Humans think too highly about themselves particularly when judging other species. How can we judge something we can’t experience ourselves? like multiple distributed consciousness of octopuses or emergent descentralized logic of ants?Some species even with tiny brains or no brains at all can solve problems for which humans spent years of engineering and planning. See study below of slime replicating the Tokyo rail network in 26 hours optimizing by cost efficiency and fault tolerance.
As a naturalized American who lived in 3 other countries including two in Europe and who travels often all over the world, married to a European, etc I must say the US has its perks and it’s definitely in my top 5 countries to live. I lived mostly in the south and the east coast so I don’t have a full picture of the US as a resident. But it’s the same in Europe, living in Berlin is very different than living in Sicily, even Milan is very different than Sicily being the same country. So to be fair the US should be compared to Europe not to a particular country. The car culture in the US I think is fine because the country is built around it, the interstate system is pretty good and gas is cheap. I do like road trips very much, at my own pace not having to worry about train/flight schedules. In Europe taking long family road trips by car as we do in the US would be prohibited and even stupid in the eyes of many Europeans. I also like that you can talk to Americans everywhere and get to know people. In Europe you start talking to a stranger they look at you like you went crazy. Being social is part of having a good quality of life too, so the US ranks pretty high there.
There’s plenty of ways to trust your very young kids and raise them to be independent. Allowing them to walk alone for half a mile crossing roads is not one of the them. Kids can behave very differently when they are with their parents or other adults. So you can’t assume because they do something with you all the time they will stick to the same behavior and rules without supervision. At 5 years old their brains are still way too mature, they lack any judgement and impulse control, it doesn’t matter how smart you think your child is. Once they reach 9-10, that’s a different story.
Love this. Have you tried lighting at that scale? Would it be possible to simulate say candle light on a table? Or window light? I think with light sources the images would look more intimate.
There were definitely horrible places on the internet pre Facebook that were popular among kids like Rotten and Ogrish. But there was not a trillion dollar company investing billions of dollars and hundreds of scientists on research to attract and hook kids to their platform. This is not remotely comparable.
I have always been pro fundamentals. It caused me trouble early in my career with bosses that didn’t understand why I would spend time trying to understand how something worked at a low level if I was a high level user. But then knowing the fundamentals gave me an edge as a designer and developer by understanding capabilities and limitations of the tools I was using. For example understanding how indexes work internally in a relational database. So I see the value in this type of work, not to land a job as a LLM researcher, but as an informed user of the tool.
My understanding is some of it about 20% is intragovernmental,like borrowed from SS. Not that it doesn’t matter, but the 100% left is what sets the interest rates. The other 20% will start moving into the 100% public debt at some point. So it can get worse even if we stop borrowing.
It just takes a bit of reading about American history to know that we have had authoritarian phases pretty much since our independence. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson policies against freedom of speech, native Americans and international trade, Fillmore and Buchanan fugitive slave act and Dred Scott, Lincoln suspension of Habeas Corpus, Cleveland using the military against unions, Johnson military expansion in Vietnam, Nixon secret bombings and using CIA/FBI against protesters. The nation was heavily polarized during each of these periods as much or more than it is today.
Commuting wears you out. The energy and stress saved from not having to drive in bumper to bumper traffic or ride public transportation can add a good deal of productivity.
In my experience having room in the house, not having to cook dinner, not having to go grocery shopping, never have to clean the house, travel comfortably and have a full time nanny, makes a lot of a difference. You save a lot of time that you can then invest in yourself, your partner and your kids.
We will go for the third one next year and that would be it for us. I come from a family of 8 children and my wife is a single child. I don’t think I had a better childhood, just different. She has a lot of good memories of traveling with her parents and does not regret not having siblings. I saw my dad a few days a week for a good portion of my early childhood and regret that a bit. My wife and I are equally social, I’m actually more of an introvert in some circumstances. We are both considered of others, and like to share. I would say the one skill I developed that she lacks is the ability to focus and concentrate in public spaces with noise. Because that’s how I did homework and studied all the way from elementary school to college, always around a bunch of loud people, no place in the house where I could close a door and be alone.
There’s never a right time to have kids. But having them older has its perks. You are much more calmed, patient, you are wiser and likely financially stable. Throwing money at problems definitely makes life 10X easier when you have kids, something most people can’t do in their 20s or even 30s.
Being a dad is fulfilling enough that I don’t want to do anything else but hang out with my kids. Perhaps that’s what Paul Graham meant when he said kids make you less ambitious? And I know the day will come when they won’t like to hang out with me, so I’ll have the time to go back to building things.
I spent a few years on and off consulting working for two of the Big 4. I can’t speak for all the teams but the ones I worked with provided good value. Our job was to protect our customers from poor designs and lack of accountability. Some of the projects I worked with were very big involving dozens of suppliers. Our customers didn’t have the capability to coordinate so much work and they also lacked the know-how and expertise in many of the domains. Also many of the big engineering and tech companies out there can be very sloppy. Don’t think because they carry a recognizable name (I don’t want to name them but they are SP500) they always do good work. I have seen stuff that is really really bad, like unsafe bad. That’s where my team would step in and fill those roles on the customer side. Many of the projects I participated were also highly regulated, and that’s a whole additional layer of complexity for which you need people with experience in very particular areas. A bad design that leads to an environmental disaster or even a violation of regulations can be extremely costly.
The way I understand it is, these fabs have massive overheads so not selling is not an option. It is also relatively easy to pivot production from enterprise to consumer. Now if they all start doing that at the same time to stay in business during the down cycle, an oversupply in consumer chips is possible.
As feedback, you made that popup way too clean and easy to close. That’s not how it works in reality. You need to make the background transparent and the X so small it’s technically impossible to hit. Also think about adding an ad and a timer and move the popup slightly after N ms so that the user always hits the ad.
Economic stability alone is not enough for a currency to be an important store of wealth. China doesn’t have a free floating exchange, it has very strict capital controls and lacks political and legal predictability. You need very specific institutional foundations to have a currency like the USD, which the Chinese political system rejects. The US has an independent legal system. If you have a dispute with the US government you can take it to an independent court. In China, you have no way to sue the CPP. China is a single party socialist republic with all the political authority concentrated at the top, so one high impact event like the sudden dead of Xi Jinping could send its economy into fallout because of political uncertainty. In the US the system is explicitly designed to absorb this type of shocks. So for these and many other reasons the Yuan under the current Chinese political system will never be a serious contender to the USD as global currency, it’s just way too much institutional risk for foreign investors. It’s also very unlikely the CPP will ever pick a Yuan rivaling the USD vs political control over their domestic policy. They can’t have both.
It’s very unlikely that the USD will lose its status particularly to the Yuan. You can do that mental calculation yourself. Would you convert all of your lifesavings from USD to Yuans today or in the next 10 years? The answer is probably “not a chance”. The reason is simple, liquidity and trust. China has no comparable open and independent financial institutions international central banks can trust, nor can they have them without surrendering control over their monetary policy. So as long as there’s no alternative to the USD (BRICS will likely fail), it will continue being the default global currency for reserves, debt and trade.
Drugs are regulated with the same care in the US, the problem is you are comparing a drug in Europe with a dietary supplement in the US. You can’t expect to grab a high quality of any dietary supplement from say Walmart. It’s the same in Europe. In the US there are labs making high quality dietary supplements, but you usually don’t find them at retail stores or even Amazon, so it needs a bit of research.
I work in renewables in the US. The current picture is actually a lot more positive than people believe. But good news are usually boring at not good for click bait, so they aren’t covered by the media. There’s a lot of work on solar energy currently and the forecast is VERY good. We do have some issues like grid connectivity and shifting policies but the market economics are working extremely well. The fact is solar is too cheap and, unlike wind, very easy to deploy, so it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you will eventually support it. Texas for example, the conservative oil and gas hub of the US, is already outpacing California in total capacity additions because 1) they have tons of land and 2) no BS, quick local permits. So if you are a solar builder, you go to Texas not California. And yes, Texas is still pro fossil fuels, but the laws of supply and demand will continue favoring solar so that’s where the money will flow to.