dachris

It looks like the difference between the Boston Dynamics robots 2016 vs 2021

The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak

So 5 years of progress within a year.

The good thing is, with AI scraping everything today, it will be incorporated into the AI - so your content will continue to exist in the weights.

In that way, your thoughts will live on ...

My favorite: near the Bering strait you can see the distortion of the map - obviously ships go in straight lines on a sphere but in a curve on the map.

As you say, in moderation. That also applies to red meat, considering the adverse effects listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat

The compression is nice, you can fit very long (low-entropy ;-) messages in there - this one is 9k characters:

https://textarea.my/#7cGBAAAAAMMgzfmTHORVAQAAAAAAAADAuwE=

Very nice, the introduction to recursion in university (which was around that time of the year) was drawing a fractal Christmas tree

Writing this on a first-gen 13 DIY, so it's already a bit dated. I've already added additional RAM and swapped in a much bigger SSD (really underestimated how much space you need if you heavily use docker and VMs).

The 1st year was a bit bumpy with 4k monitors over a USB-C hub being somewhat flaky. Ever since a clean Ubuntu reinstall, I'm very happy, no complaints whatsoever.

Sure, it costs more, but the combo of perfectly running Linux, giving me the piece of mind of repairability and easy upgrades for me justifies a higher price.

On the other hand, I'm not willing to pay the kind of premium you have with Apple products, where for incremental steps in more RAM or SSD you pay a multiple of the off-the-shelf price of the added space.

Lots of normal people don't think it's fine.

Lots of parents limited their kids' TV (television, you know) time back in the day (mine sure did, thanks mum and dad, even though I didn't particularly approve of the restriction back then).

Now you have to limit smartphone (and tablet and PC and TV) time. Lots of parents do this already, CEOs are not alone.

Its sister tunnel - the Semmering Base Tunnel [0] - is scheduled to be completed in 2030. These two combined greatly reduce the travel time from Vienna to Graz and Klagenfurt (combined 1h 15m time saving).

You don't hear that much about great engineering projects today, yet it's still an incredible feat to build those.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel

Good to see that there's new episodes and they've still got their mojo - putting it on my list.

For the other non-native speakers wondering, "fly" means your trouser zipper.

He surely has his fly closed when cutting through the hype with reflection and pragmatism (without the extreme positions on both sides often seen).

You'd be surprised how many people run 'npm i' in their CI. I've seen this on multiple occasions.

'npm ci' is some mitigation, but doesn't protect against getting hit when running 'npm i(nstall)' during development.

Would an airtight container and liberal addition of dessicants help?

Really funny on a farm when you see young calves "kissing" i.e. stick their noses/mouths together and lick each other's noses.

The manual for a human body says several hours of exercise per day.

Children try to follow it, but it's being made hard for them, and by the time you're an adult most have learned to forget the natural instincts for movement and how much fun you can have doing physical exercise.

Not to give any ideas, but a likely outcome is a US-based fork that has the offending bias removed, with a "ministry of truth"-y name.

That's certainly not the only (and I'd also not put it as primary) reason for extending the lifespan.

Still, breaking one's hip in advanced age is often a death sentence as many people never get out of bed again.

When an old person breaks their hip around here, people say something along the lines of "we'd better hurry up for visiting them one last time".

This is fun - and really powerful.

In some way, multicellular lifeforms (like a cherry tree or a human) also have to contain a kind of formulation like this so that they result in the fractals of branches and blood vessels as well as the overall structure.

Really ironic that Britain left the EU, but is even further ahead down this road. British humour I guess.

Hopefully it doesn't get implemented, but obviously they could force OS providers to implement this in Android and iOS.

Power wants to stay in power.

In a healthy society, citizens should always be wary of those in power and keep them on their toes, because power corrupts (and attracts already problematic characters).

Not driveling when they get thrown some crumbs or empty phrases ("child safety", "terrorism").

It is, but cui bono. I know that local software companies in my city had meetings coordinating the local software dev wage level. There's no reason to assume something like this isn't going on at a larger scale too.

Yes, perfect AI content has multiple issues, that need to be addressed differently

- treating certain content in the same way that drugs are treated. Lots of countries are already moving towards age restrictions for social media.

- some kind of hardware-provided signatures for images and video, anything else must be assumed to be generated

Will be interesting for kids growing up - the peer pressure is now already very high to have smartphones, to be on Whatsapp, Instagram, TikTok, this will only get worse.

Maybe if I have kids I will found some Amish-like community with only 90's tech (only half joking).

I've also seen elderly people whose time was past (very old, bed-ridden, lost their partner) go into into what's basically hunger strike in the nursing home. They said "I'm not really hungry today", eating very little, getting thinner and thinner until the end.

It's now legal here, but family, religion and tradition can be obstacles to assisted dying.

In case you don't want to leave that way, you have to prepare ahead of time. There's different legal means in different countries, e.g. advance directive covers the case where you can't decide yourself anymore.

That, or the fast road to dictatorship. Escalate until you declare martial law, never to be revoked. The end.

The Ghorman massacre in the recently aired season 2 of Star Wars Andor is the playbook version of this.

I don't think the US is there yet, but the direction seems about right. As you say, step by step.

It's a nice graph, I think the most well known one is in "Stocks for the long run" [0]

I'm more concerned how it will grow over the next n (lets say 50) years.

Somehow, it doesn't really fit into my head that there will be another 7 doublings of money invested stock market over the coming 50 years (as others have commented, 10% annually is doubling every 7 years).

Reality is complex of course, there's inflation, there's taxes, dividends don't grow the stock market cap.

Still, I would assume less growth due to several factors. The last few decades have seen several tailwinds that can't repeat in the same way:

- falling corporate tax rates globally [1]

- falling interest rates [2] (since 1980, until 2020)

- rising P/E ratios (partly in response to falling interest rates) [3]

- demographic expansion [4]

- improvements in diversification (index funds, theoretically you need a lower risk premium than when investing in individual stocks)

And I'm not sure that headwinds coming from environmental degradation of many types are already priced in.

I still think that stocks will do better than bonds (there's a risk premium [5], those are real assets, there's innovation and growth), just be cautious about assuming that the future will mirror the past.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stocks_for_the_Long_Run

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/corporate-tax-rate...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10 (choose max in the time scale)

[3] https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

[5] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/ ERP currently at about 4.4%

Context is king.

Start out with Typescript and have it answer data science questions - won't know its way around.

Start out with Python and ask the same question - great answers.

LLMs can't (yet) really transfer knowledge between domains, you have to prime them in the right way.

It's amazing, yes, and at the same time, it makes perfect sense.

(Somewhat) similar mechanisms are at work whether you're pulling together stars into a galaxy, hydrogen gas into a solar system or water towards the drain of your bath tub - a pull towards the center, the centripetal force, slight variations producing "artifacts".

Thanks for the pointer to bounded rationality, and the well-chosen words "are not capable of doing anything about". Yes, the doomer attention economy and also most media in general constantly bombard you with useless information, making decision-making very hard. What's the most important concern? The likely collapse of the pension system (here in Western Europe)? The war in Ukraine? Climate change? Trade wars? Pick you poison.

I'd add to the "mental health" recommendation to go low on such information, as it is mostly noise and non-actionable.

Awareness that in the long term, the tides might change, doesn't fall for me into this category. It's just a basic fact of life that it easily forgotten in the busyness of day.

I also share this kind of existential angst. The future is unknown - yes, such a scenario might come true. As might nuclear war, a truly deadly pandemic etc. And yes, there is too little done to mitigate the potential impact. And lots of unknowns.

However - don't let it drag you down. Think about what you can do, personally, as a person that has agency, to mitigate the potential effects for you, for your family, for your community.

And the answer for me, personally, is the same as for many other of these issues - stay in good health both physically and mentally, keep in touch with the people around you, have a buffer (financially, resources, time), raise awareness of the potential impact. And don't be a doomer, acknowledge that you might be wrong - because you would have been (up to now).