throwanem

The invention you describe, by making possible cargo transport without dependency on either a supply of fuel or the vagaries of weather, would revolutionize the global economy to an extent little short of utopian.

You might want to pick a better example the next time you advance this argument, is what I mean to say.

Thousands? Millions? Trillions? Hectoseptisquintillions? "Ignorance is not a datum." Teach that as catechism from 1975 and we might have been spared the "rationalist" scourge altogether.

Begin your reading on page 346, at the heading "Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love." After that, review Section Two for its many examples of psychopathic (mis)behavior in the marital context.

Not so great for the black ones, but that's okay. It shows honest wear, including from my watch strap's steel buckle, and the sharp pressure is a good reminder to improve my typing posture and protect my aging wrists.

The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of primary sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.)

Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20241229052235/https://ntrs.nasa...

That was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture.

I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.

What do you see?

One might insightfully argue the whole point of the psychopath is precisely that it doesn't show. I recommend Cleckley, whose definition is seminal in The Mask of Sanity, [1] originally 1941 but prefer his 1988 fifth edition especially for its rather disconsolate preface. But even a cursory review of either will trivially show the comparison does not hold.

[1] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/personality/psychopathy/194... - despite the filename, this is the 1988 edition. I like my paper edition (I made my paper edition) but the PDF will serve well enough for your reference here.

I was married for a decade. Little of that was happy. (We both made the mistake of marrying each other, then compounded it by both being afraid to be first to admit to having noticed.)

Everyone noticed - and of course I've seen it from the other side, too, many times. You can't hide when people are together who don't want to be. That always shows.

I don't really want to say "thank you." That story, more to the point that I can't find a priori cause to doubt it, makes me glad I'm about to go enjoy a gorgeous spring afternoon full of birdsong and sunshine. But I appreciate your taking the time to follow up.

Surely there must have been underlying tensions in that marriage.

(I don't feel at all confident in that statement; I am requesting reassurance.)

...sheesh.

I can't make heads nor tails of anyone's position in this mess, precisely because of its devolution into everyone yelling at one another. Yours happened to be the tail comment on this branch at the time I posted. Don't take it more personally than it was meant.

I understand why this website doesn't have DMs except among YC founders. But if it were otherwise, I'd have DMed you instead of posting that first comment publicly. The criticism I remain convinced has merit, but such things are better done in private. If I chose to make an example out of you over the other guy, it was because you looked like offering a better chance than he of redirecting this into the kind of discussion from which someone could conceivably learn something.

I've already pointed this out as the silly, purposeless argument it's become. (Or more become.) Even I at this point can't figure out who is advocating what or why, other than for the obvious ego reasons. You're bikeshedding at each other and wasting all the time and effort it requires, because no one else is enjoying it any more than you two are: if anything you have left your audience more confused than we began, but I see I repeat myself.

Show me you can stop doing that, and I'll happily mediate a technical version of this conversation that proceeds respectfully from the two of you each making a clear and concise statement of your design thesis, and what you see as its primary pros and cons.

For that I'll take a flat $150 for up to 4 hours. I usually bill by the 15-minute increment, but obviously we would dispense with that here, and ordinarily I would not, of course, offer such a remarkable discount. But it doesn't really take $150 worth of effort to remind someone that he should take better care to distinguish his engineering judgment and his outraged insecurity.

They're etymologically unrelated, "bikeshedding" having been coined in our field and our lifetime, but semantically not too far apart. The main difference I see is that pettifogging connotes an ulterior motive which the described activity serves to conceal, while bikeshedding explicitly denotes the service of no purpose save the burnishment of the bikeshedder's ego.

(The term "bikeshedding" is insufficiently defined, in that it implicitly excludes the social reasons always underlying human behavior, which is why I these days prefer the word I used. Honestly, having been away from it now something over a year, even the simple jargon of the field begins to take on a queasy pseudocolor in my mind, the stinking sinus-stinging yellow-green of a revolted gut revolting. Thinking back over the rattle of acronyms and half-words that used to shape my days comes to be like thinking back over times I have been feverishly ill. Perhaps for once in my life I am on the leading edge of something.)

Sure thing! That probably won't take more than a couple years at 10-20 hours a week of tutelage, and although my usual rate for consulting of any stripe is $150 an hour, for you I'm willing to knock that all the way down to just $150 an hour.

From most this would be no compliment. Out of you I genuinely appreciate it. I don't think you could show me greater kindness if you were trying, and I want you to know it means a lot.

Will you still think I'm fucking with you if I call your comparison a lot more insightful than I think you realize?

White nerdy kids have just been relatively less desperate up to now, socioeconomically speaking. You used to have to be a real hardcore loser, as a not otherwise messed up white boy, to embrace Crowley or hermeticism or any of that other shit that's only interesting to the poor kids and the crime kids and the kids from fucked-up families, who hang around smoking cigarettes together just off school property. (Hello.)

But now, as we exit the second "gilded age" for the second "great depression," the prospect of success in "straight" life, the white folks standard college/job/marry/kids/Epstein-client script, proves a mirage, and the same immiseration of opportunity comes for American whites that American blacks have always known. Thus proliferate get-rich-quick schemes among those certain they are deserving - i.e., con games among suckers, Crowley's native element. Given how much his speed habit led him to write, it's no surprise he comes roaring back. (He did have a sense of character and of history, hence making sure he left behind an appealing - as appalling! - set of lies.)

I have a lot more respect for B.I.G., who at least in my recollection never pretended he was other than one in a million. But when somebody like any of these guys starts saying he sees himself in you or vice versa, you had better keep your knees tightly together and a hand over your drink.

Yes.

Eat the gamma, pocket the beta, hold the alpha. Nothing in the picture here stops gamma rays so it doesn't matter what you do with those; skin will stop alpha particles, but so will mucosa (and you die of that); in your pocket, the beta source will spall X-rays off your trousers at least some of the time so the beta burns will be mitigated.

This has devolved into "MCP is web scale." https://youtu.be/b2F-DItXtZs

I believe chess players discuss it as "initiative" or "tempo."

If you called him on it he would say that was on purpose, then talk your ears off about how. He was a ferociously effective charlatan, which is why people still remember the name he made up for himself. (And even invented a rhyming couplet to prate as a pronunciation guide!)

There's actually a useful and quite generic metaphor to be excavated here. I would just tell you what it is, but I think you'll more enjoy finding it for yourself.

Crowley is full of shit.

By this definition a hammer is a magical or "magickal" implement - the K was Crowley's invention, so that he could trademark it - which of course can be true if someone decides as much, but the only reason to couch such trivia in the pettifogging obscurity Crowley favored is because doing so will help you nail bored young socialites, an activity which Crowley also famously favored. (Gotta watch out for that neurosyphilis! What a shame he never did.)

Try thinking for yourself, instead.

Eh. I enjoyed it enormously and I do likewise recommend it, but its story isn't related to AI (either the concept of its moment or the technology of ours) even slightly, nor trying to be, or at least not in any way I saw. It was pretty open with its themes, so I would expect that one to have been pretty noticeable if it was present alongside the questions of reality, artifice, grief, and simulationism with which the miniseries does concern itself.

I wasn't talking about what 'should be allowed,' rather what presently is. But your example goes rather more to my point, don't you think?

As with any tenant (owner or domicilee) of a private property in the US, the management of a store has broad privilege over lawful access to the premises, the legal theory at basis being that of trespass. Stores frequently use this power to exclude known shoplifters, check kiters, etc.

Not you, though, not after having prevailed in Marsymars v. Wally World - congratulations! Absent some novel obnoxious behavior on your part, the terms of the judgment are such that treating you as a trespasser would almost certainly result in a further finding of contempt of court, with penalties condign upon the franchise. (The general property right is not abrogated, but the specific judgment takes precedence where it applies.)

That relationship is materially different from the one which predeceased it, and the change was a direct consequence of your suit. Granted, Wal-Mart was not to you a "vendor" in the sense we mean it here but a retail store serving the general public, and you are not a "client" but a customer, and the parallel fails of establishment in several other obvious ways besides. I'm impressed it still goes so well to my point despite those flaws. Good work!