wallacoloo

i haven’t kept up with ENS to this deal. they moved from a multisig to a DAO. as GP claims, they also restricted the set of actions available to governance before this move. on the face of it then, it doesn’t look unlikely that the DAO will vote to further restrict its own abilities as time goes on. this exact mechanism has been used to progressively decentralize other protocols, and as we see with other “governance tokens” (e.g. Uniswap — where IIRC governance can tweak like one single boolean parameter), massively restricting governance abilities doesn’t destroy the viability of the token (which is to say, it’s not clear to me in which direction the finance incentive — if any — points with regards to such “ungovernance”).

so your argument against consortiums (bluetooth) is that they work?… but at a higher cost (lengthy specs)?

the historic alternative is a slightly lower cost (most of BT complexity is of the plumbing type, not the PhD type) and much more significant market risks (due to incompatibilities: smaller addressable market and less ability to pivot from one market to a different one).

from the engineer PoV, i agree with you: i’d love for these specifications to be simplified. from the business PoV, i don’t think it actually matters that much.

i think the bit about old paradigm vs new paradigm tenure application bias overlooks a few things. this bias doesn’t just affect the proportion of admissions across paradigms, it’s a selection filter that allows only the best of the new paradigm people through. so even if this bias results in only 5% of the field being new-paradigmers after the first round, that selection might mean that closer to 10% of the overall output comes from new-paradigmers (because it’s selected for new-paradigmers which are in some way exceptional). that’s not enough to reverse the direction of this selection, but the effect would reduce the requirement for the other “luck”-based elements in order for the new paradigm to “take root”.

i always assumed ethanol production was encouraged by the govt precisely to spur excess production of corn so as to make our food production more robust. i.e. during a bad year of food production, halt ethanol production and redirect that excess of corn back into the food supply; crisis averted. is that not the case?

the book was Walkaway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)

the only reason i didn't name it before is that i couldn't recall the name off-hand.

> In 2019, TSMC spent $14.9 billion on capital expenses while it generated $34.6 billion in revenues mostly from investments in prior nodes; in 2020, the foundry spent $30 billion in 2021 and generated $56.8 billion revenues.

having trouble parsing this. is the datapoint from 2020 missing?

> why pay the huge transaction costs and help the current crypto-rich get richer, instead of making purpose-built chains for your future applications?

the most convincing arguments i’ve heard for reusing an existing chain is 1) easier access to users, 2) easier to deploy and 3) if your application needs decentralization, a mature blockchain will be more secure (attacks like 51% attacks have higher cost) and reliable (in the uptime sense) than something you can deploy yourself.

> There's vague talk about "the backbone of future banking systems" or such for crypto as having similar fundamental value

another argument is that many cryptos are valuable because of “regulatory arbitrage”. bitcoin/monero/zcash are all easy ways to (partially) shelter your money from tax and legal regulations (hence why they are/were largely associated with drugs).

if you can recall the author/title i’d love to look at it! i’m curious how the story deals with the disjointed sensory input in the “revived” agent. e.g. does Grandma experience sight/sound/touch/feel? if not, how does she cope with sudden full-body paralysis/numbness/loss-of-familiar-senses? did she agree to this, or know it was going to happen? and so on.

i remember one subplot to a Cory Doctorow book focused on a lab that was trying to develop a self-aware machine and the barrier there was that the machine would commit suicide as soon as it understood the broader context of its being. sort of makes me wonder that in order to achieve the sorts of AI you’re talking about, we need not just map the brain but also understand (or bruteforce) enough of it to avoid agent crises. the barrier to that could be larger than just developing a wholly new neural network (idk).

i think the point is to benchmark the “what if i did invest in FileCoin” v.s. the “what of i didn’t invest in FileCoin” case. where would your $ be if you didn’t invest in FileCoin? for a lot of people actually making that decision, the default place that money would be is one of Eth/Btc/stablecoins with yield (debt based)/S&P 500 (totally different regulatory area). so if you want to look at the “what if i don’t invest” scenario, without radically changing the other preferences of where that money goes, Eth/Btc comparisons seem pretty reasonable.

if you have a high-uptime PC, you can find USB-enabled SDS011 sensors for $30 on Amazon or anywhere else, and free software that creates a web dashboard that shows VOC count by time. can’t remember if these devices measure CO2/NO2 specifically though.

https://github.com/seandlg/sds011docker

stove/oven UX has been shit ever since they were first digitized. my first home had an analog-controlled electric oven: turn the dial to the temperature you want. every oven i’ve owned since uses up/down touch buttons to adjust the temperature in 5-degree increments. it turns the half-second process of swinging a knob to the right place into a 5-second process of holding a button until it hits the right temperature.

worse, i find myself trying to micro-optimize my use of oven temperature buttons: instead of holding up until the temperature is reached, i repeatedly tap it to make it go faster — but not so fast that the debouncing mistakes 2 presses for just one press, otherwise it’s net slower. i find myself actively making latency v.s. throughput decisions: i can preheat the oven by pressing “on”, dialing in the temperature, and then pressing “start”. or, i can press “on”, “start”, and then dial in the temperature and press “start” an extra time. preheating begins whenever you first press “start”, so this shaves off 5 seconds of preheat latency at the cost of 1 extra second spent on an extra button press.

i get irrationally angry every time i use a digital oven. the digital oven is like some looking glass into a half-dozen interlinking societal systems that have managed to settle into some totally unsatisfying equilibria… and they’ve stayed there for decades. it’s legitimately depressing.

> that gives you a real incentive to take care of your local community. This in turn improves the stability of the society as a whole, since the large group of homeowners is not in favor of any real upheaval which might threaten the status quo.

“take care of your local community” and “[preserve] the status quo” are placed in fairly direct opposition often in daily life. unless you want for children to live in the home they were born in forever, no new infrastructure to be built, etc. who really wants the status quo anywhere to be maintained for 30 years? most people i know, most communities i’m involved in, crave more novelty than that.

the job market is a matching market. my desires vary from my ex-coworkers’ desires. out of every 10 companies, there are 9 that i won’t tolerate working for. fortunately, my favorite options probably vary from that of my ex-coworkers’, so that doesn’t mean 90% of companies are destined to be suckers. but it does mean that if you randomly recruit engineers, you should expect a low follow-through rate (you want a good match, don’t you?).

now throw a pandemic into the mix. everyone’s lifestyle has been disrupted to a lesser or major degree. everyone’s rethinking certain key aspects of their life, whether intentionally or emotionally. relevant to this: employees are just a lot more discriminating in their job evaluation than they used to be. the pool of jobs i’m willing to take has shrunk by 2-3x. again, that doesn’t mean the total matches must fall. but it does mean that it’s going to take more effort to locate matches. i.e. “it’s harder to hire engineers”.

we’re dealing in counterfactuals here, so we’ll never truly know. one possibility is that vaccine mandates brought a large portion of those on-the-fence in to get a vaccine sooner than later, at the cost of pushing others on-the-fence way far away from ever getting the vaccine. i.e. a short-term boost in vax numbers at the cost of long-term rates. maybe worth it, maybe not (there’s so many second order effects).

in any case, i have friends here in progressive seattle who were part of the “vaccinate and done” group back in Apr/May but once the governor used vaccine uptake as an excuse to enforce new mandates now say “i’ll get the booster once i know doing so means i get to go back to normal”. so mandates definitely do push a certain type of otherwise compliant person away from getting the vaccine. i only have anecdata, but i think it’s worth keeping an eye on that viewpoint. could this “vaccine and done” group grow into a “reject mandates (including boosters) and done” if the mandates prevent them from actually being “done”?

dunno where we’re at today with newer captcha models, but for old-style static image captchas there used to be browser extensions where you could solve (say) 100 captchas in one sitting and then navigate the web freely and the next NN captchas your browser receives would be solved automatically.

or you could pay like $1 to cover 1000 captcha solutions. again, not sure if these still exist for newer style captchas though.

yeah, kind of confusing. “omicron at 100% prevalence, Colorado” is easily mistaken as “100% of the population of Colorado has/had omicron”.

it’s nice to believe, but a lot of our ability to return to normal requires these bureaucracies to be on board. it doesn’t matter that you individually are comfortable sending your kid to school, that school’s not going to be open if the consensus and bureaucracies are against you.

somehow we failed to coordinate the back-to-normal in my region when the vaccines arrived. this seems like the next best opportunity to admit that we’re ready to lift restrictions, so here’s hoping we can keep the majority on board this time.

> you should be thanking hiring managers who turn down candidates who have no regrets about past work at toxic companies

"no regrets" is an important part of this. though it's not quite the precise word i'd like, since your friends could well not regret their choice to stay given the circumstances you outline. what i want is for our culture to fight against antisocial behavior: to encourage the everyday person to give sufficient weight to social impact when making decisions.

"sufficient" is subjective, so as a starting point replace that with "non-zero" and i think we come out ahead: the toxicly selfish (or socially ignorant) are encouraged to behave at least mildly pro-socially, and the friends you mention who tried to leave evidentially gave non-zero weight to their social impacts -- even if they failed -- and would pass such a test.

the world is gray and i don't want a purity test. but that's not a license to ignore our social responsibilities.

the job market (especially if you’re an engineer considering Norton) is so flush right now, you could choose a hundred other positions with similar workload and benefits. when you choose to work for a shitty company under such circumstances, it shows that you don’t care in the least for the other people with whom you coinhabit the planet. that’s antisocial behavior, and human society relies upon a certain amount of soft punishment for antisocial behaviors. yes: you should be thanking hiring managers who turn down candidates who have no regrets about past work at toxic companies, because those hiring managers are preserving our society at the margins.

> It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities.

the young people i know come to cities in an attempt to establish themselves socially (i.e. to explore and make connections with more people like them). density (in terms of people per unit of travel time) is hugely relevant to that: leave for the wilderness and the breadth of social ties open to you substantially decreases.

this seems to me among one of the central generational conflicts in cities. young people primarily prefer city life for growing their social opportunities (and so a lot of them are interested in development/upscaling to facilitate that). AFAICT most families and older people come to cities for proximity to the basic needs, and either they don't value cities for the social component, or they're established enough that what they prefer is the stability of maintaining their existing ties v.s. growing new ones (so development/upscaling just gets in the way).

> You, as a neighbor, get nothing. Meanwhile, you have to deal with additional traffic in the neighborhood; cars parked on the street; more people (quite possibly of a different socioeconomic strata) coming and going; construction noise; higher property taxes; usually uglier buildings; blocked views; more crowded schools; and more load on public infrastructure.

there was a time in this scenario when those schools and public infrastructure didn't exist. presumably, the thing which justified their build-out was an earlier increase in density. one would therefore expect further increases in density to justify more forms of (or larger scale) public infrastructure. what scenarios would lead one to value the existing public infrastructure but not value the future public infrastructure? is it just a problem of time horizons/discounting (i.e. that the negative externalities of upscaling are immediate while the positives accrue over a longer time period)? that would seem to align with the anecdote about seniors, at least. but then i'm curious how the original community ever overcame these tradeoffs in order to achieve enough density and construct the earlier forms of public infrastructure.

i’m also worried about how they calculate this rent-to-income ratio.

> Monroe County in Florida, where the median market rate rent consumes 62.9 percent of the area’s median household income.

at this point, if they’re using the IRS definition of “household”, they’re probably overestimating how much each household pays on rent. as rent per sqft rises there’s a competing effect whereby more people of different tax households pool their income and collectively rent just one unit.

e.g. median IRS household income is $100,000. median house rent is $60,000/yr. 4 unrelated people each making the median income choose to share that roof. the median share of income going to rent in this case is 15% — not the 60% that could be calculated if you compared median unit rent directly to median IRS household income.

the methodology seems pretty important and should be touched on, otherwise it’s easy for the reader to misinterpret what these numbers actually mean.

> That would reduce the value of their real estate assets in places like SF and LA.

does it actually work that way? a large part of land value seems to come from network effects: the more densely populated a region, the more valuable each sqft.

upzoning a plot often seems to be an immediate profit, too. SFH worth $1M, gets upzoned, suddenly a developer can pay $2M for the plot and tear down the house + build high-density units that are very valuable.

maybe values fall once you overbuild, but i have yet to see that in my lifetime.

see:

> i agree with the sentiment, however, it’s wishful thinking.

if you’re trying to persuade me that i shouldn’t use SN as an unwilling test subject, save your breath: i’m not engaged in any effort to de-anonymize him. his project is founded on adversarial mechanics within an extrajudicial (i.e. lawless) space: it’s naive to think those mechanics won’t bleed over from the project to its adjacencies. that’s the point i’m trying to make.

i agree with the sentiment, however, it’s wishful thinking.

Bitcoin exists in a space within game theory where everyone is in a constant adversarial relation with everyone else. it’s an explicit design, and that relationship is the only way we really know that the software and cryptography are sound. but you can’t completely isolate the protocol from its surroundings. the adversarial challenge of trying to break the bitcoin protocol is going to leak into the adjacent challenge of trying to de-anonymous the person who explicitly wanted to remain pseudonymous. in a twisted sense, if SN remains pseudonymous under the extreme pressure of thousands trying to de-anonymize him, that’s the only way we can really be sure that anonymization is still possible in the modern age.

the closest anagram i can make from “antonomasias” is:

Satosi nanamo

seems like a stretch, unless there’s more that i’m missing.

these are available in the US. they retail for $20-30 for a pair. they were easy to get from October-ish through mid December and now they’re sold out everywhere because of people testing for holiday gatherings.

well, build a whitelist of the conditions you are interested in knowing. then just run the report through a sed filter so that it strips out all the information you’re not interested in. destroy the original report. problem solved: infohazards avoided.

what are more interesting blogs you’d recommend that touch similar-ish topics to Lyn’s?

> Basically anything that is a part of the cpi basket is an inflation hedge. (Insert used car meme.)

much of the CPI are depreciatory or non-durable goods. i can’t hedge against multi-year inflation by purchasing meat and dairy. if i buy a car as you suggest, it’s not likely to be worth as much 5 years from now than today.

or do you mean not literally buying the CPI basket, but buying commodity futures, stock in producer companies, etc?