307 karma · joined March 4, 2024
Here is one empirical data point.
I switched over to Firefox this morning and will advocate for it.
I've considered it for a while, but I never felt motivated to make the switch. It took me a good half hour to set it up the way I like it.
1. Big words at the start - pretending to hack at a problem so big that just swinging the axe is a major undertaking
2. The prose slowly drifts to make less and less sense; words have no practical meaning anymore.
3. Simplistic images galore. Various plots via cellular automata and "pretty" images show things that have nothing to do with the topic and are only distant metaphors at best. Yet these images are the proof that it all "works."
4. A nothingburger by the end. Leaves you wondering, why did I read all this?
Every essay by Wolfram is the same.
---
The donkey, feeling unappreciated, approaches God with a heavy heart.
"Dear God," says the donkey, "why is it that all the other animals mock me, belittle me, and hold me in contempt?"
God listens patiently and replies, "My dear donkey, I understand your pain, but there's nothing I can do."
Surprised, the donkey responds, "But you are God! The all-powerful, creator of all things. Surely you can help?"
God smiles gently and says, "I may have created the world, but even I cannot change public opinion."
---
Matt Mullenweg might feel like God and might be among the most influential and richest people on the planet. But they won't be able to change public opinion, which is without a doubt against them.
I would advise stopping the madness before it is too late.
Sadly, instead of supporting open source with $5 million, they each will spend 10 million on lawyers.
The Shameful Defenestration of Tim
https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
A credit card balance during the grace period is not a debt - it is no different than paying by check - it is not more than a delay between a purchase being reflected on an account. That's all.
Only the balance after the grace period should be counted as a debt if we are using that term to talk about a population being more or less indebted than say X number of years ago etc.
A credit card balance is simply a form of bank account for large number of people.
I think that statement can't be true.
Detailed measurements exists for less than a hundred years - yet the WWA is cock sure this is the highest rainfall ever. It goes to the credibility.
Countless prior models were completely off, but this one is suddenly correct and needs to be treated as a reliable predictor.
The problem is that if you dare to question the accuracy, you are immediately labeled a "denier." The only acceptable answer is that no matter what the prediction is, if it is alarmist, it is correct.
I don't know about others, but I always float thousands on my balance and pay it off by the end of the month; the payment is all automatic. Often, for large sums, I pay it off online right away when I get home.
In my opinion, this is not debt—as long as you have the money, don't overspend, and pay it off within the grace period of 30 days, as long you are using the credit card as an intermediary for convenience and as a service that gives you various protections. There is benefit to the customer.
That is the main attraction of Pyhon.
To stay on the topic of drones, Skydio is an example of a US startup that produced drones in the US, and for some applications, it produced better drones than an established and sophisticated competitor. Is every component in Skydio manufactured in the US, very unlikely ...
I am no DJI hater, I have owned multiple of their drones and I think their products are awesome of extremely high quality. That being said, a SkyDio was light-years ahead of them when it came to high-speed object avoidance.
SkyDio, a US startup, entered the market producing drones with object avoidance so advanced that it was far beyond what DJI offered.
Their consumer pricing was quite competitive ~ 1000, the drone was by far the best in the market. Nothing was even remotely as good as a Skydio at high-speed object avoidance!
It seems like the US government became interested and probably funded them in some capacity, and with that, they exited the consumer domain. They only sell drones to governmental agencies now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skydio
> In March 2021, the company became a unicorn, becoming the first US company that both manufactures and sells its own drones to exceed $1 billion in value
Saying that that no one can compete with DJI is simply not true. You can't compete with these companies because each are probably heavily subsidized.
Drone technology, like chip technology is a national security issue.
Loan forgiveness ... in essence, a form of vote-buying ... vote for me, and we'll forgive your loan (aka someone else will pay the loan).
If there is a chance that, at some point, we forgive loans - why would the cost of education ever decrease?
Otherwise, you will be left scratching your head about the era the opinion is from.
Notably, the author has another post with a "recipe" to success (a recipe that they now believe to be outdated), again with no timestamp.
You can only figure out the date of that writing (2007) by looking at the comments
It was so satisfying to code up a solution where you knew you would get through it little by little.
https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/23/datasette-gunicorn/#be...
> transforming a tool of empowerment into an amplifier of existing disparities.
Which disparity are we talking about? That of non-coders vs coders?
It used to be that someone who did not know how to code had zero chance of writing any program that runs.
Enabling these people to write code is a massive empowerment unlike any we have seen before. Hundreds of millions of people who had no chance of writing working code before will be able to do so if they wish. That's a lot of people reaching for lots of ideas. I doubt that genius and insanely productive programmer, would be able to outcompete all these competitors that previously did not exist.
I don't think we fully comprehend what this will mean in the future - but I doubt it amplifies disparity.
... how authoritarianism shapes public discourse
It is well known that bacteria are necessary to digest food.
If you got the grant, you won; if you did not, you lost. Losing means you cannot hire graduate students you cannot perform your job at all!
Now consider that around 15% of grants get funded, and it takes about six months to determine whether you got that grant or not.
The desperate competition for money overshadows everything in science.
Science is often thought of and presented as huge leaps, when in reality, it is an iterative process that builds on small advances.
It feels like a religious talk.
The presentation consists of chunks of hard-to-digest, profound-sounding text followed by a supposedly informative picture with lots of blobs, then the whole pattern is repeated over and over.
But it never gets to the point. There is never an outcome, never a summary. It is always some sort of patterns and blobs that are supposedly explaining everything ... except nothing useful is ever communicated. You are supposed to "see" how the blobs are "everything..." a new kind of Science.
He cannot predict anything; he can not forecast anything; all he does is use Mathematica to generate multiplots of symmetric little blobs and then suggests that those blobs somehow explain something that currently exists
I find these Wolfram blogs a massive waste of time.
They are boring to the extreme.
It states that while it is true that people exposed to the sun get skin cancers more often, their outcomes are also usually far better.
So are their outcomes to all other forms of cancer. Thus, overall, the benefits are substantial.
This is not to say you should go out and lay in the sun for hours and get your skin dark brown - instead, it is about not being afraid of normal and regular sun exposure. It is good for you.
Things that mildly damage cells are not necessarily bad for you. They trigger apoptosis, a renewal of these cells. This is why fasting is beneficial, why exercise is beneficial, and why challenging your cells is beneficial. Many of the famous mud and water treatments that help arthritis have waters that are ever so slightly radioactive (well within safe limits but far higher than normal background radiation) for example.
You get new and more resilient, and better cells.
as humans moved northward, the exposure to sun was so important that even their skin lost it protective pigmentation to allow more sun to reach the body
we are not even remotely close to understanding all the beneficial processes that take place when the sun hits skin
thinking that exposure to sun is like exposure to acid shows a complete disconnect from reality,
I would urge you to read up on this a lot more - you will find that people who spend time outdoors in the sun are healthier, happier, and live longer. Their outcomes when facing all kinds of cancers are far, far better.
leaking all SSNs makes relying on SSNs as authentication unfeasible,
the only way to stop SSNs being authentication token is to give everyone access to them, but yes that can cause short term troubles
The concept of having SSN is de facto wrong, there are situations where one needs to identify oneself unambiguously
I went to another country, and what I found is that to get a monthly bus pass I had to fill out a form that asked for:
Full Name + Gender + Date of birth + Place of birth + Mother's Maiden name + Mother's DOB + Mother's place of birth
(and so on) I forgot the exact details, but it was ludicrously intrusive. Mother's maiden name? Really??? I did not even know some of that info and filled it out with educated guesses. It is not like they were able to check ...
all that information is just an unreliable SSN
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs
2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work
> Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...