j-wags

Pros:

- Price (~$200 one year ago)

- Display quality/resolution is fine

- Brightness is excellent, can use it in direct sunlight without issue

- Build quality is fine.

- It really is just a plug-and-play USB-C monitor that overlays on whatever you're looking at.

- The focal distance (~4 meters) is really nice since my eyes often get strained when working on my laptop screen

Cons:

- (BIG con) it turns out that the field of view is TOO large - I often can't see the system clock in the corner of my screen or the quickbar in games.

- It just has normal pads like for glasses, and they can get a little sore/leave a red mark since they're heavier than normal glasses

- It's powered by the same USB that delivers the display data, so while it works fine for my macbook, it won't display from my phone. I've seen that there are battery/power converter dongles to add power to the cable but haven't tried one.

So if I did it again I'd just check reviews and get whatever is cheap and well reviewed currently. I was thinking about finding some sort of airplane-friendly keyboard+mouse setup as well but it turns out that just using my laptop keyboard and touchpad works fine.

> It feels like smartphones have saturated the available time. It's like the famous quote from the Netflix CEO: "Our main competitor is sleep." There aren't many more biological hours in the day to capture. At this point, it's mostly a war between recommender systems for your attention, as they've already consumed roughly all the available time.

...

> For me, the big issue with recommender systems isn't that they will destroy our minds, though that is a possible risk. It's the incredible waste of potential. Billions of hours of human time will be allocated today, guided mostly by clickbait incentives. The goal is to entertain people, not in a joyful way, but to help them dissociate.

> You have such an opportunity. There's probably a video on YouTube right now that, if I watched it, would inspire me to call my dad, talk to a stranger, or start a new relationship. Google could probably introduce me to a good friend, a co-founder, or my future life partner.

> They have the data, but they aren't using it that way. Instead, they're optimizing for a few more cents of advertising revenue, which is a colossal, civilizational-level failure.

...

> That is the crux of the incentives problem we've been discussing. One thing that gives me hope is we're no longer in the era of free software. Paradoxically, now that intelligence is cheap enough, people are willing to pay for software. It's more reasonable to charge for a subscription now because you can provide measurable value to someone's life. Paying $10 or $20 a month for a social media service that actually helps you live according to your goals is a much less crazy proposition than it was 10 years ago.

[1] https://blog.sentinel-team.org/p/forecasting-the-future-of-r...

And generally, I'm a big fan of the weekly newsletter from successful forecasters. Keep up the great work!

Worked great to avoid eye fatigue/posture issues on airplanes though. I'm happy I have them, but in hindsight I'd have gotten a Viture or something with a better nose bridge and a narrower field of view.

Even in my immediate circles, I know many industry scientists who do scientific work beyond the level required by their company, fight to publish it in journals, mentor junior colleagues in a very similar manner to a PhD advisor, and would in every way make excellent professors. There would be a stampede if these people were offered a return to a more accountable academia. Even with lower pay, longer hours, and department duties, MORE than enough highly qualified people would rush in.

A hypothetical transition to this world should be tapered. But even at the limit where academia switched overnight, trainees caught in such a transition could be guaranteed their spots in their program, given direct fellowships to make them independent of their advisor's grants, given the option to switch advisor, and have their graduation requirements relaxed if appropriate.

It's easy to hem and haw about the institutional knowledge and ongoing projects that would invariably be lost in such a transition, even if very carefully executed. But we have to consider the ongoing damage being done when, for example, biogen spends thousands of scientist-years and billions of dollars failing to make an alzheimers drug because the work was dishonest to begin with, or when generations of trainees learn that bending the truth is a little more OK each year.

There are a number of travel vloggers who do a trip exactly once and report on what happened. The same vlogger will make videos about taking ships, trains, airplanes, and long- and short-distance buses, in a variety of countries, on a variety of budgets. Among these vloggers, it is generally agreed that long-distance buses in the USA are the worst form of transit in the developed world. Their videos on other forms of travel rarely (if ever) show the kinds of unsafe experiences they have on long-distance buses in the US.

I'm also a numbers person and I've looked around to try and find stats for how dismal the safety and on-time performance of US long distance buses are for you, but none are published. I can just report that the cancellation rate is well over 10%, the on-time performance is maybe around 50%, and personally speaking the experience is frequently unsafe and miserable.

I don't mean to make this personal, but if you're in the US, consider driving to the local greyhound station/pick up and just waiting there for particular bus. It's really one of the worst experiences you can have in a city.

Some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uPDQvqoN4w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QGTaGwxxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTpt4tMnDT0

I've taken a number of flixbuses in Europe and they were decent. Most cities had some sort of bus terminal where you could sit and grab food before the trip, the bus was clean, the advertised power outlets worked, seat assignments were respected, and they'd make stops at places with clean restrooms.

I've also taken a few flixbuses in the US west and wouldn't recommend people do that. The cleanliness is poor, the on board amenities like power outlets/wifi are frequently broken (or don't exist), paid seat assignments have never been enforced, bathroom stops are disgusting, and there is a lack of order/safety on board. And the bus terminals simply don't exist - in Los Angeles you stand in an uncovered parking lot outside the central jail and there is no notification of which bus goes where. Everyone just runs (literally) up to each bus as it arrives, preventing passengers from disembarking, and asks the bus driver where it's going, and then tries to cram on immediately because that's the only way to avoid getting an undesirable seat.

Safety is a huge issue on these buses. I conduct most of my life on foot and by public transit in southern California and there's some sense of safety from knowing you could avoid/move away from people acting dangerously. But on the bus you're stuck, and I often arrive with my nerves frayed by the behavior of other passengers. They don't publish stats on this but my friends who have taken these buses also reported they also feel extremely unsafe, with one telling me they were on a trip where a stabbing occurred.

I regularly take the Amtrak from San Diego to LA to see friends and family, and during the track closure last year I tried flixbus a few times. After 4 tries, I simply stopped discretionary travel to LA for the better part of a year because it was such a bad experience.

> Factors contributing to social disenchanment in Syria include socio-economic stress caused by the Iraqi conflict, as well as the most intense drought ever recorded in the region.[

This has led to half a million deaths, and the migration of 6 million refugees has caused political fractures in several developed nations.

The world is not set up for mass migration on the scale that will be needed if regional agricultural productivity changes unpredictably, even on the scale of decades. I could easily believe that a larger number of these events could compound into millions of famine deaths and a conflagration of military conflicts. 1+ billion deaths is well within range if global food logistics break down or a general military conflict is triggered.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_revolution

- Requiring a car for daily life drives up cost of living, pricing the bottom tier of earners into the streets

- Restricting housing unit supply by mandating single family zoning makes whole regions unaffordable

- Blocking effective public transit into the suburbs effectively geofences homelessness into urban centers

- Concentrating the overwhelming majority of homeless services downtown is a policy choice, not a natural outcome

I think a lot of people look at urban areas in the US and think "that looks awful, my area should make the opposite of those policy choices", and it leads us to subconsciously hold some weird beliefs. Tall buildings and public transit don't make people homeless. They do the opposite. But something about the American lifestyle (my own upbringing included) plants these negative associations with urban centers, and it wasn't until I saw other cities around the world that I realized it didn't make any sense at all.

This WAS solved at the ballot box. The law written by our elected representatives requires airport security to allow a reasonable opt-out[1].

> DHS ensures alternative processing is available to resolve match or no match outcomes. The mechanism or process to opt-out and complete alternative processing may not impose additional burdens or requirements on the individual beyond what is necessary to complete the verification process.

Many of the responses in this thread are indicating that the implementation of this opt-out is excessively burdensome, such that opting out could easily cause a traveler to miss their flight.

We should all be concerned that the authority granted an extraordinary enforcement power over a functionally mandatory part of modern life ignores limitations that that we "made at the ballot box" because it finds them inconvenient.

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/23_0913_mgmt...

Someone may have hoped that overwriting the bad file with an all-0 file of the correct size would make the update benign.

Or following the "QA was bypassed because there was a critical vulnerability" hypothesis, stopping distribution of the real patch may be an attempt to reduce access to the real data and slow reverse-engineering of the vulnerability.

Maybe we should rank our "have to"s on a scale from 1 to 5, where for example:

- "objects in motion have to (1) remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force"

- "humans have to (2) eat food to stay alive"

- "developed countries have to (3) maintain a scientifically literate populace"

- "university PR people have to (4) write like that to pay for food and shelter"

- "university PR people have to (5) write like that to afford a new sports car"

I think you meant something like the example for (4), but reasonable people might see it more like (5), and in both cases it's at odds with the more fundamental "have to" (3) for society.

Yes and yes. I'm 6 years past defending my PhD and I have low confidence in being able to reproduce results from papers in my field (computational biophysics).

I was recently at an industry-heavy biophysics conference that ran a speed dating event, and my conversation starter was "what fraction of papers in our field do you trust?". I probably talked to ~20 people, with a median response of ~25%.

Even a tiny amount invested in reproduction studies and accountability would go a long way. Most papers in _computational_ biophysics still don't publish usable code and data.

We're making good progress but it's difficult to interface with fundamentally different organizational models between academia and industry. I'm hoping that this model will become normalized in the future. But it takes serious leaps of faith from all involved (professors, industry leaders, grant agencies, and - if I can flatter myself - early career scientists) to leave the "safe route" in their organizations and try something like this.

[1] https://openforcefield.org/ [2] https://openfold.io/

From the US Coast Guard [2]:

> The Captain of the Port (COTP) plans to establish the Fort McHenry Limited Access Channel for commercially essential vessels on Thursday, April 25th until 6 a.m. Monday, April 29 th or Tuesday, April 30 th if weather adversely impacts vessel transits. As with the other temporary channels, this new channel will be marked with lighted aids to navigation and will be limited to transit at the discretion of the COTP and based on the prevailing weather conditions. The Fort McHenry Limited Access Channel will have a controlling depth of 35 feet, a 300-foot horizontal clearance, and vertical clearance of 214 feet due to the adjacent BG&E powerlines. The controlling depth and available width may increase based on pending survey analysis. Deep draft vessels utilizing this channel will require a Maryland State pilot and two escort tugs, ahead and astern on centerline. The Maryland Pilots will impose a 3 foot under keel clearance (UKC) requirement for all vessels and limit transits to winds being less than 15 knots Weather Forecast for 39.22N 76.54W (Elev. 3 ft).

[1] https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9505027 [2] https://homeport.uscg.mil/Lists/Content/Attachments/89633/MS...

> ... Other fixes are regulatory. America’s cyber strategy, published last year, makes clear that the responsibility for failures should lie not with open-source developers but “the stakeholders most capable of taking action to prevent bad outcomes”. In practice that means governments and tech giants, both of which benefit enormously from free software libraries. Both should expand funding for and co-operation with non-profit institutions, like the Open Source Initiative and the Linux Foundation, which support the open-source ecosystem. The New Responsibility Foundation, a German think-tank, suggests that governments might, for example, allow employees to contribute to open-source software in their spare time and ease laws that criminalise “white hat” or ethical hacking.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997821 [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/engineer-details-messy-lk-...

I was having a conversation about this with a friend last weekend, and we'd assumed that centaurs were still better than either top humans or top computers. I'm unable to easily find this info on google, could you share where you saw that centaurs are no longer better than top computers?

I'm completely uninformed in this area. Is there precedent for anything like this in the modern day?

Some of the people receiving these furby emails were probably already conceiving of (or actively working on) Stuxnet-like capabilities. Maybe a future FOIA request will reveal several teams quietly emailing up the org chart to absolutely not relax the rule for furbies.