rickydroll

One approach is reading your and other people's written speech out loud. Pay attention to where it feels awkward; for me, that was the direction I needed to practice. A trick that I use currently to reinforce speaking written speech is using Grammarly to make corrections, which I try to internalize.

Another trick is don't correct words and letters. Say the sentence you really meant to say. It is not uncommon for me to say a thought or a concept two, three, four times in a row as I'm wrestling with what the language should be on the written page.

You need to train yourself to speak written speech. When you do that, the thought processes behind typing your words activate, and your language use changes.

Maybe it's time to develop an open-source inference engine. I feel like I'm missing something. I have no idea how to do it, but the need is there.

Good to know. I figured I'd start with Gemini because if I used Claude, I'd probably get addicted to the results. Then I would have to commission a velvet painting of me dressed in Dickensian beggar clothes with big eyes and a quivering lower lip, holding my hands out, asking for tokens.

In my experience, (using 3.8 flash) the Google models do a fairly good job at summary notes and simple documentation (do this, do that). It doesn't seem to be as bad as Claude for producing headache-inducing text.

It might even make it searchable.

Personal Panama Papers? :)

I believe this makes a lot of sense. Hopefully we also have a smart meter one could use to get quick feedback on water use, so homeowners can see how changing their behavior reduces water use in the same way that a smart meter for electricity gives us the same feedback for reducing energy use.

Even without the economic incentive, I've turned off the lawn irrigation installed by previous owners, use soaker or drip irrigation in my berry and vegetable gardens, and water ornamental plants only when they're really in distress during our summertime droughts. It's amazing how soil can go from moist and wonderful in the spring to desiccated powder in a summer drought.

Coming soon, we'll be replacing the front yards with creeping thyme and maybe wild strawberries. I do need to see if wild strawberries, though, are a groundhog buffet. I hate those little fuckers.

You're taxed on income, like anyone else, but the big difference is that wealthy people get liquid cash through tricks like borrow, spend, die. They also have other ways to gain wealth that don't involve a cash phase.

I'll get hate from some corners on this, but I'm coming to see the wisdom in not significantly increasing the tax rate on the rich, but instead broadening the tax base. For example, count tricks like borrow, spend, die as cash; make stock buybacks illegal; treat compensation in the form of assets as cash income at the valuation price when the transfer happens; count inheritances above $X million as income, cash income.

My artisanal guillotine business becomes financially viable. In fact, it may even become a unicorn.

Or strengthen your partnership with your dog by hiking together and working on agility training, tracking trials, and obedience.

Build a garden and harvest food, creating a bee- and butterfly-friendly environment while watching the little beasties feed on the bounty supplied by the plants' sex organs.

With the magic of grit and glass, make a telescope, then spend evenings observing with your organic eye, planets, and waiting for those moments of atmospheric stability and clarity when you see the most amazing detail.

AI won't keep me from any of these things, but the need for money to live does.

Good find! Thanks.

The question I have is what is copyright for? As far as I can tell, it is used for censorship, and rent extraction.

I thought it looked an awful lot like David Chaum's DigiCash. If they haven't brought Chaum into the discussion, I would be very nervous about using Taler.

[edit] Yes, he has been involved. https://www.heise.de/en/news/39C3-How-the-open-source-cash-G...

original https://chaum.com/ecash/

new and improved https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/eCash_2.0_9-7-2...

Interesting stumble upon. https://chaum.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Better-than-mon...

I recognize that billionaire talking point. It's the argument behind the Laffer curve.

https://bipartisanpolicy.org/issue-brief/what-a-new-laffer-c...

FTA: For years, policymakers and economists have debated the shape and peak of the Laffer curve, a theoretical model suggesting that if top tax rates increase beyond a certain point—called the revenue-maximizing rate—they will yield negative marginal revenue.

A new paper from economists at the Joint Committee on Taxation finds that the Laffer curve is flatter than previous theories have suggested, meaning the revenue-maximizing “rate” might be a broad range rather than a single point.

Lawmakers looking to raise taxes might find it difficult to raise substantial revenue from top rate increases; however, broadening the base, examining untaxed sectors, and reducing the tax gap represent promising pathways to closing the gap between revenue and spending.

---

I'm glad they highlighted that instead of increasing the tax rate, broaden the tax base. For example, if they treated borrow-spend-die as income. We could keep a lower tax rate. The same argument could be made for eliminating the estate tax. Treat inheritances as income for tax purposes.

All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.

The small artist copyright is a red herring. I think the number of small artists who make money from their work is frightfully small. For example, my partner makes some rather nice jewelry that is different from anything out there. We're doing the craft fair circuit to see if she can sell any and if it's worth continuing to make them.

She sells a relatively small number of pieces at each fair. Occasionally it's even enough to cover expenses.

Would copyright help her? No, because we wouldn't have the money to sue. Small copyright violations might be worth a cease and desist. Large copyright violations would have more money than us for the lawsuit. We would need that Goldilocks-sized violation. They are small enough to be responsive to the threat of a lawsuit but big enough that they have enough money that would be worthwhile suing them, i.e. enough to pay our lawyer.

I want an electric car that isn't bound to the stealership and isn't a ticking time bomb when they stop maintaining the software. If my car doesn't go for 200,000 miles, I feel like I was cheated.

The thought that discipline would eliminate the need for statins or GLP-1s is a nice fantasy. It appears that all it does is increase stress on the patient and make them feel like crap because they're blaming themselves for something out of their biological control.

When I had high cholesterol, I tried diet, which didn't touch it. I tried 9 statins, failed on all of them. Niacin didn't work. And now I stab myself every two weeks with Praluent, and it works beautifully. I'm looking forward to fewer heart attacks.

Diet and exercise didn't bring down my blood sugar numbers enough, and I've tried several drugs that didn't work for one reason or another, but now the GLP-1s seem to work where others didn't.

As far as I'm concerned, they're essential tools.

I still consider it trash food. I have a firm policy of not eating any seafood that wears its skeleton on the outside.

The previous commenter had mentioned it already, and I don't think 9/11 had the same psychic shock and persistence as COVID and 2008. But I'm sure you have had a different experience behind your feeling of 9/11 as a more persistent traumatic event.

Trump is a continuation of a multi-tentacled, longer-timeline octopus that encompasses all of our collective traumatic events.

I have a few more times around the sun, and you are not the only person with that perspective.

I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.

I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.

I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.

> I have nothing but only because I don't go down this specific rabbit hole

I did 2 years ago, and you are right, you got nothing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43512337

The published numbers are totally in line with recent voter activity in the States.

I wonder how much noise pollution is partly causing the lost songs. It is known to hinder finding mates.

I'm a little surprised that no one has mentioned the Isaac Asimov's story "Profession."

https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/AST/AST_1957_...

Looks like a speech recognition error for consumables. That said, many refrigerants today are quite combustible.

I understand this period. We force kids to get up and go to school way too early, especially in the teen years. I forget what the researcher said, but it was something like starting high school at 9 to 10:00 in the morning.

For me, it doesn't matter much. I've blacked out the windows in my bedroom because any light while I sleep isn't good, and morning sunlight triggers migraines, which isn't a great way to start the day. Since I'm on the far eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone, I will miss a lot of summer daylight.

Well, it was the only one that didn't create an anthropomorphic armadillo, albeit one that has been dressed up by a wildlife rescue person that had eaten a few too many magic mushrooms.

I've had a different experience. My code is better. The ease of refactoring and practicing very defensive programming without getting burned out from the repetitive boilerplate. It all comes together better than it did when I was programming professionally too many moons ago. IFF I don't let the LLM toddler run amok. :-)

Seriously, I find I need to slow down the rate of change. I don't move forward until I understand the change proposed and have updated the docs. At the same time, I find that keeping up with the LLM/agent is exhausting. 3 hours with an LLM leaves me as tired as 6 hours with a keyboard had previously. I find that coding when tired or fuzzy yields code that shouldn't have been written in the first place. Sadly, once it's been written and debugged, the temporary fix becomes permanent.

Yes, but are they ballistic material? Can they protect the wearer against small arms fire just like they do in the John Wick movie?

They are called “entitlements” because we have a reasonable expectation of getting what we were promised when we agreed to pay taxes as our part of the social contract.

If you say, “We should have invested more,” I point you to the 40% of current retirees that were not in a position to invest because their jobs didn't pay them enough above the cost of existing. And then there are any number of events, such as age discrimination, common medical issues, divorce, and bankruptcy, that destroy retirement plans.

From what I can tell, it's not possible for the vast majority of the population to be able to save for a 20 plus year retirement.

One of the things that keep people from saving are the activities driven by their investing in the stock market. To increase returns, "Activist investors" and private equity drive companies to shed jobs. You shed a job, you destroy a person's ability to save for retirement, which makes them more dependent on the social contract of Social Security and Medicare.

Cutting benefits will only cause suffering. The cost will fall on society in other ways in terms of elderly homeless people filling the ERs, begging in the streets, or committing suicide. Is it time for a "Modest Proposal II"?