kiliantics

take a look at how their pensions work and and what it costs you and you might reconsider (basically, it's a similar deal to the police pension mafia)

nice, "ultracrepidarian" is going to be getting some use from me, looks like I'm late to the game though:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ultracrepidari...

There are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.

While the idea in the post is an interesting one, the analogy to planing is terrible. The difference in results from a power planer and a hand plane (even with a pretty basic blade) is night and day. Wood planed with high quality and sharp steel has a finish that doesn't even need oil or varnish.

People talk about how non-AI code will become an artisanal craft and I think it's a bit of a stretch. The one exception might be when code has an intrinsic aesthetic quality in itself, rather than just the functional output, something like the obfuscated C code competition entries. Hand-worked wood might be crappy too, like a school woodwork birdhouse project made by a beginner, but a truly artisanally crafted piece of furniture or cabinetry has a very tangibly superior output to an IKEA bookshelf or other industrial stuff.

On the point of doing work for the sake of doing work and not for the sake of the value of the output, this is nothing new, as suggested in the blog post. But the more apt analogy would be all the "bullshit jobs" that have existed for decades in modern corporations. People who expand their teams to justify more budget to hire more people to create more work to expand their teams to get bigger budgets, etc. All the while producing nothing of real value in the company. The thing that AI seems to have done is accelerated and exaggerated this tendency, maybe since it was already the natural tendency within the logic of our corporate work culture.

I took a boat ride in Maine on a lobster boat once that was owned and operated by a man in his 90s. Someone else in the town told me that he was being pressured to stop working by his family because he had recently fallen out of the boat while lobstering alone and broken a rib. He still managed to climb back into the boat with his injury and get home. It's a different America up there.

The phrasing in the article shows very strong bias towards Israel in general

It's about how the taxes are spent too. If the government cuts welfare and gives handouts and subsidies to special interests, that is not an effective redistribution.

I'm a European living in the US and my sense is that perceptions towards AI are generally more positive here than in Europe if anything (I do work in tech though which skews things a good bit).

This article almost feels like some kind of psychological manipulation: "Jeez Americans, can't you just get on board like the rest of the world?"

Check out forum.woodenboat.com to read from a lot of amateurs taking on the project, just be warned that the rabbit hole is alluring and very deep.

It's typically not recommended to self-design, the physics gets technical and there are a lot of free working plans out there including by famous naval architects.

Most people start out with simpler designs using plywood and fiberglass but, due to my aforementioned disdain for a lot of modern approaches, I personally went with a traditional oak frame, cedar plank, copper rivet construction. It is very time consuming but I'm enjoying the journey. I chose a flat-bottomed sail boat design (dory) to make it a little easier on myself.

There are endless variations on the concept of a "wooden vessel that can be propelled through water" idea so it really depends on your interests and tastes. It's a "form follows function" situation too, so you also need to consider your use case -- engine, oar, sail; ocean, river, lake; etc.

Same, specifically boat-building for me because it just draws me in.

But more generally, I would like to commit my time to making the built world more beautiful and sustainable. I despise the obsolescent plastic slop that we all are forced to use, wear, live in, and just see and be around all the time. I find it such a degradation in our society -- the shift in taste and values away from an appreciation of well-made, durable, and well-designed physical objects.

Taxes used to be based only on property rather than labour, maybe we should go back to that. Of course this won't happen as it is a force of wealth-deconcentration.

Most left wing movements and organisations in the West drew strength from the existence of strong socialist states, both materially and ideologically. These kinds of groups were a balancing force against the right wing/capitalist direction, which is inherently undemocratic, having as its logical endpoint the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.

Wouldn't really be to my taste either but this whole story just reminded me of how much more interestingly the wealthy used to spend their money.

What legacies of high craftsmanship will be left by Musk and Bezos and their ilk? The rich seem to have collectively decided to no longer value good taste.

And I believe this has downstream effects on the aesthetics of everyday things for the average person too. It seems the average person will never again enjoy public works projects that are aesthetically beautiful, like say the Brooklyn Bridge or New York Public Library. All the craftsmen required to build such things no longer exist because the wealthy do not employ them.

Duration of the signal, along with intensity variation, is consistent with the duration of any possible point source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal#Time_variation

Location: NYC Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: perhaps but unlikely Technologies: open to any, have lots of experience in ML with python/pytorch, some C/C++ and Julia, on the edge and in the cloud Résumé/CV: https://github.com/kilianbreathnach/resume/blob/gh-pages/Wal... Email: kiliantics@gmail.com

The right time would have been when the going was good some years back. Tech workers could have put together an unparalleled strike fund and commanded unprecedented political power. We could have truly changed the world.

But, as already mentioned, if you think sentiment is unfriendly to unions now, it's nothing compared to how it was back then. The typical tech worker somehow thought they were already changing the world, doing some VC's bidding for nickels on the dollar, adding sparkly features to another B2B SaaS product...

It's definitely an under-explored area of business but I don't see why there couldn't be a scalable "co-operative" form of banking that could serve this need. Something like a credit union, which distributes the risk of investment among members without some added overhead that goes to investors. As pointed out in another reply, there are European countries with more established co-operative practices in agriculture and other larger industries and I believe this is partially due to sources of capital that are made available by the state for projects like this, so it is a form of co-operative/socialist investment.

Well if only we put as much energy into thinking about how to scale this model rather than the get-rich-quick startup/corporate model that typically just benefits investors, maybe we as a society would have good answers to your questions :)

I am a member of the local food co-op. While not a perfect model for society, I think it's a good example to provide some alternative to the system of work we all take for granted.

I want to be able to buy food at the co-op but only members can shop there. All members must do a work shift at the co-op in order to maintain their membership. This way, in principle, there is no labour cost or labour exploitation required to run the co-op (in reality there are a few full-time employees for certain jobs). I can choose the job I would like to do for my work shift and this way everyone who is working at the co-op wants to be there, has some satisfaction in doing their job and everything tends to run well. There are ways to make the less desirable jobs more palatable, though you'd be surprised how many people are only too happy to do the bathroom cleaning shift over other shifts.

In addition, every member is a part owner of the co-op with no one owning more than anyone else. So there is no exploitation of the consumer either. All money goes back into the co-op. All decisions are made by elected committees so everyone has a say in how things are run.

This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships. And similar models can be used for other basic needs, like housing co-operatives, common in Europe, where people are collectively their own landlords.

It's really strange that all the comments in here take any question of an alternative as forcing us back to a hunter-gatherer state of nature kind of situation. Other models exist and have proven successful even at pretty large scales. The fact these are seemingly inconceivable shows just how susceptible we are to this mythology of work.

This "mutually beneficial" transaction only seems so simple and obvious if we refuse to investigate the many unstated assumptions here.

It would require far less labour to secure these living standards if all the land in the world weren't already claimed and violently defended by a property-owning class. Looking back through history, it's plainly evident that most ownership, especially of land, was acquired through violent means that most would condemn today.

If there were some great reset where we could all agree on a fair system in which no one had any benefits or disadvantages due to some historical events, there is no way the same labour trade "deal" would be maintained.

I think OP must have grown up in a pretty affluent neighbourhood. (How many schools have programmes with epidemiological institutes?) If I had done TY in the school I went to with the others in my cohort that did, my experience would have likely been much closer to theirs than to OP's: rarely attending school, drinking, smoking weed, and in some cases not returning back to school at all to finish the leaving cert.

I was much happier getting out of school as soon as I possibly could like yourself.

The book "fom winde ferfeelt" is basically a book-length version of the joke, written by a brazilian who was frustrated with the inconsistency in the rules of the German language.

This reminds me of an interesting video I saw of someone making garum:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICZww0DtQKk

His description of the flavour is so intriguing.

I think rope, at least of any appreciable length and strength, is a much more modern technology.

I've spent the last couple of years researching and building my own timber frame structures and I have come to be of the opinion that aesthetics exist for a reason. A functionally sound structure will have pleasing aesthetics.

Understanding more about home-building now, when I look at what's available in new builds and renovations these days I see a lot of suspect aesthetics and they are usually accompanied by (if not directly representing) poor design decisions.

While this might be true on the technical level you mention, I don't know the details, I think the general pattern holds true even for larger cities. Think of NYC, where many suburbanite "bridge and tunnel folks" choose to live in Jersey, Long Island, etc. to avoid the higher city taxes but have no problem availing of all the city-funded infrastructure. They even caused the state governor to backtrack on congestion pricing so they could keep driving their vehicles in at the expense of NYC residents.

When it comes to analytics or machine learning type products, the scaling without massive implementation effort problem seems to be pretty universally hard to solve. Of course the usual big names seem to manage this on some level but startups seem to get stuck at building a handful of great solutions for a handful of clients/problems but unable to increase the number without also increasing the effort proportionally.

Do you know of any examples of small scrappy places that have figured this out? Is there any good writing on what kind of organisational and engineering approaches are necessary to make this step?

I built a storage system with these, which are almost down to $300/kWh now:

https://www.currentconnected.com/product/sk48v100-48v-server...

Of course you will need a charge controller and some other components which will add to the cost.

obligatory link to the road space picture that shows why this would not be a good move for urban transit systems:

https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/

Your point is valid but if it's a good reason to stick with the ban then maybe we should be employing it to enforce other rules that would have a far greater impact. Not enough people are attentive and thoughtful and yet we allow them to operate massive machines in public spaces which kill tens of thousands per year. I don't think allowing pets on planes and in restaurants could ever have such a magnitude of impact as we have allowed by letting nearly anyone drive a car.