andriesm

Definitely gonna try it out, I've been frustrated with Gmail's inability to sub-segment it's main categories of smart labels in a good way, and it's a long term battle to not miss important emails amid the clutter of time waster stuff. Tried another paid for client "mimestream" which delivers a real gmail desktop app experience, but doesn't really address this.

Me a little too, it's not usual that we think about "increasing safety" as delivering tangible benefits.

Of course I come down on the other side of the debate when it comes to safety - the machines are still quite far away from murdering us all, we should still be full throttle on pushing the capabilities if we want to do the most good.

Ib my younger days I used to get all excitef about new scientific breakthroughs. After decades I know better and apply the heuristic of disregard whenever I come across the hidden punch-line "In mice".

It really is a very good metric for preventing you to get sucked into hype that will 99.99 percent of the time result in exactly zero real world impact 10 years later.

Banning plastic straws is one of the lowest effectiveness and most absurd ideas ever. Plus those paper straws are really bad for your health and the contain "forever chemicals". I'm sorry for the inflammatory comment but anyone who advocates for banning plastic straws in America is wasting time on environmentalism theatre.

Making the strong claim that this infrastructure was for a fact built by a government is not merited, unless you have some compelling evidence?

I am also not sure if the article's claim is merited - it sounds a little too convenient and I struggle to find the watertight case for it in the article. It could be a case of us simply not knowing either way, and thus should avoid making a strong claim for either A or not(A).

I'm always amused by how much people value wealth differences above absolute measures of poverty. I am more a fan of, let's increase wealth inequality even more if it means we can raise the bottom. In America very few people die of starvation, but Americans complain bitterly about the fact that others have it so much better than the people at the bottom. I have been in many truly poor places where people would give anything to trade their miserable starvation at the door lives for that inequality that poor Americans have to endure.

Why is it so important to you as a goal, to not give money to Joe Rogan?

What I find interesting, was the starting assumption that serious societal problems need to be solved centrally, at the top, by a govermental-type body like a "town council".

This article shows why "rule by committee" is such a unresponsive way to solve real world problems.

The bigger the committee, the higher the ratio of useless distractions to merit-worthy ideas.

Big committees surface many more, and broader, considerations. But doesn't do much in terms of vetting for quality.

The more collective (and thus diffuse) responsibility becomes when you scale up to large committees with many members, the worse it gets at filtering for quality.

Good ideas routinely get thrown out along with bad ideas at these committees, in fact the few good ideas often get drowned out by the bad ones.

Sometimes you really just need someone in the committee to say "screw this" and pick up their crossbow and show that it works, by actually DOING it.

It's often times the disaffected splinter factions on the edges of these large committees that provide the pivotal breakthroughs - in my experience.

For me the most practical way to realize such interactive programing, in ways that solve real world problems for me, with visual interfaces, is to use jupyter notebooks.

You just have to bind sliders to variables, and tie your outputs to graphical plots and there you go.

The big challenge is to come up with a large library of pre-built canonical graphical representations for different programming abstractions and being able to wire them seamlessly together.

Cutting off one of your two perfectly functional legs, to match your mental image of having one leg - that is objectively crazy. You can rationalise and claim this makes that person happy. Maybe it does, but that would be indicative of a very serious mental disorder. Rather treat the mental disorder than cut off the leg, is what I propose?

exactly. It works well for 95 percent, but the other 5% sees the propaganda for what it really is - lies, dishonesty and fake news.

Nicotine self medicates for a bunch of reasons. It may even be beneficial for certain neurodegenerative conditions. While the answer is, let people use "real" medicines, or safer forms, remember people themselves know all the reasons why something like a cigarette is the best choice for them personally, much better than some overall one-size-fits-all prohibition for everyone. I'm pretty sick of some people trying to control others. If you don't like smoking don't smoke. If you fear the health consequences, don't smoke, even warn others. But who are you to control what others do with their bodies? (enter public healthcare - which is why socialised anything is incompatible with individual liberty)

It's nr 2 variant is a lot less pleasant apparently, not to mention how it would affect dating prospects and such, so it's rather sad that science has no solution for these and many other viruses. What I don't understand as a lay person is the extremely slow rate of progress against viruses like these - imagine computing as a field progressed as slowly as this...

exactly. Reason is, businesses that engage in lots of inefficiencies get outcompeted, and if the inefficiencies/mistakes are egregious they go out of business. Government has the ultimate monopoly, where the only remedy available for most "shareholders" is to vote out the "CEO" and "directors" once every couple of years. In the private market, you can take your business to a competitor if you don't like how one company treats you. Or as a shareholder you can sell your shares in company A and buy company B instead. The only real remedy against government incompetence is to emigrate, and then you find yourself in a new one that also acts like it's the only game in town for it's citizens - because it is.

I suspect it comes down to the difference between the two questions (a) Whether SSRI"s a/d meds work (b) Why/How they work.

Clearly these things help many people. But not everyone and may even be harmful in some cases. Why, now that we don't seem to have really high quality answers on.

In promotional materials they often show pictures of the laptops without the notch.

If the notch is such an obvious eye-sore, why aren't they abondoning it?

I don't just want to live, I want to understand why many things still seem to operate so irrationally in terms of cost. vs. value received.

I actually appreciated the unique perspective, and the experience, and don't care that it is not statistically validated, since the point is to stimulate thinking.

It suggests a few aspects to look into - an overly litigious society, crappy systems, an insulation of patients and doctors from the costs of treatments by insurance intermediatories etc...

Uhm why are you trying to get your cat addicted to something ;-) you drug pushers you!

I don't know. The Guardian has published misleading stories before. It's very possible that this is in fact a true and accurate summation of the situation. But I also cannot be sure that this is tainted by some propagandistic motives, or misunderstanding of the situation. I don't have an opinion either way. I just wish I could trust newspapers and take them at their word.

Why are they so desperate to make the point that entrepreneurs aren't responsible for their successes?

Let's play a game of pretend, none of us are responsible for our lives, everything is luck. And those who do better than others don't deserve it, so let's strike them down with taxes and punitive measures.

Yes thinking that good CEOs would be cheap in a free market shows you have essentially ZERO understanding of basic economics, just like the author who thinks there is a specific ratio that CEO pay is not allowed to be relative to the average employee, which is obviously weighed by the large number of lower level employees.

The fact that Tim Cook ONLY costs 1447 times what an average employee costs is a real bargain.

There are 10s of 1000s of average employees. There was effectively only one Steve Jobs until Tim Cook proved he could be Tim Cook, and as a shareholder I would not want you to try and nickle&dime the guy who has created so much value for shareholders.

Yes, the CEO is the chief value creator because ultimately he decides who remains at Apple, he sets the overall strategy and HE has to take full and final responsibility in front of shareholders for all results good or bad.

Mr Middle Manager or Mr Programmer is not going to be called in by the board to explain any problems with profits or growth. Mr Programmer is important but there are more people that can do his job as well as him, as there are people who have a proven track record running an Apple or similar.

Shareholders that buy Apple stock do so at least in part because Tim Cook is the CEO. Sure I first look at the business fundamentals and the valuation, but Tim Cook's proven track record is a major part.

Go watch Buffet interviews on YouTube to hear how highly he rates Tim Cook.

I've never heard Warren Argue that Tim is overpaid, and yet Warren is a very large shareholder.

It's easy for people with very little stake in Apple to have strong opinions about what the Apple CEO should be paid.

If shareholders buy Apple stock in part because Tim Cook is the CEO and not some new unproven person of dubious merit, how much is he worth paying? A lot

Well they fired the previous competent CEO for political reasons. If politics and what you do in your private time is more important than competence, then this is what you get. Well deserved. FireFox getting it what it deserves. If you hire CEOs based on being women or having nice private beliefs, instead of competence you can eat failure all day long as far as I'm concerned.

I agree - most people should buy low cost index funds but that is not enough - they have to space it out as monthly contributions over many years.

If you put all your money in at thr wrong moment, like say the Nasdaq in 99 then you waited 13 years just to break even.

But if you bought monthly you would have done very well because you averaged into the market.

The alternative is if you really understand valuations, diversification, risk and market psychology, like I do, then you can consistently beat the market. Most people cannot and most people you pay fees to do it on your behalf won't.

You could consider buying berkshire hathaway instead of a stock market index.... assuming the lead investors don't die too soon.

No it can be skill. Was Warren Buffet and Charlie munger just lucky, year after year? Was Michael Burry of the Big Short just lucky to short the mortgage backed securities market, no he also side stepped the dot com crash and bought value stocks, recently he had very nice shorts on Kathy Woods ARKK... clearly he isn't just lucky, he has skill. I used to think I have skill yet my results were random for about a decade, then I grew a lot emotionally and in wisdom/perspective, and now I too beat the market average in both return and risk.

I wonder if a big part of the allleged theft from the little guy isn't due to dishonest CPI statistics that manipulate officially reported inflation to be lower than the cost of living increases most people experience.

Also perhaps fractional reserve banking does create the issue thatp those who can borrow money and buy assers have an advantage over those at the bottom who strugglle to buy assets and cannot borrow.

I am certainly a fan of modern day capitalism compared to socialist redistribution, but a lot can maybe be fixed with "honest" money of some sort that is not easy to inflate at will. (Algorithmic money perhaps like a carefully designed crypto or some variation of gold backing)

The challenge with honest money, is you cannot really control monetary policy (the free market will set interest rates) , but the benefit is, nobody can debase it too easily.

i. e. no bailing out wallstreet during recessions, but also if you gonna bailout consumers with stimmies they will pay for it later in higher taxes.

I'm very interested in Charter cities/special economic zones/free cities...

I find it interesting how local populations view these as a threat and an attack on them.

Which of course is their right. But these countries like this particular example of Honduras is not doing well on quality of life or economic measures, and a major reason why they cannot attract foreign investment is because of their policies and legal/business frameworks.

Creating such a small exception area with its own independent rules, allows for experiments. Such experiments would allow one to test if a charter city really brings enough inbound capital and business activity into your country to justify the giving up of full control over it.

I mean, is democratic control over every last inch of your country really all that valuable when so much of your population suffers in poverty?

After decades of suffering, maybe it is time to try something new, to do a small scale project and see if there are large economic benefits to enabling free charter cities to operate with a relatively high level of freedom?

Should certain favored religions be taught in a preferntial light at state funded schools? If not, why should certain preferred political ideologies be taught at state funded schools. Critical race theory is always one sided, its always about teaching white people not to be racist towards black people, it's never the reverse. Clearly one sided, racist, and deeply politically one-sided too. Don't need schools to take sides on politics or religion.

Reading between the lines to read race into a law where race is absent seems to me to be racism.

The whole point of laws is, they should make sense when you reverse race or leave out race completely.

And this is why critical race theory is cancer... its always one sided, victims are always darker and perpetrators are always lighter shades.

Operation fear is ticking along nicely

No I think the real insight is that production systems benefit from professional log monitoring tools more and dev environments benefit from real time light-weight on-demand immediacy of tailing.

He is increasing our understanding and awareness and warning us of the trap of tailing production systems because we get so used to doing it in dev.