atticora

The social status of officers has fallen, causing the competition for those jobs to decrease, resulting in selection from a smaller, less capable pool of candidates. And incrementally reverting to the population intelligence norm.

I am very impressed by the engineering and design of my Bambu Labs printer. To me that outweighs a large number of stories about ballpoint pens. I've bought far less impressive machines from China too of course. But from here it looks like there are many industries where their actual delivered capabilities are at least as good and sometimes better than anything I can buy elsewhere.

DJI is another such example, and both companies clearly reflect technology with military applications. China does have the capability for leading edge tech. Whether their social system exploits it effectively is another question.

Deterministic systems, or at least highly predictable ones, can arise for non-deterministic components, as for example the Boltzmann equation demonstrates. Other examples include the models that we build of automata on machines made of matter made of non-deterministic particles.

I hope we never find out whether China's military is a paper tiger or not. It sounds like Xi doesn't know either.

Select "all" on the graph to see the massive effect of the pandemic on freight prices. So what is driving the current much smaller spike? Houthi? If so that looks like a very effective way to make money on this commodity.

Strong agree. Which is why my emotional hurt should create no obligation from the homeless or anyone else. But it's still real even if we choose not to act on it, and it still changes behavior with economic consequences.

It works on embeddings, which are concepts. So it would at least be manipulating a similarly weighted network of concepts, though much shallower. It would be an answer from his literal domain of discourse. It would be evocative rather than authoritative.

> it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and induction as they relate to the recent advances in machine learning.

For a possibly not useless proxy, train an LLM on his oeuvre and ask it.

If visitors to our solar system are on a similar scale of a few grams we're unlikely to detect them soon. If they can fit von Neumann constructors in those and make them to survive planet fall we may be their offspring. If we could reach and seed potentially habitable planets that we wouldn't we? Shouldn't we?

> It's very literally not hurting you, your business, or the economy

It literally hurts me to see people destroying themselves with drugs. I think the duty of a homeless person to change anything in order to sooth my hurts is exactly equal to zero. But that doesn't make the hurt not exist.

And yeah, I avoid businesses in areas where I want to avoid that hurt, and I'm not alone in that.

And yeah, when you destroy yourself with drugs you're subtracting epsilon from the GNP, so it effects the economy.

So that's three lies in one sentence.

I support your right to destroy yourself and hate it when you do that.

Thermodynamics is a prime suspect. Higher equals colder. The increased cost of temperature regulation would account for some extra fuel burning. The data should be available to separate the effects.

> That's insanely impressive and almost scary level of adaptation

I fully agree while thinking the same thing about our immune system behavior. The insanely scary impressive thing is that this level of adaptation is the rule not the anomaly in biological systems.

To mangle a quote, in its majestic equality the norm forbids both liberals and conservatives alike to plagiarize. I'd guess that both groups do it at about equal rates. But since there are so few conservatives left in those jobs the risk has become highly asymmetrical across ideologies.

I'm not a fan of Gay or Harvard, but the slow hunt and take down by a pack of wolves on tangential issues just made things worse. Her replacement is likely to be a less accurate reflection of Harvard's current culture, and the difference amounts to stealth.

So much of the conservative coordination and amplification for this happened on X. There's a good argument that if Musk didn't buy Twitter, this didn't happen. Elon may never make a profit on the investment but he gets extraordinary leverage on the national conversation.

> The California Constitution ... prohibits the state from discriminating ... on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin ... This measure would provide that ... the state may use state moneys ... for purposes of increasing the life expectancy of, improving educational outcomes for, or lifting out of poverty specific groups based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations.-- https://legiscan.com/CA/text/ACA7/id/2827675

  * increasing life expectancy
  * improving educational outcomes
  * lifting out of poverty

None of these functions of government is hampered by providing them to any citizens that need them, regardless of their race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. It is unfair to exclude other people from these services on the basis of characteristics that they do not control.

Having recently become a sexagenarian I have managed to fully solve this problem by completely running out of fucks to give, and they don't seem to be filling up again. I have proof: I have switched from belts to suspenders. Old age is liberating.

The web is shaped by the needs of the indexes as the solar system is shaped by gravity.

> foss.heptapod.net is not well indexed in google/bing/duckduckgo search, so people find it harder to search for issues in the project.

SEO : WWW structure :: gravity : orbital mechanics

I recently bought an adjustable bed base which has USB ports on both sides. Each port has a bright blue light that illuminates the whole bedroom at night. I don't use them so covered both with black electrical tape. Problem solved. I've had the same problem with several desk lamps that lit up the world with that blue light even when turned off. I returned a couple of those immediately.

But I looked through the reviews for all of the above and the issue wasn't even mentioned. I thought I was one of the few weirdos that care. It's nice to read here that I'm not alone in this. But we have to complain enough to make the manufacturers care.

> How is it largesse when the government is doing it because it's in the public interest?

Public Choice Theory is the school of thought that the idea that government acts "because it's in the public interest" is "romantic and illusory":

  Public choice economists make the same assumption—that although people acting in the political marketplace have some concern for others, their main motive, whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists, or bureaucrats, is self-interest. In Buchanan's words the theory "replaces... romantic and illusory... notions about the workings of governments [with]... notions that embody more skepticism." -- https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicChoiceTheory.html

> It's demoralizing working on the subscription feature.

Agree. I loathe subscriptions and avoid them like Covid. But the code I write for the publishing industry is out there day and night, across continents, pitching subscriptions to readers thousands of times per minute. Begging them to renew for this limited time offer, prodding them through the checkout process.

It's not like a pacifist writing missile guidance software, but it's sad that this is where the money is.

I'm a happy Kagi subscriber but I find that I frequently have to switch to one of the competitors for a particular search. The problem is that when Kagi can't find a good match, it just says so and returns nothing. That's fine for some things, but other times I want any results, no matter how tenuously related, so that I can use their verbiage to iterate on my search to get some results. It's not a big problem since you can just prepend a `!g` etc,, but it makes a clean shift to Kagi a bit harder.

If double negatives cancelled regress we'd drown in mediocrity. (Failure is a feature.) If a double positive cancelled progress we would stand next to the giants rather than on their shoulders.

It has become a taboo to speak of group differences in intelligence, as this article bravely does. Instead it has become more acceptable to assume that deviations from equality are due to power imbalances that arise from practices of oppression. Therefore a group with unequal success is assumed to be a result of the group's acquired characteristics, not their genetic ones. If they came from the same blank slate as the rest of us, how else to explain their success than by anti-social algorithms? And so antisemitism is justified by a seemingly kind taboo.

> I'm too busy burning my oxygen to figure it out

Your mitochondria are doing that so your brain doesn't have to spend attention on it. And its not very clear whether they are "you" or your symbiotes.

> In normal conversation I've got a part of my brain monitoring and thinking "no don't say that, you'll look weird"

I was born without one of those and have had to reverse engineer one by gauging the you-look-weird look in people's faces after I say stuff. That only happens like 68% of the time now. HN feedback has been good for calibration, thanks y'all.

It was disappointing to read that this is not due to Covid-19 acting as a black monolith to advance the evolution of the simians.

See also the 240Z restoration in progress by @mymechanics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B13vXFj37RI&list=PLN0SuqPcbL...

I'm in awe of the level of detail and the casual ability to just fabricate anything. And the large capacity for work.

Air gapping for network security, tree edition.

In this case I know the rancher and the processor, and they both can confirm that these cattle are purely grass fed. Since this was a dry year, that cost a painful amount of alfalfa in addition to forage, which contributed a lot to the price.

This is about the best life a stock animal can have. They are born and raised on the range. A couple of times in their life they are moved in a trailer from one section to another. And on the last day they go the processor and get put down very suddenly. So greater than 99.9% of their lives are spent on wild lands with little interference.

Here's another way buying in bulk is different: The rancher texted me a picture of the cow I was getting. Safeway doesn't do that.