NickM

Judging from the photo, this chair looks like it has the same problem.

I can't for the life of me figure out how or why anyone considers these chairs to be comfortable. Maybe my back just has a weird shape or something, but these chairs seem to literally fight to keep you from sitting up straight with a healthy posture. And yet, everyone seems to love them. It feels like some sort of bizarre conspiracy.

To be clear, this is not just my initial impressions. Everyone loves these name-brand luxury chairs so much that I've owned three of them over the last ten years (a Mirra, an Embody, and a Humanscale Freedom), because I keep thinking maybe I just need a different model, or maybe I haven't figured out how to adjust the damn things properly. They all feel well-built and high quality, but they all feel more and more uncomfortable the longer I sit in them, and I can't find a way to use them that doesn't seem to cause progressively worse back and neck problems. I can't figure out where the disconnect is happening.

This being a real-world situation, it should be possible to figure out what's really going on, which is what California seems to be doing. No reason to make unwarranted assumptions either way in the mean time.

To be fair, this was a worse problem prior to Obamacare. At least now we have the exchanges, and companies can't deny you coverage for preexisting conditions. I agree with what you're saying, and the current system certainly has big problems, I just don't think you can blame Obama for that.

That said, China - and most of the world - is on an exponential growth curve for renewables right now. It will take a long time for the world to switch over to EVs, so we're better off starting now, regardless of the current emission profiles for electricity generation.

It's virtually impossible to measure something like that of course, but the WHO estimates about seven million premature deaths occur per year due to air pollution, and certainly some portion of that pollution comes from electricity generation. With the enormous amount of power being sucked up by cryptocurrencies, it's not unreasonable to think that they're directly causing some non-insignificant amount of sickness and death.

Here's a better study from the NHTSA that measures the safety impact of Tesla's autopilot features. They found that Tesla vehicle crash rates dropped by almost 40 percent for cars equipped with autopilot: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF

The question is, do the costs and downsides of cryptocurrencies outweigh the benefits of not having to trust a third-party intermediary? The author is arguing no, and for the overwhelming majority of real-world cases, I would tend to agree.

And plenty of people still seek roommates in these areas; lower housing costs also tend to correlate with lower wages and general cost of living, so it doesn't mean everyone is going to automatically live alone just because you're not in SF or NYC.

Sure, if you're just looking at one job, then yeah someone else is going to come along and take it. But if enough people start feeling the same way as the author, there will be fewer qualified developers in the hiring pool for blockchain work. This will likely result in fewer companies and less work being done in the area, and more work being done on other technologies. (Other technologies that are more useful and beneficial to society, if you happen to agree with the author of this post.)

The electrical grid is already sized for peak usage, not average usage. Supercharger stations are also being sized for peak usage, and most of the stalls usually remain empty. Incorporating stationary storage cuts down on the costs incurred by both of these inefficiencies.

The people who keep buying into BTC because they think it's fundamentally more useful than fiat currency are in a very small minority. Most of the people buying BTC are viewing it as a speculative investment, but the only reason they're buying it as an investment is because it keeps going up, and the only reason it keeps going up is because people keep investing in it. If it starts going down for some reason, even a little bit, the positive feedback loop could easily switch to a negative one and the bubble will pop. All the investors will start selling at once to try and reap their profits before it falls further.

Also, part of the reason the bubble has gone on for so long is that historically it's been difficult to short BTC. This may change with the advent of Bitcoin futures markets....

Sometimes this is certainly true, but I think when it comes to abstraction layers, people tend to overestimate the benefits and underestimate the costs. Lately I've been thinking a lot about Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions.

20 years ago we had native UI toolkits that were fast and responsive, relatively simple to program against, and yielded a common design language that was shared across all the apps on a given OS. Now we have monstrosities like Electron that are bulky and slow, yield non-native UIs across the board, and require programmers to understand a whole mess of technologies and frameworks to use effectively.

I mean, sure, now you don't have to rewrite your web code to build a desktop app, but don't get me started on the utter quagmire that is modern web development. These days it feels like software development has an infection, and instead of carving out the infection and letting it heal, we just keep piling more and more bandaids on top of it.

I'm not second guessing human nature, just saying people do crazy things all the time. The vast, vast majority of people are not suicide bombers, for example, but it still happens sometimes. It doesn't matter how much collective responsibility we have; eventually you may just end up with a brilliant programmer with schizophrenia or something who writes an AI in his basement and unleashes it on the world.

I'm also certainly not resigning myself to catastrophe. There are probably ways to prevent or mitigate the negative impact of AI, like the one being suggested in the original article, for instance. I would hardly consider myself a cynic, but forgive me if I'm skeptical of the idea that every human in the world can somehow agree to never do anything that might create a dangerous AI. If it can happen, it eventually will happen.

Imagine there's a big red "end the world" button that anyone on the planet can push. No matter how idealistic and utopian your views are, do you really trust that there's not a single person out of 7 billion people that might push the button? That is the kind of situation I worry we may face once people figure out how to create strong AI.

Well, suppose all the people who want to be green go ahead and cut back to one car, go vegetarian, live in a smaller house, etc. etc. Maybe if everyone is really dedicated, we could all cut our emissions in half. So then what? We're still all emitting way more CO2 than the planet can absorb; climate change would still happen, it'd just be happening a bit more slowly.

We're not going to realistically solve this problem by all making personal sacrifices, because even in the best case, where everyone chips in, it's only enough to slow the bleeding. If we really want to truly solve this mess, we need to promote truly sustainable technologies that scale well and appeal to everyone.

Don't put solar panels on your house out of a personal sense of guilt about your own emissions, put them on your house because it grows the market for solar, stimulates research into better panels, and helps push forward the economies of scale that are needed to make renewables cost competitive with fossil fuels. Don't buy an electric car because you want to pollute less, buy an electric car because you want to fund the continued technological improvements of electric cars in general.

We're all focusing way too much on merely slowing down the death of the planet when we should be focusing on fixing the problem altogether. Don't aim for a slower death, aim for a faster transition to carbon-neutral. If we all feel that the planet is doomed anyway, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it's a lot harder to motivate ourselves to try and fix a problem that feels unfixable.

Even people who care nothing for the irreplaceable beauty of nature ought to consider how much measurable economic value we risk destroying in the name of short-term profits. Of course (as the podcast explores) it's a complicated equation, but still a very compelling one.

But does that mean it was wrong of me to create this documentary? Not necessarily. If people watch my film and take action to reduce worldwide emissions, it's likely to cancel out the carbon cost of making the film in the first place.

One could argue that having fewer people on earth would still be a good thing because it would give us more time to solve the real problem of reducing CO2 per person; but it would also mean we'd have fewer scientists and engineers working to develop the sustainable technology needed to solve our problems. It's not clear if fewer people would lead to a better or worse end result, or if it would just get us to the same place more slowly.

Exercises are great and all, but once I try to go past exercises, I start getting lost in layers of monad transformers, and I struggle to figure out the "right" way to do anything. It just feels like there are all these layers of abstraction and complexity that are required for even simple applications, and I can't seem to reach the point where it all clicks for me and becomes manageable.

Reading the TOC and chapter notes for that book, I'm not convinced it'll help me. Even the "final project" at the end of the book is described as "a little weird, but small". I don't need more weird, small examples, I need a full-fledged application! I've tried picking out random Haskell OSS apps and studying them, but without newbie-friendly documentation to walk me through the code, I find it very hard to follow what's happening....

But this doesn't mean the situation is hopeless! Renewables are quickly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. Battery prices are falling rapidly, enabling cheaper electric cars, as well as cost-effective stationary storage facilities. There are startups that are trying to make plant-based meat substitutes that taste better than real meat and cost less. These are all scalable solutions; even someone who cares nothing for the planet would rather have lower energy costs, or a sexier car, or a cheaper, tastier burger. if we want long-term sustainability, we have to build and promote these kinds of alternatives.

If you want to make a difference, don't worry about what your immediate, personal impact to the environment is: one person's impact is negligible. Worry about what sorts of technological development you're funding.

Or worry about what sort of politicians you're supporting. If all the people who bought a Prius in the last ten years had bought a cheaper non-hybrid, and instead spent that extra money lobbying for better emissions standards, I bet you that would have made a way bigger difference in the end.

Instead of looking at the situation through the lens of "Tesla vs other car companies", let's take a step back and look at the battle of "electric vs gasoline". The better EVs do, the more charging infrastructure gets built, and the more receptive people are to buying EVs in general. These kinds of effects disproportionately help Tesla; their whole business is electric cars, whereas EVs are only a tiny slice of the pie for every other established car company.

Because there is so much room for growth in the EV market, we're also not necessarily dealing with a zero-sum game right now. Helping other companies sell more electric cars does not necessarily mean Tesla will suffer reduced demand; it may actually have the opposite effect. Even simple lack of awareness is still a big obstacle for EVs: https://electrek.co/2017/01/03/electric-vehicle-adoption-awa...

In practice though, it's not uncommon for multiple machines to fail at once: maybe you lose power to a rack, or a network switch dies. In this case your partitioning scheme really does matter if you want to minimize the odds of data loss. Using a smaller number of larger partitions can decrease the odds of data loss (though, at the expense of losing a larger amount of data if/when you do lose all N replicas of a partition).

Using many smaller partitions can indeed speed recovery, and sometimes this is the right tradeoff to make. But, suppose any amount of data loss means you have to take your cluster offline and rebuild your entire dataset from scratch: in this case, you may be better off with a small number of partitions per node.

http://web.stanford.edu/~skatti/pubs/usenix13-copysets.pdf

The authors basically try to determine "if all data is replicated to N nodes, how can we minimize the probability of data loss when a random N nodes go down at once?" There are some really interesting tradeoffs that arise in the process of answering that question.