and half the team at the front end and half the team at the back end. The interface between them was defined, and they didn't really have to talk to each other about the details behind the contract. That was important. Now they got along pretty good and they worked together, but they didn't constantly have to go back and forth across that boundary.
there's a funny thing - I realized that at the locus of innovation, we tend to think of TSMC, Samsung, and Intel as the process leaders. But a lot of the leadership is actually in the equipment manufacturers like ASML, and in materials. If you look at who is building the innovative stuff, and the EUV worldwide sales, the number is something like TSMC is going to buy like 150 EUV machines by 2023 or something like that. The numbers are phenomenal because even a few years ago not many people were even sure that EUV was going to work. But now there's X-ray lithography coming up, and again, you can say it's impossible, but bloody everything has been impossible! The fine print, this what Richard Feynman said - he's kind of smart. He said ‘there's lots of room at the bottom’, and I personally can count, and if you look at how many atoms are across transistors, there's a lot. If you look at how many transistors you actually need to make a junction, without too many quantum effects, there are only 10. So there is room there.
Yeah, I didn't know about ASML before reading this. They are Dutch!
These 4 letter acronym companies sneak up on you :P
Things I didn't know before watching a rocket launch!
- How a single falcon 9 is capable of lighting up the entire horizon on a pitch dark night
- How long it takes the sound from the rocket to travel 12 miles
Things I didn't know before visiting Florida
- People hauling boats everywhere
- People finding it hard to understand my accent
- So few people wearing masks
Looks like all the floor planning jobs in hardware are going to be automated away!
Humans have a built in boot sequence!
https://youtu.be/P1ww1IXRfTA?t=1592
"And for two electrons, gravity is so weak compared to electricity, electricity is so much more enormous than the gravity. I can't express because I don't know the name of the numbers. Its one with thirty eight or forty zeros after the one. Bigger is electricity!"
Ask any student studying for JEE and they will tell you in an instant how many zeros after 1, without any depth of understanding of the marvel.
"A range of initiatives to deregulate the private space sector were introduced by Narendra Modi's cabinet in June 2020 and the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (INSPACe) was established for incubating technology into private firms, known as Non-Government Private Entities (NGPEs) by DOS. NGPEs were included as a crucial part of ISRO's Space Communication Policy draft issued in October 2020."
"As of 2021, a new Space Activities Bill and a space policy are being drafted by NALSAR Centre for Aerospace and Defence laws to regulate space manufacturing and the legal aspects of the industry in India."
"For private companies to start space launches in India, the Act is needed to be in effect."
"In February 2020, there were 35 startups that came up in the space sector, of which three focused on designing rockets, 14 on designing satellites, and the rest on drone-based applications and services sector. The number further grew to over 40 in January 2021.[9][10] Two companies, Skyroot Aerospace and AgniKul Cosmos, have tested their own engines and are in advanced stages of developing their own launch vehicles"
3 or more syllables:
Haletic(yes), Rorqual(no)
stress on first syllable:
Haletic(yes), Rorqual(yes)
/l/ is the most common consonant phoneme, followed by /m, s, n, r, k, t, d/, then a huge drop-off before other consonants:
Haletic(l, t), Rorqual(l, r)
Short vowels are favored over long vowels and diphthongs:
Haletic(all three vowels are short), Rorqual(one long vowel, one diphthong)
Airbnb 2021 Search Updates
https://www.airbnb.com/2021/announcement
Flexible destination sounds great for randomization. I wish if more apps had randomness built in. For eg: uber to a random destination, doordash from a random restaurant, biking directions from google maps along a random route etc
Ghost Platform
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/a-deep-dive-into-airbnbs-server-driven-ui-system-842244c5f5
Viaduct
https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/taming-service-oriented-architecture-using-a-data-oriented-service-mesh-da771a841344
There is an implicit assumption that regulation improves safety. On closer observation though, there does not seem to be a simple, linear relationship between regulation & safety. If you're building safety systems, the burden of regulation will slow down deployment and can result in reduced cumulative safety conferred (The total area under a Safety vs Time curve).
An existing example being Medicine. Has it slowed down due to increased regulation? Has that reduced cumulative safety?
We tend to over-regulate because the costs of over-regulation aren't easily visible but costs due to new deployments are much more apparent. The costs of the seen vs the unseen.
An extreme example of this bias; A new medicine can cure a fatal disease, it saves 99 lives but 1 in 100 folk shoot themselves because of the medication. Would you have it? Would you deploy it?
Where in our lives could we be over-regulating due to this bias?
Being aware of this seen vs unseen bias may confer appropriate controls on regulation in our public and private spheres.
AI, self-driving are two upcoming industries where these biases will play out
Musk seems to be a vocal proponent1 and implementer2 of this concept. For example, in his decision to deploy auto-pilot "early".
There is a related but different concept of weighing the known vs unknown. This is not what is being discussed here. Unknown effects from a new medicine may cost more damage then the know effects. This is a valid concern. This issue in it's extreme is not computable.
The seen vs unseen works completely in the domain of the known.
In the example medication above only the known positive (saves lives) and negatives (person shoots themselves) were discussed.
"
•A new $800,000 four-seat airplane or $5 million turboprop won’t have 1/100th of the intelligence of a $500 DJI drone
•A $27 million certified-in-2018 business jet has nearly every knob, button, and dial as a 1944 B-29. Why not one button “configure yourself for takeoff?”
•There is no such thing as regulatory error.
"
This example exemplifies what you are conveying. The airline regulatory framework is so stringent, that it takes more than a decade for new technology to get certified and become commonplace. Therefore all planes are operating with several decade-old tech. Simple obvious tech like terrain collision avoidance etc are missing from contemporary planes.
On the other hand, some of the best-in-class drones today are impossible to crash.
Philip Greenspun, who gave these lectures makes an interesting argument. He asserts that the entire FAA book of regulations can be replaced with just a single mandate requiring you to have insurance more than a certain amount to fly a certain plane.
What would happen as a result of this is that actuaries would do a better job of figuring out how safe your plane is.
The current approach is very prescriptive. You must do all these exactly like this for us to certify your plane. This can make you get stuck in a local minima, because any new tech that you try out will initially reduce your safety.
ML is an interesting example of how we got better results as we became less prescriptive. An optimizer and appropriate tests/incentives go a long way, be it for machines or humans 😄
Similarly, Declarative programs by specifying what they want allow the language to evolve and optimize how that is actually implemented. Imperative programs by specifying how they want something, constrain this avenue for optimization.1
Things I didn't know before visiting Hawaii
- Chickens everywhere 🐔
- So much Aloha and Mahalo branding
- Everything is as much if not costlier than Bay Area.
Have a shallow swimming pool, where you can introduce various kinds of aquatic life.
Also add several different LED TVs on the floor where people can play Netflix, Youtube etc.
Then charge people to float in the pool with a snorkel while enjoying the wildlife, watching movies etc. Multiple people can watch a TV like a theatre.
You can charge for extras like aromatic oils, bubbles, Fish Bodycure etc.
@maanitm has this been in Shark tank?
Neat!
DeepRacer Evo
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081GZSJVL
"As you can see, for most of that time China was one of the world’s most powerful empires, with the notable exception from around 1840 until around 1950 when it went into a steep decline. As shown, around 1950 it started to rise again, at first slowly and then very rapidly, to regain its position as one of the two most powerful empires in the world."
"For example, to Americans 300 years is a very long time. For the Chinese it is very recent. While having a revolution or a war that will overturn our systems is unimaginable to an American, it is inevitable to a Chinese person (because the Chinese have seen that they have always happened and the Chinese have studied the patterns of why they have happened). While most Americans focus on particular events, especially those that are now happening, most Chinese, especially their leaders, see evolutions over time and put what is happening in the context of them. While Americans fight for what they want in the present, most Chinese strategize how to get what they want in the future. As a result of these different perspectives the Chinese are typically more thoughtful and strategic than Americans, who are more impulsive and tactical. I also found Chinese leaders to be much more philosophical (literally readers of philosophy) than Americans leaders. If you read their writings and their speeches, you will find this to be true. Philosophies of how reality works and how to deal with it well are woven into their thinking, which is expressed in their writings."
" Their history and the philosophies that have come from them, most importantly their Confucian-Taoist-Legalist-Marxist philosophies, have a much bigger effect on how Chinese people, and especially Chinese leaders, think than America’s history and its Judeo-Christian-European philosophical roots have on Americans’ thinking. That is because the Chinese, especially their leaders, pay so much attention to history to learn from it. For example, Mao, like most other Chinese leaders, was a voracious reader of history and philosophy, wrote poetry, and practiced calligraphy—e.g., I was told by an esteemed Chinese historian that Mao read Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance, the mammoth 294-volume-long chronicle of China’s history that covers around 16 dynasties and 1,400 years of Chinese history, from around 400 BC to 960 AD, and the even more mammoth Twenty-Four Histories several times as well as numerous other volumes about Chinese history and writings of non-Chinese philosophers, most importantly Marx. I’m told that his favorite book was Zuo Tradition, which focuses on political, diplomatic, and military affairs in a “relentlessly realistic style” 2 in the period from 722 BC to 468 BC, because the lessons it offered were so relevant to what he was encountering."
"In 1995 I had my 11-year-old son, Matt, go to China to live with Madame Gu and her husband and go to what was then a poor local school (Shi Jia Hu Tong Xiao Xue).24 Matt had been to China with me many times over the years since he was 3 years old. He would tag along to meetings in which the kind Chinese people I was meeting with would give him cookies and milk while we met. He attended lunches and dinners that were fun banquets and had gotten to know Madame Gu well, who was very loving with him so they had a wonderful relationship. So he fell in love with the Chinese people and China. Madame Gu knew that I (and my somewhat hesitant wife) would love for Matt to live in China and have the life of a local Chinese child. We all knew that it would be very tough for him, but good tough. His living conditions would be basic (e.g., there was typically hot water only two days a week). Schools in China then, like most everything else, were poor. He didn’t speak the language so he would have to learn through immersion, which he did. Though his school was poor (e.g., there wasn’t heat until late November so students wore their coats in classes), I saw how they had smart and caring teachers who provided the children with an excellent, complete education that included character development."
Wow!
"Without the US disrupting China’s currency and capital markets they will likely develop quickly and increasingly compete with the US currency and credit markets. You won’t see this all at once, but you will see it evolve that way at a shockingly fast pace over the next 5-10 years. As shown in the Dutch, British, and US cases that development is consistent with the natural arc of things. Also, the fundamentals are in place for that to happen if the Chinese continue to run sound policies and develop their markets well. There is a lot of potential for Chinese capital markets, the RMB, and RMB-denominated debt to grow in importance because it is so underinvested in relative to its fundamentals. For example:
China and the US are the largest trading countries, both accounting for about 13% of global trade (including exports and imports), yet the RMB accounts for only about 2% of world trade financing while the dollar accounts for over 50%. It would be pretty easy to increase the share of trade financing in RMB.
While China accounts for around 19% of world GDP9 (and is growing at a faster rate than the US) and has around 15% of global equity market capitalization, it has only about 5% weight currently in MSCI equity indices and its assets represent only about 2% of foreign assets in portfolios. In contrast while the United States on the whole accounts for around 20% of world GDP and is growing slower, it now accounts for over 50% weight in MSCI equity indices and has around 48% of non-American money in it. My point is that Chinese markets are underinvested in because the investment has lagged the development, especially for foreign investors.
As previously explained and shown in the development of the Dutch, British, and American empires, the development of the world’s leading capital markets and the world’s capital market centers of Amsterdam, London, and New York was an essential step in each empire’s development to become the leading empire and has traditionally lagged the country’s fundamentals the way the Chinese capital markets and Shanghai as a financial center (and to a lesser extent Hong Kong and Shenzhen) have lagged China’s developments.
The development of Chinese currency and capital markets would be detrimental for the United States and beneficial for China. So once again it seems likely that American policy makers will be forced to choose between a) trying to disrupt this evolutionary path by becoming more aggressive with their wars (in this case via a more aggressive capital war) and b) accepting that evolution will likely lead to China becoming relatively stronger, more self-sufficient, and less vulnerable to being squeezed by the US at the expense of US leadership in this area, especially over the next 5-10 years. We are seeing some early signs of US moves to curtail Americans’ investments in Chinese markets and to possibly delist Chinese companies from American stock exchanges. These are double-edged swords because while being marginally harmful to Chinese markets and listed companies they also weaken American investors’ and American stock exchanges’ abilities to be competitive, which will support the development of those in China and elsewhere. For example, the Ant Group’s choice to list on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges gives investors the choice of investing on those Chinese exchanges or missing out on those investments, which are listed there and not on other exchanges."
"For example, one should accept the fact that when choosing leaders most Chinese believe that having capable, wise leaders make the choices is preferable to having the general population make the choice on a “one person one vote” basis because they believe that the general population is less informed and less capable. Most believe that the general population will choose the leaders on whims and based on what those seeking to be elected will give them in order to buy their support rather than what’s best for them—e.g., the general voting population will choose those who will give them more money without caring where the money comes from. Also, they believe—like Plato believed and as happened in a number of countries that turned from democracies to autocracies through the millennia (most recently in the 1930-45 period)—that democracies are prone to slip into dysfunctional anarchies during very bad times while people fight over what should be done rather than support the strong, capable leader who will tell them what they should do. They also believe that their system of choosing leaders lends itself to better multigenerational strategic decision making because any one leader’s term is only a small percentage of the time that is required to progress along that developmental arc.10 They believe that what is best for the collective is most important and best for the country and is best determined by those at the top. Their system of governance is more like the governance that is typical in big companies, especially multigenerational companies, so they wonder why it is hard for Americans and other Westerners to understand the rationale for the Chinese system following this approach and to see the challenges of the democratic decision-making process as they see them."
Excavator Training for Beginners {Heavy Equipment Operator Training | YouTube}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWvKa1Bkak8
This made my day. We have discussed the idea of having a heavy machinery amusement park.
So, build an amusement park where instead of roller coasters and slides you have a bunch of these heavy machinery. You could have different tasks for people to complete and scores on accuracy etc. You would need to geofence the machine such that the users cannot take the machine outside a specified boundary. similar to oculus guardian. And limit the ranges of the equipment such that self-damage is not possible. And make people sign waiver for liability.
How does an escavator compare to a roller coaster in terms of price? I would choose playing around in an escavator over a roller coaster.
Influencer Senpais & Their Mimetic Characteristics
Starting a thread to identify meta characteristics of Influencers:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ULx6hg19kGkm_H_09IZls1WLpjBe-KNWyyEXJa4eivs/edit?usp=sharing
Post Modernity
https://revisesociology.com/2016/04/09/from-modernity-to-post-modernity/#:~:text=Post-Modernity refers to the,ways of thinking about thought.
"By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters."
Emogifs | Viewer Discretion Advised
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/map.html
Map of 27 varieties of emotional experience evoked by 2,185 videos. Participants judged each video in terms of 34 emotion categories (free response) and 14 scales of affective appraisal, including valence, arousal, dominance, certainty, and more. At least 27 dimensions, each associated with a different emotion category, were required to capture the systematic variation in participants’ emotional experiences. We mapped the approximate distribution of videos along these 27 dimensions using a technique called t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). Emotion categories often treated as discrete are in fact bridged by continuous gradients, found to correspond to smooth transitions in meaning (Cowen & Keltner, 2017)
source:
https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC6675572/figure/F3/
Niantic Platform For AR | Developer Platform From Makers of Pokemon Go
https://niantic.dev/
Featured Creators:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkRECr53OxQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvbsAf3BlrM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrjEI4uxc6M
"CGTN (formerly known as CCTV-9 and CCTV News) is an international English-language cable TV news service based in Beijing, China. It is one of six channels provided by China Global Television Network, owned by the Chinese state media China Central Television (CCTV), under the control of the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party."
This video mentions blockchain, but I can't find anything online about how exactly the digital yuan uses blockchain.
China released a whitepaper on Digital Yuan. Does not contain many technical details though.
https://www.alchemyapi.io/
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/28/alchemy-raises-80m-at-a-505m-valuation-to-be-the-aws-for-blockchain/
"You see, here’s how I think it works. The overriding determinant of pilot safety in hang gliding is the quality of pilot decision making. Skill level, experience, quality of equipment; all those things are not determinants. What those things do is determine one’s upper limits. More skill gives you a higher limit, as does more experience or better equipment. But safety is not a function of how high your limits are, but rather of how well you stay within those limits. And that, is determined by one thing; the quality of the decisions you make"
"And here’s where we get caught by a mathematical trap. Let’s say I’m making my decisions at the 99% level, and so are all my friends. Out of every 100 decisions, 99 do not result in any negative consequence. Even if they’re bad decisions, nothing bad happens. Since nothing bad happens, I think they’re good decisions. And this applies not just to my decisions, but to my friends’ decisions as well, which I observe. They must be good decisions, they worked out didn’t they? The next natural consequence of this is that I lower my decision threshold a little. Now I’m making decisions at the 98% level, and still, they’re working out. The longer this goes on, the more I’m being reinforced for making bad decisions, and the more likely I am to make them.
Eventually, the statistics catch up with me, and my descending threshold collides with the increasing number of opportunities I’ve created through bad decisions. Something goes wrong; I blow a launch, or a landing, or get blown over the back, or hit the hill on the downwind side of a thermal. If I’m lucky it’s a $50 downtube or a $200 leading edge. If I’m unlucky, I’m dead."
"But let’s first ask this question, if we wanted to address this problem of bad decisions being reinforced because they look like good decisions, how would we do it? The answer is, we need to become more critically analytical of all of our flying decisions, both before and after the fact. We need to find a way to identify those bad decisions that didn’t result in any bad result. Let’s take an example. You’re thermalling at your local site on a somewhat windy day. The thermals weaken with altitude, and the wind grows stronger. You need to make sure you can always glide back to the front of the ridge after drifting back with a thermal. You make a decision ahead of time, that you will always get back to the ridge above some minimum altitude above the ridge top; say 800 feet. You monitor your drift, and the glide angle back to the ridge, and leave the thermal when you think you need to in order to make your goal. If you come back in at 1000′ AGL, you made a good decision. If you come back in a 400, you made a bad decision. The bad decision didn’t cost you, because you built in a good margin, but it’s important that you recognize it as a bad decision. Without having gone through both the before and after analyses of the decision, (setting the 800 foot limit, observing the 400 foot result), you would never be aware of the existence of a bad decision, or the need to improve your decision making process."
https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/
https://github.com/aws-quickstart
"you actually only need to invest $25k/yr to get the equity benefit of
being a very early employee. Not only can you get better risk adjusted
returns (by diversifying), you'll also have much more income if you work at
a big company and invest $25k/yr than if you work at a startup"
FATF’s Proposed Updated Guidance for Cryptocurrency Regulation:
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/fatfs-updated-guidance-march-2021
I believe gaming will follow the same dynamics as streaming.
"Chance IV can be drawn together and fused only by one quixotic rider cantering in on his own homemade hobby horse to intercept the problem at an odd angle."
Nice line!
https://nav.al/rich talks more about Chance IV
https://metapurser.substack.com/p/nfts-the-first-5000-beeples
https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/why-we-spent-over-2-million-on-digital
https://www.georgesoros.com/2014/01/13/fallibility-reflexivity-and-the-human-uncertainty-principle-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5LapixLbk&t=3236s
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/b20/
https://deadline.com/2021/05/snl-elon-musk-youtube-international-livestream-1234752413/
Dogecoin, by the way, is up another five percent today. In the last seven days, it has risen more than 85%, no doubt fueled mostly by Musk speculators.
Top 100 DOGE addresses own 70% of supply.
This may be a very standard makeup tutorial on youtube for a lot of people.
I had no idea that the art/science of makeup is so intense.
Email filters that I have settled on
Trying out different ways of managing emails, I have settled on the following system that seems to work well for me.
Essentially, there are two axes on which you can categorize every email:
-
Notify: Whether I need to be notified of the email.
These are emails that are time-sensitive.
-
Action: Whether the email requires some action from me.
These emails result in a todo queue. Note that reading the email itself is an action and therefore a todo.
So, then we arrive at these combinations:
Notify, actionable:
This is the default.
No Notify, actionable:
Examples include newsletters. These can be read with a delay.
Setup a folder called lazy_read and redirect all such emails to that folder. Turn off notifications for that folder on phone. Archive emails after the action has been performed.
Notify, non-actionable:
Examples include alerts of credit card transactions above certain value. Sign-in attempt into online account. These emails are time-sensitive. But usually, there is no action to perform.
These emails must send notification and then automatically get archived. Gmail doesn't allow notifications for archived emails. Therefore, I've setup a folder called archive_me where these emails land. Every once in a while I select all emails in the arhive_me folder and then archive them.
No notify, non actionable:
Examples include bank statements, receipts etc. These don't need to be notified. There is also no action to be taken.
Directly skip inbox and archive.
Is it possible to build drones that migrate across large distances?
Say you have your typical drone or a light VTOL airplane. Its got a battery and a folding solar panel. It will fly towards the destination until it becomes low on battery power. Then it uses its cameras to scout for transmission lines or rooftops to perch on. Once perched it opens its solar panel and charges its battery. If its motion sensor detects any human or animal approaching it, it just flies off and finds a new perching spot. Once charged it continues flying towards its destination.
Maybe also carry some paint to drop whenever you detect car windshields :P
Neat idea!
- What capabilities can a long distance drone provide?
- What is it to be used for? Package delivery? Surveillance? Military?
For delivery scenarios
- Will it actually be faster than current airplane/land delivery mechanisms?
- Is it to be used for delivery to remote locations?
In my opinion, it may serve the remote and/or moderate distance delivery scenario.
Also why fly away when human approaches?
Trying to deal with actively antagonistic agents seems out of scope, capabilities. Just have a warning label on drone "Do Not Touch. Federal Crime". Assume some percentage will be lost. Prosecute few cases and publicize them, if necessary.
See the number of defaced bikes of bike sharing services at your nearest major city for reference 🙄
You mean bikes like this 🤣:
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/
https://theconversation.com/bottoms-up-how-whale-poop-helps-feed-the-ocean-27913
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-J-yt57Vjg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zFl79CCjTM
Nice Hub for Space Start-Ups 5 Years Down The Line
"Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. (i) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. (ii) In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."
This theory is as relevant today in the context of software development. In big companies, an individual developer can sometimes be very "alienated" from the final product.
Apple takes secrecy(alienation) to the extreme, where the developer is reduced to a cog in the system.
https://zora.co/disclosure/1834
Sold for $140k- Crypto is big in the EDM community
Random song from the same artist:
NFT NRG
https://zora.co/disclosure/1267
Disclosure's Twitch Stream | EDM Creation Process
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/934408111
https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/why-we-spent-159k-on-digital-battle-pets/
https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/nfts-the-lay-of-the-land-2/
https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/why-we-spent-159k-on-digital-battle-pets/
https://www.delphidigital.io/reports/nfts-the-lay-of-the-land-2/
Applies to programming as well.
"The recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character. Not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric. Not to write treatises on abstract questions, or deliver moralizing little sermons, or compose imaginary descriptions of The Simple Life or The Man Who Lives Only for Others. To steer clear of oratory, poetry and belles lettres. Not to dress up just to stroll around the house, or things like that. To write straightforward letters (like the one he sent my mother from Sinuessa)"
-- Marcus Aurelius on Rusticus
"That I wasn't more talented in rhetoric or poetry, or other areas. If I'd felt that I was making better progress I might never have given them up."
-- Marcus
"That when I became interested in philosophy I didn’t fall into the hands of charlatans, and didn’t get bogged down in writing treatises, or become absorbed by logic-chopping, or preoccupied with physics"
-- Marcus
"The name Pāṇini Backus form was also once suggested in view of the fact that the expansion Backus normal form may not be accurate, and that Pāṇini had independently developed a similar notation earlier."
Earlier being 2000 years earlier, 6th to 4th century BC!!
Panini is pretty cool, See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pāṇini
"Pāṇini has been considered the "first descriptive linguist", and even labelled as “the father of linguistics”"
"Pāṇini's theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the 20th century.[23] His treatise is generative and descriptive, uses metalanguage and meta-rules, and has been compared to the Turing machine wherein the logical structure of any computing device has been reduced to its essentials using an idealized mathematical model"
Interesting read on a theory of depression (and
trauma). Can explain why certain therapies around body awareness (Tai Chi,
Yoga), mind Awareness (Meditation) may work better.
Things I didn't know before driving to Texas
- Extreme wind speeds on I10 between Tucson and El Paso. One grandma was thrown to the ground at a rest area, when the door to her truck was blown open
- Horizontal street lights
- Fuel pump nozzles are different in Texas with a spring over the hose
- Cops doing their rounds on horses
Excerpt from "The White Tiger: A Novel" by Aravind Adiga
"I came to Dhanbad after my father’s death. He had been ill for some time, but there is no hospital in Laxmangarh, although there are three different foundation stones for a hospital, laid by three different politicians before three different elections. When he began spitting blood that morning, Kishan and I took him by boat across the river. We kept washing his mouth with water from the river, but the water was so polluted that it made him spit more blood. There was a rickshaw-puller on the other side of the river who recognized my father; he took the three of us for free to the government hospital. There were three black goats sitting on the steps to the large, faded white building; the stench of goat feces wafted out from the open door. The glass in most of the windows was broken; a cat was staring out at us from one cracked window. A sign on the gate said: LOHIA UNIVERSAL FREE HOSPITAL PROUDLY INAUGURATED BY THE GREAT SOCIALIST A HOLY PROOF THAT HE KEEPS HIS PROMISES Kishan and I carried our father in, stamping on the goat turds which had spread like a constellation of black stars on the ground. There was no doctor in the hospital. The ward boy, after we bribed him ten rupees, said that a doctor might come in the evening. The doors to the hospital’s rooms were wide open; the beds had metal springs sticking out of them, and the cat began snarling at us the moment we stepped into the room. “It’s not safe in the rooms—that cat has tasted blood.” A couple of Muslim men had spread a newspaper on the ground and were sitting on it. One of them had an open wound on his leg. He invited us to sit with him and his friend. Kishan and I lowered Father onto the newspaper sheets. We waited there. Two little girls came and sat down behind us; both of them had yellow eyes. “Jaundice. She gave it to me.” “I did not. You gave it to me. And now we’ll both die!” An old man with a cotton patch on one eye came and sat down behind the girls. The Muslim men kept adding newspapers to the ground, and the line of diseased eyes, raw wounds, and delirious mouths kept growing. “Why isn’t there a doctor here, uncle?” I asked. “This is the only hospital on either side of the river.” “See, it’s like this,” the older Muslim man said. “There’s a government medical superintendent who’s meant to check that doctors visit village hospitals like this. Now, each time this post falls vacant, the Great Socialist lets all the big doctors know that he’s having an open auction for that post. The going rate for this post is about four hundred thousand rupees these days.” “That much!” I said, my mouth opened wide. “Why not? There’s good money in public service! Now, imagine that I’m a doctor. I beg and borrow the money and give it to the Great Socialist, while touching his feet. He gives me the job. I take an oath to God and the Constitution of India and then I put my boots up on my desk in the state capital.” He raised his feet onto an imaginary table. “Next, I call all the junior government doctors, whom I’m supposed to supervise, into my office. I take out my big government ledger. I shout out, ‘Dr. Ram Pandey.’ ” He pointed a finger at me; I assumed my role in the play. I saluted him: “Yes, sir!” He held out his palm to me. “Now, you—Dr. Ram Pandey—will kindly put one-third of your salary in my palm. Good boy. In return, I do this.” He made a tick on the imaginary ledger. “You can keep the rest of your government salary and go work in some private hospital for the rest of the week. Forget the village. Because according to this ledger you’ve been there. You’ve treated my wounded leg. You’ve healed that girl’s jaundice.” “Ah,” the patients said. Even the ward boys, who had gathered around us to listen, nodded their heads in appreciation. Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren’t they? When Kishan put some food into Father’s mouth, he spat it out with blood. His lean black body began to convulse, spewing blood this way and that. The girls with the yellow eyes began to wail. The other patients moved away from my father. “He’s got tuberculosis, hasn’t he?” the older Muslim man asked, as he swatted the flies away from the wound in his leg. “We don’t know, sir. He’s been coughing for a while, but we didn’t know what it was.” “Oh, it’s TB. I’ve seen it before in rickshaw-pullers. They get weak from their work. Well, maybe the doctor will turn up in the evening.” He did not. Around six o’clock that day, as the government ledger no doubt accurately reported, my father was permanently cured of his tuberculosis. The ward boys made us clean up after Father before we could remove the body. A goat came in and sniffed as we were mopping the blood off the floor. The ward boys petted her and fed her a plump carrot as we mopped our father’s infected blood off the floor."
Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/fGOdoNC
This is fiction. Still, I plan to share this the next time I hear someone say that the medical system in India is better than the one in the US.
While, in general, it may not be true that India has better medical
services than the U.S. The claim is valid for individuals from a high
enough social strata, when you account for their drop down the social
ladder if they move from India to the U.S.
Kim Jong Un syndrome
When Kim Jong Um visits America and finds everything shit.
Discovers for the first time that traffic lights turn red as well.
He actually has to go to the doctor and not the other way around.
There is a company which is charging $4 per month to screen out spam from your snail mail. 🤣
This is like gangsters asking for protection money in Mumbai.
How is this video not on panchayat? 🤷
something similar to haletic going on here. much older though. we could do something similar to their payments and faq pages
🤔.
https://hubs.mozilla.com/
https://spatial.chat/
https://gather.town/
Portal on Solana Blockchain
https://theportal.to/
Portal Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JwMKbJhtLA&t=1s
“When people decide to leave San Francisco, they usually don’t know where they want to go, they just want to go,”
"Extremely bright fishing boats are squid catching boats. The bright lights attract the squids."
The port scenes are reminiscent of Mormugao port.
"Consider the following problem: we are given a table of n integer keys A1 , A2 , ..., An and a query integer
X. We want to locate X in the table, but we are in no particular hurry to succeed; in fact, we would like
to delay success as much as possible."
"Of course, we can get very slow algorithms by adding spurious loops before the first test of X against
the A i . However, such easy solutions are unacceptable because any fool can see that the algorithm is just
wasting time. Therefore, we must look for an algorithm that does indeed progress steadily towards its
stated goal even though it may have very little enthusiasm for (or even a manifest aversion to) actually
getting there."
"This represents a disimprovement by a factor of n over the näive algorithm. Observe that the lack of
enthusiasm of the reluctant search algorithm is not at all evident from its behavior since it performs a
X = A i test every O(1) operations, never repeats a test, and stops as soon as it finds the answer. Few
search algorithms, honest or not, can match this performance."
"Reluctant algorithms have plenty of important practical applications. For example, the reluctant search
algorithm is particularly applicable to the case of real keys (real not in the mathematical sense, but rather
in the sense that they can be used to open doors and drawers). The reluctant search algorithm is the only
one known so far that accurately emulates the behavior of bundles of such keys."
"However, suppose the maze is actually quite agreeable, so much so that we wouldn’t
mind spending a few extra cycles in the search for v; in fact we vaguely hope, nay, decidedly wish, that
the search will take as long as possible, and even though our sense of duty prevents us from giving up the
search altogether, we are not that insensitive to the primeval necessities of our human nature, and besides
what is wrong with taking a more relaxed attitude to the problem, as long as we do what we are supposed
to do, since we have always been told that haste makes waste, and no one needs to be perfect anyway, and
so forth. With these assumptions, the problem falls squarely within the domain of our theory."
"The slowsort algorithm is a perfect illustration of the multiply and surrender paradigm, which is perhaps
the single most important paradigm in the development of reluctant algorithms. The basic multiply and
surrender strategy consists in replacing the problem at hand by two or more subproblems, each slightly
simpler than the original, and continue multiplying subproblems and subsubproblems recursively in this
fashion as long as possible. At some point the subproblems will all become so simple that their solution
can no longer be postponed, and we will have to surrender. Experience shows that, in most cases, by the
time this point is reached the total work will be substantially higher than what could have been wasted
by a more direct approach."
"For practical applications, it is obvious that slowsort is the eminently suitable algorithm whenever your
boss sends you to sort something in Paris. Among other nice properties, during the execution of slowsort
the number of inversions in A is nonincreasing. So, in a certain sense (if you are in Paris, all expenses
paid, this sense is clear) slowsort never makes a wrong move."
Yes, you can trust a DNN to drive your car.
I often hear the argument that you cannot trust a DNN to drive your car, since the DNN is a black box and cannot explain how it arrived at a certain decision.
My counter-argument revolves around other examples where we have trusted processes(even medical!) without knowing the mechanism involved to great success.
Acetaminophen - The mechanism of action isn't fully understood yet we use it effectively to manage fever.
Drug repositioning - Several drugs are created for one purpose but then are found to produce an unexpected effect during clinical trials. The drug then gets marketed for the unexpected side effect. eg: Rogaine(Minoxidil) initially designed to treat hypertension was found to result in hair growth. Today it's prescribed to treat hair loss. Viagra(Sildenafil) is arguably the most popular example of drug repositioning. In most of these cases, the mechanism of action is only understood retrospectively after the success of the drug. The mechanism of action of Rogaine is still not understood.
ECT(Electro Convulsive Therapy) has also been used successfully. The mechanism of action remains elusive.
Fire - We have tamed and controlled fire for several hundred thousands of years while theories like Phlogiston(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory) existed up until the 18th century.
Great point! I think the argument for correctness stems from the close historical ties between Computer Scientists and Mathematicians and a general Math, Science envy1. The craft aspects of ML, CS become difficult to digest.
Explainability in ML and Proofs in Software systems are great to haves but should only be required in very specific scenarios.
These fields would grow faster if they let go of such concerns.
Aleo- IDE for Zero-Knowledge Proofs.
https://aleo.studio/
https://github.com/arkworks-rs
https://aztec.network/
https://medium.com/zeroknowledge/welcome-to-2021-with-zero-knowledge-113636625d5
"Aleo team is proud to announce our $28M raise from industry-leading investors to build the first platform for fully private and decentralized applications. We’re thrilled to work with our lead Series A investor @a16z and other first-class supporters."
https://twitter.com/AleoHQ/status/1384522355960160259
"StarkWare raises $75 million in Series B funding round led by Paradigm "
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/99211/starkware-funding-round-ethereum-paradigm
Summary:
- Can invest 10% of asset or income whichever is lower if annual income >
107k, else 5%
- Over trailing 12-months
- Across all securities offered under Regulation CF
Tier 1:
- Non-accredited investors can invest unbounded amount
- Startup can raise upto $20 Million
- Need SEC and state regulator approval where security/shared being sold
Tier 2:
- Non-accredited investors can invest upto 10% of income or assets,
whichever is greater
- Startups can raise upto $50 Million
- Only need SEC approval
- Considered a Mini-IPO
Crowdfunding, Angel Investing Platforms:
"AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, who spent six months lobbying for JOBS Act reforms, recalls:
It ended up being a giant dog's breakfast of different bills combined together, and then some genius, probably some congressional staffer, said "How are we gonna get this thing to pass? Oh-- let's say it has something to do with jobs. Jumpstarting Our Business Startups! JOBS, JOBS!" And then, what congressperson can vote against something called the JOBS Act? It was a miracle."
https://www.itrustcapital.com/?referralcode=FreeAccount&utm_campaign=Brand-Top&utm_medium=search&utm_source=google
"From the 1960s through the 1990s, venture capital was an excellent way to pursue these twin interests. From 1999 through the present, the industry has posted negative mean and median returns, with only a handful of funds having done very well."
https://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-15-notes
"Not all technology is created equal: there is a difference between Pong and the Concorde or, less glibly, between Intel and Pets.com. Microprocessing represents real technological development, peddling pet food on-line, less so. Conversely, things that may be dismissed as fake technologies (Amazon and Facebook occasionally receive this critique) often resolve very challenging technological problems. Among its many innovations, Amazon helped develop intelligent customer recommendations and logistical efficiencies that allow you to order almost anything, anytime, and get it the next day; Facebook developed ways to manage large numbers of connections in a computationally efficient way, create an effective developer ecosystem, and to make it pleasurable to administer your on-line relationships."
"In 1976, when Genentech launched, the field of recombinant DNA technology was less than five years old and no established player expected that insulin or human growth hormone could be cloned or commercially manufactured, much less by a start-up."
I want to know how they measured that productivity per capita. It's hard for me to believe that it hasn't increased by orders of magnitude.
"Often, even great technologies fail to earn the inventors or investors a return (see, e.g., Nikola Tesla)."
"Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel all successfully resolved roughly similar technical problems, but only Intel truly prospered – poor management consigned the other two to “also-ran” status."
"And what does it mean to be contrarian? It does not mean simply doing the opposite of what the majority does – that’s just consensus thinking by a different guise, a minus sign before the conventional wisdom. The problems of reactive contrarianism are the same as those of following the herd. The most contrarian thing to do is to think independently. It is not without its risks, because there is no cover from the crowd and because it frequently leads to conclusions with which no one else agrees."
War & Peace.
https://blakemasters.com/post/23250566538/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-12-notes
[Valuations]
https://multicoin.capital/2018/02/13/new-models-utility-tokens/
https://beincrypto.com/ethereum-flips-bitcoin-yearly-network-fee/
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-transactionfees-eth.html#1y
"What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. Featuring an 8-wide decode block, Apple’s Firestorm is by far the current widest commercialized design in the industry. IBM’s upcoming P10 Core in the POWER10 is the only other official design that’s expected to come to market with such a wide decoder design, following Samsung’s cancellation of their own M6 core which also was described as being design with such a wide design.
Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs (Intel is 1+4) that is seemingly limited from going wider at this point in time due to the ISA’s inherent variable instruction length nature, making designing decoders that are able to deal with aspect of the architecture more difficult compared to the ARM ISA’s fixed-length instructions. On the ARM side of things, Samsung’s designs had been 6-wide from the M3 onwards, whilst Arm’s own Cortex cores had been steadily going wider with each generation, currently 4-wide in currently available silicon, and expected to see an increase to a 5-wide design in upcoming Cortex-X1 cores."
"A +-630 deep ROB is an immensely huge out-of-order window for Apple’s new core, as it vastly outclasses any other design in the industry. Intel’s Sunny Cove and Willow Cove cores are the second-most “deep” OOO designs out there with a 352 ROB structure, while AMD’s newest Zen3 core makes due with 256 entries, and recent Arm designs such as the Cortex-X1 feature a 224 structure.
Exactly how and why Apple is able to achieve such a grossly disproportionate design compared to all other designers in the industry isn’t exactly clear, but it appears to be a key characteristic of Apple’s design philosophy and method to achieve high ILP (Instruction level-parallelism)."
"Floating-point operations throughput here is 1:1 with the pipeline count, meaning Firestorm can do 4 FADDs and 4 FMULs per cycle with respectively 3 and 4 cycles latency. That’s quadruple the per-cycle throughput of Intel CPUs and previous AMD CPUs, and still double that of the recent Zen3, of course, still running at lower frequency. This might be one reason why Apples does so well in browser benchmarks (JavaScript numbers are floating-point doubles)."
"What’s interesting here is again the depth of which Apple can handle outstanding memory transactions. We’re measuring up to around 148-154 outstanding loads and around 106 outstanding stores, which should be the equivalent figures of the load-queues and store-queues of the memory subsystem. To not surprise, this is also again deeper than any other microarchitecture on the market. Interesting comparisons are AMD’s Zen3 at 44/64 loads & stores, and Intel’s Sunny Cove at 128/72."
"One large improvement on the part of the Firestorm cores this generation has been on the side of the TLBs. The L1 TLB has been doubled from 128 pages to 256 pages, and the L2 TLB goes up from 2048 pages to 3072 pages. On today’s iPhones this is an absolutely overkill change as the page size is 16KB, which means that the L2 TLB covers 48MB which is well beyond the cache capacity of even the A14. With Apple moving the microarchitecture onto Mac systems, having compatibility with 4KB pages and making sure the design still offers enough performance would be a key part as to why Apple chose to make such a large upgrade this generation."
"Last year we had speculated that the A13 had 128KB L1 Instruction cache, similar to the 128KB L1 Data cache for which we can test for, however following Darwin kernel source dumps Apple has confirmed that it’s actually a massive 192KB instruction cache. That’s absolutely enormous and is 3x larger than the competing Arm designs, and 6x larger than current x86 designs, which yet again might explain why Apple does extremely well in very high instruction pressure workloads, such as the popular JavaScript benchmarks."
"The performance numbers of the A14 on this chart is relatively mind-boggling. If I were to release this data with the label of the A14 hidden, one would guess that the data-points came from some other x86 SKU from either AMD or Intel. The fact that the A14 currently competes with the very best top-performance designs that the x86 vendors have on the market today is just an astonishing feat."
"The fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including the SoC, DRAM, and regulators, versus +21W (1185G7) and 49W (5950X) package power figures, without DRAM or regulation, is absolutely mind-blowing."
"Whilst in the past 5 years Intel has managed to increase their best single-thread performance by about 28%, Apple has managed to improve their designs by 198%, or 2.98x (let’s call it 3x) the performance of the Apple A9 of late 2015."
"Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim.
This moment has been brewing for years now, and the new Apple Silicon is both shocking, but also very much expected. In the coming weeks we’ll be trying to get our hands on the new hardware and verify Apple’s claims.
Intel has stagnated itself out of the market, and has lost a major customer today. AMD has shown lots of progress lately, however it’ll be incredibly hard to catch up to Apple’s power efficiency. If Apple’s performance trajectory continues at this pace, the x86 performance crown might never be regained."
"Our internal tests show a wide range of features running an average of 1.5X the speed of similarly configured previous generation systems."
Problems areas with maximum potential for impact are Neglected, Important and Tractable
Highest-priority areas:
- Positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence
- Global priorities research
- Building effective altruism
- Reducing global catastrophic biological risks
Second-highest-priority areas:
- Improving institutional decision-making
- Nuclear security
- Climate change (extreme risks)
See https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/
Instead of filtering for products that have the features you want, filter for products that don't have the features you don't want.
Example:
Say you are buying a used car and say you don't care about new tech like android auto or apple play. Specifically, filter for cars that don't have those techs.
Or maybe you don't care if the car has dents on it. Then specifically search for cars with exterior dents.
Say you are looking to rent an apartment and say the amount of space is not important to you. Add filters on rental sites to only show apartments smaller than a certain area.
Why does this work?
Assuming the market is efficient, you get what you pay for. Which means the total features that can come for a certain price is zero-sum. It is often harder to ascertain what all the good features are since you need to be an expert to do a thorough appraisal. It can be much easier to identify features that you don't care about.
Another reason why this works is that marketing is tuned to amplify the good features and trick buyers by giving an inflated perception. So you need to be meticulous to separate the hype from substance. The negative features(dent etc) don't get polluted by marketing.
It doesn't delve much into why barbell investing is actually superior. Can it be proven mathematically that barbell investing is superior given whatever power-law distribution etc? Or will you need to use psychology or other social sciences to prove superiority?
Or is it that barbell investing is not necessarily superior but the author prefers that style of operating?
"Another way of looking at this is to invest in yourself. You might put 10 to 20 per cent of your savings towards upskilling, or starting a risky side-business. If it does happen to pay off, the returns will be huge."
"The perfect Barbell Strategy job has “few intellectual demands and high job security, the kind of low risk job that ceases to exist when you leave the office”. Ideally, it should be something that won’t force you to bastardise your other work; non-political and low-profile. You do your nine to five, and then you check out. All your evenings, weekends and vacation time are free for working on your speculative side-hustles.
As Taleb points out, comfy sinecures have frequently been fertile ground for greatness:
The great French poets Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse and the novelist Stendhal were diplomats; a large segment of English writers were civil servants, Kafka was employed by an insurance company."
Another example is Einstein at the Patent Office. https://www.ige.ch/en/about-us/the-history-of-the-ipi/einstein/einstein-at-the-patent-office.html
"The job at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property – Einstein referred to it tongue-in-cheek as his "cobbler's trade" – turned out to be stroke of good fortune because it was excellently paid (CHF 3500 per year) and was undemanding for his nimble intelligence. He spoke of the Federal Office for Intellectual Property as "that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas". With his courteousness and modesty and his humorous approach to life, Einstein was very well liked. On 1 April 1906, he was promoted to technical expert – class II. He managed his time exactly: eight hours of work, eight hours of «allotria» (miscellaneous) and scientific work, and eight hours of sleep (which he often used instead for writing his manuscripts)."
7 predictions for the next 12 months
-
Transformers replace recurrent networks to learn world models with which RL agents surpass human
performance in large and rich game environments .
-
ASML’s market cap reaches $500B.
-
Anthropic publishes on the level of GPT, Dota, AlphaGo to establish itself as a third pole of AGI research.
-
A wave of consolidation in AI semiconductors with at least one of Graphcore, Cerebras, SambaNova, Groq, or
Mythic being acquired by a large technology company or major semiconductor incumbent.
-
Small transformers + CNN hybrid models match current SOTA on ImageNet top-1 accuracy (CoAtNet-7,
90.88%, 2.44B params) with 10x fewer parameters.
-
DeepMind releases a major research breakthrough in the physical sciences.
-
The JAX framework grows from 1% to 5% of monthly repos created as measured by PapersWithCode.
stateof.ai 2021
Morrie is concerned about where will growth come from.
When I look at the blistering pace of AI development, I am more concerned about how society can culturally keep up with AI forced changes.
In other words, to me, it seems like we are growing faster than ever.
We wanted flying cars, instead, we got 140 characters of AI-generated text that can pass the Turing test.
"Originally, it was researched for the treatment of diabetes, but development was not continued for this application due to poor results in testing.
Subsequently, halicin was identified by artificial intelligence researchers at the MIT Jameel Clinic in 2019 using an in silico deep learning approach, as a likely broad-spectrum antibiotic. This likelihood was verified by in vitro cell culture testing, followed by in vivo tests in mice. It showed activity against drug-resistant strains of Clostridiodes difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, with an unusual mechanism of action involving the sequestration of iron inside the bacterial cells, that thereby interferes with their ability to regulate the pH balance across the cell membrane properly. Since this is a different mode of action from most antibiotics, halicin retained activity against bacterial strains resistant to many commonly used drugs."
Panchayat 2050?
The Times, 1894: “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
The New York Times, 2020:
"Sea-level rise could displace as many as 13 million coastal residents by 2060, including 290,000 people in North Carolina."
"By 2040, according to federal government projections, extreme water shortages will be nearly ubiquitous west of Missouri."
"By 2070, some 28 million people across the country could face Manhattan-size megafires."
Design a Better Life Instead of Managing a Shitty One
It's more important to design for a better life, than to try manage a shitty one.
- Don't manage what can be changed
- Have a goal, direction or purpose
No amount of organizing your life can give you that.
Find your purpose, the rest is secondary
Productivity tools can't give your life direction, meaning or purpose.
Figure out where you want to go and how you want your life to look,
the rest will sort itself out.
Task management systems help organize the items you're surrounded by.
But if you're surrounded by shit, it'd be better to figure how to
get out of it instead of spending spend your life arranging it.
Whether you use GTD or something else to do that is secondary.
"As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.
A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is"
Substitute "comfortable" with "organised" or "productive" in the above Quote from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harris for a concise, nice summary of the above
Feynman vs Nolan Technique
Feynman Technique
- Choose a concept you want to learn about
- Pretend you are teaching it to a student in grade 6
- Identify gaps in your explanation; Go back to the source material, to better understand it.
- Review and simplify
Nolan Technique
- Choose a concept you want to make a movie about.
- Pretend you are explaining the concept to someone with a PhD in it.
- Identify parts of the movie that were simple to understand. Go back and edit them out.
- Reorder parts of the movie while playing some backward.
Different ways to share a common resource among competing entities:
- Random
People seem to complain the least about random, luck, fate etc. Which is why the most contentious resources are sometimes divided using lottery.
Examples:
Zolgensma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onasemnogene_abeparvovec), the million-dollar drug which can decide whether your child gets to live or not.
Course allocation in BITS using priority numbers
- FIFO - Early bird gets the worm
Examples:
Tatkal, Black Friday
- Currency
Use virtual/real currency to buy the resources in auctions.
Examples: IPL, Course allocations in IIMs
- Proof of Work
Examples
Bitcoin - resource being the newly minted block
Course allocations at CMU. You get to register for way too many courses, but to continue with them you have to complete the assignments. Since students can't keep up with assignments in 9 simultaneous courses, they will automatically drop off.
- Proof of Stake
Examples
Some cryptocurrencies
Vatican Church
- [Benevolent] Dictator - Let some dictator choose who gets what
Examples:
North Korea
Torvalds - resource being MRs into mainline
- Mimicry - Let someone else slice their pie, then slice your pie in the exact same way
Examples:
Index Funds
Most middle class spending
Corollary
When the demand for the resources are asymmetric (A is willing to pay more for alpha than beta, but B is willing to pay more for beta over alpha), following methods can be employed on top of above:
- Stable Marriage Problem
Examples:
Medical Residency
JEE degree assignment is a trivial reduction of stable marriage algorithm when students have a preference for college but not vice versa.
- Sperner's Lemma
Examples:
Iterative auction to arrive at stable prices for resources. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~arielpro/15896s15/docs/paper11a.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-tesla-was-left-out-of-the-s-p-500-11599579707?st=x50z71e7aylivut
adding share token link to avoid paywall
I believe you were also thinking about index arbitrage when you posted this?
Yup, Index arbitrage opportunities & risk from high impact points of
failure. The two are related.
My previous understanding for inclusion into the S&P 500 was a
pre-determined set of criteria on a fixed schedule. Did not know that an
8-person comittee decided which companies >$11 trillion of funds track and
when they'd get included into the index.
This is concerning and requires further investigation.
Yes, it is concerning. It seems easy to make money by buying just before inclusion and then sell. Infact this seems to be what a lot of folks are doing. TSLA crashed after it was announced that it won't be included.
As the market is zero sum in the short term, that gain would come at the cost of normal investors who are passively investing in S&P. If the share price of new companies drop right after joining S&P(due to arbitrage selling), then that will push the return of S&P lower.
VTSAX should be immune to this though.
Yeah, I'd posted about this Index arbitrage mechanism way back in https://panchayat.haletic.com/#91
Why should VTSAX be immune to arbitrage?
Also need to look at the inclusion criteria for the CRSP U.S. Total Market Index that VTSAX tracks
Cooking up an example:
Say you have 100K invested in SnP index fund. And at time t TSLA joins the index. At t-δ, you will have 0K invested in TSLA. At some time arnd t, Vanguard will start buying 1K(1% weight going by today's market cap) TSLA for you.
But right after that, TSLA would drop by say 10% with all the arbitrage selling. So you lose $100 to arbitrage.
For VTSAX, everything is same except the company would be "A1 Quality Paper Clips" entering the index at 0.0001% weight. The loss to arbitrage would be proportionally only 1 cent. I was handwaving through the example. Do you see anything wrong in my understanding?
Now large private companies that IPO might enter with heavier weights and cause greater losses. But that arbitrage can only be leveraged by private investors. And, that already happens when founders get to cash in large sums right after IPO. We just don't call it arbitrage.
Oh yeah, the impact on a single stock joining a broader index like VTSAX will be lower than it would be on something relatively less broad like S&P500.
For VTSAX, the transition/discontinuity boundary should be when a company goes public or dies or gets re-privatized (is that even a thing?). For S&P, there exists another discontinuity boundary of when a company becoming big.
If you know when a company is going to go public, you have the same kind of index arbitrage opportunity on CRSP US Total Market based funds as you have on an S&P500 based index fund. The discontinuity would be less intense than it'd be for the S&P500 for sure though.
Note:
- A company can be private and huge, e.g Public sector Oil&Gas enterprises.
- The numbers may not be as low as in your example, given that they're market weighted and market weights of stocks on the index are more exponentially than uniformly distributed.
For S&P, there exists another discontinuity boundary of when a company becoming big.
The only discontinuity boundary in SnP is when the company becomes big. Going public should have no implication for SnP?
A big company going public should impact both the S&P500 and VTSAX.
Going big impacts the S&P500, going public can impact both
or gets re-privatized (is that even a thing?
I remember Michael Dell taking Dell private.
Oh yeah, the impact on a single stock joining a broader index like VTSAX will be lower than it would be on something relatively less broad like S&P500.
The main difference is that most stocks joining VTSAX, join when they are very small. Hence the impact is negligible. If a big private player IPOs like you mentioned Aramco etc, then you have the same impact as SnP. Still massive private company joining VTSAX can only be arbitraged by private equity investors.
Panchayat Changelog - Visiblity levels
Panchayat now has visibility levels for every post.
You can make a post Aham(private), Gram(group) or Lok(public).
Public posts are visible to everyone without logging in.
Gram posts are visible to everyone logged in.
Aham posts are only visible to the author.
https://gitlab.com/haletic/panchayat/-/merge_requests/78
https://gitlab.com/haletic/panchayat/-/issues/90
"Having ideas in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much more subdued game even on the ground that's safe."
Reminds me of the protruding steel pipe in the central lawns while playing ultimate.
Building a desktop in 2020 vs 2000
-
Even more stuff has gotten integrated into the motherboard
In 2000, you would have a video card(HDMI, DVI, VGA, S-component), sound card(3.5 mm), ethernet card(RJ 45), modem card(RJ 11) etc that would plug into PCIE lanes. Today other than the GPU everything else is integrated into the motherboard. If you are using a CPU with integrated GPU, then all your PCIE lanes will essentially be empty. Most noticeable change is the integration of SSDs into the motherboard with the M.2 slot. SSDs plug into motherboard slots just like RAM.
-
Target audience: Gaming
In 2000, the desktop computer was aimed at Nerds and Geeks. Today the entire Desktop computer market seems aimed at gamers. You can see this in the branding everywhere. Motherboards have game related styling etc. A side effect of this is that commodity components(Amazon best sellers) for desktops tend to be costlier higher end ones. For eg: the best selling CPU on Amazon is a 12 core Ryzen 5. In 2000, the best selling components were the cheaper entry level ones. You also find RGB lighting and other styling options for GPUs, cases, motherboards. Even RAMs come with options for color lighting. In 2000, everything was a biege box and internal components had no styling options because they were hidden away.
-
GPU size/price
GPUs used to be called video cards and were just one of many other cards that plug into the motherboard. Today they have grown both in size and price. Gamers today pay for the GPU almost as much as the rest of the computer combined. And the GPU has become large enough to be the largest visible component inside the Desktop. https://photos.app.goo.gl/zE6sQYFTPgaykvfr5. It consumes a disproportionate percentage of wattage supplied by PSU as well.
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by how many things have remained same over the years. Compared to many other things, building a desktop in 2020 is remarkably similar to building one in 2000.
Similar to how we have sharing economy. Where we take any service and connect people who have surplus resource to people who don't, therby eliminate the middleman and create more wealth for both parties.
Which led to all the AirBNB for Xs.
ADHD economy is where you take any service which was in a long format and just shorten the duration. So going from long format movies to youtube videos to TikTok. Or Books to articles to tweets. Extrapolating this what would be next? Short format sports, where the entire game is played in 30 seconds? We have already seen the trend with 5 day test cricket to One-Day to T20.
This is also a form of unbundling. Take the sum and chop it up into smaller pieces. Then use voting systems to bubble up the mimetic pieces among the chunks. This can explain the wierdness(higher variance) of TikToks as compared to Youtube videos.
Instagram Reels which is otherwise a bit copy of TikTok has one
groundbreaking feature different from TikTok.
Instead of the 1 min upper limit on TikTok, the upper limit is now 15 s.
What enabled the sharing economy is the internet's ability to create
globalized reputation systems and cut out the middle man.
What enables the ADHD economy? The low-friction, high throughput, always-on communication capabilities of a smartphone enabled world?
P.S: Great post! Provides good food for thought
The thing that enables the ADHD economy would be low overhead of context change. In 1850 you wouldn't walk a mile to your town library read 140 characters and then walk back. Or drive to a drive-in theatre watch a minute long TikTok and then drive back.
Today you can context switch to consuming that medium and then context switch back to continuing your daily life with minimal overhead due to the cellphone always present with you. This enables consumption of stuff in micro byte sized chunks.
https://therecount.com/
When you are young if your interests are in areas that are also high paying(software, medicine etc), then it's gold.
Assuming you have a high saving's rate, if your interests change, then you have the flexibility to switch to almost any other interest with the backing of the built-up FU money.
Same can be extended to geography as well. When you are young, if your place of interest happens to have a high cost of living, then later if your interests change, you can easily relocate to a cheaper place. But if your place of interest is a cheaper place when young, then moving to a higher cost of living place when you get old is not easy.
Things are not yet crystallized in my head, but I feel invoking ergodicity can provide some explanation to the question of why all index fund investing.
The rational behind not diversifying further into gold, bonds etc is that if you are willing to take more volatility of the market, then you can get higher returns in the long term. But why not invest in just high growth FANG stocks for even higher volatility and return. Index funds seem like an arbitrary line in the risk/reward continuum.
Will update when/if I realize erdogicity can help explain something here.
We've discussed why go all VTSAX (or equivalent) before. It's the simplest, robust path to wealth. You invest in 1 asset, that gives you high diversification with good returns.
The rational behind not diversifying further into different asset classes is simplicity. The rational behind not investing in just high growth FANG like stocks is robustness via diversification.
Ergodicity does seem useful to explain why people shouldn't put money into 1 stock though. For an individual 1 bust is all that is needed to throw them under, and being averse to ruinable risks seems prudent.
If I understood you correctly, then the goal function is "maximize diversification without compromizing simplicity". And index funds seem to be optimal for that.
So what if Vanguard were to offer a single index fund that invests in equity, bonds, gold, real estate etc. That would provide even more diversification without reducing simplicity. Does that mean this new fund is the one we should go for?
Both the excel and wikipedia demos are insane.
He didn't talk about food. The largest incentive for me to want to go to office.
"We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located."
Having a certain window for meetings is a good thing even if not going remote.
"The first factor is the commute. People lose large amounts of precious time and energy getting to and from the office every day, and the process adds stress to their lives."
Commute for me has always been a plus.
"Many of our employees feel that they can concentrate better and get more done at home because they don’t have to spend mental energy focusing amid the noise, other distractions, and real anxiety that can come from presence in the office. Some people argue that these costs may slow down individual employees in the short term but help all employees as a whole in the long term because of the increased communication. However, both the data and my own personal experience point toward the conclusion that open office plans actually significantly decrease communication, because people keep quiet in order to avoid bothering their neighbors."
"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."
Hamming, You and Your research
If you assume remote work to be an extension of closed door and if what
Hamming says is true, then we have a paradox.
Any metric that tries to measure the quantity of work but not quality over
a long term will give a wrong impression. Since Hamming says that people
with closed doors work harder, number of pull requests, lines of code
changes, issues solved, emails sent etc will all be higher.
But, in the long run you would still have lost productivity due to lower
creativity, innovation, solving of wrong problems etc
"Transformer models like BERT and GPT-2 are domain agnostic, meaning that they can be directly applied to 1-D sequences of any form. When we train GPT-2 on images unrolled into long sequences of pixels, which we call iGPT, we find that the model appears to understand 2-D image characteristics such as object appearance and category."
I don't see why big banks aren't already using similar AI to analyse patterns in the stock market. To me an active investor trying to play the market sounds like a chess grandmaster trying to beat a chess engine.
https://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-and-buyers
https://coda.io/@shishir/four-myths-of-bundling
https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundling-and-unbundling
Another way to explain flattening of the demand curve is if you assume how much a person is willing to pay for a channel as a random variable. Then adding together a bunch of mutually independent random variables results in a sum with lower variance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
In other words, a bundle will have lower variance in how much people are willing to pay for it. Lower variance is great for the seller and buyer as they can price the good appropriately.
This is an interesting insight. I had never looked at bundles this way. My perspective till now was "Why am I paying for all this crap when I only need just these few things".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore#Quota_system
Bundling of different ethnicities to reduce variance. Less variance means less "us v them" feeling and less tensions between groups.
In case you guys missed it John Conway died due to COVID.
Back in Hyderabad, Quickr had this offer where they would collect the item from the seller, package it and deliver it to the buyer for free. To top that off they had cashbacks for first time orders and whatnot.
Apparently people started using Quikr to move their belongings to new house. Sell it to yourself at the new address. Quickr will provide free moving services and pay you cash while doing it.
However nothing beats this https://freakonomics.com/2007/03/26/how-to-cheat-the-mumbai-train-system/
PS: Even with the arbitrage losses, it might still work in their favor as any publicity is good publicity. I might have forgotten everything else about this article but would remember that I can get a $24 pizza for $16 next time I am deciding between order and takeout.
The environments are getting more realistic, but the characters still look gamelike. Couple more years before we won't be able to tell the difference between a game and a movie.
Yeah, the video was pretty insane.
Unsure of how literally to take the video. How much of a delta is it
from current gaming engines? Do the graphics shown in the video actually
translate to such realistic/movie_like graphics?
Need to look at some modern game and see the current level of detailing in them.
Having a gamer to translate the information in the article would be
great :)
Turning Your Team- Fred Wilson
https://avc.com/2013/08/mba-mondays-turning-your-team/
AMD stock has grown ~30x in the last 4 years.
+Amazon CPU Best Sellers
+| AnandTech | US .com | UK .co.uk | EU .de | AU .com.au |
+|-----------+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------|
+| #1 | Ryzen 5 3600 | Ryzen 5 3600 | Ryzen 5 3600 | Ryzen 7 3700X |
+| #2 | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 5 2600 | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 9 3900X |
+| #3 | Ryzen 5 3600X | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 5 2600 | Ryzen 5 3600 |
+| #4 | Ryzen 9 3900X | Ryzen 5 3600X | Ryzen 9 3900X | Ryzen 3 3200G |
+| #5 | Ryzen 3 3200G | Ryzen 9 3900X | Core i7-9700K | USB-C Hub |
+| #6 | Ryzen 5 2600 | Ryzen 7 3800X | Core i5-9600K | Pentium G4560 |
+| #7 | Core i7-9700K | Core i7-9700K | Ryzen 7 3800X | Pentium G5400 |
+| #8 | Core i5-9600K | Ryzen 3 3200G | CPU Cooler | Ryzen 5 2600 |
+| #9 | Ryzen 7 3800X | Ryzen 7 2700X | Ryzen 5 3600X | Ryzen 7 2700X |
+| #10 | Core i9-9900K | Core i5-9600K | Core i3-9100F | Ryzen 3 1200 |
+|-----------+---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------|
"In fact, the biggest excitement this week for me was just that I
upgraded my main machine, and for the first time in about 15 years, my
desktop isn't Intel-based. No, I didn't switch to ARM yet, but I'm now
rocking an AMD Threadripper 3970x. My 'allmodconfig' test builds are
now three times faster than they used to be, which doesn't matter so
much right now during the calming down period, but I will most
definitely notice the upgrade during the next merge window."
By keeping an eye on the amount of debt that needs to be paid relative to the amount of hard money that there is to pay it, and the amount of debt payments that have to be made relative to the amount of cash flow the debtors have to service the debt and the interest rewards that one is getting for lending one’s money, one can assess the risk/reward of holding the time bomb.
Annexure: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/changing-value-money-ray-dalio/?published=t
"In cases in which the debt relief facilitates the flows of this money and credit into productivity and profits for companies, rising real stock prices (i.e., the value of stocks after adjusting for inflation) happens. When it sufficiently hurts the actual and prospective returns of “cash” and debt assets so that it drives flows out of these assets and into inflation-hedge assets and other currencies, that leads to a self-reinforcing decline in the value of money."
[All US TIPS currently yielding negative. Track US Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS):
https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/us ]
"After devaluation, the outcomes diverge significantly across the cases, with a key variable being how much economic and military power the country retained at the time of the devaluation, which impacted how willing savers were to continue holding their money there."
"In the case of the US, there were two big abrupt devaluations (in 1933 and 1971) and more gradual devaluations against gold since 2000, but they haven’t cost the US its reserve currency status.
Typically leading up to a country losing its reserve currency position 1) there is an already established loss of economic and political primacy to a rising rival that creates a vulnerability (e.g., the Dutch falling behind the UK or the UK falling behind the US) and 2) there are large and growing debts that are monetized by the central bank printing money and buying government debt, leading to 3) a weakening of the currency in a self-reinforcing run from the currency that can’t be stopped because the fiscal and balance of payments deficits are too great for cutbacks to close."
Good stuff. Now I wish someone would also make a culinary ladder of abstraction, instead of the dozens of recipe books.
Created an Observable notebook to interactively climb the musical ladder of abstraction and posted it on my taksati blog
Two of the more interesting features:
-
ZFS Support
Unsure if can get ZFS on upgrade. Support is Experimental whatever that
means. With ZFS can snapshot. filesystems and rollback filesystem.
-
Wireguard in Kernel
May enable faster, less power hungry VPN. Though currently already get
wireguard with Mullvad on linux
Released.
Did not know it was illegal for US citizens to hold gold from 1933 to 1974.
During world war II, US top marginal tax rate was 94%!.
During world war I, US top marginal tax rate was 77%.
"While this was just around 15% of the total cost of the war, with the very high war costs it meant German currency in circulation rose 599% during the war (by contrast Britain saw an increase of 91% and France of 386%"
JP Morgan Chase is named in his honour.
"I live in a small village in the Himalayas in North India, and make a living by projecting an air of calm authority in dire circumstances, such as the imminent demise of your Postgres database. "
Importance of Top of Mind
"I think most people have one top idea in their mind
at any given time.
That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward
when they're allowed to drift freely.
And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit
of that type of thinking, while others are starved
of it.
Which means *it's a disaster to let the wrong idea
become the top one in your mind."
Control Environment to Control Top Of Mind
You can't directly control where your thoughts
drift.
If you're controlling them, they're not drifting.
But you can control them indirectly, by
controlling what situations you let yourself get
into.
Be careful what you let become critical to you.
Try to get yourself into situations where the most
urgent problems are ones you want to think about.
Specific Time Sink Thought Patterns to Avoid
I've found there are two types of thoughts
especially worth avoiding:
-
Thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by
definition an attention sink.
-
The other is disputes. These too are engaging in
the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like
shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without
the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to
get real work done
Money as Time Sink
Money matters are particularly likely to
become the top idea in your mind.
The reason is that they have to be.
It's hard to get money.
It's not the sort of thing that happens by
default.
It's not going to happen unless you let it
become the thing you think about in the
shower.
And then you'll make little progress on
anything else you'd rather be working on.
Just about every startup I've seen grinds to a
halt when they start raising money or
talking to acquirers.
Disputes as Time Sink
Someone who does you an injury hurts you
twice:
first by the injury itself,
and second by taking up your time afterward
thinking about it.
If you learn to ignore injuries you can at
least avoid the second half
The laws are on page 46-47 Lex I, II, III.
Things I didn't know before I started motorcycling in US
-
Helmets are supposed to fit snugly around your head.
Really snugly. You should not be able to chew with the helmet on. And you should not be able to insert fingers between your helmet and your forehead. When you buy the helmet, it will be very tight. You have to give it some time for the foam to break in and mold to the shape of your helmet. In India I used to wear a helmet 2 sizes larger, which apparently doesn't allow the helmet to do its job properly.
-
You need Earplugs to ride on the highway
The noise levels are pretty high due to wind on the highway here, and are recommended even otherwise. Most people I know ride with earplugs on.
-
Wind buffeting
Again related to wind. At highway speeds you can feel the wind push you in different directions.
-
Tribe camaraderie
A passing motorcyclist will always acknowledge you even from the far side of the road.
-
Cars are scared of you
They leave a lot of buffer around you at a red light or highway.
-
Pin lock insert
You get a transparent moisture absorbing membrane to stick over your helmet visor which prevents fogging of the visor.
-
No turn off headlight option
Bikes here you cannot turn off the headlight.
Found this site to be better among the many clones.
The trend for covid19 cases is a steady line in log-linear graph for both India and US.
I wanted to calculate two things:
- At what rate are cases doubling in US and India.
- If we were to project out the trendline for India, how would the numbers look. It will be interesting to look back at these numbers in the future with 20/20 hindsight vision.
TLDR;
cases are doubling every 2.3 days in US and every 4.66 days in US.
Projection for number of confirmed cases in India:
day date confirmed#
0 2020-03-06 31
1 2020-03-07 35
2 2020-03-08 41
3 2020-03-09 48
4 2020-03-10 56
5 2020-03-11 65
6 2020-03-12 75
7 2020-03-13 87
8 2020-03-14 101
9 2020-03-15 118
10 2020-03-16 137
11 2020-03-17 159
12 2020-03-18 184
13 2020-03-19 214
14 2020-03-20 249
15 2020-03-21 288
16 2020-03-22 335
17 2020-03-23 389
18 2020-03-24 451
19 2020-03-25 524
20 2020-03-26 608
21 2020-03-27 705
22 2020-03-28 818
23 2020-03-29 950
24 2020-03-30 1102
25 2020-03-31 1279
26 2020-04-01 1485
27 2020-04-02 1723
28 2020-04-03 2000
29 2020-04-04 2320
"Alcohol is a major enemy of a creative individual! In excess it is highly toxic to the brain! Even small doses can reduce the quality and the density of REM sleep. Alcohol also suppresses deep sleep, produces sleep fragmentation, and relaxes the upper airway muscles, which worsens snoring and severity of obstructive sleep apnea. Apart from its negative impact on sleep, alcohol reduces cognitive powers, inhibits memory encoding, and should be particularly avoided at times of creative effort!
On the other hand, lots of research indicates that small doses of alcohol may benefit health. Actually, a drink a day may be the simplest known method of preventing arteriosclerosis, heart attack, and cerebrovascular disease. There are reports that moderate beer drinking, or perhaps even alcohol in general, may reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's (Breteler et al. 2002[66]) (beer belly or aluminum in beer cans will have an opposite effect). In smaller quantities alcohol can improve the blood lipid profile, while, in contrast, excess drinking is associated with hypertension. Some physicians recommend daily alcohol in very small quantities (not more than a drink per day).
To a highly creative individual, alcohol poses then a health-vs-brain dilemma. Certainly it should be avoided 3-5 hours before sleep. It should also be avoided altogether before intellectual work if there is no intervening sleep period in between. This would leave place only for very moderate drinking in the early evening (assuming you do not do any brainwork later on) or at siesta time (assuming that this is the time you take a break from intellectual effort to take a nap). "
The same dynamics as portfolio diversification should translate to identity as well.
With a diversified portfolio you reduce the volatility. This hedges your risk. But you also reduce the potential upside.
Found something interesting. The share of deaths due to air pollution has remained constant for India at arnd 12% since 1990. In that same period absolute global deaths due to air pollution has decreased by ~50%. Which means the absolute number of deaths due to air pollution in India has also decreased by ~50% since 1990.
If someone had asked me, I would have guessed that more people die today due to air pollution in India compared to 1990. The opposite is true by as much as 50%!
PS: The improvements are attributed mainly to lower indoor pollution, while the outdoor pollution has become worse.
On a popular Reddit.com forum called “Buy it for Life,” a community of consumers extol the virtues of Methuselah-grade toasters and table saws, and lionize brands like Blundstone (boots), Bushnell (binoculars), Craftsman (tools), Vitamix (blenders) and Briggs & Riley (suitcases) for creating truly durable goods—and standing behind them.
First time seeing Methuselah being used as an adjective. Wasn't searching for it.
This is the most popular essay by Vaclav Havel.
This is the essay by Czechoslovakia President.
If only Elon had stuck to his timelines, we could all be benching remotely from home right now.
"I am sure many of you have come across Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, a must-read when we were students at IIT. The Nobel prize-winning physicist was one of the giants of the twentieth century. In his autobiography, though, he writes how he found the atmosphere at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton stultifying. Now, as you know, the Institute of Advanced Studies brings together some of the finest scholars in the world to ponder problems in a multi-disciplinary environment. But he found the atmosphere sterile because there were no students to ask him questions, questions that would force him to rethink his beliefs and perhaps discover new theories. Ideas start with questioning and alternative viewpoints, sometimes seemingly silly ones. After all, Einstein built his theory of relativity pondering the somewhat wacky question of what someone travelling in a train at the speed of light would experience. So nothing should be excluded but everything should be subject to debate and constant testing. No one should be allowed to offer unquestioned pronouncements. Without this competition for ideas, we have stagnation."
"When people had babies, I congratulated them enthusiastically, because that seemed to be what one did. But I didn't feel it at all. "Better you than me," I was thinking."
Actual question from California motorcycle knowledge test
If you are being chased by a dog, you should:
1. Stop your motorcycle until the animal loses interest.
2. Approach the animal slowly, then quickly accelerate away from the dog as it approaches.
3. Swerve around the animal.
Hint: The same technique works with cops in India.
So JLC says that you should be able to ride out recessions without having to sell stock. But you are also more likely to lose a job during a recession. So to be able to ride out a recession without selling stock would mean your emergency fund should cover expenses for 2-3 years on average. That's a lot of cash which contradicts his mostly stocks when young strategy. What am I missing here? Does he assume the case of having a job through the recession to cover normal expenses.
I was randomly reading about jellyfish and came across this fact. They have created an antivenom by using CRISPR to selectively turn off skin genes until they found the gene that causes toxicity. The much-awaited discoveries from being able to edit the gene are starting to come out. And the fact that the discoveries are reaching me without explicitly searching for CRISPR means they are becoming widespread.
Damn, they are like a pack of wolves.
"The system will not compete with the Iridium satellite constellation, which is designed to link directly to handsets. Instead, it will be linked to flat user terminals the size of a pizza box, which will have phased array antennas and track the satellites. The terminals can be mounted anywhere, as long as they can see the sky."
Wonder if the antenna array needs to be dynamically pointed in a specific direction 🤔. Basically, can this be mounted on an RV/sailboat?
https://www.starlink.com/maritime
It's pretty expensive. Not sure why. Seems aimed at commercial shipping enterprises. But get together >50 people on a (few) boat(s) and you may have a decent deal?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1545165611201728512?s=20&t=vFxOxwoNjbfeUz0Qw_NsUA
Basically, price segmentation.
This is what panchayat should insure us against. To 2050 and beyond.
Watched part 1. The discussion at the end between Arvind and Raghu is interesting. Also just realized that there have been 3 back to back high profile exits from RBI. Raghu(didn't get extended), Urjit Patel(resigned before term end) and Viral Acharya(resigned before term end). And with that, the current governor is more of a govt's boy. @debo Kotia was very animated about Shaktikanta having an MA in history. This antagonism towards intellectuals is a bit worrisome.
I see this as an improvement to the ingroup-outgroup theory in the sense that it is trying to explain similar effects. Even if you take just our group(which is a small sample I agree) the fact that the ones whom I would consider to be most non-conformist also tend to be Right. That seems more than coincidence to me. And this theory explains that.
Yeah, will see this pattern along a lot of other dimensions too. Non-conformist high fashion people setting trends by dressing like people two level's down. Non-conformist highly technical people using old-school tools and low-tech gadgets etc.
Didn't think of the highly technical people using low tech gadgets example. that's a good one.
This is brilliant. Ideas & phenomena come in cycles, and Girard's mimetic theory explains how ideas & phenomena get diffused.
Something similar is also observed in marketing in general. In social networks, the trend is set up by folks in the prime of their youth: 18-24. Every other age group tries to follow the younger group. For example, in the case of photosharing social apps:
Trendsetters in GenZ set the fashion trend. These trendsetters now use Dispo (Live in the Moment, Photos come next day!)
Peers of GenZ trendsetters are one step behind and will imitate shortly. GenZ folks currently use Snapchat (Share photos instantaneously)
GenY will imitate GenZ and are two steps behind. Currently, GenY folks use Instagram (Share photos after carefully editing for capturing memories. #InstagramFilters #Throwback)
GenX will imitate GenY and are three steps behind. Currently, GenX and older use Facebook. (Share photos) As uncles and aunties adopt Facebook, younger generations want to move on. GenY has moved from Facebook and stopped using it.
As GenY has started adopting Snapchat, GenX moves on and stops using it
Interesting interpretation where the age group replaces the social class hierarchy.
Curious to see any examples of people in the low age group imitating people way older. Scot refers to ghetto fashion like torn clothes etc. What would be equivalent examples in social networks?
So something that very old people and very young people are doing. But people in the middle cannot do it because they would then be mistaken for the older folks.
Seoul now at the forefront of tech/trends?
Korea >> Japan?
K-Pop & Hip Hop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HerU6Gzn_O4
Seoul now at the forefront of tech/trends?
Korea >> Japan?
K-Pop & Hip Hop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HerU6Gzn_O4
Story of BTS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Tc_Y2U0Tg
Mukbang | Eatcast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukbang
E-Sports | BTS | K-Pop | Metaverse
Interesting Drinking Games
BTS Fashion Show | Louis Vitton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=KsH_V0D4PyA
Squid Games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqxAJKy0ii4
Seoul will be the first city government to join the metaverse
https://qz.com/2086353/seoul-is-developing-a-metaverse-government-platform/
BTS Game | Netmarble
https://btsw.netmarble.com/en/home
BTS Army Bomb Light Stick
https://btsmerchshop.org/product/bangtan-boys-army-bomb-light-stick-map-of-the-soul-special-edition/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkRKZLUwWkc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xorUCuvpKY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR7ksHznHFc
Fanlight
http://fanlight.co.kr/
https://www.lumen.world/
How might we immerse people in shared alternate realities without using headsets?
Coldplay X BTS - My Universe (Official Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YqPKLZF_WU
I guess I should do a blog post on the S. Korea- BTS- metaverse theme sometime
Coldplay X BTS - My Universe (Official Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YqPKLZF_WU
I guess I should do a blog post on the S. Korea- BTS- metaverse theme sometime
https://www.matthewball.vc/all/what-is-an-entertainment-company-and-why-does-the-answer-matter
"Riot also “operates” a virtual K-pop girl group composed of LoL heroes that has already topped Billboard global streaming charts on two occasions, and the squad’s first music video hit 100MM views on YouTube in a single month (and is approaching 450MM today)"
Madison Beer
Riot LoL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOxkGD8qRB4
Sony- Boundless VR concert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm_1PWZoW_I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sx6wYt1Zbc
This also explains things like why we don't hesitate to travel in express train general class. A typical middle class Indian would never travel in general. According to this theory its because we have no doubt that we will be considered as part of the lower class even if we travel in general. But for someone in middle class the risk is real. If others see him travelling in general they would conclude he doesn't have enough money. For us, people would conclude we are just crazy.
@debo also why we prefer a village or a city but not town to live in. In a village, no one would confuse us with a villager. So, the village ways are fashionable since it's two levels deep.
As a corollary, say you want to practice the Seneca advice of trying out poverty for a month. Maybe the thing to try out would be a middle-class lifestyle (one layer below) instead of complete austerity (multiple layers below) since then the fashionableness and novelty would counter the withdrawal symptoms and make it actually fun.
Agree with the village/city over town being more fashionable. It's also more interesting. 1 Level away seems boring/known. 2 Level out seems novel and interesting.
A little context for the corollary:
The goal is confidence in your ability to wean yourself from luxuries. This allows enjoying them without getting trapped by lifestyle inflation. The proposed test to validate this was the above Seneca advice.
So your claim in the corollary being, test living with complete austerity for a short-period, think you can be do it, actually start living austerely, realize you were only able to do it as the novelty was masking the withdrawal? 🤔
Shouldn't the novelty wear off if this is done on a recurring basis?
If not, would it sustain for long periods of austere living too? If you find it fashionable and novel over a long period, maybe that's fine than?
Also not sure if middle class living would help gain confidence in your austere living capabilities. Need to make the implementation more concrete before I can properly visualize the effects of this.
"Vintage is fashion. Everything old is new again. The mom-jean silhouette harks to the 1980s (boomers wore them!), and before that, the 1950s. Flared jeans were a late-'90s millennial thing, when teens were getting fashion inspiration from the late '60s and '70s. In the late '00s, there was resistance to skinny jeans, which were a throwback to the Beatniks of the '50s and early '60s. Eventually, millennials embraced them tighter than denim on a leg."
What's currently influencing and at the same time reflecting culture- Discord.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBvrq1ntFKY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAXDxug-1B4
https://discord.com/
https://www.doodles.app/
https://baytobreakers.com/
"AlphaGo had three far more powerful successors, called AlphaGo Master, AlphaGo Zero, AlphaZero and Super Saiyan Alpha".
Ok, I just made up the last one.
"While the fever of conversions was spreading all over the central part of Goa, a meeting of Brahmins was called in Divar Island off the glorious city of Goa (now Velha Goa), to consider the crisis facing them. It was decided that, it was better to accept Christianity or else leave the Island, to go and live elsewhere. Finally, a consensus was arrived at to consult God Ganapati and abide by the verdict that he would give."
@hoperyto I think this is a good example of the viral nature of internet changing old paradigms like politics. I think being funny will be a prerequisite to enter politics in the future just like being thin is a prerequisite to becoming a model.
"In humans, T. gondii is one of the most common parasites in developed countries;[7][8] serological studies estimate that 30–50% of the global population has been exposed to and may be chronically infected with T. gondii, although infection rates differ significantly from country to country.[9][10] For example, estimates have shown the highest prevalence of persons infected to be in France, at 84%, as at 2000."
"T. gondii has been shown to alter the behavior of infected rodents in ways that increase the rodents' chances of being preyed upon by felids.[11][15][16] Support for this "manipulation hypothesis" stems from studies showing T. gondii-infected rats have a decreased aversion to cat urine.[11] Because cats are the only hosts within which T. gondii can sexually reproduce to complete and begin its lifecycle, such behavioral manipulations are thought to be evolutionary adaptations that increase the parasite's reproductive success.[11] The rats would not shy away from areas where cats live and would also be less able to escape should a cat try to prey on them."
"A number of studies have suggested that subtle behavioral or personality changes may occur in infected humans,[22] and infection with the parasite has recently been associated with a number of neurological disorders, particularly schizophrenia[16] and bipolar disorder.[23][24] A 2015 study also found cognitive deficits in adults to be associated with joint infection by both T. gondii and Helicobacter pylori in a regression model with controls for race-ethnicity and educational attainment.[25] Although a causal relationship between latent toxoplasmosis with these neurological phenomena has not yet been established,[9][16] preliminary evidence suggests that T. gondii infection may induce some of the same alterations in the human brain as those observed in mice."
I wonder if humans domestication of the cat was encouraged by humans getting infected by Toxoplasma gondii?
Cats don't seem to have been domesticated in the same way as other animals. We seem to have not applied much of a selection pressure on making them more useful for us, unlike what we did to dogs1
@hoperyto FYI
@hoperyto If you haven't read this. Pretty interesting.
I didn't know:
- Shampooing was introduced in Europe from Indian colonialists.
- That happened so recently.
I didn't know about this happening.
@hoperyto
You don't need this anymore.
Zelensky announced his candidacy on the eve of 31 December 2018, upstaging the New Year's Eve address of President Petro Poroshenko on 1+1 TV Channel.[6] Six months before Zelensky announced his candidacy, he was already one of the frontrunners in opinion polls for the election.[7][8][5] Zelensky won the election with 73.22% of the vote, defeating incumbent Petro Poroshenko.
Extrapolating the city-rural simulation, there could be some behavior that can only happen in megacities or dense populations. Thinking of trends in India...
My takeaway from this article "Put more content out". Thanks to my friend "confirmation bias" for summarizing the article for me.
Hard to believe this article was written in 2002.
"
Then there is the famous fly puzzle. Two bicyclists start twenty miles apart and head toward each other, each going at a steady rate of 10 m.p.h. At the same time a fly that travels at a steady 15 m.p.h. starts from the front wheel of the southbound bicycle and flies to the front wheel of the northbound one, then turns around and flies to the front wheel of the southbound one again, and continues in this manner till he is crushed between the two front wheels. Question: what total distance did the fly cover ? The slow way to find the answer is to calculate what distance the fly covers on the first, northbound, leg of the trip, then on the second, southbound, leg, then on the third, etc., etc., and, finally, to sum the infinite series so obtained. The quick way is to observe that the bicycles meet exactly one hour after their start, so that the fly had just an hour for his travels; the answer must therefore be 15 miles. When the question was put to von Neumann, he solved it in an instant, and thereby disappointed the questioner: "Oh, you must have heard the trick before!" "What trick?" asked von Neumann; "all I did was sum the infinite series."
"
"Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it" - Moravec
A compact way to express this argument would be:
1. We should expect the difficulty of reverse-engineering any human skill to be roughly proportional to the amount of time that skill has been evolving in animals.
2. The oldest human skills are largely unconscious and so appear to us to be effortless.
4. Therefore, we should expect skills that appear effortless to be difficult to reverse-engineer, but skills that require effort may not necessarily be difficult to engineer at all.
"The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four-year-old that we take for granted – recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question – in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come." - Steve Pinker, The Language Instinct
Interesting because it goes against current notions on who's jobs are currently at risk
Releasing today.
doesn't get any better than this.
People can now buy us coffees! ☕
You know asciinema right? I was wondering if you can set it up such as all terminal sessions are automatically recorded. It will be great if you could just go back in time and replay your terminal in real-time.
I didn't know you could buy a portable satellite phone for $1000.
@debo have you tried the spectacles that wolfram was using to avoid motion sickness?
- Reddit was not really private. Although the subreddit is private its still in public domain.
- Reddit has been acting recently. They are planning to become mainstream. Ads, premium subscription, promoted posts, more censorship etc. I wouldn't be surprised if in some time they remove private subreddits or change it in some way that we are forced to exit.
- There are certain features we would like which reddit does not have currently. Tagging, mailing list, complex searches. These are not there currently in panchayat but we plan to add them incrementally. Reddit also had a pain point where it would automatically archive all posts older than 6 months making them read only.
- Reddit will not be there forever. We wanted to reclaim our data while we still could. Since we own our data, we should be able to keep the service alive longer migrating to anything else if needed.
But why the name Panchayat?
This was very organic during a conversation with Debo.
What's Morjim?
That's the name of the current release version 2.0. There was Arambol 1.0 before this that Debo had made. That's available at arambolpanchayat.haletic.com
@debo do you remember how the name panchayat came about?
Migration to panchayat.haletic.com
This subreddit is now deprecated. Further posts can be made at panchayat.haletic.com.
Aha!
This one is pretty good.
The reason to stay away from back friday, cyber monday is you are getting gone and accepting the price.
As the spacecraft coasted past the Moon and was pulled around its far side, communications were instantly and completely cut off. NASA referred to this event as loss of .signal (LOS) and it occurred with alarming predictability by virtue of the deep understanding the trajectory experts had of an Apollo's flight path. The first time it occurred was during the Apollo 8 mission, and Frank Borman found the accuracy of Houston's predictions awe-inspiring. At the precise time that he had been told communications would disappear, they did. "Geeze!" he said to his crewmates, there being no one else to hear. "That was great, wasn't it?" Then he mused: "I wonder if they've turned it off." Bill Anders laughingly replied: "Chris [Kraft, the boss in Houston] probably said, `No matter what happens, turn it off." Bill's humorous suggestion was that, in order not to worry the crew if the predictions had not been as accurate as they had hoped, Kraft would have ordered the people at the transmitting station to turn off the radio signal at just the right moment. Borman wondered, however. When next they spoke to Capcom Jerry Carr, he reported: "Houston, for your information, we lost radio contact at the exact second you predicted." Carr confirmed that that was what had happened. Borman probed further. "Are you sure you didn't turn off the transmitters at that time?" "Honest Injun, we didn't," came Carr's joking reply.
Despite being nearer to the Moon than any human in history, and with the exception of some sightings that Lovell had made through the spacecraft's optics, this crew had yet to view their quarry. This was partly because the three largest of their five windows had fogged up owing to a design problem with the sealant around them. Additionally, they had spent most of their time during the coast broadside to the Sun, twirling slowly in the barbecue mode, in which attitude their two good windows, which looked along the direction the craft was pointed, showing only deep space. As with many of the moon shots, Apollo 8 arrived over the western side of the lunar disk at the same time as the Sun was rising over the eastern side. The nearer they got to the Moon, the closer it came into line with the Sun until, in the final few hours before arrival, the spacecraft entered the Moon's shadow and plunged the crew into darkness. Apollo 10 arrived at the Moon under similar lighting conditions and its commander Tom Stafford still gained no view of the approaching planet. "Just tried looking out as far as I can, out the top hatch window, and still can't see the Moon; but we'll take your word that it's there." "Roger, 10. That's guaranteed; it's there," said Charlie Duke in mission control.
Apollo had become a part of the Cold War, a grab for prestige by the United States at a time when they and the Soviet Union stared at each other, each with nuclear weapons in hand, waiting for the other to blink. There were serious concerns that the Soviets might try to interfere with the Apollo flights, perhaps by jamming radio transmissions, therefore it was decided that the guidance and navigation system should be completely autonomous.
When production of computers for the Apollo programme was at its peak, it consumed fully half of the world's output of integrated circuits to construct only the 75 units that were built between 1963 and 1969.
From Apollo 13 onwards, all S-IVB stages were steered onto trajectories that led to a violent end, each forming a new crater on the Moon's surface.
In the years that have elapsed since the Apollo programme, people have forgotten the scale of what the S-IVB was designed to achieve. There is little appreciation of the difference between low Earth orbit and the reaches of space to which this engine took the Apollo crews. In any case, many fail to understand the relative scale of the Earth-Moon system. I once gave a talk to schoolchildren about the Moon and used the popular method of scaling the solar system down to what our minds can handle. As props, along with a model of the Saturn V launch vehicle and some good photographs, I took my own model of the Earth-Moon system. Earth was represented by a 20-centimetre globe that I had been given some years earlier. The Moon was represented by a lucky find I made during a visit to the holy grail of aerospace memorabilia: the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in the USA. While browsing the museum's gift shop, I had come across a 5-centimetre-diameter diameter foam ball, grey and pockmarked with craters, that perfectly matched the scale of my globe of the Earth, as the Moon's diameter is very nearly one-quarter that of Earth. During the talk, I threw my foam Moon out among the schoolchildren and asked the boy who caught it to come forward and hold the Moon beside my Earth at what he thought would be its correct distance. Repeated attempts by various children suggested distances between 0.5 and 1 metre. Of course, I had previously calculated the correct distance and cut a piece of string to length, which I had rolled up around a pencil. I asked the final child to place the foam Moon at the end of the string and walk back until I had fed out its full length. Back she went up the aisle between the rows of seated children. Their teacher sat at the far end of the aisle and I noticed how her eyes widened as the schoolgirl took my Moon up to where she was seated. On the scale of my little model, the mean distance between Earth and the Moon was represented by a piece of string 6 metres long. I then explained how every flight into space by humans since the end of the Apollo programme had risen above Earth between 300 and 600 kilometres, no more than the thickness of that girl's little finger. It was by the power of the S-IVB that Apollo transcended any space exploration before or since, and took men into the realms of deep space.
German film maker Fritz Lang is usually credited with introducing the concept of the countdown as a device to raise suspense in his 1929 film Frau im Mond (The Girl in the Moon). It was adopted by the German rocket pioneers in the VfR, who maintained its use after their move to the United States.
The entire space vehicle with its launcher and transporter was substantially heavier than the Eiffel Tower.
It was Apollo 8's next manoeuvre that really scared the managers. Although the SPS engine had been designed for utmost reliability, everyone was aware that its failure would doom the crew to stay forever in the Moon's grasp. Worse, as the firing of the engine would take place around the Moon's far side, no one on Earth would be able to monitor its progress, and instead would have to wait until the spacecraft re-emerged, hopefully on a path for home. Shortly after midnight in Houston, Texas, on Christmas Day, Apollo 8 reappeared around the Moon's eastern limb exactly on time, with Jim Lovell playfully informing mission control, "Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus."
Although Apollo 17 ended the lunar phase of the Apollo programme, America's investment in its hardware and infrastructure continued to pay back for three more years. A spare S-IVB IVB stage became an orbital workshop called Skylab. This massive 77-tonne space station was launched by a Saturn V on 14 May 1973 and serviced by three crews riding modified Apollo CSMs launched by Saturn 113s. The crews stayed on board for 1, 2 and 3 months respectively. The final Apollo flight was also to Earth orbit as part of the Apollo-Soyuz Soyuz Test Project in 1975, again using a Saturn IB, when an American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft met and docked in space as a political act of detente, thereby ending the `space-race' amicably. The two remaining Saturn Vs were turned into lawn ornaments.
Panchayat has been online in beta for more than a month now. I think we can carve out a stable release. Since we have feature parity with reddit, this could be a good starting point. Some tasks to be completed for the release:
- Require login to view the forum.
- move domain from port 5555 to panchayat.haletic.com
- disable posting on golfviewecho802 and have an announcement redirecting to panchayat.
- have some way to reset the password, because sooner or later someone will forget their password.
- containerize everything to run within docker to keep panchayat best until 2050.
- have a system to periodically backup the database off methuselah.
Any other must-have items to be tackled for the first stable release. All the other features like tagging, mail digest etc can be handled in subsequent releases.
Key Learnings:
The capture interval is 2s. This sets a limit on the final fps of the video. Going higher than 3 fps (3x2 = 6x speedup of time) causes very fast jerks.
Next time to have a faster and smoother video, the capture interval must be shorter possibly every 500 ms. But this will create more data than can fit in an SD card. Maybe shoot at 720p instead of 1080p or have multiple SD cards and keep swapping.
Next time should have the camera facing upwards. This was corrected by the second day, but the first day missed a lot of the skyline and has a lot of mobile screen time.
Also need to see how Youtube reacts to having copyrighted music in the video.
Mars-Shot:
Write a script to extract time from the photo and query Google Maps timeline to fetch the GPS coordinates at that particular time. Use this coordinates to generate a thumbnail of the map and embed into the video. This would create an embedded moving minimap similar to video games.
Do you find the video disorienting because of all the jerkiness? Should I maybe slow it down further? It will make the video proportionally longer though.
Things I didn't know before I visited HK
- Many small stuff. Smallest hotel room I might have stayed in. Smallest McDonald's for sure I have seen anywhere.
- Hong Kong dollars have a fixed peg to USD.
- People wearing masks around.
- The official currency is printed not by a Fed equivalent but by Standard Chartered and HSBC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_Hong_Kong_dollar#Note_printing
- British words. Do not throw "rubbish" etc
"People wearing masks around" wouldn't have been on the list had I visited today.
Fundamental Economics Textbooks?
What are the fundamental textbooks in Economics?
For eg: for physics you have feynman's lectures or resnick halliday. For algorithms you have Cormen. For Operating systems you have Silberschatz.
The suit currently sells for $440K and lasts about 10mins of flying time. A flight experience costs ~2000 GBP. Jet suit training costs ~6000 GBP
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/hotel-rooms/buying-guide/index.htm
"I want it, I got it" - Ariana Grande, 7 rings
so at lunch one day a Bell Labs executive asked what would it take to raytrace this scene in real time and I said well we need a 512 by 512 array of Cray supercomputers each with a red green and blue light bulb on top and we'll put it in the desert and fly over to 10,000 feet and take pictures of it.
Things I didn't know before I visited China
good stuff!
Things I didn't know before I moved to the West Coast
- Proposition 65 is everywhere. Everything is known to the state of California to cause cancer.
- SF is not really the epicenter of Silicon Valley. In fact before it was not even considered part of silicon valley.
- Lot less F150s. Lot more Tesla, Prius etc.
- Bay Area's got no buildings above first floor. Zoning laws restrict such construction in spite of ridiculous prices.
- Apparently, every company in the valley has crowding of men's restrooms. At least in NVIDIA it's not uncommon to have to wait in queue before getting a urinal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USXoINPEhoA
Things I didn't know before I moved to the US.
- Students use pencil a lot.
- People like to write notes and stick it everywhere. In fact, there are a lot more explicit instructions and notes to be read everywhere. for eg: "caution: uneven floor"; on airbridge or "caution: vehicle makes wide turns" on buses.
- Americans hold their pen/pencil differently while writing.
- At restaurants, most often you wait to be seated. You don't just find an empty table.
- Even while walking people prefer to walk on the right.
- Communal showers are a common thing.
- America goes nuts over pumpkin every Halloween. I always thought pumpkins were only used for lanterns and other decorations. Halloween season even brings pumpkin snickers with it.
- chai = masala tea.
- bhangra is a thing.
- snail mail carry spam too.
- Lot of the courier services do not need a signature from the addressee. Amazon would happily drop off a $1000 iPhone outside your door without any signature.
- Food Takeout is called "To Go".
- Electrical sockets do not generally have switches. If they do, ON is UP.
- They use letter paper size instead of standard A4.
- Planes have a planeside valet who takes your bag and places it in the airline cargo at the airbridge and then unloads it and hands you before leaving the airbridge.
- Airports are open access. Anyone can enter. Till the TSA checkpoint there is no frisking or access control.
- The only time you get frisked or go through a metal detector or get your bags xrayed is at the airport. Apart from that there is no frisking at malls, theatres etc
- Americans are not very used to 24 hour clock. I realized this when I wrote 15:00-15:45 on a meeting room booking form. The receptionist was like "I am not very comfortable with military timing, this is 3pm right".
- attached bathrooms are not as common as in India.
- you can walk into T-mobile(or any other cell phone provider) pay cash and walk out with a sim card without filling a single form.
- mm-hmmm is the most common way to acknowledge people in conversation.
- Universities have their own full fledged police with uniform, vehicles, guns and equipment.
- Different colors of the same product cost different on Amazon.
- Pet dogs are very docile.
- Apartment numbers come after the street names in addresses. State names are abbreviated in addresses.
- Prescriptions are sent directly to the pharmacy by the doctor.
- Checking account is the default one used. Savings account is used to set aside excess money from the Checking account.
- Bikes here do not have stands. There is also no concept of repairing a puncture. If there is a flat you just replace the whole tube.
- There is an incinerator under the sinks in kitchen to grind the garbage before disposal.
- Prepone is not a word.
- Jury trials where normal citizens act as judges.
- USPS does this thing where it puts your package in a larger mailbox, locks it and then places the key inside your apt mailbox. You open your mailbox, get the key, use it open the larger rotating time sharing mailbox.
- American addreses are concise. State/City/Street/Apt. Compared to my address in India. State/City/Node/Sector/Plot/Apt
- You can rent self storage. Basically warehouses to keep your stuff that you don't have place for at home. 🤦
- You can deposit cheques by just taking a photo of it in the app. No need to go to bank.
- When you give your car for service, they give you a loaner car.
- Car recalls are not uncommon.
- You can take your car puncture into a tire shop and they will fix the puncture entirely for free. You don't need to be a member or anything.
- Planes that fly advertisement banners.
- Carbon monoxide and fire alarm sensors in every apartment.
- Utility poles made of wood. https://photos.app.goo.gl/h1T2pxDeWBzLTFhB9
"""
Ninety-eight per cent of Xichan’s patients are women, most of them between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Nose jobs and blepharoplasties (which create the double eyelid crease) are the most popular procedures. Zhang said that in the early days, most clients were seeking to hide a scar or a physical deformity; now, he said, “more often than not, it’s very attractive women who are chasing perfection.”
"""
I wonder how many nights did the guy have to sleep in the hall after this?
RFC - replacement to reddit?
Should we look for an alternative to reddit?
Some pain points that just keeps nagging.
- lack of permanence. think Orkut, myspace.
- lack of customization mainly dissipation of comments to everyone.
- Not truly private.
Passing of a Great Mind: https://books.google.com/books?id=rEEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA89#v=onepage&q&f=false
Red Queen Hypothesis
What you refuse to see is your worst enemy
Moloch DAO
https://medium.com/@simondlr/the-moloch-dao-collapsing-the-firm-2a800b3aa2e7
https://www.molochdao.com/
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/twildenh/PowerPointTM/Paper.pdf
no one got the joke?
http://mashable.com/2017/02/24/diy-self-driving-cars/
viewing all comments by anyone anywhere in the subreddit chronologically
recently discovered https://www.reddit.com/r/golfview802/comments/. Previously I used to miss comments unless it was a direct reply to my comment or post.
the ken thompson analogy was awesome.
https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature23017.html
TL;DR
https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/12/15959036/dna-storage-cell-crispr-gif-bacteria-information
"I haven’t been tracking the latest efforts on the part of computer virus writers, but if there was a computer analogy to this RNA-shuffling model, it would be a virus that distributes itself in the form of unlinked object code files plus a small helper program that, upon infection in a host, would first re-link its files in a random order before copying and redistributing itself. In addition to doing this, it would search for similar viruses that may already be infecting that computer, and it would on occasion link in object code with matching function templates from the other viruses. This re-arrangement and novel re-linking of the code itself would work to foil certain classes of anti-virus software that searches for virus signatures based on fixed code patterns. It would also cause a proliferation of a diverse set of viruses in the wild, with less predictable properties."
I was looking at the translation table provided in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteinogenic_amino_acid#Gene_expression_and_biochemistry.
I noticed that there are actually 66 codons of the form "UAG". While there should only have been 64, since 6 bit depth(3 * 2 bits per base pair. Sure enough starting working on finding the duplicates among those 66.
Cleaning up the table gave:
GCU
GCC
GCA
GCG
UGU
UGC
GAU
GAC
GAA
GAG
UUU
UUC
GGU
GGC
GGA
GGG
CAU
CAC
AUU
AUC
AUA
AAA
AAG
UUA
UUG
CUU
CUC
CUA
CUG
AUG
AAU
AAC
UAG
CCU
CCC
CCA
CCG
CAA
CAG
CGU
CGC
CGA
CGG
AGA
AGG
UCU
UCC
UCA
UCG
AGU
AGC
ACU
ACC
ACA
ACG
UGA
GUU
GUC
GUA
GUG
UGG
UAU
UAC
UAA
UAG
UGA
alb_d@XPS-13-9370:~$ cat temp | sort | uniq > list2
alb_d@XPS-13-9370:~$ cat temp | sort > list1
alb_d@XPS-13-9370:~$
alb_d@XPS-13-9370:~$
alb_d@XPS-13-9370:~$ diff list1 list2
52d51
< UAG
58d56
< UGA
Looking back at the table, both of them are marked asterisk with notes below saying:
- UAG is normally the amber stop codon, but in organisms containing the biological machinery encoded by the pylTSBCD cluster of genes the amino acid pyrrolysine will be incorporated.[8]
** UGA is normally the opal (or umber) stop codon, but encodes selenocysteine if a SECIS element is present.
🤦
Apparently we only discovered this multiplexing for the first time in 2009.
highly recommended!
Great Read!
Awesome read!
How weird is it that we have to understand our own machinery using analogies to something we have created. You would have expected it to be the other way round.
It is weird but it makes sense. We only understand the things we create and we (our conscious minds) didn't create ourselves. But we (our conscious minds) did create computers
"These genes are fundamental to the actual storage of the genome and are thus of paramount importance. Any failure in this code rapidly leads to a non-functioning organism.
So it is to be expected that this code isn’t tinkered with and that turns out the case. The H3 an H4 genes have a zero effective mutation rate in humans. But it goes far beyond that. You share almost the exact same code with anything from chickens to grass or molds."
"If we were to destroy all existing C compilers on the planet and leave only the code for one, we would be in great trouble. Yes, we have the C code to a C compiler, but we need a C compiler to compile it!
In actual fact, this was solved by not writing the first C compiler in C (duh), but in a language that was available already: B. See here for details about ‘bootstrapping’.
The same holds for the genome. To create a new ‘binary’ of a specimen, a living copy is required. The genome needs an elaborate toolchain in order to deliver a living thing. The code itself is impotent. This toolchain is commonly called ‘your parents’."
"It appears that RNA, which is an intermediate code between DNA and a protein, may have been the ‘B’ for DNA. Which begs the question where RNA came from. It is very interesting to note that extra-terrestrial objects often contain amino acids!"
http://mashable.com/2017/02/22/skype-lite-aadhaar-india-stack/#gLyQWOv6bqq6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_DNA_Profiling_Bill
https://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bdorsey1/41docs/51-fra.html
We were thinking of starting a common collaborative blog for various entropy rich content. Suggest names as reply to this text if you can think of anything. upvote if you like any.
Hackers and Fishers
Haven't read but smells relevant to rorqual!
/u/hoperyto do you still use arrow keys to navigate in Emacs?
http://sci-hub.io/
Now the government will start sending decoy NSLs to ISPs with warrant canaries preemptively to camouflage the real gag order that will follow. The first NSL would trigger the warrant canary and render it useless against subsequent NSLs.
hip hip hurray!
The link you provided isn't up.
I think this should be an equivalent version of your link:
https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~yahel/papers/Enabling_Rural_connectivity_with_SDN.EECS-2012-201.pdf
The name of the ship on which the landing was attempted was "Just read the instructions". It is the name of one of the sentient vessels in Ian M Banks novels.
"I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing."
"First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. "
"Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist."
"The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked."
"For ages, men had conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power."
"But what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?
In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks."
"The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part."
road bike party 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhabgvIIXik
u might remember this video.
martyn ashton fell from a 3m high bar in September 2013 is now permanently paralysed from waist down. This happened in the middle of year long filming of road bike party 2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhI3CUDEWfU
This subreddit has been recycled from another one. Hence the name cannot change. However the title of the subreddit is our prerogative.
This is a carillon call to suggest the title for this subreddit. We play by reddit rules. The one with maximum votes becomes the title.
I now have enough karma to start new subreddit with name of choice if that be the request.