wheels

I'd actually say the US is moving in the direction of Europe -- historically "left" in the US was social-democratic, whereas "right" was classical liberalism (again, these labels get wonky across cultures -- what Americans call libertarianism). That US picture does at least point to two different ends of something that's basically the same spectrum.

In Europe "left" mostly means socialist, and "right" mostly means nationalist. But socialism and nationalism aren't opposites, and can often go together, so you see things like the author of this article pointing out that the "right" doesn't want to completely dismantle the social safety net.

The US is, however, in the process of realigning to the European style.

That seems to literally just be restating what I said? Being one of the couple most accepted implies that there are other theories, and if it'd been found, it wouldn't be a theory, but simply part of the historical record.

Kind of odd to see this turning up here: this theory isn't new and in fact is one of the couple most accepted theories about the origin of the gospels. It was proposed more than a century ago, and this article doesn't say anything particularly new or interesting about it. Honestly, the Wikipedia page is probably better:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

Erm, sure? Cast iron takes a little while longer to heat up because it's heavier, but it retains heat well once hot. It's even better on induction. I cook mostly in cast-iron and carbon steel and haven't ever had a gas stove. (Like a lot of kitchen wonks, I keep a cheap non-stick pan around for eggs and pancakes, and basically nothing else.)

It's not surprising that this feels different than Thunderbird as it's a completely separate app with a separate background just being rebranded with Thunderbird identity. There's probably some effort to make them play nice together, but K-9's been around for ages (I think I've been using it for more than a decade).

And if it was a 30% stake in OpenAI for that $7 trillion (kind of a standard VC round percentage) that would put OpenAI's valuation at about the same of all of the 7000-ish NASDAQ companies (including almost all public tech companies) combined.

One word of caution there (aside from other dangers of benzos): I had a friend use them on a flight from the US to UK, and apparently was still obviously intoxicated from them when arriving, and got rejected at the border, put in a holding area, and sent back on the next flight. If going through a place where you'll actually have to talk with an immigration officer, not necessarily the smartest thing.

I assure you that the kids that are struggling with severe dental problems are not drinking two liters of tap water per day. Maybe we should fluoridate Coca Cola.

A fair point. But having the internet turn on you before you get any traction is also probably going to be a death-knell for an early stage company. It doesn't bode well for their ability to make or raise money.

I voted the grandparent up about the license allowing it. But things being allowed isn't a benchmark for them being decent.

I don't think we should stone adulterers. But I also think cheating on your partner can mean you're an asshole.

Private universities aren't. They get loads of research funding, tax breaks, people paying for their education with government backed loans. All American universities are to some extent public.

It's true, but there are more well educated alternative country musicians than one might guess.

Willie Nelson went to Baylor (but didn't finish) and Lyle Lovett has a degree in German literature from Texas A&M. Robert Earl Keen also graduated from A&M. Lucinda Williams's dad is a poet and literature professor. Emmylou Harris went to UNC and Boston University. Hell, even George Straight and Garth Brooks have degrees. That's not quite Rhodes Scholar, but perhaps not entirely expected?

Honestly: it's not worth my time to keep arguing with you. You've not taken any accountability for the several demonstrably false claims you've made here.

I wasn't comparing Sam to an Olympian; I was comparing you to one. Just because you were working in a donut shop at that age doesn't mean that that's the benchmark for achievement. Some people go to the Olympics. I honestly don't know enough about Sam's achievements before then to know if he'd done impressive things.

The whole "white man" thing is also a complete straw man. The other two YC-founders-turned YC CEOs of that era were Michael Seibel and Garry Tan, neither of whom are white.

It sounds like what you're offended by is the whole YC process -- that there are quick interviews that (back then) translated to small amounts of funding -- that literally the decision was made in a single interview. But that wasn't anything specific to Sam; that's how it worked for everyone. You can find that stupid if you want to, but then might I suggest this is an odd forum to hang out on if you find that to be offensive?

You're really just making shit up here. He didn't get $50 million for his startup within 15 minutes of meeting Paul Graham. YC's deal back then was for about $15k per startup for 7%. Loopt didn't even over its several years raise $50 million -- it was around $30 million, and that happened over a space of several rounds over several years.

I was in YC a few batches later and met Paul Graham and Sam in that era. I remember walking around San Fracisco with Sam and him telling me about Loopt. He was a few years younger than me (I was 29, he was 24), and I remember being impressed by him.

And it's possible that Sam listed his age at 19 on his YC application, and that's what PG was going on. He would have probably still been 19 when he filled out the application. Again, this isn't hard to verify -- his birthday is on Wikipedia, and he was in the summer batch of 2005. Interviews are about a month before the batch starts. But there's not really a lot of my point that hinges on if it was a month before or a month after his birthday when they met. More my point was that the stuff about him investing in Stripe as a teenager because PG "gave" it to him is completely bogus.

It really seems like you have an axe to grind here, and I'm not completely sure why. Again, I think some of the stuff that's happened later in OpenAI is worthy of criticism, but that doesn't mean you have to reinterpret everything that happened before that through some bogyman lens.

I was going based on Wikipedia. Sam was 20 when his YC batch started, and also would have already been 20 for the YC interview. But it was close -- a few months, so it wouldn't surprise me if that gets elided in a dramatic retelling.

I'm not sure how it's relevant that you worked in a donut shop? Surely you're aware that isn't the peak of over-achievement at the age of 20? God, watch the Olympics if you want to see a bunch of very determined young people. Or go to an Open Source conference. Or, as it were, YC. Sam was only slightly younger than normal there. Some 20 year olds have accomplished a lot.

You seem to really want to create a villain out of the situation, which is kind of weird. Mentors and investors are usually older, and 20 years isn't rare. That's hardly Silicon Valley specific.

You also repeated the false thing about him getting a stake in Stripe as a teenager again. Again, Stripe came into existence when Sam was 25. There's just no version of that story that works. I don't know about Sam's Stripe investment, but at that point he was already around YC a lot, even though Loopt was still going. He probably just got in with other angel investors. But at that point he was in his mid-20s and running a Sequoia-backed company, so that's not especially weird.

(There's genuine stuff to be critical of in the trajectory of OpenAI, but this seems like a really weird spot to latch onto.)

Weridly this is the second time this has been repeated in this thread, but Sam wasn't even a teenager anymore when he met PG the first time (but would have just turned 20), and was 25 when Stripe was founded, so your story is obviously wrong.

Stripe was founded when Sam Altman was 25. Loopt, Sam's first company, was founded when Sam was 20, and was Sam's mechanism for meeting Paul Graham, so this story is pretty obviously wrong at some level.

Kind of like everyone's favorite interior design non-profit, IKEA. (Seriously. It's a non-profit. It's bonkers.)

Well, usually in a realtime system you're required to produce something in a fixed amount of time. Designing the algorithms to not need variable amounts of memory is one of the challenges. Commonly you can have a buffer that's the largest you could reasonably work on in that time slice.

There's some difference between user space and kernel. I don't have much experience in the kernel, but I feel like it's more about making sure tasks are preemptable.

In user space it's often about complexity and guarantees: for example, you really try not to do mallocs in a real-time thread in user space, because it's a system call that will only return in an unpredictable amount of time. Better to preallocate buffers or use the stack. Same for opening files, or stuff like that -- you want to avoid variable time syscalls and do them at thread / application setup.

Choice of algorithms needs to be such that for whatever n you're working with, that it can be processed inside of one sample generation interal. I'm mostly familiar with audio -- e.g. if you're generating audio at 44100 Hz, you need your algorithms to be able to process chunks in less than 22 microseconds.

My apartment shared with three other roommates in that era was $750 (four bedrooms and a giant living room in a trendy neighborhood of a decent sized city). So $150 checks out.

I'm pretty sure this is illegal under California law:

https://starpointinjurylaw.com/articles/information/work-7-d...

Startups don't fit into one of the excepted categories.

When I started my company I personally worked 7 days a week, but expecting it of employees seems completely bonkers.

It's pretty revolting that you would turn this into a narrative of American exceptionalism.

I didn't disagree with your point, just the way you supported it.

I'd say exactly your argument is why it's hard to make changes.

The US has this pretty weird civil religion where the constitution is the holy text and the people that wrote the constitution are prophets.

Most other countries don't have that. A lot of democracies don't even have constitutions (UK, for example). The US constitution is an interesting historical document, but it's just a collection of laws. There are a lot of things democracies have figured out since it was written. Amendments are basically impossible at this point because the canon is closed and American politics have evolved to make it structurally impossible.

It should be possible to argue that laws should be fluid without appealing to the prophets of the civil religion. You could, you know, just talk about why it's a good idea. Shouldn't that be more powerful than trying to guess what someone who lived multiple centuries ago would have thought about it?

A friend of mine was doing Technics repair and customization and about 6 years back we started building a prototype of embedding a Pi with a 3.5" LCD in the body of a 1200. I build a custom Qt GUI for xwax that was controlled by a single rotary encoder with a push button. We could throw out a lot of the UI since it was only ever playing one track at a time. He eventually got called up to be Alle Farben's touring sound guy and we never picked it back up once he was back.

The Creatan stuff is raki, not rakı. Both the pronunciation (ı is 'uh') and beverage are different. Rakı is the basically the same drink as ouzo or pastis. Raki is the same as grappa.

It's somewhat confusing since there are a lot of things based on the Arabic / Persian word arak (arak, raki, rakı, rakija, etc.) but they're not all that closely related drinks.

"Rakija" would usually be translated as "fruit brandy" (but also overlaps with grappa, and then there are Croatian varieties which throw a lot of herbs and flowers in there) whereas arak, rakı and friends are most in the category of pasties, ouzo and sambuca in their flavoring. Confusingly, the Cretan raki is grappa.

The other confusing thing is that most of these words (schnapps, vodka, arak, rakija) are generic words for distillates, not indicative of a style. Vodka can be made of almost anything, but in contrast to other styles, its heavy filtering and purification (basically leaving not much but ethanol and water) is what makes it "vodka", and where I'm skeptical that the Moldovan booze meets that description.

I think it's more likely to expect the changes to be largely generational. That's how most dietary trends change. I give my kids less meat than my parents did, and they'll probably give their kids even less.

The other piece is that meat should have its externalities priced in. We shouldn't be doing to animals the things we do in factory farming. Not being shitty to animals makes animal products a lot more expensive, which generally means people consume less of them. A carbon tax also wouldn't be crazy.

People eat a lot more meat than they used to because it's cheap now. Eating meat with every meal is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon in the west. Making it not cheap again would put us back to where we were a few generations back.

People liked cigarettes as much as they liked meat, but social norms, policy changes and price hikes have made it to where people smoke now a lot less than they used to. Having a cheap / enjoyable alternative is a nice route, but it's not the only one.