SuoDuanDao

I'm currently teaching Chinese high school students, and I don't buy it. There is certain content that's blocked here, but most of what's on the local tiktok is pretty trash either way because t's not the subjects, it's the format. You can try to surface more wholesome five-second videos but even if you succeed, they'll still be five-second videos.

Beyond a Free-for-all, ID-checked gates, or a sanitised platform there's a fourth option: you declare what you want less of and your own software enforces it against the platform's preferences.

Ads are everywhere. I really think the 'fight against advertising' needs more of an aiki bent than it has. Advertising is such a massive juggernaut, we have as much hope of stopping it as a naked person has of stopping a freight train whose operator doesn't slow down for suicides.

But that image assumes we need to stop the momentum of this industry cold. personally, I believe that a course correction of a few degrees would be enough. Even that takes massive leverage though. I'd love to know who else is building in this space and what their approach is.

The trouble with adblocking is that it causes discomfort to a powerful party without making any demands. We withhold attention at scale, but we never say what we'd accept in exchange for giving it back. The only thing the advertisers can do is escalate, and they own most of the spaces we operate in.

There probably is a bargain - however faustian - to be struck. Advertising optimises for money transferred immediately over long term positive-sum introductions. It's obvious why they do that, but adblocking could be the leverage needed to encourage something more long-term beneficial for all.

What I can't work out is who the counterparty even is. My own hope is that Google and Meta face a 'kodak moment' - with genuinely better advertising simply overtaking their business. What I'm unsure about is how advertising's equivalent of the digital camera finds buyers - plenty of us want to walk away from advertising, and it's possible to adopt something less mutually destructive as a user... but the free stuff advertising currently pays for is not so easily replaced. Anyone have an idea what disruption would even look like in that space?

That is a great point. We have such a 'bias for action' in popular culture, especially in places like Hacker News, that we overlook how much energy successful cultures have put into 'bias for restraint'.

I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?

This reminds me of 'friendzone' discussions - "if this guy keeps asking to date you when you've made it clear you're not interested, why talk to him at all?" -"Because he does all kinds of things for me that would be inconvenient to get elsewhere!"

I feel like there's a third way between 'regulate it' and 'stop using it'. Give the guy a reality check maybe. I heard the term 'make refusal legible rather than silent' and I think that applies to the situation very well, if Uber saw a more profitable - and less annoying - use of that space I'm sure they'd switch. Then again, I am working on an app that would do something like that so I'm probably biased towards seeing every problem with a matching shape.

I'm sapiosexual, so really hot and not all that clever can't co-occur from my perspective. But education is orthogonal to intelligence and really not a factor. I'd probably find e.g. an intelligent woman raised in a hunter-gatherer society more attractive than an equally intelligent woman educated in an academic field I don't respect.

10 000 hours is the number observed among elite performers (Olympic athletes, chess grandmasters, concert level musicians and the like) - I don't think most people complaining about the difficulty of contemporary dating are aiming to be in the top 1%.

I think you're onto something. It seems like thinking about 'meta-relationships' tends to depersonalize the individual interactions and devalue the individuals involved. It's as though successful relationships are a fitting problem, and looking at the macro environment strips out the individual quirks which optimize for one's own fit.

If that kind of thinking were helpful, I think we'd have evolved to have a very accurate guess as to what the majority of our preferred demographic finds attractive - but apart from psychopaths, most of us don't. the optimal mating strategy doesn't actually seem to be to work to approach some generic ideal, but to be most authentically and extremely oneself, then filter out everyone who doesn't like that. It's intuitive why looking too seriously at averages distracts from that project.

why was this flagged?

Spending more to reduce recidivism is like insulating your house - if you think you can't afford it, you probably can't afford not to do it.

Canada's internet companies are basically crown corporations. Squashing competition doesn't help the consumer as much as you might imagine.

I'd guess there is still more interest in moving to London proper than space for additional housing within the city though.

I'd say Jo Zayner's the closest to Tesla due to the showpersonship and self-experimentation in public.

I wish I knew whether I was actually better at erotica than other genres or people are just more likely to pay for erotica. I suspect it's the latter...

didn't know that. Are they massive by European standards (significantly above 75 acres)? I'm sure they're small by American standards given the size of the landmass...

This field has its own version of Pascal's wager - if magic isn't real, knowing that puts one in a minority of people correct about the matter globally but only reduces social friction in a modern western society. If it is real, it has the potential for a Copernican-scale revolution in worldview. So it's a question worth taking seriously.

I suspect a Copernican revolution of that nature would only happen with some kind of innovation that's too big to be ignored, people have been publishing rigorous experiments on magic for decades and they're just too easy to ignore. I hope we can see an outflow of noetic science into noetic engineering.

as always, it depends on practices. Here's a pretty good presentation on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z75A_JMBx4&t=783s&pp=ygUbY2...

I think the comment about dutch farms was that they were getting along fine with high labour costs and small footprints.

direct to consumer seems like a huge growth field to me actually, there's much less need for a middle man (grocer) now that everyone can buy and sell via their preferred marketplace app.

Specifying technical books is interesting - my first book was fairly technical (though the spiritual theme which probably reduced the target market significantly) but my most successful books monetarily were far and away the erotica I wrote primarily for my own gratification. I know erotica's an active genre, but it's still a source of consternation that I get so much more reader interest for something so much easier and less meaningful.

At the end of the day, intermittent renewables and nuclear are both low-externality energy sources chasing the same public funding. Neither competes with high-externality energy sources except in rare situations, and since the public purse isn't infinite they're in competition with each other.

So it'll probably be a while. FWIW, I'm on the intermittent renewables camp, wish there was more civility in the debate, recognize the worst behavior comes from my side of the aisle and still think pro-nuclear arguments are their own worst enemies.

I don't have the numbers with me, but I've seen convincing discussions that it can work with some caveats. The main issue being that spot prices are extremely volatile, so it's possible for a player at the utility space to get very high prices for electricity for very short times. But daytime-pricing schemes, while they follow the general trends of this volatility, insulate the consumer from the worst of this volatility enough that simply arbitraging the difference probably won't pay for the wear on a Tesla. But a fleet of Teslas paying the same rates as the utilities could make it a profitable enterprise.

Reading between the lines of Tesla investor meetings it sounds as though they have the software but haven't implemented it because it would hurt their brand as a luxury good.

reasonable statement. I think of programming as a discipline with three core skills, those being choosing what problem to solve, writing a solution, and debugging the solution. I suppose it's the writing that's gotten a lot easier with the addition of GPT, debugging has gotten slightly easier, and choosing what to work on has gotten a lot more competition.

From that framework, debugging is the new code monkeying... anyone have thoughts on that analysis?

Batteries are currently following their own version of Moore's law, though they double in quality (or halve in price) every 48 instead of every 18 months. Of course, that isn't a trend that can continue forever, but it doesn't need too many more iterations to be the only game in town.

Well, yes. Permaculture seeks to adopt practices from the kind of long-running success stories you're describing. For historical reasons it does so much more with respect to paleolithic practices than bronze age ones, but there's nothing to permaculture which requires it.

Fewer, I'd assume? What I'm curious about is whether anyone has advice for people getting into programming now.

I agree, but I'm worried about where that leaves junior devs - what are the entry level jobs for coders in a post-LLM future?

It is a fair amount of work even with forest gardens (I grew up in a permaculture project that began a few years before I was born). I think the economics are only appealing to the rational actor if the labour displaces time spent in the gym rather than the office.

Which suits my lifestyle just fine, but if you don't enjoy gardening in your free time it's probably better to deliver for ubereats on a bicycle or something.

I'd really like a citation on the 'big ag has less environmental impact' claim.