0xWTF

That works with a network. But as the period of disconnection grows, the uncertainty grows.

There's a term I saw all over someone's Google calendar schedule, pre-pandemic "DNS without asking". Now I realize it means "Do not schedule without asking" but my mind thought "Domain Name Service without asking" ... how in the hell would you do that?

I guess this is similar: how do you make trustworthy decisions that seem to inherently depend on the network, in the absence of a network? Before the internet, we had phonebooks instead of DNS, and we had cash instead of cards. Did the phonebook have every number? No. Was every piece of cash not counterfeit? No. But it's "good enough". Portable reference sources and tokens. The references are issued periodically and the tokens have evidence of exhaustion, their decay over time. A dog-eared dollar with a bunch of phone numbers on it, half-torn ... the merchant doesn't have to accept it.

How do you do these things digitally? Periodic issue seems pretty straightforward ... if you have a network. Token issuance, similarly, needs at least occasional communication with other nodes in the network.

So there's a local dwell capability.

Is this part of the same reaction we saw with Denmark starting to have emergency stores within 50 km of every Dane? Is this motivated by a need to prepare for war?

Can we get a reset on the state actors while we're at it? Because I'm sure there are a number of countries who can't infiltrate 2025 FAANG, but could infiltrate 2015 FAANG, and any start-up is going to be dealing with scaling and will have vulnerabilities that rhyme with 2015 FAANG.

I was about to ridicule this, but then I thought about it. My wife is in a skilled trade in SV, and that actually sounds about right. She has nothing to do with software, but probably earns, dollar/hour, about the same as a mid-tier L6 SWE at Google. I do R&D program management, government though, so the conversion to quality of life is kinda weird. Most people would see our house and assume I'm a director.

Anyone who has downloaded raw data from an unencrypted weather satellite can appreciate how crazy familiar territory can look when a bit of rotation and skew is applied. Imagine a satellite over the Southern Ocean looking southeast across Madagascar where North is in the lower right corner of the image and the satellite is only 5 degrees above the horizon.

My general experience with things like this from Google is to assume that this is at least one big step behind what they're doing now internally. Taking a position on how useful one finds this today effectively insulates from thinking more seriously about what could be done. If taken from a perspective of "what hints are laying around in this blog post or scientific articles about what's possible?" it's probably more effective use of time if you're going to invest time in reading it.

As an example, as you're reading it, try posing a few relevant counterfactuals.

> consultation

consolation

Tangent inbound: your comment is a great example of my rule that whenever you read or hear the word "just", you should think hard about what that means. My wife told me to "just build a retaining wall." That word, "just" does a lot of work in our society.

In case you haven't contemplated this logistics challenge before: the key is you need to stock shelf-stable products in these stores and at some point in their shelf life, transfer them out to other stores for actual consumption and back fill the emergency stores with fresh lots of new shelf stable products. You're just buying more shelf-stable supply once and then managing the transit through the supply chain with speed bump before the last mile.

It would be nice if the totals included total power produced by the selected subset.

How do I get them as ringtones?

This concept of deploying unreviewed vibe code strikes me as very similar to using a fallen log as a bridge to cross a ravine. Yes, it works, until the day it doesn't. And that day is likely to be much sooner than if it had been a concrete-reinforced steel design signed out by a PE.

FFS, I'm a physician and I had to look up that the acronym. Have mercy on people: NMIBC = non-muscle invasive bladder cancer.

Recent, high level overview of their position: https://openai.com/index/preparing-for-future-ai-capabilitie...

I'm on the investor side these days and this seems consistent with what I'm seeing. Aside from the "Oooh, AI, defense tech, yada yada" part of the article, I think the real estate angle is interesting in the context of the larger demographic trends (the US population pyramid has a wasp waist around Gen X, ref (1)) I kind of wonder what the shift will look like when the 40-50 crowd in the Valley retires over the next 10-20 years. Will they be replaced or will the housing prices come down?

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

As a DoD employee, it would be amazing if more companies took this seriously (I'm looking at you health tech bros).

deviation's ADHD has not read The Bitter Lesson

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

SV only started looking like a service-based economy, from a taxation perspective, after IRC section 174 changes came into effect.

> You can trivially prove this yourself.

Given the long list of dead philosophers of mind, if you have a trivial proof, would you mind providing a link?

Whenever I hear a critique of the US academy I'm reminded of Rodney Dangerfield and Sam Kinison's bit in Back to School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeeL-U7cbpE

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've read (I believe on this very forum though I can't find the link, but also see 1, 2, and 3) that the European universities are often closely aligned with local industries. A challenge here in the US: outside Silicon Valley, what are the manufacturing industries in the US cities with universities? What are the major industries in Kansas City? Are those companies funding research at UMKC? What are the major industries in Dallas? Are those companies funding research at Southwestern?

Ronny Chieng actually breaks down the larger problem quite nicely: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i1Hi_hacvN4

So now we do in fact have an incredible university system supported in part by a mess of underskilled labor in fly-over states that dropped out of college after saddling themselves with significant educational debt.

Wildly, the one industry that is a major economic driver in most cities is healthcare, which is a pretty dead-end industry in terms of economic output, that is, outside of certain world-reknowned institutions like the Mayo Clinic, healthcare doesn't really generate a significant exportable commodity.

(1) https://education.ec.europa.eu/education-levels/higher-educa...

(2) https://www.jstor.org/stable/24118541

(3) https://sciencebusiness.net/news/universities/deepening-coll...

I think the current subtrends of things like a resurgence of interest in mechanical watches, fountain pens, steampunk, etc, are sort of a large excursion on a dampening social problem: that technology is too far beyond our comprehension.

Can you even even tell what network stack got you this packet?

How about the protocols that got it from the network to your screen?

How about the quantum mechanics of the phosphors that pushed out the photons?

There are certainly techno-luddites/visionaries who are running their own email servers, but it's a pretty hostile environment for personal email servers. Ignoring the spam, just getting the existing big boys to trust you can be humiliating exercise in futility.

Can I get by without Excel? Sure. Google Sheets? Sure. No spreadsheet at all? Gonna be hard.

I first found this site via photo.net back in the 90s or perhaps early 2000s. I had recently gotten my BS in Physics and happened to be a photography buff. I took a day in the summer at my parents' house and just read it. Digital wasn't a thing yet so frames of film were precious. He clearly explained the EV system and everything suddenly just clicked. I took hand written notes in an A5 notebook, which became the foundation of a lifelong habit of journaling.

Just clarifying for thread (pretty sure OP understands) it's not the domain name that's sketchy, it's the page style.

Came here to ask about the Aussie RDTI. So, if I spend $10M on R&D and make $5M, what's the difference between US and Aussie net?

I'll just leave this here

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

Can I float an adjacent model? Classes are nouns, functions are verbs.

Gave a Waymo engineer a ride in my FSD Tesla around the Bay recently. The conversation was very illuminating. It seems to me there should be pretty clear corollaries in more traditional engineering markets. Does Black and Veatch take out E&O insurance? Did John McShain take out E&O for the Pentagon? Did Tishman take out E&O on the World Trade Center? Did the University of California take out E&O on the Manhattan Project? Does Boeing or Lockheed take out E&O on aircraft?

I would welcome folks thoughts on how this applies to medicine and war, two aspects of life where 'the enemy gets a vote' and the consequences are high.

In medicine, I see the LLMs as a pretty good net outcome. For war, I see this as potentially catastrophic. We need more Stanislav Petrovs, fewer Charles Forbins and his Colossus.

Link to the actual abstract on PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40097094/

The article may not be consistent with what I'm hearing from doctors using ambient dictation, which admittedly fits a slightly different niche than the author's use case, but points to their final prediction that the paths to adoption will be complicated.

A number of the docs I'm working with describe using ambient dictation as a game changer. Using the OODA loop analogy of the author: they are tightening the full OODA loop by deferring documentation to the end of the day. Historically this was a disaster because they'd forget the first patient by the end of the day. Now, the first patient's automatically dictated note is perhaps wrong but rich with details the spark sufficient remembrance.

Of course MBAs will use this to further crush physicians with additional workload, but for a time, it may help.