edbaskerville

The personality defect that leads you to become powerful is the same defect that makes you want to become even more powerful.

It's the job of the rest of us to restructure the system to prevent this kind of pathological runaway power accumulation. It means new laws, but also a more enlightened culture.

> Then starting in 1905, Albert Einstein published a series of papers in which he hythesized that the pollen particles were moving because they were being bombarded by invisible molecules in the liquid...At the time, this theory was controversial, because the idea of molecules was not yet widely accepted.

What? The idea of molecules was not widely accepted in 1905?

Way too many John Le Carré novels (and his memoir). Not escapist enough, frankly—it adds up to a very dismal appraisal of geopolitics, with plenty of foreshadowing of what the world has become: the kleptocracy in the ruins of the Soviet state; having fought communism, the need to now fight capitalism; and this one I saved from The Little Drummer Girl: "What are we to become, I wonder? A Jewish homeland, or an ugly little Spartan state?"

The problem with MAD is it's a deterministic framework. It doesn't properly account for the risk of a war caused by mistake.

If Stanislav Petrov hadn't been in the chain of command, MAD might not have worked. And it could still fail to work in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Deterministic chaos is cool. But this is even more special in a sense: for a problem where random initial conditions are almost always chaotic, this is a catalog of periodic orbits—these are all non-chaotic.

It would be cool to pair this with a numerical simulator that shows what happens when you perturb any of them.

EDIT: oh, it already does this, thanks other comments

Apple was at its best and most creative during the long Steveless interregnum. The inmates were running the asylum, so they couldn't ship products or make money. But it definitely seemed weirder and more fun, at least from the outside.

Can someone answer this for wheels on luggage?

Unsurprisingly this one generated a lot of responses.

My working hypothesis for this question involves colonization, technologically driven scales of time and space, and selection. The essence is totally obvious: either you develop sustainable practices or you go extinct.

Consider a group of people colonizing an area previously uninhabited by humans. When they arrive, they will disrupt the local ecosystem to some extent.

In some cases, the new combined system of ecosystem structure and human culture will settle into an attractor that can support humans for a long time (relative to frequency of colonization). In other cases, it will not, and the human population will die out. (Externally driven parameter changes can also turn a sustainable system into an unsustainable one.)

With a low enough colonization rate, most active communities will be operating sustainably.

Over time, technology increases the rate of spread of humanity. Cultures with more advanced technology increasingly spread into existing settlements as well as taking over existing land.

But the basic process continues: some systems last; some do not. The ones that last longer are the ones with sustainable practices.

This process is now operating at a global scale. Either we get sustainable, or things get bad.

Some people have concluded that the easier path is to colonize other planets.

Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.

Emphasizing this response. Bayesian models can always produce simple probabilities if you ask them to. E.g., given this data, what is the probability that the next flip is heads?

The fact that the model is represented as a distribution over Bernoulli parameter p doesn't contradict this: you just integrate over the posterior.

I can't tell if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing that men use big trucks to compensate for a masculine sense of inadequacy. But I think this is a good point, and I think we need to fight against it.

I don't think it's politically impossible. These things are killing children (among many other people). "Giant trucks and SUVs are killing children" seems like a pretty powerful line.

I don't have perfect pitch—I can't name notes and chords instantly out of thin air—but I'm a musician and can immediately sense if the tuning is nonstandard. It can be trippy. I think that, yeah, it's basically a matter of personality whether it annoys you or intrigues you, perfect pitch or no...

I'm currently practicing for a show with my cello tuned down a half-step, and it strongly conflicts with my ear<->muscle memory. Similar experiences when jumping between standard tuning and the Bach 5th Suite (A string tuned down to G) or Kodaly Solo Sonata (lower two strings tuned down a half step).

I find KDE to be a bit like using Mac OS 9 with extra customization--not in a literal sense, but in terms of the ethos. It looks more like, say, late-90s Windows, but the UX is more consistent in a old Mac-like way, albeit with some rough, this-is-a-community-project edges.

GNOME seems to be trying to oversimplify and prettify like today's Apple, but yes, makes weird decisions. But Apple is definitely worse than either in terms of feature/design churn.

Hoping to use this to reboot an ancient abandoned project. At the time there wasn't a mature P2P connection layer that took care of all the realities of the modern Internet out of the box. Now there is, and it's great to see.

This isn't Tailscale because it does secure P2P connections between any pair of devices, whether or not they have Tailscale. This enables real end-user P2P for, e.g., local-first apps with no server infrastructure except relays for resilience. And even if you lose the relay servers, things keep on working the same for any hosts that don't need them.

This solution is a really great argument for Apple(/Google) just adding per-app color settings.

It's Steve Jobs cargo-culting.

Whoa, didn't realize that was Jony Ive! Good job Jony! Gave both Ferrari and EVs bad press with a single product launch!

A good lesson in not messing with a good thing. If they had just put an electric motor in a classic Ferrari body, it could have been a nice moment for the energy transition.

Indeed. Even positing an illusion seems like a contradiction. If it's illusory, doesn't there need to be a subjective entity experiencing the illusion?

I think the point is that they took our collective knowledge without asking and are selling it back to us. We should own a substantial portion of it.

(Not sure if this is the right approach, but the general idea seems rather important.)

If you read The Mac is Not a Typewriter in 1992—thus burning Option-Shift-hyphen into your typing patterns for life, along with a dogmatic love for serif body fonts—you're the real victim here.

and we will now hold you responsible!

I just visited a McDonald's for the first time in a while. The self-order kiosk UI is quite bad. I think this is evidence in favor of the idea that an incompetent AI will soon be incompetently running a McDonald's.

Thanks, that's interesting.

& that is a great website...

I'm also done with JetBrains—just tried them again (RustRover) after a hiatus. It felt much slower than I remember, even after changing away from the default theme as others have suggested.

Having just made the switch to Kubuntu, I'm going to try Kate as my primary editor for a while. It's missing features, but it sure is snappy.

The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.

Maybe they mean Thiel?

The road not (yet?) taken is the full flowering of the HyperCards, the Visual Basics, the Macromind Directors and Flashes...

That is, the idea that a non-expert might create interesting software in an authoring environment with good, well-thought-out building blocks and easy-to-grasp metaphors, shorn of layers of accidental or over-engineered complexity.

In this vision software still requires careful logical thinking, but it makes it much less cumbersome to translate that thinking into running code, with no tooling and build system nightmares.

Instead, we've invented such powerful models that they can regurgitate and recombine complex incantations on our behalf. The complexity is still there, though, and it's still inscrutable to non-experts.

But maybe they can help us eliminate some of it?

I think that path is still possible, and it may even nicely complement the LLM world, where LLMs help generate software that individual humans can still easily comprehend and manually modify.

An evolutionary biology professor of mine—a renowned and outspoken if often inscrutable guy—liked to say, facetiously, "everything is 50% heritable." I think he was getting at something along these lines.

I think maybe they were saying that their personal AI slop detector had produced a false positive on "whole personhood", and they felt sad about that? Or perhaps I'm missing it.

Interestingly, if you have one-dimensional observations f(t) of a k-dimensional strange attractor, the lagged vector time series [f(t); f(t - tau); f(t - 2 * tau); ...; f(t - (k - 1) * tau)] maps onto the full k-dimensional attractor. Specifically (as I check Wikipedia) it's a diffeomorphism, an isomorphism of differentiable manifolds.

Presumably the earth system isn't at anything resembling an attractor right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if people are trying to use related techniques to try to detect qualitative changes in the system dynamics (like bifurcations).

Maybe someone more knowledgeable could chime in on whether/how measurements at a single point on the earth's surface might be used to do that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takens%27s_theorem