gamepsys

The entire concept of making a living off recordings/reproductions didn't really start until the invention of the printing press which allowed for mass reproductions.

Prior to that anyone with enough time on their hands and skills could legally reproduce any text, music, painting, etc for profit. Artist where largely compensated for performances or for original artwork. There was more relative demand for live performances because of the lack of other available entertainment options.

Now the primary issue with being a successful artist is the attention economy is incredibly competitive, and the barriers to entry are incredibly low.

> All that remained were ragtag interns and junior developers.

For many people, their first job in software engineering is the worst codebase they will deal with professionally for this reason. The first job hires lot of people with little/no experience. As soon as someone gains some experience than can move on to better paying jobs, where there are better developers with better standards.

People who write histories often frame the past in order to impact how people think about the present.

Except for the fact that we have a ledger for government spending now and the pentagon cannot account for $3.5 trillion dollars.

More alongside the banking system, but we could have governments spend their budget in crypto. They would mint new coins at the beginning of every fiscal year. The coins could pass from department to department being recorded every time they exchanged hands within the government. To exchange the coin for cash, any vendor or individual would have to exchange the coin at a bank while showing identification, and the bank would record the transaction alongside the individuals name and reason for spending the money. The bank would then give the individual cash, and the government would in turn give the bank cash. 100% of government spending would be fully transparent to the taxpayer, they could see which departments received how much money and what they spent it on.

It has some flaws in the system -- it essentially creates a new government minted currency and the banks would need an incentive to be party to this transaction. It solves the problem of lost government funds, and helps create a paper trail that anyone can audit to detect embattlement faster. It might impact the government's ability to fund some classified operations. You can't exactly say "I am {First Name}, {Last Name} and I am cashing my paycheck for working at the CIA" to the entire world.

There's also the issue of money. If you are turned down for a job that would have paid 20% more because of working in a controversial industry that can have a big impact on your life. I'd prefer to be able to have civil discussions about politics with coworkers, but I don't care enough to sacrifice even 1% of my salary. This entire Ask HN is about income maximizing after all. I think getting into vice or anything controversial is a bad long term move, even if it includes a sizable temporary bump in compensation.

I would be equally embarrassed if either of those were on my resume. I'd have similar levels of embarrassment with alcohol, firearms, cannabis or politics. You don't want your resume to suggest you are controversial in anyway. Maybe 80% of the people you run across will be cool with it, but it only takes one person in a company to veto your resume and there are usually 3+ people that look at a resume with veto power. It'll close doors for sure.

When I was in highschool I had to fill out a survey about my experiences with substances. I remember getting a laugh out of lying on the survey. Always take any self reported questionnaire results with a large grain of salt.

Even after reading the article I'm not sure what the headline means. It seems to be some sort of a debt dispute (unpaid contractors). Is the rocket put up as collateral on the lien? Are the contractors refusing to hand over the physical rocket to SpaceX until they are paid?

The bet I described was that GPUs would be more and more relevant in modern computation, and that Nvidia sells the best GPUs and the best toolkit for writing general purpose code on GPUs. GPT is just the latest on a large chain of applications.

Rule of thumb, the more people are talking about a stock the more weary you should be that your insight is ahead of the curve.

I clearly said "up to 5%". If I lose 5% of my stock portfolio on a single stock in a year, but the rest of my portfolio goes up the expected annual return of 8%, I still made money that year.

1. It's normal in the tech industry to own a lot of stock in the company you work for. Investing in a vendor (in Nvidia's case) or another adjacent company is lower risk. You cannot avoid risk in investing, it's a natural part of the situation.

2. You can avoid the sell low situation by having 3-6 months of expenses saved in an emergency savings account. With all the layoffs in the last few years everyone should have gotten the message to do this. Even in a large downturn six months of expenses in a savings account is enough for you to re-skill and find new employment.

> As a retail investor, it's good to remind myself that if I actually had the skills to invest professionally, someone would probably be paying me to do it for them.

Don't discount the knowledge you have from being deep into an industry. The higher quality of the CUDA toolkit compared to other SIMD languages, combined with it's increasing relevance in compute (gaming, followed by blockchain, followed by ML, followed by GPT) would have made this an NVDA an easy pick for anyone (of the increasing number of people) that worked in parallel computing from 2006-2023.

Sometimes you can see a company is positioning itself for a great long term position before the entire wallstreet herd takes notice. That's when you add a single stock as part of your diverse portfolio. I keep up to 5% of my stock portfolio as these single stock picks, judged entirely on the product the company sells.

I think Central/South America has good long term prospects, into the 2060s at least. Countries like Ecuador are making big moves to improve their future. While a lot of the changes are controversial and risky, I think it's likely to workout positively for some of them. With current population trends it's going to be one of the last regions to have maintain positive population growth. The aging populations, and the project population declines, of the world will cause incredible strain on the economy. Being several decades behind the global trends will give them an advantage on any manufactured goods not fully automated. The most political stable and globally connected countries in the 2030s and 40s will be the winners.

Political instability, crime/corruption, changing climates, and weak military power makes investment in the area high risk. It's hard to determine which smaller countries will be breakout successes. If this river is actually clean in 3 years, this is a positive signal for Ecuador.

This idea that a website could be 'done' was very much part of the old mentality from software people that software had to be shipped on floppy disc or cd-rom, and you had no guaranteed patch ability after you shipped.

The web 2.0 craze was largely about realizing how web is different than old cd-rom based distribution.

I concede that I was assuming a traditional chemical rocket to generate the force. A more gentle force would put less strain on the structure.

No and no.

* At the time its decommissioned it will be over 30 years old, well past it's original planned lifespan.

* It was never designed for orbital maneuvers with that much delta-v.

* Due to how adjusting orbits works, it would require about as much energy to move it into such a different orbit as it would to just ship a new one from Earth. This is even more true when you consider we would have to ship all the fuel into orbit to perform the orbit shift.

> Old-growth forest protections proposed Friday will apply to trees on public lands managed by the Forest Service, but not to the Bureau of Land Management

Wow, this just confirmed my lack of knowledge around how national forests are administered. As someone in the PNW, are there any national agencies that govern the use of forests besides National Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management?

I think this works fantastic in Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. The ground floor is filled with restaurants, cafes, bars, retailers that define the neighborhood as a cool part of town. There is enough public transportation, grocery stores, and other amenities that it creates a walkable community (a rarity in North America).

The area has downsides, but it is doing well economically.

> Cheaper grocery products can sometimes use inferior ingredients or lower-cost alternative ingredients, too. Comparisons with more expensive products may not be realistic because they're fundamentally different products, even if they may seem similar to the consumer.

The total cost of materials for a can of soda is negligible.

After you've sold to the entire addressable market then you should begin maximizing your revenue per customer.

For the most part the cluster of PS3s supercomputer was a myth used to hype up how powerful the PS3 was. The amount of RAM per compute was so low that it limited the type of workloads it was good at. Then server CPUs became more powerful as the PS3 processor stayed the same.

However PS3 clusters did find niche success as a super computer. There are a handful of notable examples. The fastest one ever built was by the US Airforce, consisted of 1,760 PS3s, and was the 33rd fastest super computer at the time. It was used for satellite image processing.

> So the wealth of everyone is going up faster than the supply of desirable land

We are also slowing down the rate we are making land desirable. During the 50s-70s we had massive success by creating suburbs that were connected to city centers. Due to how geography works, new suburbs are further from city centers and inherently less desirable. We have developed most of the geographically appealing regions of the US. The regions that can support more sprawl are seeing growth at a high enough rate that local infrastructure such as schools, roads, water, and construction labor is being stressed.

In the not too distant future we will have climate change that will displace people and a declining population that will reduce housing demand. Combine that with new building techniques/materials and in 100 years the housing situation will be totally different than today.

> Twitter has proven he can't manage people and has blundered into every other success he's ever had.

I think you are just as biased as the parent comment if you think one failure invalidates the merit of all previous successes.

The same idea is explored in more details in his later book 'Fall; or Dodge in Hell' where AI generated individualized content radicalizes parts of the population and convinces them to believe blatantly false facts. It's a decently large B plot in the novel that ties into some of the larger themes.

I don't think we are over-engineering it. You want to "weed out" everyone but the best candidate for the role, or the best candidates for your open roles. It's a very hard problem to identify the "best" person from a group of people. It would be different if all programmers that are good enough are the same, but we all know the skill ceiling on programming is very high. Selecting the best devs is a critical function for any software project.

> There's a pretty decent chance it's simply too expensive!

I doubt the 24 year old, 300Mhz RISC, 32MB Ram, PS2 instruction set is too expensive to do a cycle perfect replication.

> I don't know that it's true that moving a lot means you work with more people.

It's generally true that you meet more people switching jobs every 2 years. You work with all the people that stayed and all the people that also left after 2 years. You end up on more total teams.

It's not universally true. If you stay in a place with higher than average turnover, constantly working with new people then you would be in an position to work with more people. Additionally, if you worked in a very centralized team in a very large software company you could end up working with more people.

Finally, the quantity of people you've worked with isn't the key metric you should maximize your professional network for. You ideally want in any 3 month period multiple people in your professional network whose recommendation will carry a lot of weight for an open position you would be interesting in taking that would give you a strong recommendation. After you've reached that level of baseline employment security then you want to maximize for people that will recommend better and better positions.

US regulation applies. On top of US regulation, basically every nation will see you as a potential security risk because the difference between an ICBM and space launch rocket is mostly payload and flight path.