jefe_

Interesting & detailed interview with founder of a Ukranian drone manufacturer. Talks about procurement around 10 mins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlSMz_vtSwg

Our digital twins will write the comments. They will be us, but with none of our flaws. They will never experience the shame of posting a dumb joke, getting flamed, and then deleting it, for they will have tested all ideas to prevent such an oversight. They will never experience the satisfaction-turned-to-puzzlement of posting an expertly crafted, well-researched comment that took 2 hours of the workday to draft - only to receive one upvote, for their research will be instantaneous and their outputs efficient. Of course they will never need to humbly reply, 'Ah, I missed that, good catch!' to a child comment indicating the entire premise of their question would be answered with a simple reading of the linked article - for they will have deeply and instantly read the article. Yes, our digital twins will be us, but better - and we will finally be free to play in the mud.

It seems to me that taking down fraudulent academic researchers and barring them from ever having anything to do with research in the future would also have a significant impact on the ethics and behavior of the next generation. If technology is lowering the barriers to fraud detection, why should it be applied to one sector over another?

I have a bit of AI fatigue around this wave of tools, but also understand why they are garnering so much attention. Many of the innovation hype categories of the past decade have appeared stuck in the 'early days but just wait...' phase. Self-driving cars, drone delivery, crypto as a currency, crypto as a(n) _____, plant-based meats, virtual reality, etc. While there has been great progress in each of these areas, not one has yet matched market demand with current capabilities in a way that enables it to become a 'game changer.'

To the general public, ChatGPT and the Image Generators 'just appeared,' and appeared in a very impressive and usable form. Of course there were many waves of ML advances leading up to these models, but for many people these tools are their first opportunity to play with ML models in a meaningful way that is easy to incorporate into daily life and with very little barrier to entry.

While impressive and there are many applications, my questions surrounding the new AI tools relate to the volume of information they are capable of producing and our capacity to consume it. Tools can be used to synthesize the information, tools can act on it, but there is already too much 'noise.' There is a market for entertainment tailored to exact preferences, but it won't provide the shared cultural connection mass media provides. In the workplace, e-mails and documents can be quickly drafted. This is a valuable use case, but it augments and increases productivity. It will lower the bar necessary for certain jobs, and it will increase productivity expectations, but it will become a tool like Excel rather than a replacement like a factory robot (for now).

The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231 - Never show half-finished things to others. <- ChatGPT managed it's release perfectly in this regard.

The challenge is that AI generated content will only register as garbage to those who fall 1-2 standard deviations away from the mean interest level for whatever content the AI is producing. For everybody else, it will typically be a 'good enough' story, recipe, video, etc. Several months ago, I wanted to cook chicken curry, so I googled and chose a top result. The recipe was fine, but it wasn't what I wanted. I then googled for a new recipe, this time more carefully vetting the ingredients. The recipe was an improvement, but still not what I wanted. Finally, I used NYT Cooking as my search engine, and the recipe was excellent. If I didn't have a strong preference, and know exactly what I wanted, the first recipe would have been perfectly suitable. The danger is that demand for 'advanced sources' erodes to the point that these publications/content creators are either forced to adopt the AI and turn to garbage or go out of business.

Similar thing would happen in my Toyota, the song 'Afraid' by Yellowcard would play every time I turned on the car. Realized it was playing the first song in my library. In Apple Music there is a song called 'A a a a a Very Good Song (Silent Track)' by artist Samir Mezrahi, that contains 10 minutes of silence. I added that to my library and now that song plays when I turn on my car (although this autoplay only happens occasionally since some Toyota update). The album art simply says: 'have a wonderful day.'

The song: https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-a-a-a-a-very-good-song-si...

This is really awesome. I think the ability to record the camera position / perspective changes atop the video (while shooting and after shooting) for export to flat video or gif would be really cool. It would allow people to record creative clips and share them on existing platforms.

The customer's words echoed in his mind. 'robert at lightbulb emoji dot kz, but with a real lightbulb emoji.' The clerk had registered thousands, maybe tens of thousands of e-mails into the Nordstrom Rack Nordy Rewards program, and he had seen it all, but this, this was something entirely new. This wasn't the single letter username or the overly sexual address or the gmail address with the plus sign, all mildly interesting but within the bounds of what was possible. What was normal. What was sane. This was something entirely new. The point of sale workstation has no key for the lightbulb emoji. This was the predicament. But if an emoji can be an e-mail address, maybe some other part of the computer can be a keyboard. Maybe the floor can be a table. Maybe hands can be screwdrivers. The clerk began touching the screen. Pawing at the sides of the monitor. He began mumbling as he moved his attention to the receipt printer, ripping it open, 'there's gotta be an emoji button in here somewhere.' As his search intensified, so too did the stares of customers waiting in line. In a final effort the clerk hoisted the register above his head before smashing it on the ground, bringing himself down with the machine. Associates had pooled around their coworker and were urging calm. Emergency Services had been notified and were en route, and slowly the chaos turned to calm. An associate reached out to ask the customer if she could finish ringing him up on another register. 'Sure,' he replied, 'but this time let's just use my gmail address.'

For a holiday get together a teammate created a trivia game using this tool: https://ahaslides.com/

It was surprisingly fun. You could join just using a link (no account needed), and scorekeeping was well done. They incorporated media, so for some questions a song would play, for others there would be images, word scrambles. My favorite question type, they would play a song, and you had to choose, from a list of emoji, all of the emoji that applied to that song. Unsure how much of this is default functionality of the tool, and how much was my teammates creativity, but it definitely worked very well and as well received coupled with a zoom call. We had about 20 people of all ages playing.

A few years ago I experimented with a crypto trading bot. Got busy with other things, and pivoted to less-active strategies. Several months later I was in bed about to fall asleep when I received a tax document from Coinbase, and the first thing I saw was '$150k.' Being relatively new to finance / taxes, and having profited nowhere near that amount, I had a moment of absolute panic. I can still remember getting out of bed and turning on my lights walking to my computer. Of course once I did some research it was clear the number referenced was pertaining to throughput, not gains, but it definitely would have been nice to have some additional context provided in the message from Coinbase. I imagine there is a bit of hesitation on the brokerage side to move in the direction of 'interpreting,' or 'downplaying' some of these more regulatory aspects, but any additional education they could provide would be helpful. Can definitely see how something like this could inadvertently nudge someone already having a tough time over the edge.

Glad they are pivoting to this 'Upgrade your Mask,' approach. Noticed a few months ago a lot of energy seemed to be spent on encouraging the final 5-7% of people to wear masks. Also noticed many people 'wearing masks,' were still wearing ineffective or fashion-first masks. So you had 5-7% unwilling to adopt the health practice, but another 20-30% with proven willingness, just poor implementation, yet all messaging was focused on that smaller, resistant audience.

I've perused WSB for a while, but watching GameStop this morning, I'm worried this recent 'short squeeze initiative' opens the door for various retail trading restrictions. Whether phase-out of commission-free trading, per-trade taxes, restrictions on options trading, tightening of pattern day trading restrictions, it seems something is coming. It's tough to envision a circumstance where retail trading is permitted to interfere with such a fundamental activity as short-selling. It's like a DDoS attack on the stock market, and I expect the defenses to be similar: additional vetting, limits, circuit breakers (which already exist but could be modified).

I really hope I'm wrong because their ability to make GameStop, Nokia, and BlackBerry trend in 2021 is genuinely hilarious.

It's interesting to me that the demand for Parler was almost exclusively the result of policies enacted by other social media platforms. Perhaps there was merit to the notion that letting groups operate in a contained area of larger platforms would have been favorable to outright bans. This would allow the larger platforms to monitor engagement, control spread, and quietly respond as they desired, no one the wiser. Instead they made very public proclamations of content restrictions and bans, which escalated some casual participants to more engaged participants. These participants then gathered on a new platform that promised the ability to say anything, so they started saying anything. But then some people started to believe anything. And then the beliefs turned into action, and then it became a real problem. But the outcome is in no way surprising. What is surprising is that the response now is the same response that started it all, more public bans and content restrictions. It's trivial to start a social media app (especially when security is not the priority), so in a few months another app will pop up, and it too will get out of hand, but what then? It seems like policymakers and thought leaders aren't thinking long term and are doing nothing to look at underlying issues.

Next Year: 49ers court Russell Okung with state of the art crypto mining facility.

This leaky bucket approach seems ineffective, ignores the root cause, and likely emboldens people adhering to these ideas. As bizarre as it sounds, I think the root cause for the rise in supply and demand for misinformation is the decline of the church/religion. Couple that with technology and it's uncharted territory. Many people need something to believe in, whether it's luck, god, nature, whatever, beliefs are complex frameworks that order a chaotic world. They help people handle a number of difficult circumstances from inequality and injustice to fear and uncertainty, to loss and sadness, to dealing with difficult people, finding motivation, the list goes on.

Like religion, conspiracy theories fill many of those voids, but they are much better equipped to thrive in the 21st century. Where churches build communities in buildings, conspiracy theories form communities on social media and internet forums. Where churches hold the carrot of an afterlife or ultimate application of fairness, the conspiracy theory holds the carrot of a future leak or whistleblower leading to your team's ultimate victory and subsequent righting of wrongs. Where church uses god as the reason for everything, conspiracy theories use mini-gods arising from issues, responsible for all sorts of machinations and plots. Where churches use imperfect human leaders capable of hypocrisy and moral shortcomings, conspiracy theories often lack formal leaders, and when they are present, the bar for morality is low compared to the alleged crimes of the conspirators. Churches ask for money, conspiracy theories ask for time. Churches offer boring lectures on people who lived thousands of years ago, conspiracy theories are engaging and tie directly to real world events.

Whack-a-mole with ideas that keep popping up does nothing to solve the underlying issues: there are many people out there who feel empty in some way and they are desperate to fill that void with just about anything. Containment of misinformation has failed and will continue to fail, just like prohibition of drugs fails, and abstinence only sex education fails, and religious persecution fails.

I think the best approach is to ignore, minimize, monitor real-world impact, and organically counter. With that approach you avoid creating martyrs, and you can exploit a major weakness conspiracy theories possess compared to formal religion: Conspiracy theories operate in the realm of the living, there is no promise of truth in death as with many religions. Because of this, very few conspiracy theories truly stand the test of time, eventually they're either disproven, evolve to become too outlandish, or simply become boring and fizzle out.

Thermo Fisher Scientific has freezers that hit these temps. About $10-20k per unit it appears.

https://www.fishersci.com/us/en/browse/90106033/ultra-low-te...

I would say standing against injustice is not political. But there comes a point where in order for change to occur and prevent future injustices, the stand must become a walk (to keep the metaphor). Some will say it should be a jog, others a sprint, some will think continued standing is fine. And that's just discussing the pace. There will be ideas and opinions on route, and whether or not to stop for breaks, and whether water should be supplied, or what impact people walking will have on the roads, the list goes on. I think when the time comes to give direction or motion to a stand against injustice, it then becomes political. It's not bad that it becomes political, it's the natural course of change in society, but it does mean that some of the unity derived from standing must be sacrificed, as people choose the mechanism for change they support. The key is to sacrifice as little of the unity as possible.

I don't know what their endgame is but it seems they timed the release well strategically. Two hours earlier, Trump tweeted that he was ending stimulus negotiations, which led to a big market selloff into the close. Any selloff of FAAMG attributable to the breakup big tech announcement will be unnoticeable, but may accelerate or extend an overall decline which could pressure some connected fiscal conservatives to call for continuation of stimulus talks, and prompt some leans-right voters to consider market decline. So much of the messaging all around seems bizarre that I've started to assume it's simply 'optimized,' and it registers with some subset of voters, making them more likely to vote. If it all seems disjointed, you're not the audience, you check both boxes of 'will vote' and 'vote decided.'

Interesting concept, I would have considered leaving the bridges their natural colors and installing small, tinted panes of glass at photo spots along the walkway. Would allow photos to show a more immersive 'banknote world,' while maintaining design consistency for area residents.

I've found that I typically don't need to know how it works if my use case is common and the library is well documented, but when either of those doesn't hold it can be very helpful to read through the implementation in the source to understand how best to implement. But I think the black box would be less of an issue when interfacing with documented third party libraries, than with internally developed services and libraries, particularly in smaller orgs. Team A 'generated' Service A and Team B needs to integrate it in their 'generated' Service B, it seems that could get messy and would be tough to test or troubleshoot. Possibly an additional AI tool specifically for compatibility and integration could solve that problem.

Part one of this book really helped with my understanding of monetary policy, very clear examples of how the price of money is expressed through Exchange Rates, Interest Rates, and Aggregate Price Levels and the interplay between these measures: https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Guide-Macroeconomics-Managers...

Here is a PDF of a diagram I made to help organize my understanding of this content: https://www.lucidchart.com/publicSegments/view/e1d12ae5-a8a0...

Boeing was still promising end of year FAA certification for 737 Max as recently as early December. Around that time, they had a spokesperson on CNBC who was asked directly how the outstanding steps (which indicated February at the earliest) aligned with their end of year statements and the position was essentially, 'we've been saying end of year and end of year could still happen.'

When your brand is suffering a crisis of confidence, you don't rebuild it by missing deadlines and dodging reality. The amount of hubris it takes to be so flippant in these circumstances is indicative of a deeply flawed corporate culture, and that falls at the feet of the CEO.

Also, how do you allow Starliner mission to occur without 100% confidence in ability of mission to be executed flawlessly? There are certainly complexities, but it almost seems like they passed the point when they could have quietly bumped the launch, and ended up in a literal PR gamble.

The craziest part of this article is the note at the end about airlines being forced to remove mention of Taiwan in order to do business in China. Went to Delta website to find a flight to Taipei, and sure enough every stop of trip lists city, state/country and for Taipei is just says:

Taipei,

According to the article, even this is still 'out of compliance,' because it should say 'Taipei, Taiwan China,' blown away this is how the booking page appears on the Delta website when loaded from the United States.

Makes me worry, localization takes effort, and effort often leads to blanket solutions that 'check everyone's boxes.' The most worrying examples of this in my opinion have been the superhero movies of the past decade. These blockbuster franchises were all written to accommodate distribution in China (and worldwide for that matter) as a goal. This led to simplified dialogues for translation, story lines that avoided pushing controversial buttons, and the result was a decade of moderately entertaining and decidedly safe cinema. Sure, blockbusters are not the best barometer for a nation's ability to push artistic boundaries, but they have historically spoken to the sentiments, dreams, and challenges of a time. Unfortunately with the sequels and superheros era, it seems the tone has been one of risk-averse idealism, which strikes me as a particularly low form of entertainment, entertainment that is truly disposable, unable and unwilling to stand the test of time. Possibly straying into problems with corporate consolidations, but I think it's all related as larger corporations tend to take smaller risks in efforts to appeal to broader audiences. If very few companies are able/willing to tell China no, censorship features become acceptable, and then they become normal, and then maintaining two branches becomes burdensome, so then censorship becomes the compliant option, and at that point the dream of technology empowering regular people to do amazing things, to become real superheros, fighting corruption, injustice and oppression, that dream will be truly dead. Think about how much things have changed since the Arab spring... it happens quickly.

Housework in many parts of Africa is hard, grueling work, and the women perform it from sunrise to sunset every day. Washing clothes without a washing machine, scrubbing dusty floors, cooking on charcoal stoves. None of these tasks use ergonomic materials and much of the work occurs very close to the floor, which creates a lot of up and down movement that strains back and knees. Coupled with hauling water around from sources up to 300 yards away and lack of electricity, I would not want that to be my only option in life.

When I was a kid and my Uncle described Amazon as a 'new virtual bookstore,' this is almost exactly what I pictured. Very cool.

Agree with the article's criticism of the heavy focus on Brittany Kaiser. It felt like the filmmakers were trying to put her into Snowden or Assange type circumstances, and then use those circumstances to manufacture credibility and heighten suspense. I have difficulty with the scene about a news article breaking that mentions her. Shes groaning about her career being over, but you can tell shes really excited to be in the spotlight. Assange comes off equally self-centered in the Poitras documentary, but in that case the magnitude of circumstances had already been established, along with his central role in those circumstances. The filmmakers behind 'Great Hack' never reached those levels of clarity regarding involvement, and as a result their decision to use Kaiser as primary subject felt misleading.

The U.S. business community decided years ago that manufacturing should move overseas. Ever since, the entire U.S. economy has been centered around the assumption of cheap imports, with the exception of one key product: microprocessors, a product where the U.S. has long retained dominance. This dominance provided an opportunity for balance in the U.S. trade relationship with China, but the leverage was never really used to truly demand changes to trade practices. Now, the U.S. is starting to wonder if moving everything to China was such a good idea, but due to Chinese microprocessor advancements, the U.S. lacks that key trade leverage item they had to realistically negotiate, and many of their traditional 'negotiating' techniques won't work with China.

The U.S. can't go to war with China.

The U.S. can't ban Chinese imports.

The U.S. can't overthrow Chinese Government.

Just as U.S. has built their whole economy around imports, China has done the same with exports, they need to put people in jobs and keep the exports flowing, so they have no real incentive to rework a favorable deal.

So really the U.S. is relegated to performing a Symbolic Trade war: Declare China a Currency Manipulator, Stir the pot in Hong Kong, Requesting Companies return to the U.S.

All the while, the markets are pretending the Trade War is real, delivering massive swings for large investors capable to profiting from the volatility.

Private Insurance pays healthcare providers higher rates than Medicare. Private Insurance rates serve as a subsidy for healthcare providers, allowing them to fund advanced services & facilities while also accepting the lower Medicare rates.

I don't understand how removing this Private Insurance, and then moving everything to Medicare rates, wouldn't instantly reduce the amount of money flowing into the healthcare sector and cause massive slowdowns in all areas, from research, to quality of facilities, to provider pay (nurses, doctors, phlebotomist, hospital janitors), to real estate, and most other sectors of the economy.

It would be great if industry rates were lowered, but many aspects of the economy are relying on rates as they exist presently.

It seems the more optimal route would be to slow the increase of rates, but this seems to be at odds with the process of untangling Private Insurance and implementing a new Medicare for All System.

So my question is, how does Medicare for All cut costs without collapsing the healthcare sector?

Second this, my mental calendar is a circle, but running counter-clockwise with January 1 at the 12, Feb at 11, etc. I have no problem looking at linear timelines, but viewing these clockwise representations of the year, with January at the 8 position, was surprisingly difficult.

That said, the data is really interesting.

I visited D.C. recently and the National Mall is a decent 'padded room' for tourists to ride scooters, but even with large open areas and wide paths there were still numerous instances where scooters disrupted flow of pedestrians. I think Manhattan lacks the space necessary for tourists to ride the scooters, and everyone to store them, and introducing the scooters with existing strategies would quickly become a large safety and traffic congestion problem.

If they could do the following, then it may be possible: Restrict to residents and possibly allow visitors who have ridden a certain amount in other cities. Restrict availability in large parts of the city to certain hours. Strong enforcement of no riding on sidewalks. Scooters must be stored in docks or racks, may not be left on streets (providers must rent storefronts or space in/near bodegas with penalties for scooters left on streets).

Even with all of this, I still think the scooters would become burden.