scottlocklin

Eat the crickets, drink the soylent, bugman peasant. Don't forget to self optimize and make yourself more useful to your goblin overlords.

"Cricket One is shipping its cricket powder to food producers in over 15 countries — including bakeries and snack makers in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific — but further growth in these and new markets has proven a challenge." -probably because most civilized countries thinks eating bugs or earthworms or whatever disgusting thing is on the food startup menu today is dystopian and grotesque, and that should be fed to farm animals before it's turned into human foods.

I don't know how people are eliding "forests" from my statement about soil. Soil is important and poorly understood[0], which is ironic because it's where most carbon capture is happening now. Forests are nice, and everyone likes forests, but soil is pushing the needle in ways that a shitload of 500 year old houses ain't gonna[1].

[0]https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/11/13/where-is-all-that-c...

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/46/11652

I don't even know why this is a question. So, people burn hydrocarbons for energy. How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy? Please draw this chemical reaction out, along with energy balances and how endothermic it is.

The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics. Life actually does a pretty good job of turning CO2 into dirt which gets buried -encouraging that rather than building some preposterous contraption involving mineshafts seems a little more sensible.

So much for my CalTech fanboyism: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25118150

Cipolla was right

Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

I appreciate you doing this. However .... what HN search feature?

I went and read the 2013 comments; they certainly were critical of the website: almost a trope on HN, I guess considering how many people make a living at that. Nobody really seemed to notice anything untoward. Many/most were as gee-whiz fanboy about it as people on this article on Moderna.

>The underlying reason that I believe electric aircraft can break the sound barrier is that electric motors can deliver far higher power-to-weight ratios than piston engines, jets, or turbines.

That's a completely worthless figure of merit (I assume he means thrust to weight; because electric helicopters have abysmal power to weight ratio -shit like this matters) and no reason to believe in this nonsense. By the same reasoning, one could build a piston engined supersonic aircraft because there are piston engined helicopters. Another thing that has a high thrust to weight ratio; those water rockets I used to play with as a kid.[0] Pretty sure you can't go supersonic with those either unless you fire them out of a howitzer.

Electric airplanes are a terrible idea without battery technology comparable to hydrocarbon power to weight ratios. Even then, they're a terrible idea unless the motivating technology is lighter than a jet engine and tanks for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with high school physics educations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_rocket

Anyone who actually use the excuse of "foreign interference" for totalitarian censorship basically basically doesn't believe in the concept of democracy.

"Foreign interference" has been going on from day 0 in the United States. It very obviously got us into WW-1 (the British -a largely untold but very obvious info ops campaign for something that served no US national interest), it got us into the middle east (nothing the US does there happens but for foreign interference from Saudis, Emirates and Israelis, who overtly bribe our think tanks and politicians), and it fairly obviously got us our "free trade" policies which gutted the US manufacturing capabilities to the point we can't make enough surgical masks in the US to protect our people (thanks, China).

None of the above happened because of dipshits saying things on twitter or facebook or sharing Russia Today articles. None of the above will go away if the CIA, the political center and the tech oligarchs censor the internet to protect us from meaningless internet bugaboos.

It's a naked power grab, and anyone who supports it because of "muh democracy" is a collaborator with tyranny.

I find it darkly amusing that people need a book to tell them to turn off IM tools, phone, email and other distractions for a while. I also find it darkly amusing that GTD is basically a system for dealing with IM tools, phone and email for people who feel they have no choice (they totally have a choice; it is a bullshit paradigm -even the president has plenty of goof off time).

I have no place else to say so, but latency in zoom is annoying as fuck, and it totally didn't happen with twisted pair. Back in 2016 times, I insisted on twisted pair meetings. Even then, dipshits with ipotatos on wifi would find a way to fuck it up. Now a days, even I don't have access to twisted pair, so we're in a new dark age, similar to how old fashioned 7 gallon flush toilet bowls were vastly superior to the atrocities we have now. Most people only dimly aware of what has been taken away from us in the name of "progress."

I think a first rank classics PhD is probably worth more than an average PhD in physics. The problem is, exactly as you say: the majority of "classical scholars" these days don't even read Greek or Latin; something the average high school graduate could do in the 1800s.

Depends on the point in time, though obviously you have better data than me. I am pretty sure you'll eventually be able to say the same about Moderna, assuming they don't get away with a giant placebo swindle.

That's pretty disingenuous; the CDC presents the data in the same way.

They have a merit-based admissions reputation at least, and their small numbers keeps it exclusive.

On the other hand, most Stanford guys I've met have also been sharp, and they graduate 700 PhDs a year according to someone below.

Yeah sure man: if I finally made a product that worked, that I bet the future of my failing company on, and it is actually a product which every human on earth needs to take, possibly many times: first thing I'm gonna do is lower my S&P500 correlation risk. That totally makes sense. Not.

People have been calling them the new Theranos for years for not publishing anything, and basically having zero useful products. They just got a half billion in bridge funding from the government on top of the 2-3 billion they've lost over their history. These are scammers taking the money and running.

Yeah, whatever: I have one too; only 16 years out.

PhD is definitely a currency, and no they're not fungible: I'm trying to figure out which ones are actually worth something. In my experience it's a fairly lousy signal. Every Caltech PhD I've met has been sharp as a tack though.

I'd love figures on how many PhDs are issued broken down by school in timeseries format. JDs don't count. Would be helpful to know who is debasing the currency. Caltech definitely isn't. One of the few actually elite institutions left. No fake subjects either.

I'm guessing places like Harvard, UCB and MIT each issued close to 1000 last year. Lower ranked schools, maybe 500 each; probably cumsum to significantly higher than CalTech even with short histories.

Decent program, but try to get some lower back work in there. That's an investment you absolutely won't regret. Sandbags work and are cheap; big rocks too. Bridges if nothing else.

There was some stuff about Spain in March 2019, though I didn't follow the paper enough to see if it made it into publication or was bad methodology

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

>This is because in a lot of western countries

Dude's in Iran, not New Jersey. Pretty sure "western countries" the only ones experimenting with gender neutral anything, mostly because there are large populations of over educated people with weird ideas who have never been around children.

C/A as sinister manipulators has to be the most preposterous conspiracy theory to come out of the last 4 years -and that includes Qanon. They were a marketing company also known for the scoundrely manipulations of the.... LL Bean catalog. Maybe they sold some people flannel shirts. Terrible.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/11/02/huckster-hack-uk-govt-rep...

Block weights, sledgehammer levers, captains of crush grippers, fat grip barbells/dumbbells; even a large bucket of water and a pair of pliers. Brookfield's books are considered canonical, and everyone who is anyone (I'm not anyone) in grip is on grip board[0]. I was first made aware of it looking at this dude's geoshitties website[1], which is mercifully still around and a great beginners resource.

To sell you on it a bit: if you've lifted for ~10 years you've probably hit your biological peak on the big exercises, and you've gone into some kind of maintenance mode, or are concentrating more on strength endurance, or rotating through peak efforts on different kinds of strength, or working around inevitable injuries or whatever. Either way, a man gets bored, and a large part of the appeal of strength training is the feeling of making progress. Various forms of hand strength; there's basically infinite potential there. Leonardo used to bend horseshoes, and it's a seemingly impossible feat I think most men are capable of with some training. It's also something available to old people who might not be able or willing to pull 5 wheels on the deadlift any more. You can, of course, injure your hands or forearms, but your chances of being crippled by it are fairly low. The other thing about it; you can train a fair amount (unlike big lifts) without blowing out your cortisol, but you get that intense triumphant grrrrrrr ogre nerve energy from doing it that you do after a max effort lift. Also it looks cool and chicks and small children dig it when you do seemingly impossible feats.

Anyway, peasants who hoed their crops and lifted bricks all day were fucking STRONG in the hands. Probably stronger than most nobles in that regard.

[0] https://www.gripboard.com/index.php?/forum/7-workout-reports...

[1] http://www.geocities.ws/ltgodfrey/lever.html

It's not clear that knightly training was as useful as UFC training. Ineffective martial arts were a big deal for literal decades before the Gracie family came along, I guess because people didn't want to put in a mouth guard and see what happens. How often did the knights actually see combat, as opposed to train for combat, and do non-lethal sparring? The one form of training which is of undoubted utility is group tactics, but it's unclear what the non-mounted training was for this sort of thing for most times/places.

You're also probably discounting what peasant style manual labor (and hobbies, which include beating the shit out of each other with fists, clubs, etc) does for your combat ability. Hand and wrist strength is a huge deal in pre-firearms days, and peasants were at least 3-4 standard deviations stronger in these ways than average people now (really: that much -I've fooled around with building hand strength and it's bonkers how strong people can get in this domain). People basically exerted their strength through simple hafted tools all day; makes them good at exerting their strength through simple hafted tools all day. Regarding group tactics; peasants had lots of games which could have helped them with this. For example, Hurling[0], and I'm sure there was lots of stuff like Calcio Storico[1].

The real advantage the knights had (beyond equipment, like horses and the morale of feeling superior to the peasant) was probably nutrition. They spent most of their downtime hunting, feasting and eating meat, and between wearing heavy armor and their strength oriented workouts, the knights were probably pretty jacked. 50 or 100lbs of muscle and fat and 6-8" of height helps a lot. I don't have references in front of me for this, but David Willoughby talks about some of this in his book, and I'm sure you can see it in skeletons of Nobles versus peasants (aka Nobles will have larger skeletons with 'deformities' at the muscle attachment points).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurling

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJEvtkFKBc

Related: a "stirring" defense of child labor from a Gates foundation apparatchik that got published in the left-leaning guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/nov/06/c...

Pretty sure Gates is a Democrat! Yeah, man, Child Labor laws are so 19th century.

The Democrats policies don't help the working class very much either these days. That's why the republicans have an opening, even on social issues. The 'whassamadda kansas' guy has made an entire career of noticing this, but nobody listens to him. Particularly hilarious in his last book, "Listen Liberal" was his skewering of the "microfinance" fetish of the "left" -aka, let's get the third world in hawk to American userers.

It's a titanic shift; I'm old enough to remember guys like Walter Mondale and Tip O'Neill who made Bernie look like an Ayn Rand fan; they were mainstream democrats who actually did help the working man. Now, even the far left are screeching ninnies who are obsessed with things which would actually destroy the working man's life more than the last 40 years already have.

What you're missing is the "left" has long since transferred its affections away from poor people who are not wards of the state.

"Woke" politics magically appeared in 2008 when leftists were manning occupy wall street, which pretty much immediately degenerated into escalating virtue signalling instead of, you know, making some reforms to wall street. I'm sure that was a total coincidence.

It's widely recognized by the actual American left that neoliberals have taken over the Democratic party, but it's less often said that the Republican party is mutating into a worker's party, differentiated largely on social class. Political correctness: it's just a social class differentiator; keeping the filthy workmen off of our proverbial lawns. Democrats are now the party of the managerial/professional/muh collitch class and minorities, and Republicans are the party of the working class and ... I guess its historical association with small businessmen holds. The history of who passed NAFTA (back almost 30 years ago now, mind you) is pretty irrelevant: nobody in the present day Democratic party is talking about revoking it (2016 Bernie might have; I miss 2016 Bernie); it was the modern worker's party, not the past workers party who wants to renegotiate this disaster.

Lasch saw this at work in the 1970s, FWIIW, which is why Gurri is talking about him. Lasch was an actual Marxist, though he eventually made common cause with Paleocons because he saw the cheerful "left wing" atomization of the family as incredibly destructive for working people, which, of course, was true.

Complaining about strict evaluation, the std lib not doing what he wants it to, the type system, the lack of heap profiler/threadscape, and .... demanding Golang handle zero values in his preferred way is basically him whining it ain't Haskell. I could blubber about it not having power conjunctions or self intervals or whatever if I wanted Golang to be J, which would be a similarly moronic roster of complaints. In reality golang is a basket of compromises like any other programming language. There's vastly more good stuff built in it than Haskell, despite Haskell being older and more theoretically amazing, so they must be doing something right.

His only criticism that resonated with me was go get defaulting to head, which befuddled me when I first saw it, but that's a compromise too; one oriented to the large codebases that golang is designed for. It's actually a pretty good compromise compared to the propeller head Haskell dork "Things break backwards compatibility in Haskell, and the users just update their code because they know the library author did it for a reason." -aka this appears to be a statement from an academic wanker who obviously never had to ship on a timeline in his entire fucking life.

Because people gamble on election outcomes using ethereum.

It's actually not an interesting or original idea, and this is a shit tier paper; it's generally a way for a physicist to attempt to get a job when done grad school.

Echo state networks do insanely well on the Mackey Glass equation and ESNs are randomly connected and use linear regression on the output node.

TLDR: dude ate less (careful tracking with no cheating) and got some strength training in. Strict discipline and doing some work actually generalizes.

Reminds me of Alfred Lord Duggan's "Count Bohemond" where Sichelgaita of Salerno comes off as one of Bertie Wooster's harridan aunts. Also trash historical fiction, but unlike the above authors, Duggan never pretended otherwise.