aetherson

Clearly the workforce couldn't support a situation in which almost half of everyone was a manager, so...

But in fact they are changing over time -- this is an expectations treadmill. When you get something newer and better, it highlights the flaws in what you had before.

You will also be dismayed to hear that a 2011 iPhone is no longer state-of-the-art, and indeed can't run most modern apps.

Still nonsense.

Train stations and airports are where they are. Lots of them are quite close to downtowns. Others aren't. Nobody's changing their locations in existing large cities.

There are plenty of cities where the nearest airport is closer than the nearest long distance rail station. There are plenty of cities where they aren't.

I don't know which wealthy, western country you live in, but to be clear in the US Acela trains get up to 150 mph (241 kmh) -- admittedly in a short section, but with other sections that have a top speed of 135 mph (217 kmh). The entire route from Washington to New York has an average speed (including stops) of 90mph (140 kmh).

Should Acela be faster? Probably! But people should be clear-eyed about what the reality of the situation is.

I mean, the recent innovation in US air travel is that the TSA no longer adds hours to every flight. Like, is it maddening that we're curing a self-inflicted problem? Sure, of course it is. But the railfan community is also stuck in 2010. Every flight I've been on in the last 10 years I've walked through a metal detector, not a scanner, I've kept my shoes and belt on, my laptop in my bag. It's like 2000 all over again, except that now we have to pay a nominal fee every 5 years or whatever it is to use PreCheck.

Everyone should be mad that we dug this hole and then climbed out of it, but people shouldn't pretend that we're still in the hole.

There is a limited amount of computation that you can useful do in the absence of new input (like an LLM between prompts). If you do as much computation as you usefully can (with your current algorithmic limits) in a burst immediately when you receive a prompt, output, and then go into a sleep state, that seems obviously better than receive a prompt, output, and then do some of the computation that you can usefully do after your output.

I'm very confident that queries were not routed to human workers behind the API.

Possibly some other form of "make it seem more impressive than it is," but not that one.

It goes into public domain in the US in this case. In other countries it may remain copyrighted or already have been in public domain, depending on local laws.

In general, countries can't/don't enforce their laws outside of their territories, with lots of nuance and boundry cases.

There is zero chance that someone would "go after you" for, say, buying a copy of a Tintin book that was made without permission, in America. If you, say, wanted to publish a Tintin book and then export it to Europe, they might disallow it.

My wife and I both read them in our childhoods, and we bought them dor our kids a couple years ago and they really enjoyed them.

Bear in mind that lots of large, sophisticated shops have policies of not intervening when someone is blatantly shoplifting.

I think you're overestimating the appetite for confrontation that many shops have.

Not, again, that confrontation is impossible, just that it's not guaranteed.

You "guarantee" that? I think it's a possibility, but very far from universal.

You are never not going to have some people who are unemployed. Don't mistake that for the idea that the economy is demand-constrained. It's clearly not right now, and automation of Uber workers would certainly make someone unhappy, but it would also very clearly lead to economic growth and vastly more people being better off than worse off.

Unemployment is low, labor force participation is high. We do not currently have an excess of labor, and a good deal of the reason that we had inflation was that there was no pool of waiting labor to soak up money injected into the economy during covid -- so instead that money bid up prices.

The energy consumption of both crypto and AI are way overstated. Total energy budget of crypto is less than a percent of world electricity consumption (not energy consumption, electricity). And a ton of that electricity is particularly no-carbon.

AI is harder to get numbers for and obviously is a moving target, but plausibly half of the consumption that crypto is.

I don't see any real evidence that either AI or crypto have had "major negative impacts for society."

This is the classic expression of the fallacy that the value of something is based on the cost to create it from the seller, not the benefit it brings to the buyer.

They mean that you only need board position, you don't need the previous moves that led to that board position.

There are at least a couple of exceptions to that as far as I know.

We Built This City is fun forgettable pop music. Shiny Happy People was wretched from day one. Fight me.

I use Grubhub regularly, they almost always have their own drivers. For a few pizza places that had existing delivery services, they're just a front end onto the pizza place's delivery service.

May be regional. I'm in the Bay Area.

Does that matter very much? How much of DoorDash's revenue can possibly come from international travelers who want to use the same app they always do?

I assume that the $7T ask was to try to spend a lot of time in the news cycle when he wanted to be there. Obviously it was an impossible ask.

There is no real train station in San Francisco: you're insane if you think that the Caltrain station could move significant fractions of the traffic that SFO does. SFO is more convenient to a much larger percentage of the people who live in the area (sure, not the strict city limits of SF proper) than a hypothetical station in downtown SF would be.

Like, this is pure fantasy. It's just people who have some kind of weird identity built up out of "liking trains" ignoring the actual world.

I said, "there's about a 20-40 minute advantage to train stations" and you're like trying to go to bat for the idea that an intracity commuter station which is 12 minutes from the airport somehow disproves that.

And then there's San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans... there are plenty of cities that have airports that are very convenient to them, and train stations that aren't.

My point is if you have a substantial sized city that does not already have a large train station in its center, you aren't building a train station in its center, in the same way that if your city doesn't have an airport that you've built up around, you aren't going to build it. We're all at the mercy of history here, unless you're going to try to build a new planned community where there currently is only light population.

So you're saying first we should invent time travel. Sounds practical!

If you want to build a transit hub outside the city center and link it via subway, that's no easier or more convenient for a train station than for an airport.

Ah yes, the fake line of argument that for airplanes you have to drive an hour to get to the airport two hours before your flight, while in the case of trains, a powerful genie comes into your house, packs your suitcase and whisks you away in his powerful arms directly to your seat on the train 13.21 seconds prior to departure.

It's BS. In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens. You do not in fact need to get to airports hours in advance, and security theater in airports is still excruciating, but you can get PreCheck or Clear and cut the time way down. There is some time advantage to boarding trains, but it's on the order of 20-40 minutes, not hours.

Paris and London are only 213 miles apart! It's about 2/3rds the distance that SF is from LA, much less say SF to Seattle or NYC to Chicago. Rail travel works great in Europe because distances are small, density is high, and the cities grew up centered around rail infrastructure.

Wait until you find out how fast passenger jets are.

People aren't idiots. They know what foods are healthy.

A lot of people struggle with intense cravings for foods that they know to be unhealthy. These cravings stack up against their willpower and sometimes overcome that willpower and they eat in ways that they know are unhealthy.

If the cravings are less intense, willpower wins more often, cravings win less often.

I think that you will indeed see that some people on ozempic eat much the same mix of foods as before, but less so. But others will in fact change their dietary mix. And I'm pretty sure that the empirical evidence supports me on this.

It does at least potentially address that.

Ozempic's mechanism of action is not "ramp up your metabolism" or "make you absorb fewer calories from food." It's "make the desire to eat less intense, making it easier to remain on a diet plan." That diet plan could be, "eat exactly the same things but less of them," but it will often be, "cut out unhealthy snacks" or whatever.

Hot take: slavery was actually always awful.